"Shock" Host Christopher Lee Introduces THE MUMMY'S HAND

A couple of decades late as a true Shock horror host, but Christoper Lee did introduce horror films on TV for Sci-fi Channel's "Classic Monsters Month" in 1994.

You can pick up the thrilling vibe that monster kids must have felt in Shock Theater times when the film (this time THE MUMMY'S HAND) actually starts, with the Universal logo, the familiar score kicking in, the credits....

THE MUMMY'S HAND (1940)

Nowadays if we were to compare THE MUMMY'S HAND to Universal's original THE MUMMY (1932), we would say that the 1940 film is neither a remake nor a sequel but rather a reboot of the franchise. Rebooting is what Hollywood studios do to re-center and re-engage with a property that they feel can still make money. The studio had recently undergone a fairly serious re-organization and the new regime was faced with a number of new commercial, aesthetic, and social realities. SON OF FRANKENSTEIN (1939) and THE INVISIBLE MAN RETURNS (1940) had been successful reboots of first-generation Uni monsters; THE MUMMY'S HAND was hoped to be a similar fresh start that could provide a new story arc : Im-Ho-Tep's atmospheric menace was replaced by the unstoppable supernatural killer Kharis; the thick, dreamlike gloom & doom of THE MUMMY was stripped out and replaced by the rough & tumble action-adventure of THE MUMMY'S HAND. Gone was the brooding Germanic dark Romance and in its place was substituted a plot line more akin to a Saturday matinee serial.

New York Times, October 8, 1958

But all this analysis is probably too esoteric and of little general interest for viewers of this film on TV. It was only much later that I was able to piece together why there were parts of THE MUMMY and THE MUMMY'S HAND that were so similar (the recycled hand-cranked-silent-film-looking origin scenes of the Mummy, for example) yet so completely different. But who cares? It was a Mummy movie--- how much more really needs to be said? When I first saw THE MUMMY'S HAND on television in the early 1970s, I had already seen mummy rampages on re-runs of my favorite cartoons, all of which were obviously inspired by the Universal Kharis series rather than the Im-Ho-Tep film, so everything looked like it should be to me.

"Curse of Anubis," from "Jonny Quest," originally broadcast in October 1964

Screen Gems had bundled together THE MUMMY (1932), THE MUMMY'S HAND (1940), THE MUMMY'S TOMB (1942), and THE MUMMY'S GHOST (1944) for SHOCK! (THE MUMMY'S CURSE [1944] would show up on TV beginning in 1958 as part of Son of SHOCK!), but as yet I have not found a single station that aired the films of the SHOCK! package in the order of its theatrical release. Thus, if you were seeing these movies for the first time ever as a regular viewer of SHOCK!, then there was no telling what order you would see them in. It was probably just best in the interests of coherence to treat them as individual, stand-alone films rather than try to decipher them as part of a series. Leave chronologies and arc mythos to the detail-obsessed fanboy bloggers fifty-something years in the future.

As mentioned around here somewhere, kids really seem to connect somehow with Mummy movies and there's a lot to thrill young viewers here. (But let me get sidetracked for a minute: I watched this the other night with a nine year-old and her first question was: "But I thought the Mummy was ordered to kill everyone in the tents... how come he grabs the lady instead of killing her like he's supposed to?" She's right, of course--- at no point does Andoheb explicitly change his instructions; Kharis sort of improvises, roughs up Solvani, abducts Marta, and brings her back to the Temple of Karnak, where, out of nowhere, Andoheb decides to embalm her, marry her, and make her high priestess. Where did that plot point come from?) Kids probably also like the grating comic-relief sidekickery of Babe Jenson (Wallace Ford), though I wonder if I ever did.

