The Stamps of Frankenstein

News has come that the Royal Mail of Great Britain will be issuing stamps celebrating Hammer Films this summer. The set will include a Curse of Frankenstein stamp, based on the poster shown here.

Frankenstein philatelic history spans back a mere decade. In 1997, Royal Mail plans for a Mary Shelley bicentennial stamp were abandoned, and — not for the first time — the author was supplanted by her creation. A Tales of Terror set appeared, itself a subset of an ongoing Tales and Legends series, featuring four famous British monsters painted in a vigorous caricature style by Ian Pollock. The watercolors included a bushy-haired Dracula, a split-face Jekyll and Hyde, a fiery-eyed Hound of the Baskervilles, and a subdued, laconic Frankenstein Monster.

The same year, at Halloween, after vigorous lobbying by the Karloff, Lugosi and Chaney estates, the American Postal Service issued a heavily promoted Classic Movie Monsters series featuring Universal Pictures’ family of creatures: Lon Chaney’s Phantom, Chaney Jr.’s Wolfman, Lugosi’s Dracula, and Boris Karloff on two stamps: The Mummy and Frankenstein.

Thomas Blackshear II provided excellent portraits of the characters, notably a baleful, lizard-lidded Karloff Frankenstein, though monster fans, understandably, had hoped for paintings by the legendary Famous Monsters cover artist, Basil Gogos.

The USPS distributed thousands of promotional kits to schools. “We are using the fun of these 'monsters' to get kids interested in collecting stamps," said Azeezaly Jaffer, manager of Stamp Services. “The subject matter of these kid-appealing stamps offers employees the opportunity to promote the hobby.”

The USPS would use The Monster again, in February 2003, this time a closely cropped photograph of Karloff in mid-transformation at the hands of Jack Pierce. The picture served as the “Makeup” entry in a series called American Filmmaking: Behind The Scenes.

Date unknown, a curious Hollywood Horror Classic set was issued by the West African Republic of Sierra Leone, with art by American painter Zina Saunders. The collection includes Charles Laughton’s Dr. Moreau and Lionel Atwill from The Mystery of the Wax Museum, along with the familiar Universal monsters, and features the world’s first Bride of Frankenstein stamp. Karloff appears in a scene from Son of Frankenstein.

The new stamp set, coming June 10 from the Royal Mail, honors popular British films, notably the three Hammer Film lynchpins, Curse of Frankenstein, (Horror of) Dracula, and The Mummy. Much has been printed in the UK about Christopher Lee, featured on all three stamps, becoming the first living non-royal to be featured on a British stamp. In a statement published in the Telegraph, Lee says “I suppose its an honour. Her Majesty is rather more recognisable than me, though. In all but one of the stamps I have seen I have my head in bandages. It’s probably a mercy.”

Interestingly, the other stamps in the Film set honor the bawdy Carry On Series, including their Hammer Film spoof Carry On Screaming.

The stamp design is a bit awkward, using horizontal film posters with the Queen’s cameo and postage overlain and competing with the already busy images. Nevertheless, it’s amusing to see the Queen’s profile sharing space with the once critically reviled Hammer horrors, and Screaming’s pneumatic Fenella Fielding.

Closeups of the British 1997 Tales of Terror series.

USPS pages for the 1997 Classic Movie Monsters series, and 2003 Filmmaking: Behind the Scenes.

A fascinating page of Dracula stamps from around the world, including a full sheet of the Sierra Leone Hollywood Horror Classics series.

Two wonderful blogs: Literary Stamps, and Fantastisk Filateli.

Tagged!

After nine months of blogging unscathed, I’ve been tagged, dammit, for a meme (rhymes with “mean”), a fancy word for “Tag, you’re it!”.

I am usually wary of these things. The word “viral” puts me in mind of Nigerian money scams, but I overcame my apprehension considering that I was tagged by the inestimable Richard Harland Smith of Movie Morlocks, and the great company I fell in with: My fellow tagees are Kimberly Lindbergs of Cinebeats, Final Girl Stacie Ponder, Video WatchDog Tim Lucas, and Marty McKee of Johnny LaRue’s Crane Shot.

The challenge posed is as follows:

1) Pick up the nearest book.

2) Open to page 123.

3) Locate the fifth sentence.

4) Post the next three sentences on your blog and in so doing...

5) Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

I was game. And I was about to enter the Twilight Zone…

Sitting at the computer, the books immediately at hand are those I use as reference for my blog. The one on top of the pile, currently, was Master Movie Monsters, from 1965, a lightweight celebration of classic horrors, by Brad Steiger. Unfortunately, Mr. Steiger ran out of things to say ten pages short of the magic 123 number, so I moved to the next book, which was Focus on the Horror Film, a longtime favorite of mine, a collection of serious articles on horror films, published in 1972. The cover features an Oliver Reed Werewolf, Lugosi’s Dracula, and The Monster and The Bride holding hands.

I flipped to page 123, counted down and read the three target sentences. I was knocked for a loop. The passage dealt with Hammer’s The Mummy, describing Christopher Lee’s formidable creature as a hollow crust, dusty and cratered with gunshot wounds, comparing it with Mary Shelley’s description of a “degraded and wasted” monster.

For all the randomness of the exercise, the sentences I landed on were perfectly appropriate for my Frankencentric blog!

Delighted, I roughed out my post, set it aside to be polished later, fired off 5 invitations as prescribed, and I turned in. 

Back online Friday afternoon, prior to posting my contribution, I clicked through the links on my menu, landing on a daily favorite of mine, Arbogast On Film, one of the blogs I had tagged. And there, somebody pinch me, was Arbo’s meme entry… from Focus on the Horror Film!

I don’t know what the chances are that both Arbo and I would have the same out of print, relatively obscure, thirty-six year old book within immediate reach. I contemplated probabilities, fate, happenstance and telepathy. I am not normally paranoid, but I checked for hidden microphones.

I had to rewrite my post. This time, I went to another table piled with books waiting to be read or re-read. The book on top was from the second category. I regularly pick books off my shelves to revisit. They are always somehow different each time around.

The book is True History of the Kelly Gang, by Peter Carey, one of the most gripping novels I have ever read, a literary tour-de-force told in the legendary Australian outlaw hero’s “voice”.

Based on a famous letter written by Ned Kelly himself, Carey uses its rythms, its archaic expressions and peculiar writing style devoid of punctuation, save for periods. The words rush together, breathlessly. Seems every sentence in the book is supercharged. Here’s the passage dictated by the meme:

Bill Frost has carked it he said he has bled himself to death.

Now it is many years later I feel great pity for the boy who so readily believed this barefaced lie I stand above him and gaze down like the dead look down from heaven.

The traps is out for you sonny Jim.

There. Now I have to read the book again, like right now.

As per instructions, I tagged, in turn, five other bloggers. I largely shied away from horror blogs (I couldn’t take anyone else quoting from Focus on The Horror Film!) and tried to make my list as eclectic as possible. I came up with the aforementioned (and decidedly troublesome) Arbogast on Film, whose blog — warning! — may prove to be addictive; Max Cheney of The Drunken Severed Head whose blog — warning! — may cause coffee to shoot out of your nostrils; Rob Kelly, who should be posting on any one of his countless comics-oriented blogs, probably Hey Kids Comics! or maybe All in Black & White for 75 Cents; Thom Ryan, the formidable film spelunker at Film of the Year; and Joe Thompson, an expert and enthusiast of rolling stock, I kid you not, holding forth at The Pneumatic Rolling-Sphere Carrier Delusion.

I’ll be clicking through all the links peppered throughout this post to see what everyone is reading.

Frankensteinian : Jonathan Brewster

Can you name the actor with the stitched-up face?

In Joseph Kesselring’s play, Arsenic and Old Lace, killer Jonathan Brewster returns to his childhood home in Brooklyn where he plans to lay low for a while. The cops are looking all over for him on account of twelve murders (thirteen if you count the one in South Bend who “wouldn't have died of pneumonia if I hadn't shot him!”). Now he’s stuck with Mr. Spinalzo, a cumbersome corpse that he needs to unload, and there’s also the matter of his plastic surgeon pal, Dr. Einstein, fixing his face. The last time Jonathan needed a new mug, the inebriated Einstein had just seen “that movie” and made him look like Boris Karloff!

In 1941, the line, “He looks like Boris Karloff!” brought the house down every night at the Fulton Theater in New York. No wonder. It was a bold self-referential joke. The man who looked like Boris Karloff was, in fact, played by Boris Karloff!

A masterpiece of jet-black humor, Arsenic and Old Lace was a Broadway sensation. When Frank Capra shot his very faithful film adaptation, the same year the play opened, principals Jean Adair and Josephine Hunt as the cuddly but murderous spinster aunts, and John Alexander as the comically insane Teddy “Roosevelt” Brewster took a four week stage break to appear in the film.

