Reflections on Boris

Boris as Im-Ho-Tep in The Mummy (1932)

This is my contribution to The Boris Karloff Blogathon now going on at Frankensteinia:

It was sometime in the early 1960s when I first became aware of Boris Karloff. What a name! There were Johns and Jimmys and Roberts, but no other Borises, and as far as I knew no other Karloffs in the movies, either. To this day, the only other Karloff I know of is his daughter Sarah, who used to make the rounds at movie conventions, keeping her father’s legacy intact. But forty years ago you could find him on one syndicated channel or another, raising a bushy eyebrow to some poor, unsuspecting shlub about to get whammied in black and white.

    He was part of a school of actors who specialized in horror, though some of them could do Shakespeare in a pinch: Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney, Jr., John Carradine, Vincent Price, George Zucco. They worked for major studios and poverty row fly-by-nights, appeared on Broadway, radio and television shows, constantly working. Yet in his entire life I doubt Boris earned as much as Tom Cruise pulls down for one movie. (By the 1960s, Boris was getting less than $30k per picture.)

    ‘They had faces then,’ the saying goes, and Boris did have an unmistakable one. But they also had voices then — an art as extinct as radio drama. Boris’s was without peer: smooth, slightly hollow, ethereal, melancholy. It could be soothing one minute, menacing the next. Having him narrate How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966) was a stroke of genius; hearing him whimper “friend?” in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935) can break your heart.

    As a kid, I was an avid reader of Famous Monsters and Castle of Frankenstein magazines, their editors eager to point up his thespic abilities. (Famous Monsters editor Forest J Ackeman often wrote about the mythical kingdom of Horrorwood, Karloffornia.) But there was little to substantiate the claim in what I was then seeing at the movies or on episodic TV. He’d done scads of drive-in flicks, running the rickety gamut from Voodoo Island (1957) to The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966), and a couple of Roger Corman pictures: The Raven (1963), a comedic take on Poe co-starring Vincent Price and Peter Lorre; and The Terror (1963), Boris shooting his scenes in three days on sets from The Raven with young Jack Nicholson. Another pastiche, Jacques Tourneur’s Comedy of Terrors (1963) found Karloff with Price, Lorre and Basil Rathbone. A few years shy of the Age of Irony, before gore and nihilism reshaped the culture, these slight efforts may be the last vestiges of the studio-era horror film.

Above: I remember tuning in in 1966 to watch secret agents April Dancer (Stephanie Powers) and Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn) bring down evil mastermind Mother Muffin — Karloff in drag! — in the infamous “Mother Muffin Affair” on The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. (Click to enlarge.)

    It took some maturity on my part to enable an appreciation for Karloff as an actor and artist. His golden age coinciding with Hollywood’s, he did most of his best work in the 1930s and for Val Lewton in three pictures in the 40s: The Body Snatcher (1945); quite excellent in Isle of the Dead (1945); and Bedlam (1946).

    Bride of Frankenstein is radically different in tone from Whale’s original Frankenstein (1931), but Karloff’s interpretation of the monster in both pictures was unique and, to this day, unequaled. It was commonly mistaken that he was a ‘new sensation’ when, in fact, he was forty-four at the time of Frankenstein, and had been in movies since 1919. He hung around for a third, Rowland V. Lee’s Son of Frankenstein (1939), a middling endeavor hurt by Whale’s absence.

    If I had to choose any one film as my favorite Karloff, I’d go with Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934). He was paired with Lugosi for the first of eight pictures, their different realms of eccentricity played straight. You could look at it as a New Wave picture twenty-five years before the term was coined, Ulmer casually abandoning genre conventions for decadence and depravity in delicious Art Deco topsy-turvyism. Once banned in several countries, it’s an ancestor to Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), a tilted portrait of questing, moneyed souls lost in fear and desire, and one of the few films hip to the obsessive sexuality percolating in Poe.

    There is, of course, so much more. When he died at eighty-two in 1969, Karloff had appeared in over two hundred films and TV shows. Near the end, Peter Bogdanovich and Polly Platt crafted an odd testimonial, Targets (1968). They had Karloff and could use his scenes from The Terror, if needed. What they delivered was both an obituary for old school horror and a reflection on contemporary violence and terrorism. And there in the middle of it is an aberration, an extended scene of Boris listening to Bogdanovich (unconvincingly playing drunk) prattle on about Howard Hawks (Karloff’s director on The Criminal Code [1931] and Scarface [1932]), the auteur theory, mise-en-scène and other lofty allusions ripped from the pages of Cahiers du cinéma, at a time when few in the audience (or on the set) knew what the hell he was talking about. It’s a ridiculous and touching scene, and I’m sure after Bogdanovich yelled “cut,” Boris went off to his dressing room, scratching his head along the way.