But as an adult, I think my favorite thing about this film is George Zucco. I always like his fanatical criminal style in movies from the 1930s and 1940s--- quiet, measured, articulate, intelligent, but always nuts. When it comes to movie villainy, it's no use competing against such a visually arresting figure as Tom Tyler's Mummy, so you would have to take a different road entirely, which is just what Zucco does with his urbane but insane Andoheb. But rather than scaring me, Zucco's bad guys bring me a kind of malevolently familiar comfort, like Vincent Price's Captain Robur or Gert Fröbe's Auric Goldfinger. (And put me down as a fan of Zucco's work in DARK STREETS OF CAIRO from the same year as THE MUMMY'S HAND.)

The score of THE MUMMY'S HAND (much of it rehashed from SON OF FRANKENSTEIN) really adds a lot of atmosphere to the picture, as does the the detailed ruins from GREEN HELL (1940) which are pressed into duty as the exterior and interior of the Temple of Karnak. Russell Gausman and Jack Otterson were busy together doing art direction and set design for THE MUMMY'S HAND, GREEN HELL, DARK STREETS OF CAIRO, and a bunch of other movies at Universal in 1940, so it's not surprising to see so much of their work being reworked for maximum efficiency and minimum cost on a wartime budget.

GREEN HELL, by the way, is a jungle adventure pic about some heavy-breathing explorers probing Brazilian rain forests at the Amazon's headwaters; in addition to having ugly run-ins with some laughable natives from Central Casting, they also encounter the forgotten ruins of an ancient city that hide some treasure. It's amusing to see that the crackerjack archeologists in THE MUMMY'S HAND are nonplussed by the discovery of all this Egypto-Incan architecture and art; perhaps they all adhere to the "ancient alien astronaut" theory of world civilizations popularized by Erich von Däniken which explains such similarities and connections as the result of an extraterrestrial cargo cult from thousands of years ago --- that's why everyone is so nonchalant about the bizarre cultural cross-pollination on display in the Valley of the Seven Jackals. All that silliness aside, though, it still looks cool as hell in this movie and it is used to good effect. I remember the climax being particularly suspenseful when I first saw it on TV.

Brazosport Facts, Freeport, TX, Sunday August 23, 1959

I've reproduced this Freeport, TX listing only because I find it so evocative of what used to be so weird and wonderful about late-night television. These days, of course, many cable channels re-run shows at these hours that they had telecast earlier in the day, or else they sell off these blocks of time to that nemesis of us night-owl TV watchers--- infomercials and paid religious programming. Looking at this listing from 1959, you see that, for one thing, stations used to "sign off" of the air; if you stayed up to watch "Shock" on this Sunday night, there followed five minutes of news headlines and then the sign-off with the anthem (if you've never seen one, here's a recreation featuring a pre-1959 National Anthem film). I'm especially intrigued by Channel 13's one-minute "Wanted by the FBI" broadcast at 2:15 AM-- I want to imagine that it was a different profile of some hunted desperado that the station provided every night just before sign-off: "...and is sought in nine states for a series of horrific and random axe murders. Please contact the FBI if you have any information. Good night and pleasant dreams!"

NEXT: "For spine-tingling thrills tune in to this channel when Shock presents the full-length feature film THE MAD GHOUL. George Zucco plays a crazed scientist who brews a poison that terrorizes a nation. It's exciting entertainment so don't miss it!"

A Speculative History of the "Shock Monster" Mask

At the end of 1957, the ratings data strongly indicated that there was a Monster Culture revolution brewing. SHOCK! had boosted the ratings for KTLA-TV in Los Angeles from seventh to second place; WABC-TV jumped from sixth to first place in the NYC market. Most famously, KRON-TV in San Francisco had increased its ranking 807% with the SHOCK! films. It wasn’t long before the popularity of monster movies on television spawned other media manifestations, the most beloved of which were monster movie magazines for kids.

