In the history of the movies, there are few actors and roles linked as indelibly as Boris Karloff and Frankenstein’s monster. Karloff had been acting in the movies for a decade by the time he donned Jack Pierce’s make-up in director James Whale’s “Frankenstein,” (which debuted 80 years ago this December) but it was the monster that made him a star. In return, Karloff made Universal’s (and Jack Pierce’s) version of Frankenstein’s monster an icon for the ages. Mary Shelley may have created the character in her 1818 novel, but its Pierce’s make-up and Karloff’s portrayal – the flat head, neck bolts, ill-fitting suit coat and heavy platform boots – that dominate the popular conception of him.

When Universal Pictures set out to make “Frankenstein,” it was to star Bela Lugosi, capitalizing on his “Dracula” success. However, after a few failed make-up tests, Lugosi left the project. Whale brought in 44 year old character actor Karloff, who created a movie monster for the ages. The monster doesn’t speak in the first Frankenstein film, but Karloff’s performance is a masterpiece of movie acting. Universal Pictures had thought the film would make Colin Clive (as Dr. Henry Frankenstein) a star, but instead audiences took to Karloff’s monster. Karloff’s monster, shuffles and lurches, moans and grunts, smashes and strangles and whimpers in fear. The image of the monster reaching for the light coming through the open ceiling seems to imbue the murderous brute with a spiritual yearning. The most shocking moment comes when the monster drowns a little girl as they play beside a pond.  The monster is bewildered and confused that little Maria does not float the same way the flowers they had been tossing in the water had. The movie’s script had taken a turn from Shelley’s novel, attempting to take away any humanity from the character of the monster, to make him a monster that could simply be seen as dangerous and bad and needing to be killed, but somehow Karloff got through to audiences anyway. As the townspeople revel in burning down the old mill with the monster inside, chances are even 1931 audiences were sad  to see the monster go.

The film was a hit and Universal went on to make several more Frankenstein films, with and without Karloff. The first of these, “Bride of Frankenstein,” also directed by Whale and starring Karloff and Clive, is the rare sequel that equals or surpasses the original. It’s also one of the loopiest horror movies ever made, with an introductory sequence of Shelley, Lord Byron and Percy Shelley sitting around on a stormy night to set up the sequel with her telling them that the story didn’t end the way they thought but — there was more! From there we re-enter the story of the monster, Henry Frankenstein (It’s unclear why the doctor’s name was changed from Victor, his name in the novel), and his bride Elizabeth. Now add a second “mad scientist,” Dr. Pretorius who also has learned how to create life and wants to team up with Frankenstein to create more creatures. Frankenstein wants no part of it, so Pretorius kidnaps Elizabeth to coerce him. Meanwhile, the monster, who had survived the first film’s fire thanks to an underground well is roaming around the countryside on a rampage. Luckily for him, he stumbles upon a blind hermit who feeds him and begins to teach him to speak. Yes, this is the sequence parodied so brilliantly by Peter Boyle and Gene Hackman in Mel Brooks’ great “Young Frankenstein,” but even the original scenes are hilarious (“Alone – baaaad! Friend – gooooood!”). Ultimately, the monster is detained long enough by Pretorius and Frankenstein so he can watch them create his bride – a female monster played by Elsa Lanchester (who also played Mary Shelley in the prologue). However, she doesn’t take much of a shine to Karloff’s monster (“She haaaaate me!”) and he decides to blow up the lab and all inside it, being nice enough to let his creator, Frankenstein and Elizabeth run to safety first. (Frankenstein’s monster here has clearly advanced to the mentality of an adolescent male – when the girl you like doesn’t want to get together with you, hey – flip that switch and melodramatically blow everyone up.)

Although Karloff would play a variety of roles throughout his long film, stage and television career, he would always be linked to the horror genre and to Frankenstein in particular. However, he was always appreciative of the role that made him a star. As he said, “The monster was the best friend I ever had.”

