Word: frankenstein
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Just about gone are the days of Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and their good old-fashioned horror pictures. Occasionally one of them crops up again with a week-kneed off-shoot of Frankenstein, but every effort fails to recapture the mood. Originally, Stevenson's "Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde" was one of the standout pictures of this melodramatic school; in today's guise, it is merely another problem in psychology...
...doesn't stick in the throat. "Here Comes Mr. Jordan" is an exception. The ordinarily callous producers, script writers, camera men, idea men, rewriters and their uncles' brothers' cousins who for years have scraped the bottoms of their distorted imaginations and come up with every kind of recipe from "Frankenstein" to. Topper Keeps Returning" have at last fashioned a delightful fairy tale of this 1941 world...
...colored, engagingly irresponsible pictures of beach scenes, toylike Venetian canals, imaginary Oriental landscapes, houses like patchwork quilts. Last week Sutter Street's Raymond & Raymond Gallery was exhibiting some of Papa Hiler's paintings. The critics were pleasantly taken aback. Said the San Francisco Chronicle's Alfred Frankenstein: "He sets up quite regular rhythmic patterns and then answers them in a kind of sudden, surprising syncopation. It is the nearest visual approach to hot jazz...
What have they done with the rip-roaring scream-squeezing digestion-turning horrors of old? Where is the stupendous fantasy of King Kong, the revolting blackness of The Mystery of the Wax Museum, Zombie, The Cat and the Canary, Frankenstein? It seems that Hollywood first tried to give son-and-daughter sequels to these original blood-curdlers. And when that didn't work, they turned away from blackness for blackness' sake, and took refuge in the arms of Morality...
...shady plastic surgeon who has disguised him to look just like Boris Karloff of the movies. The part is played by Boris Karloff. Making his Broadway debut, without any of his usual horrific face putty or false hair, he is every bit as sinister as he was in Frankenstein...