One such mag was Famous Monsters of Filmland, launched in February 1958 by publisher James Warren and editor Forrest J. Ackerman. FM's pages were crammed with reproductions of publicity stills and promotional material for horror movies going back to the age of silent movies. Brief articles covered the work of classic horror movie actors and provided extended explanations of movie plots as well as some production notes. FM was wildly popular with the younger generation of monster-movie lovers, many of whom caught the bug by seeing these films for the first time on SHOCK!--- the first issue of FM had an article called “TV’s Monster Parade,” in fact.

publisher James Warren in a Topstone mask on issue #1 of FM

Warren Publishing set up its own in-house mail-order service, Captain Company, which advertised in the pages of FM and the subsequent other titles of the Warren publishing line. For kids who couldn’t find any monster-related goods at their local department stores, Captain Company mail order must have seemed like paradise: posters, monster novelties, model kits, magazines, costumes, Super 8 reel versions of monster movies, and other fascinating outré items.

Warren expected to turn a much higher profit with Captain Company items than he did with the 35-cent magazine itself. It is not uncommon today to hear old-timers complain that they had been bilked out of their hard-earned allowance money because the Captain Company’s sensationalistic come-on ads were not always completely accurate accounts of the item purchased. (Personally, my bitterest rip-off memories involved sending away for a completely cool “giant life-size moon monster” for a $1 in the summer of 1969, but that scam wasn’t the work of Captain Company.)

Masks made by the Topstone company were among the most popular items sold by the Captain Company in the pages of FM. Topstone’s full-face latex masks were inexpensive ($2.00 plus .25 postage) and usually avoided movie studio licensing fees by presenting monsters and fiends who were not directly tied to specific motion pictures, such as “Gorilla Monster,” “Lagoon Monster,” “Horrible Melting Man,” “Savage Cannibal,” and “Girl Vampire.” One of the masks was called “Shock Monster.”

According to the Topstone catalog from 1956, the mask was originally called “Horror Zombie.” “Horror Zombie” was designed (and perhaps also sculpted) by commercial illustrator Keith Ward (1906-2000); some of Ward’s other creations that left an impact on US pop culture include the drawings of Elsie the cow (Borden’s Milk) and Elmer the bull (Elmer’s Glue, originally owned by Borden as well). But once “Horror Zombie” began appearing as an item for sale in the Captain Company advertisements in FM, the name of the mask was changed to “Shock Monster”; some collector cognescenti argue that it was Warren himself who was responsible for the name change in 1958.

With the close relationship between Famous Monsters and the SHOCK! broadcasts, I think that we can explain the name change from “Horror Zombie” to “Shock Monster” as an attempt to tap into the enthusiasm that the Captain Company’s customer base had for the SHOCK! movies. In other words, the “Shock Monster” mask sold through Warren’s mail-order operation was specifically meant to be SHOCK!’s monster mascot.

original color image from the 1960 Topstone company catalog

a private collector's foamed Topstone "Shock Monster" mask

Of course, the actual mask itself was a bit of a disappointment compared to Ward’s fantastic illustration. Nevertheless, there is a kind of bizarre art brut primitivism to that mask that is compelling and disturbing. Putting aside its historical/nostalgia value, the mask is interesting to look at because it is so childlike in its creepiness. In many ways, I would find a person wearing this cheap $2.00 mask to be more upsetting than one sporting one of those elaborately-designed and realistically-rendered monster masks that sell for a couple hundred dollars at high-end costume shops every Halloween.

Into the 1960s and even the 1970s, the Shock Monster became a recognizable and iconic face of the FM vanguard’s stake in the Horror Culture Revolution, appearing in Warren magazine graphics, t-shirts, decals, and other items--- you can easily imagine it painted on a hot rod in the mid-1960s. Unlike a t-shirt with a Frankenstein Monster face or a Dracula face design, the Shock Monster could not be identified with any specific film story. The Shock Monster was an unknown, free-floating symbol of excitement for monsters rather than a plug for any specific horror film product. He was, in a sense, an indie monster whose only connection was to the experience of the weekly “Shock Theater” or “Creature Feature” or “Nightmare” movies.