Classic New York scene at the old New Yorker movie theater.

And another one finds Woody at the Metro, also on Broadway on the Upper West Side:

Here’s a smile for you: watching Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin dance.

Here is Pauline Kael’s 1966 essay on Brando for The Atlantic:

Brando represented a reaction against the post-war mania for security. As a protagonist, the Brando of the early fifties had no code, only his instincts. He was a development from the gangster leader and the outlaw. He was antisocial because he knew society was crap; he was a hero to youth because he was strong enough not to take the crap. (In England it was thought that The Wild One would incite adolescents to violence.)

There was a sense of excitement, of danger in his presence, but perhaps his special appeal was in a kind of simple conceit, the conceit of tough kids. There was humor in it–swagger and arrogance that were vain and childish, and somehow seemed very American. He was explosively dangerous without being “serious” in the sense of having ideas. There was no theory, no cant in his leadership. He didn’t care about social position or a job or respectability, and because he didn’t care he was a big man; for what is less attractive, what makes a man smaller, than his worrying about his status? Brando represented a contemporary version of the free American.

Because he had no code, except an aesthetic one–a commitment to a style of life–he was easily betrayed by those he trusted. There he was, the new primitive, a Byronic Dead-End Kid, with his quality of vulnerability. His acting was so physical–so exploratory, tentative, wary–that we could sense with him, feel him pull back at the slightest hint of rebuff. We in the audience felt protective: we knew how lonely he must be in his assertiveness. Who even in hell wants to be an outsider? And he was no intellectual who could rationalize it, learn somehow to accept it, to live with it. He could only feel it, act it out, be “The Wild One”–and God knows how many kids felt, “That’s the story of my life.”

A few years after this essay was published, Kael praised Brando’s “comeback” in movies like “The Godfather” and, especially, “The Last Tango in Paris.”

Here’s James Agee on our man Buster:

Very early in [Keaton’s] movie career friends asked him why he never smiled on the screen. He didn’t realize he didn’t. He had got the dead-pan habit in variety; on the screen he had merely been so hard at work it had never occurred to him there was anything to smile about. Now he tried it just once and never again. He was by his whole style and nature so much the most deeply “silent” of the silent comedians that even a smile was as deafeningly out of key as a yell. In a way his pictures are like a transcendent juggling act in which it seems that the whole universe is in exquisite flying motion and the one point of repose is the juggler’s effortless, uninterested face.

Keaton’s face ranked almost with Lincoln’s as an early American archetype; it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful, yet it was irreducibly funny; he improved matters by topping it off with a deadly horizontal hat, as flat and thin as a phonograph record. One can never forget Keaton wearing it, standing erect at the prow as his little boat is being launched. The boat goes grandly down the skids and, just as grandly, straight on to the bottom. Keaton never budges. The last you see of him, the water lifts the hat off the stoic head and it floats away.

…Much of the charm and edge of Keaton’s comedy, however, lay in the subtle leverages of expression he could work against his nominal dead pan. Trapped in the side-wheel of a ferryboat, saving himself from drowning only by walking, then desperately running, inside the accelerating wheel like a squirrel in a cage, his only real concern was, obviously, to keep his hat on. Confronted by Love, he was not as deadpan as he was cracked up to be, either; there was an odd, abrupt motion of his head which suggested a horse nipping after a sugar lump.

Keaton worked strictly for laughs, but his work came from so far inside a curious and original spirit that he achieved a great deal besides, especially in his feature-length comedies. (For plain hard laughter his nineteen short comedies — the negatives of which have been lost — were even better.) He was the only major comedian who kept sentiment almost entirely out of his work, and he brought pure physical comedy to its greatest heights. Beneath his lack of emotion he was also uninsistently sardonic; deep below that, giving a disturbing tension and grandeur to the foolishness, for those who sensed it, there was in his comedy a freezing whisper not of pathos but of melancholia. With the humor, the craftsmanship and the action there was often, besides, a fine, still and sometimes dreamlike beauty. Much of his Civil War picture The General is within hailing distance of Mathew Brady. And there is a ghostly, unforgettable moment in The Navigator when, on a deserted, softly rolling ship, all the pale doors along a deck swing open as one behind Keaton and, as one, slam shut, in a hair-raising illusion of noise.

