Thu 29 Oct 2009
TCM Alert – A BORIS KARLOFF BONANZA: Friday, October 30th
Posted by Steve under Horror movies[8] Comments
Coming up tomorrow, Friday, October 30th. I can watch Boris Karloff in anything. Bela Lugosi? Not so much.
6:00 AM Behind the Mask (1932)
A Federal Agent goes undercover in prison to break up a drug syndicate. Cast: Jack Holt, Constance Cummings, Boris Karloff. Dir: John Francis Dillon. BW-68 mins, TV-PG
7:15 AM Mask Of Fu Manchu, The (1932)
A Chinese warlord threatens explorers in search of the key to global power. Cast: Boris Karloff, Lewis Stone, Myrna Loy. Dir: Charles Brabin. BW-68 mins, TV-PG, CC
8:30 AM Ghoul, The (1933)
An ancient Egyptian returns to punish those who violated his tomb. Cast: Boris Karloff, Cedric Hardwicke, Ernest Thesiger. Dir: T. Hayes Hunter. BW-81 mins, TV-G, CC
10:00 AM Black Room, The (1935)
An evil twin brother disposes of his enemies in a secret death chamber on his estate. Cast: Boris Karloff, Marian Marsh, Katherine Demille. Dir: Roy William Nell. BW-68 mins, TV-G, CC
11:15 AM Walking Dead, The (1936)
A framed man comes back from the dead to seek revenge. Cast: Boris Karloff, Edmund Gwenn, Marguerite Churchill. Dir: Michael Curtiz. BW-65 mins, TV-PG, CC
12:30 PM Man They Could Not Hang, The (1939)
A mad scientist uses an artificial heart pump he invented to seek revenge after he is executed. Cast: Boris Karloff, Lorna Gray, Robert Wilcox. Dir: Nick Grinde. BW-64 mins, TV-14, CC
1:45 PM Man With Nine Lives, The (1940)
A doctor’s attempts to cure cancer lead to a series of grisly murders. Cast: Boris Karloff, Roger Pryor, Jo Ann Sayers. Dir: Nick Grinde. BW-74 mins, TV-PG
3:00 PM Before I Hang (1940)
A mad scientist experiments with a serum tainted with a psychopath’s blood. Cast: Boris Karloff, Evevlyn Keyes, Bruce Bennett. Dir: Nick Grinde. BW-62 mins, TV-PG, CC
4:15 PM Ape, The (1940)
A mad doctor dresses as an ape to kill victims for their spinal fluid. Cast: Boris Karloff, Maris Wrixon, Gertrude Hoffman. Dir: William Nigh. BW-62 mins, TV-PG
5:30 PM Devil Commands, The (1941)
A scientist kills innocent victims in his efforts to communicate with his late wife. Cast: Boris Karloff, Richard Fiske, Anne Revere. Dir: Edward Dmytryk. BW-64 mins, TV-14
6:45 PM Isle Of The Dead (1945)
The inhabitants of a Balkans island under quarantine fear that one of their number is a vampire. Cast: Boris Karloff, Ellen Drew, Helene Thimig. Dir: Mark Robson. BW-72 mins, TV-PG, CC
October 29th, 2009 at 10:16 pm
The highlights here are Mask of Fu Manchu, The Ghoul, The Black Room (fine direction by Roy William Neill with K in a dual role), The Devil Commands, and Isle of the Dead.
The Ghoul is based on a novel by Frank King (the Dormouse series) and features the great Ralph Richardson. Good film with some solid thrills. Also Cedric Hardwicke and Ernest Thesiger. This was Richardson’s first film and he makes the most of it. Remade in 1962 as No Place Like Homicide. Big finale in a burning Egyptian tomb on a British estate is a humdinger.
The Devil Commands is a good adaptation of William Sloane’s classic novel of murder and the occult The Edge of Running Water. A perfect role for Karloff as a scientist driven mad by grief and guilt over an experiment gone wrong. Some critics don’t care for the voice over, but I think it contributes to the film’s atmosphere.
Isle of the Dead is one of the Val Lewton classics, as you note directed by Mark Robson. Great atmosphere or decay, disease, and dread. A quiet film but one of great power.
The Black Room is more a Gothic (classic sense) drama than horror per se. Karloff is good in a dual role and the film has a hell of a plot with full Gothic trappings. Good to see Thurston Hall as something other than a blustering old fool. One of Karloff’s finest performances.