{Information for this blog post was culled from the pages of the Universal Monster Army forum and the Halloween Mask Association forum. Both of these sites are frequented by collectors of all kinds of Horror Culture memorabilia; I have found that many of the folks there are knowledgeable and can be very forthcoming with information about these items.}

THE FROZEN GHOST (1945)

THE FROZEN GHOST is the fourth of the six "Inner Sanctum" pictures made between 1943 and 1945. These films were were popular money-makers for Universal and were re-released and in theatrical circulation right up to their appearances on TV in 1957 and 1958. Personally, I don't think that the series was very good and I don't think that they warrant consideration as "horror films," but to include them in the Screen Gems SHOCK! assortment makes sense because these were titles with a proven track record of attracting viewers.

Of the six movies, I think that I dislike THE FROZEN GHOST the most. It really exasperated me the last time that I saw it (about fifteen months ago)--- I lost my patience with it and dismissed it as sloppy, shoddy, apathetic filmmaking from professionals who know better but obviously just didn't care.

Salina [KS] Journal, April 7, 1959

Stage hypnotist Alex Gregor “the Great” (Lon Chaney, Jr.) blames himself for the death of a heckler who he had tried to entrance on his top-rated radio program. Feeling guilty that he murdered the man by squinting and staring at him, Gregor breaks off his engagement with his performance partner Maura (a pregnant Evelyn Ankers, trying not to show) and quits his show. To help Gregor get back on his feet again, his business manager George Keene (Milburn Stone) arranges a job for him as a researcher and tour guide at Madame Monet’s wax museum. Valerie Monet (Tala Birell) has the hots for Gregor and is jealous of Maura; she’s also jealous of the attention that her assistant (and niece) Nina (Elena Verdugo) gets from the mopey, dopey Gregor. To make the romantic entanglements even more absurd, add in Rudi Polden (Martin Kosleck), a disgraced and de-licensed plastic surgeon who does all the sculpting at the wax museum and who is obsessed with Nina and resentful of Gregor.

Monet disappears after a quarrel with Gregor; Gregor can’t remember exactly what happened because he blacked-out (or had an amnesiac episode or something or other), so he naturally assumes that he killed her by screwing up his eyes at her like he did the heckler. Police inspector Brant (Douglass Dumbrille) investigates, but he seems far more interested in impressing Rudi with his command of Shakespearean monologues than he is in finding the body of Monet. And then Nina disappears, but for some reason Gregor doesn't blame himself for that one. A knife gets thrown at Gregor while searching for Nina, but he sort of shrugs it off and runs off to Maura's apartment instead of trying to figure out who had just tried to kill him. In the end, Gregor reunites with Maura for more telepathic squinting and the truth is revealed.

The "hypnotic eyes...crawling with madness!" promised by the theatrical poster

Despite the title, there is no ghost in the movie. Nor is there anything frozen. At best, there's a corpse that's kept cool in an air-conditioned room, but that's a far cry from the Chaney-in-a-block-of-ice ballyhoo that Universal recommended to theater operators in 1945:

ridiculous publicity stunt suggestion from Universal in 1945

If I had seen THE FROZEN GHOST for the first time on television in the late 1950s, I may have blamed its multiple gaps in narrative logic and continuity on interruptions by commercial advertising--- perhaps the TV station needed to cut holes in the movie to make room for the commercials and that's why it doesn't make much sense, I would've guessed. But watching this now on DVD reveals how generous an excuse that would have been.

More than likely, though, I would've overlooked the faults in basic story-telling because of the wax museum setting. Warner Bros.'s HOUSE OF WAX, a 3-D film starring Vincent Prince as the owner-operator of a sinister wax museum, had come out in April 1953 and had caused a bit of a sensation; presumably some of the SHOCK!-watchers in the late 1950s had seen and remembered HOUSE OF WAX, so maybe the eerie lure of haunted waxworks would've made up for the gaping plot deficiencies.