Perhaps because “dry’ comedy is so much more rare and odd than “dry” wit, there are people who never much cared for Keaton. Those who do cannot care mildly.

Oh, yeah. And Buster loved baseball too.

G. D. Spradlin died this summer and over at the wonderful site,  Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, you’ll find a nice tribute to the actor.

Here’s Pauline Kael:

In 1928 Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur wrote The Front Page, the greatest newspaper comedy of them all; Howard Hawks directed this version of it — a spastic explosion of dialogue, adapted by Charles Lederer, and starring Cary Grant as the domineering editor Walter Burns and Rosalind Russell as Hildy Johnson, the unscrupulous crime reporter with printer’s ink in her veins. (In the play Hildy Johnson is a man.) Overlapping dialogue carries the movie along at breakneck speed; word gags take the place of the sight gags of silent comedy, as this race of brittle, cynical, childish people rush around on corrupt errands. Russell is at her comedy peak here — she wears a striped suit, uses her long-legged body for ungainly, unladylike effects, and rasps out her lines. And, as Walter Burns, Grant raises mugging to a joyful art. Burns’ callousness and unscrupulousness are expressed in some of the best farce lines ever written in this country, and Grant hits those lines with a smack. He uses the same stiff-neck cocked-head stance that he did in Gunga Din: it’s his position for all-out, unstuble farce. He snorts and whoops. His Burns is a strong-arm performance, defiantly self-centered and funny. The reporters — a fine crew — are Ernest Truex, Cliff Edwards, Porter Hall, Roscoe Karns, Frank Jenks, Regis Toomey; also with Gene Lockhart as the sheriff, Billy Gilbert as the messenger, John Qualen, Helen Mack, and Ralph Bellamy as chief stooge — a respectable businessman — and Alma Kruger as his mother.

The Front Page was made into a movie in 1931 and then remade as His Girl Friday. It’s about as good as American movie comedy gets. It’ll leave you dizzy.

I missed “Cedar Rapids” when it was in the theater but caught it on TV last week. It is a modest movie without being precious about its smallness. There were no hilarious set pieces but it didn’t lag. It was crispy and tidy and altogether satisfying. A sweet nothing that is worth your time.

Dig this gallery of famous people by Bob Willoughby.

Hot and Cool.

It’s Sidney Lumet Week at the Walter Reader Theater, guys. If you are around, check it out. If you’ve never seen “Q&A,” it’s worth it. Nolte at his best:

In the first bit here, you’ll see the old H&H Bagels in the background as Henry Winkler and Shelley Long cross 80th street and Broadway:

Morning, Sunshine:

I remember being fascinated by this movie poster when I was a kid. It was cool and sinister. Wasn’t until years later that I saw the movie, which remains overlooked, but is now available on Blue Ray DVD. Dig this Q&A with Peter O’Toole in the New York Times:

Q: How is it that “The Stunt Man” was as well-reviewed and widely nominated as it was, and yet played in so few theaters?

A.Don’t forget this is a long time ago, and I wasn’t very au fait with everything that was going on in any way. But apparently the guy who put up the bread, the money, I think he was a supermarket builder or something. [Melvin Simon, the producer, was a shopping mall developer.] He had bought the script and the entire idea on the fact that it was an art film, and it made sense on his balance books to lose money. I think eventually it crept into 11 cinemas, which is a bit shameful. [After a successful test run for “The Stunt Man” in Seattle, 20th Century Fox picked up distribution rights for the film but ordered only about 300 prints.]

Q.Was it disappointing to have put in so much effort into something that was not seen by a large number of viewers, or is that just the way it goes sometimes?