Racism to one side The Mask of Fu Manchu is ripe old fashioned melodrama. Karloff is the best of the screen Fu Manchu’s and Lewis Stone a fine energetic Nayland Smith, and as for Myrna Loy as Fu Manchu’s daughter … evil was seldom so attractive (at this point Loy was typecast as an Asian seductress —- see also Thirteen Women and The Black Watch). Jean Hersholt, Charles Starrett, and Karen Morley round out the strong cast. Grand set designs and costumes and a perfect script are among the other bonuses. It is Sax Rohmer’s gaudy epics brought to life on the screen. Pure nonsense, but splendid nonsense.
The rest are pretty much minor Karloff, worth watching depending on your tolerance, save for The Ape which is about on the level of some of Lugosi’s lesser efforts.
October 29th, 2009 at 11:54 pm
As a rough estimate, I’ve seen about half of these, and probably have copies of the rest on tape. But I’m all set to tape them all again. Wish me luck, though. With as many movies in a row as there are here, something’s bound to go wrong.
Of those that I’ve watched, my favorite is the one with Myrna Loy in it.
Any movie with Myrna Loy in it is my favorite.
October 30th, 2009 at 12:50 am
Oh I agree about Loy. If you haven’t seen it keep an eye out for a film called The Barbarian (1933 it shows up on TCM at times) where she has a nude scene. She’s in a bath but there’s no soap bubbles and clear water and she is quite lovely.
She was typecast as exotic in those days before she became every man’s dream wife — her first performance was as a vamp in a silent film. Though it isn’t a very good film John Ford’s The Black Watch (1929), based on Talbot Mundy’s King of the Khyber Rifles, with Victor McLaglen as King and Loy as the mysterious Yasmini is worth seeing just for her in all those filmy gauzy costumes. She does an Oriental dance in that famous Paramount short where Warner Oland’s Fu Manchu kills Colin Brooks Sherlock Holmes and William Powell’s Philo Vance too. She also plays a Mata Hari type opposite George Brent in Stamboul Quest (loosely based on the real spy Fraulein Doktor). And she appears in the very odd prohibition film The Wet Parade (1932) that among other things has Jimmy Durante as a Revenue agent.
If you haven’t seen it catch Thirteen Women where Loy plays a Eurasian beauty who seeks murderous revenge on Irene Dunne and the other women who were cruel to her back at an their sorority at an exclusive women’s college. Ricardo Cortez is the cop trying to stop her. It’s over the top and silly, but a great deal of fun and Myrna has a good time as the hypnotically powered half-caste taking her revenge on her sorority sisters.
October 30th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
I would add Michael Curtiz’ “The Walking Dead” to the list of superior Karloff films being shown on TCM. In fact, I would certainly have recorded it if I had gone in earlier today to check out the blog. Or if I had thought to mark it for recording in my TCM program guide, which seems to get buried and turn up just in time to remind me of something I’ve missed.
In any event, “The Devil Commands” will command my attention later this afternoon. Thanks to David Vineyard for pointing out the source of the film’s screenplay.
October 30th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
David —
Re Myrna Loy: all of the above!
Walter —
Re the blog: check it before going to bed, the first thing in the morning, and after every meal. Don’t get caught short again!
— Steve
November 4th, 2009 at 7:17 am
Walter
You can have a life or TCM and a DVR, not both.
Steve
If you haven’t seen it catch Loy in Too Hot to Handle. She an aviatrix and Clark Gable and Walter Pidgeon are rival world traveling newsreel photogs. There is some sort of vague plot about finding her lost brother, but it’s basically just an excuse for a movie that plays like a pulp story brought to life. Sheer Hollywood nonsense in its purest form. The opening as Gable ‘stages’ a war story in China is worth the price of admission alone. Makes a great companion to reading Ernest K. Gann’s book about his years as a newsreel photog, Hostage to Fortune.
November 5th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
[…] low-budget horror film was among those shown on TCM as part of a day-long festival of Boris Karloff movies just before […]
July 19th, 2019 at 4:05 pm
I was always a big fan of The Walking Dead. The idea of being betrayed by your “friends” is something that resonates with me. Then there’s the bad guys who keep killing themselves through sheer stupidity. If they had just let things be, they would all have better off. Most would have made a comedy out of this, but this movie played it straight and it works, as Boris carries the movie.