Wax museums are unsettling places, after all. They seem like an ideal setting for a horror movie because of all the not-alive-but-not-dead figures that populate them. Sigmund Freud wrote an interesting essay about this in 1919 called "The Uncanny," and it may be one of the things that he actually got right. Puppets, mannequins, waxworks figures, animatronic robots, ventriloquist dummies, hyper-realistic lifesize sculptures... there's something "not right" about these things that can be disturbing on a really deep psychological level, and a good horror movie can exploit that. Out of curiosity, I checked IMDb under the key word "wax museum" and came up with a bunch of titles: MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM, TERROR IN THE WAX MUSEUM, MIDNIGHT AT MADAME TUSSAUD'S, NIGHTMARE IN WAX, MIDNIGHT MANHUNT, the "Waxworks" segment of THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD, CHARLIE CHAN AT THE WAX MUSEUM, DAS WACHSFIGURENKABINETT, and many others.

I've seen a lot of those films, and the "chamber of horrors" stuff done in them is often quite atmospheric, but unfortunately, Madame Monet's wax museum in THE FROZEN GHOST is not all that interesting or creepy. It would appear that Monet's house of wax features random (if not haphazard) tableaux from history (Attilla the Hun, Genghis Khan, Cleopatra, Marie Antoinette) and literature (Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Lady MacBeth), as well as scenes of very recent squalid local domestic homicides that Inspector Brant worked on. It's a less than impressive collection, and it is that kind of squandered opportunity for chills which underscores the general frustration that I feel with a number of elements in THE FROZEN GHOST...at the very least, they could have gotten the creepy wax museum part right, you know? Still, I hope that it was enough to spook SHOCK! viewers in 1958.

El Paso [TX] Herald, July 12, 1958

The SHOCK! promotional book's material on THE FROZEN GHOST included a "TV News Release" story--- perhaps since the SHOCK! movies ran in many markets immediately following the evening news, it was hoped that such a fake story would provide a lead-in for the newscast viewers and coax them to hang around for the movie. The news story for THE FROZEN GHOST is titled "Lon Chaney Without Horror," and reads in part:

"It isn't often that Lon Chaney is given an opportunity to play a sympathetic part on the screen and to appear without the disguise of 'horror' makeup. This opportunity is given him in THE FROZEN GHOST, the Shock feature film presentation to be telecast on this channel [...] As a further change from custom, he gets the girl--- in this case, blonde and beautiful Evelyn Ankers [...] Harold Young directs an excellent cast in support of Mr. Chaney in this topnotch mystery thriller."

As I read this news release, I could only imagine the bubble-headed newsreaders on my local TV station in 2010 delivering this item and then engaging in light, pseudo-extemporaneous banter about THE FROZEN GHOST as the closing theme music began to roll and the weather forecaster pipes up with a quick reminder about tomorrow's outlook. Imagining such a scene amuses me far more than viewing the film itself does.

NEXT: " 'All Who Entered Are Doomed' was the curse of Ananka's tomb! Yet they dared enter to solve a terror-ridden secret 3000 years old. See Dick Foran in THE MUMMY'S HAND on SHOCK on this channel. You won't want to miss this exciting feature film. Tune in!"

SHOCK! Ballyhoo (#3): Good Night, Nurse!

OK, technically, this is not SHOCK! ballyhoo--- it is from the "Showmanship" section of a theatrical pressbook for THE WOLF MAN and is intended for patrons in movie theater lobbies rather than TV viewers in 1957: a "first-aid booth" with cigarettes and chewing gum to soothe the nerves, candles for those afraid of the dark, spirits of ammonia (smelling salts) to bring consciousness back to those who have fainted out of fear, dye for those whose hair turned white from fear, and so on.