A.It’s almost the nature of my line of work. [chuckles] I began in the theater, don’t forget. I was with the Classical Repertory Company, the Bristol Old Vic, and we did 12 plays a year. Over a period of four years you can imagine the number of times one had the highest hopes [laughs] and you find you’re playing to – as the old actors used to say – Mr. and Mrs. Wood. Which meant nobody was in the audience but the seats. I’m used to it, but it was a disappointment.

For more on O’Toole check out Gay Talese’s 1963 Esquire profile, “Peter O’Toole on the Ould Sod.”

Fat men can dance. In honor of David Ortiz, who busted a move last night after hitting a home run, here is the great Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle (featuring our man Buster):

I love Gene Hackman as much as I’ve ever loved any actor.

Dig this short Q&A with Hackman from the latest issue of GQ:

GQ: You worked with Coppola on The Conversation. He’s a director who has a “reputation.” Tell me about that movie.

Hackman: He wanted Brando for that part. But it’s not too bad to be second to Brando. [laughs] We rehearsed—normally you don’t get a lot of rehearsal in films. We took advantage of Francis having some juice, because he’d just finished The Godfather. It was a good experience, because he’s such a confident filmmaker. It was great because it was about something. It was about paranoia, the whole idea of eavesdropping. He’s a very hands-on director, but after rehearsal he left me alone. But you knew what was required of you. Most directors, if sensitive at all and think an actor knows what he’s doing in a film, have the good sense to leave him alone, and he did that.

GQ: If someone were to portray you, what would be the key to “getting” you?

Hackman: That’s a tough one. Almost anything one would say would sound egotistical. [pauses] I’d like to think that if an actor was playing me, that he would do me in an honest fashion. I always try to approach the work in that way, regardless of how good or bad the script. When I say “honest,” I say to portray what is on the page, instead of what maybe people might think of me or what I would like them to think of me in terms of personality or charisma. But just be what is asked of me on the page.

[Drawing by Jerry Vaughan]

UNDER THE SPELL OF THE BIG SCREEN

By John Schulian

We didn’t have a TV in our house until 1954, when I was nine. Maybe it was for economic reasons, maybe my parents just didn’t think it was important. They seemed perfectly content with listening to the radio, my mother in particular. I listened along with her. The first thing I remember hearing was the news that Babe Ruth had died. Honest. I was three years old and I had not the slightest idea who the Babe was, but there was something about the way the man on the radio talked about him that made it possible for even a child like me to grasp the importance of his death. Just remembering that moment makes me feel older than dirt. It’s the same when I remember listening to Tom Mix’s radio show-–his doctor was my mother’s doctor, by the way-–and Fibber McGee and Molly, Lum and Abner, Arthur Godfrey, and Art Likletter’s House Party. Linkletter’s band leader had one of the great names ever: Muzzy Marcellino. Muzzy, for crying out loud.

Something else we listened to was Lux Radio Theater, where Hollywood stars of a certain wattage acted in half-hour recreations of movies that were then in the theaters. In my house, we ate up movies, all three of us in the beginning, then just my father and me as time went on. There wasn’t any reason for this movie love. My parents weren’t star-struck, nor were they given to long, thoughtful discussions of performances, directing choices, or cinematography, good or bad. It was just something that was in the air in L.A. along with the aroma of the orange groves and the stench of the burning tires that warmed them on winter nights. If you listened to the radio, you could even hear broadcasts of the premieres of big movies and breathless interviews with stars like Cary Grant and Lana Turner.

The movie house we went to most often was the Academy, an art deco palace near the intersection of Manchester and Crenshaw boulevards. (It’s now a church.) If I went to see Burt Lancaster in “The Crimson Pirate” with my parents on Saturday night, I’d be back at 1 p.m. Wednesday for the kiddie matinee, two movies for a quarter. Might be two Abbott and Costello comedies, or two war movies (“Halls of Montezuma” with Richard Widmark and “Operation Pacific” with John Wayne), or an Audie Murphy Western paired with one starring Jeff Chandler, or-–hang onto your hat–“King Kong” and “Mighty Joe Young.”