Ever a trooper, Boris Karloff stayed back in New York to preserve the hit play’s marquee value.

The film part of Jonathan Brewster went to Canadian-born actor Raymond Massey, whose angular, Lincolnian features suited the sinister role to perfection.

The “looks like Karloff” line being so important, the filmmakers took steps to make it relevant no matter who played the part. On stage, Karloff appeared without special makeup, relying on body language and his frowning, bushy black eyebrows to convey menace and evoke his famous film role. In the movie adaptation, Massey was given a pasty complexion and a network of face stitches, making the Monster connection obvious.

It’s a shame that Karloff did not get to immortalize his Jonathan Brewster performance on film when it was fresh, especially considering that Capra's film was held back and unreleased until 1944, after the play had ended its run. Karloff went on to appear in three different TV adaptations of Arsenic and Old Lace, in 1949, 1955, and 1962.

The play, a real gem and a true classic, has been in continuous revival for over sixty years, with Jonathan Brewster as the plum and pivotal villain part. Even Bela Lugosi essayed the role in a late forties theatrical version.

And the picture at the top of this post? It's from a 1969 ABC Movie of the Week adaptation, and that’s Fred Gwynne, late of The Munsters, as the malevolent Jonathan. I haven’t seen this version, sometimes chided for its minor but unnecessary updates and tweaks. I just hope they didn’t change that famous line to “He looks like Herman Munster!”.

See the amusing original trailer for the 1944 film. “Raymond Massey… makes Frankenstein look like a glamour boy!”

A New York Times Hirschfeld caricature of the original 1941 cast.

Jack Pierce Birthday

Glenn Strange gets a fresh coat of paint as he is being transformed into the Frankenstein Monster by makeup genius Jack Pierce.

On this day, May 5^th, in 1889, Jack Pierce was born. A Greek immigrant in America, he was a baseball player, a silent movie actor and stuntman, and eventually, a makeup artist. Becoming Head of Universal’s Makeup Department at a time of unparalleled effervescence, Pierce created the wolfmen, the living mummies and all the memorable movie monsters — including a certain Bride — we have come to regard as the classics. The crowning achievement, of course, was his brilliant design for the monster of Frankenstein.

In the early days before modern movie cosmetics and lightweight foam appliances, Pierce painstakingly built up his remarkable creations with wax, cotton, greasepaints and crude chemicals. In 1935, he designed an early reusable “appliance”, casting The Monster’s towering forehead in rubber.

Despite his years of service and his incalculable contributions, Pierce was summarily let go in a management shuffle at Universal in 1947. He continued working as a freelancer for movies and TV. A legend today, he died in relative obscurity, in 1968.

See my previous post about Jack Pierce creating the Frankenstein Monster, and a post about the "lost" Karloff Frankenstein.

Jack Pierce on Wikipedia, featuring links to interesting sites.

Thanks, Max!

The Covers of Frankenstein : Fate No. 498

A ghostly Frankenstein Monster face hovers amidst lightning over its bookish creator on the September 1991 cover of Fate magazine.

The painting, by N. Taylor Blanchard, is serviceable, its narrative clear enough, though The Monster’s appearance is distinctly Hollywoodian rather than literary, and the woman looks absolutely nothing like Mary Shelley.

The accompanying article, Mother of Frankenstein, ruminated on whether psychic powers led to the writing of Mary Shelley’s "horror classic". The author, Pauline Saltzman, was a contributor to Fate magazine for over forty years.

Still published today, Fate, a magazine devoted to paranormal phenomena, was first launched in 1948 under the direction of Curtis Fuller and Amazing Stories editor Ray Palmer. Its famous and wildly successful first issue featured a cover article by Kenneth Arnold, the man who coined the expression “flying saucers”.

In January 1962, the magazine carried another Frankenstein-themed article called “The Legend of the Golem: The First Frankenstein”, written by Ted Lowell.

Fate magazine website.

A gallery of all the Fate magazine covers.

The Munsters Early Pilot Episode

It’s a clear measure of how big the sixties’ Monster Boom was when two network fielded monster-themed sitcoms in 1964. ABC went with a satisfying adaptation of Charles Addams’ deliciously macabre The Addams Family while CBS put out the sweet and silly The Munsters, turning the iconic Universal Monsters into comedy characters.

