Word: karloff
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SATURDAY: Black Friday (1940) and The Clack Cat. (1941) Classic Horror's two features explore brain transplants with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi and comic mayhem with Basil Rathbone and Broderick Crawford. CH.5...
...more sophisticated than the gross, mechanical movement of the steel-armatured puppets. The principal emotional modes are comedic, bathetic or scary. And "Kong" isn't scary, at least not to a modern audience, and the emotional moments are far too sentimental for modern tastes. Yet it works! Somehow, like Karloff with his brilliant miming in the James Whale Frankenstein pictures, O'Brien makes Kong into something not just alive, but worthy of our sympathy...
ECONOMISTS AND CORPORATE EXECUTIVES ARE NOT USUALLY thought of as disciples of Dr. Victor Frankenstein. But they too have created a monster, and it has suddenly found a voice--not Boris Karloff's this time, but Pat Buchanan's. In his strident demands for trade protection can be heard the long-mute anger of workers who feel both injured and insulted by free traders in the academy, business and politics: injured by the loss of jobs and income to foreign competition; insulted because too many free traders have airily dismissed their pain as either illusory or inconsequential...
...original inspiration for all these celluloid Frankensteins is James Whale's 1931 film which in fact takes only minimal plot elements from Mary Shelley's novel. Karloff's monster stands out in a production which is in many ways simply a Hollywood fluff treatment of the story. This time around, the handsome Dr. Frankenstein animates a monster who terrorizes the countryside, and Frankenstein's lovely fiancee, until he is hunted down and dies in a bizarre finale sequence at a windmill...
...science in its time, thus ruling out Shelley's tragic father-son relationship. The 'science' of phrenology, the study of the physical characteristics of the skull as an indicator of personality and behavior, is used as a horror technique, obscuring true possibilities of horror. The brain transplanted into Boris Karloff's monster is that of a psychopathic criminal, presumed to be preprogrammed for murder and mayhem. The revealing of this fact to 'Dr. Frankenstein extracts a reaction of dread at the inevitable terrors such a brain, reanimated, will produce. Yet Karloff is at his most terrifying when he appears...