Come summer we’d head for the Centinela Drive-In, where we saw “Shane,” “Strategic Air Command” and the truly awful circus movie “The Greatest Show on Earth.” (There’s a scene in “Heat” that was shot at an abandoned drive-in. I’d swear it was the Centinela, which sits in what is now regarded as hard-core gang territory.)

When 3-D movies were all the rage-–”Hondo,” “Charge at Feather River,” “House of Wax”–we went to see them at the big movie houses on Hollywood Boulevard, which was still glamorous and exciting then. (The first movie I remember seeing was “Pinocchio,” at the Pantages.) Afterward, we’d eat at Café de Paris, a little French restaurant around the corner from Charlie Chaplin’s studio. My father’s French buddies hung out there. My parents ate escargot and I drank Shirley Temples.

And then it was just my father and me going to the movies. It had to be by design. My parents were ancient by the standards of the day: when they married, my father was 41 and my mother 39. My guess is she was going through menopause and desperately needed some time away from her rambunctious son.

It was a blessing in disguise for my father and me. We didn’t get to spend much time together, mainly because he worked such long hours and spent a lot of time sleeping in his easy chair when he was home. I don’t want you to think he was distant or cold, though. He was, rather, the nicest man I have ever known. He was charming and funny and gracious, and he had a Danish accent that gave him, I don’t know, a continental air, I guess you’d call it. No wonder he oversaw all the big weddings in Salt Lake when he became catering manager of the Hotel Utah, the No. 1 hotel in the city. He took care of not just Mormons but Greeks and Jews and Italians and anybody else who wanted to be treated right. He loved them all, but he loved the good tippers best. To me, however, he was the dad who took me to see the Hollywood Stars in the old Coast League. And who played catch with me in the backyard, and, when we lived in Inglewood, took me to sprawling Centinela Park to pitch me batting practice and hit me fly balls. And remember, he’d never played an inning of baseball. He was a Danish immigrant who didn’t see a game until he worked in Chicago at a hotel where the big league teams stayed. He told me about players who took out their tobacco chaws only to eat, and of how forlorn the Pirates-–well, I think it was the Pirates–were when the Cubs’ Gabby Hartnett beat them with his Homer in the Gloamin’.

Truth be told, though, he was probably more comfortable going to the movies with me. His choice of theaters was an odd one, not any of the first-run houses, the Academy or the 5th Avenue or the United Artists, but a second-run house called the Inglewood Theater. And it was there that my education in movies, such as it is, began. We saw the John Ford-John Wayne cavalry trilogy, and “The Big Sleep” and Red Skelton comedies and Robert Mitchum in “Blood on the Moon.” Sometimes the old movies bored me witless-–”Saratoga Trunk” with Gary Cooper, in particular-–but more often they fed my imagination and my dreams.

The fact is, I loved movies before I loved baseball. For all I know, I read the movie ads in the newspaper before anything else. And I read Louella Parsons’ column, too, checking it for movie-star names in boldface. Then I would cut out the movie ads and paste them in a scrapbook, which wasn’t as pointless an exercise as it might seem, because I would then use the title of a movie that had captured my imagination and create my version of it. The movie I remember was “Kansas Pacific,” a Republic Pictures Western starring Sterling Hayden that I didn’t get around to watching until a couple of years ago. It was dreadful.) I drew the story in cartoon blocks on pieces of paper about the size of a postcard and I taped or glued the pieces together. Then I took a piece of cardboard, drew a screen with curtains around it, and cut slits on both sides of the screen. Then I would pull the strip of paper on which my movie was laid out through the slits while I provided the dialogue and narration. nd my parents would watch. But only after they had paid a nickel or a dime for the privilege. Even then, at the age of 9 or 10, I realized that movies were for making money.