Though it was intended for movie-theater publicity well before the movie's stint on TV, I just can't resist including this here as part of my look at THE WOLF MAN on SHOCK!. For one thing, I like the explicit mention here of treating "those who suffer from 'thrill-shock'"--- I've been gathering stuff like this for a future web log entry on how the word "shock" was used (by Universal , Film Classics, and Realart) for horror films of the '30s and '40s and how this usage may have informed Screen Gems decision to title the syndication package SHOCK! in 1957. (Another example of "shock talk" from THE WOLF MAN's pressbook appears below.)

NIGHTMARE program and THE FROZEN GHOST

KAKE-TV Nightmare's "The Host" (Tom Leahy) introduces THE FROZEN GHOST, damning Lon Chaney Jr. in the process. Poor Lon! With Rodney (Lee Parsons). Broadcast out of Wichita, Kansas, initially from 1958-59. [Hat tip: Gary L. Prange.]

THE WOLF MAN (1941)

On December 5, 1957, in a town near Marion, Indiana, two gunmen forced their way into the home of Ted Edwards and his wife as they were entertaining a visit from Mrs. Edwards's sister and brother-in-law. Their faces covered by the upturned lapels of their raincoats, the intruders ordered the Edwards and their guests to turn off all the lights in the house except the TV. As one of the gunman sat in the living room with the hostages and watched television, the other took Edwards four miles by car to the furniture store where Edwards worked as manager. There, Edwards was forced to open the safe and hand over "several hundred dollars"; later, Edwards and the robber returned, and the two perpetrators made their getaway in the Edwards's car.

The reporter for the UPI syndicated story played up the coincidence that a community theater production of The Desperate Hours had been staged a mere six blocks from the furniture store as it was being plundered (you may have seen the 1955 Paramount movie version with Humphrey Bogart as one of a trio of escaped convicts who hold a suburban Indianapolis family hostage in their home), but I want to point to a different detail: while the safe at the store was being robbed, "Edwards said the second gunman stayed behind and watched THE WOLF MAN, a murder mystery show, on television while Mrs. Edwards and the guests lay on the floor, their hands and feet tied, for two hours."

My best guess is that the bandit who kept the hostages on ice was watching the Indianapolis CBS affiliate WISH-Channel 8 during the robbery. Channel 8 had purchased the SHOCK! package from Screen Gems and broadcast them on the "Fright Night" showcase Fridays at 10:45 PM (starting in Fall 1958, these films were to be horror-hosted at WISH-TV by Selwin). December 5, 1957--- the night of the furniture store safe robbery ---would have been the television broadcast premiere of THE WOLF MAN for that particular market. Because the robbery took two hours, the gunman was presumably able to watch the entire telecast. (There must be more to this story, right? Doesn't it seem strange that it took two hours to drive the eight miles to and from the furniture store from the Edwards home and burgle the safe that you knew the combination of?)

(And while I'm digressing: I guess describing THE WOLF MAN as "a murder mystery show" as the UPI story does seems a little peculiar, too. It was a popular film when it was released in 1941 and it enjoyed many theatrical re-releases, so certainly people recognized that it was more of a "horror melodrama" than a "murder mystery." But then look at this television listing for the movie:

Indiana [PA] Evening Gazette, Wednesday November 8, 1958

It is technically accurate, but would you synopsize the movie in that way? It would be like writing "A girl tries to run away from home when her dog is seized for destruction by a sheriff's order" as a description for THE WIZARD OF OZ.)

There's no denying that THE WOLF MAN is a classic, "classic" in the sense that it is "timeless in its relevance and accomplishment." Unlike DRACULA, FRANKENSTEIN, or THE MUMMY, there's very little creaky in THE WOLF MAN that needs to be excused as "a product of its time." Despite the faint whiff of trendy (for Hollywood in the 1940s) and oh-so-modern psychoanalytic theory that screenwriter Curt Siodmak wafts over the proceedings, THE WOLF MAN feels mythic--- it unspools like a fable or a fairy tale, following a tragic arc that we've seen a zillion times in literature and motion pictures but nonetheless manages to ring true as an insight into the human condition and experience. Somewhere between Mr. Hyde and the Incredible Hulk, the Wolf Man is a Jungian "shadow" that haunts each of us, forever threatening to slip out from under our very best and well-intentioned efforts to be good, civilized, disciplined, well-behaved, and nice to each other.