The Munsters were originally planned as a cartoon show. The original idea has been tracked back all the way to a 1943 “Monster Family” concept by animator Bob Clampett, and the TV project submitted to Universal in the early sixties was penned by Rocky and Bullwinkle writers Alan Burns and Chris Hayward. Somewhere along the line, Universal ordered a pilot to be made as a sitcom with live actors, and that’s how The Munsters played out, though the characters did assume cartoon form in comic books and a 1973 animated short, The Mini-Munsters.

The strength of The Munsters lies, no doubt, with it’s inspired casting, led by the muggings of Fred Gwynne as a doofus Frankenstein Monster named Herman, Al Lewis as an irrepressible borscht belt vampire Grandpa, and actress Yvonne De Carlo displaying perfect comic flair.

The series had decent ratings, outperforming The Addams Family, and it even earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best TV Show, but it was cancelled after only two years on the air, murdered in the ratings by ABC’s new, flashy, color Batman series. Despite its short run, the series’ 70 episodes would go into syndication and its ongoing popularity led to cast reunions for specials, a TV movie and a theatrical feature, Munsters Go Home! (1966). New casts were used for a revival series, The Munsters Today in 1988, a TV movie, Here Come The Munsters in 1995, and a Christmas Special in 1996. Through it all, The Munsters would jump around from CBS to ABC, NBC and eventually Fox. It is said that The Munsters was one of the most merchandized series ever, its instantly recognized characters turned into toys, model kits, dolls and Halloween costumes, their likenesses stamped on apparel, games, squirt guns, and lunch boxes.

There were three different pilots made as the series was taking shape, the first one shot in color. It’s interesting to note how the characterss appearances evolved. Gwynne appears thinner, without the bulked up chest padding and the Monster’s prominent brow is high on the forehead, above the actor’s eyebrows, perhaps in an attempt to make the face more expressive. Grandpa Al Lewis’ pointy nose is even pointier, thanks to a makeup appliance he must have been thrilled to abandon for the series. A different child actor plays the werewolf boy part that would be toned down and given to Butch Patrick and, most significantly, Herman’s wife — here called Phoebe — is played by Joan Marshall as a Morticia Addams-type character, far sexier than Yvonne De Carlo’s glamorous but motherly Lily Munster.

The short and fascinating 17-minute pilot is on YouTube: Part One, Part Two.

There are innumerable Munsters fan sites on the net, including Munsters.com (hosted by Butch Patrick), Munsterland, the very complete Marky Munsters, and The Munsters Unofficial Website.

The original TV series is available on DVD: Season One, Season Two.

An amazing site devoted to Fred Gwynne.

The Art of Frankenstein : Emma Mount

“Once I'd seen Elsa Lanchester in this role I found her to be
the most iconic horror female of them all.”

— Emma Mount

British painter Emma Mount’s gorgeous oil portraits celebrate marginals and unconventional people like pin-up girls, burlesque queens, tattooed ladies and pop culture icons. Her outsider subjects, rendered with photographic precision, assume relaxed poses and calm gazes that suggest pride, inner strength, and an unmistakable touch of attitude.

Mount’s pop icon gallery includes Judy Garland’s Dorothy, Christina Ricci’s Wednesday, and Elsa Lanchester’s Bride of Frankenstein done in a splendid circular portrait, full face and eyes forward, with her imperial upswept hairdo and beestung lips.

“I first saw the Bride of Frankenstein at a very young age,” Emma wrote me. “The impression it made was immense and I was awestruck with her in particular from that moment on."

Mount’s painted backgrounds are distinctive. Pin-ups pose against lush curtains, starry skies or intricate damask wallpaper. For The Bride, Mount painted a startling purple leopard print.

“That's just very me,” says the artist. “It sneaks into my life all over the place (clothes, shoes, cushions) and it was the first thing that came to mind when I was painting her and needed a background. I wanted to drag her out of her black and white prison, and bring her kicking and screaming into a colourful, kitsch present!”

Mount's favored subjects are usually women, but Boris Karloff’s Mummy, the doomed romantic Ardath Bey, rates a solemn, glowing portrait, with hand on chest displaying his jeweled scarab ring. Mount captures the sad spirit of Karloff’s broken-hearted monster with the same assurance and insight manifested in her superlative rendition of The Bride’s eccentric beauty.

Emma Mount’s art is displayed on her website, at deviantART and on MySpace.

Read an excellent interview on the online art magazine Phirebrush.

With thanks to Emma.