There was something at work besides the profit motive, though. It was the ability to imagine, to let a couple of words in a newspaper inspire me to create the most primitive kind of art. I suppose the same forces were at work when I listened to the Mutual Game of the Day on the radio and envisioned what the Green Monster in Fenway Park looked like and how the ivy on the walls at Wrigley Field was coming in. I could even read about a minor league slugger in the back pages of the Sporting News-–Frosty Kennedy or John Moskus or Chuck Weatherspoon-–and spend my paper route imagining how they looked as they smacked another home run. It was as though I imagined life with a score by Dimitri Tiomkin or Max Steiner and a big, booming orchestra to back them up. If I listen closely, I can still hear the music.

Click here for the full “From Ali to Xena” archives.

Today through Friday, “The Lady Eve” will be shown at the Museum of Modern Art at 1:30 p.m.

Man, how I wish I could play hooky and catch it on the big screen. It features one of the classic seduction scenes of all time.

When I was sixteen the Regency Theater on the Upper West Side ran a Buster Keaton-Charlie Chaplin-Woody Allen revival for a few months. That was my introduction to Buster and it was love at first sight. I adore Chaplin too but Buster speaks to me in a more direct, personal way.

There’s a wonderful article on Buster by Jana Prikryl in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books. If you are not familiar with Buster, this here is a fine introduction:

More than fifty years have passed since critics rediscovered Buster Keaton and pronounced him the most “modern” silent film clown, a title he hasn’t shaken since. In his own day he was certainly famous but never commanded the wealth or popularity of Charlie Chaplin or Harold Lloyd, and he suffered most when talkies arrived. It may be that later stars like Cary Grant and Paul Newman and Harrison Ford have made us more susceptible to Keaton’s model of offhand stoicism than his own audiences were. Seeking for his ghost is a fruitless business, though; for one thing, film comedy today has swung back toward the sappy, blatant slapstick that Keaton disdained. There’s some “irony” in what Judd Apatow and Adam Sandler do, but it’s irony that clamors to win the identification of the supposedly browbeaten everyman in every audience. Keaton took your average everyman and showed how majestically alone he was.

And here’s James Agee from his classic essay, “Comedy’s Greatest Era”:

Very early in his movie career friends asked him why he never smiled on the screen. He didn’t he realzie he didn’t. He had got the dead-pan habit in variety; on the screen he had merely been so hard at work it had never occured to him there was anything to smile about. Now he tried it just once and never again. He was by his whole style and nature so much the most “silent” of the silent comedians that even a smile was as deafeningly out of key as a yell. In a way his pictures are like a transcendent juggling act in which it seems that the whole universe is in exquisite flying motion and the one point of repose is the juggler’s effortless, uninterested face.

Starting tonight, the Film Forum is hosting The Best of Buster Keaton. They will be showing a Buster movie, along with a couple of two-reelers, every Monday for the rest of the summer. Tonight gives Buster’s first feature  for MGM–and arguably, his last good movie: “The Cameraman.” It’s worth seeing on the big screen for  many reasons (the pool scene), not the least of which is this gorgeous sequence filmed at the original Yankee Stadium.

Have a laugh…on the house.

Witness: A very beautiful man.

[Photo Credit: Alfred Eisenstaedt]

How good is Nick Nolte? I haven’t seen much of his recent work–although a quick trip to IMDb shows that he’s been busy–but I think he’s one of the most interesting, powerful actors of his generation. “North Dallas Forty,” “Under Fire,” “48 Hours,” “Life Lessons,” “Q&A,” “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” “Weeds,’ “Affliction.”  That’s an impressive list. And he’s been ambitious too, stretching himself in roles like “Jefferson in Paris,” and “Lorenzo’s Oil.”

I’ll bet he’s got a Jeff Bridges Appreciation run in him too.

[Picture by Christopher Wahl]