And because the struggle is intimately familiar to all of us, the monster is one that arouses sympathy as well as fear. When that dark side breaks loose inside of us (to return to Marion, IN, for a second, it is that feeling that we are all helpless hostages to our own home-invading gunmen), there is a terrible feeling of dismay and the dread feeling that it will happen again. When it appeared on TV as part of SHOCK!, THE WOLF MAN may have had a special connection to people living in the anxious Cold War atmosphere of the late 1950s where conformity and self-restraint were seen as vital components of homeland security (I recommend K.A. Cuordileone's Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War for deeper meditations on all that).

It's no surprise, really, that THE WOLF MAN has forever set the standard for reluctant, doomed lycanthropes that have shown up on movie and TV screens since 1941. For example, Paul Naschy's hombre lobo, Waldemar Daninsky, uses Lon Chaney, Jr.'s Talbot/werewolf as a point of reference and a touchstone; Naschy, whose films are so obviously inspired by the Universal horror classics, makes the werewolf his own, but he does so in a way that references Chaney's Talbot and then continues that arc into his own work. In the process, Naschy's hombre lobo is not some derivative rip-off, but a deeper exploration of familiar ground. I'll probably never bother to get around to seeing Benicio del Toro's THE WOLF MAN from earlier this year, but I can't imagine that he does anything to improve or expand upon Chaney's work that Naschy hadn't already done (and with a lot less money).

But still, I have to say that--- as iconic as it is --Chaney's Talbot is a little over his head. Though he's damn good as the ferocious and fearsome werewolf, Lon is painfully miscast as the gentry scion of Talbot Castle and estates. Chaney doesn't seem to get "tragedy" in the dramatic sense and plays it instead as a privileged bratty guy who feels entitled to a better shake than what he's getting. I was watching Edmund O'Brien in D.O.A. (1950) the other night; O'Brien's character follows a very similar arc to Chaney's Talbot--- cocky, self-assured guy has the bottom drop out and then he discovers that "the way he walks is thorny, through no fault of his own." He is suddenly at war with terrifying lethal forces inside of his body that he can't understand. Maybe it's not fair to compare Chaney to O'Brien, but if you can imagine the latter's work in D.O.A. as Talbot, then you can see what I mean.

Claude Rains is spot-on as Sir John; usually you can depend on Rains to chew up the scenery like a termite, but his performance here is understated and restrained, as if he didn't want to thoroughly swamp Chaney (or Ralph Bellamy, for that matter) in his scenes. Evelyn Ankers is completely unbelievable as the small-town Welsh girl, but she does an excellent job acting emotionally drawn to a charisma-less creep who has been spying on her bedroom with a telescope and who won't take "no" for an answer (her acting is even more impressive when you read about the behind-the-scenes friction between Ankers and Chaney on the set). And props to Maria Ouspenskaya for her work, too--- the scenes between Maleva and Talbot are Chaney's worst work in THE WOLF MAN, but Ouspenskaya keeps it together well. Finally, I want to say that it's too bad that budget and shooting schedule wouldn't allow for Lugosi's gypsy werewolf to get the full make-up treatment... I would've loved to see that.

Chester [PA] Times, Saturday October 25, 1958

Nowadays, sadly, "late late show" refers to a celebrity publicity-driven talkshows hosted by smug chuckleheads rather than interesting overnight movie presentations.

NEXT: "A behind-the-scenes view of murder in a wax museum will thrill you when SHOCK presents Lon Chaney in THE FROZEN GHOST on this channel!"