The Peter Cushing Centennial Blogathon : Day One

This week, upon the 100^th anniversary of his birth, May 26, 1913, fellow bloggers are joining me in celebrating the life and career of actor Peter Cushing.

A young man and a fledgling actor in 1939, Cushing traveled halfway around the world to Hollywood where he got his first film experience under director James Whale. In 1940, he appeared opposite Laurel and Hardy in A Chump at Oxford. Kicking around the film capital, he joined fellow British expats playing cricket and he met Boris Karloff. Compelled by patriotism, Cushing cut short his Hollywood adventure and headed back home to duty in blitzkrieged London. He was promptly drafted into the theater and soon touring the world as a member of Laurence Olivier’s troupe. He would play Osric to Olivier’s Hamlet in the 1948 film adaptation.

In the Fifties, Cushing became a household name on British television with award-winning performances in live broadcasts playing, among many others, Beau Brummell and Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four. In 1957, with The Curse of Frankenstein for Hammer Films, Cushing embarked on a spectacular career as a horror film star, rising to a pantheon that includes the Chaneys, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and his contemporaries and friends Vincent Price and Christopher Lee.

No sketch, however brief, of Peter Cushing’s extraordinary life and career is complete without a mention of his wife Helen, née Beck, who passed away in 1971. Cushing was devastated and he would mourn her every day for the rest of his life. He would say that he was just killing time, only waiting to be reunited with her. I was in London last winter, doing research at the National Gallery where I had access to Peter Cushing’s file. It contained a photograph of a young Helen Beck, and I was struck by her beauty and the kindness in her eyes, and I understood, a little bit at least, how deeply her loss must have affected Cushing.

Peter Cushing work until the end. His last gig was narrating — with Christopher Lee — Flesh and Blood, Ted Newsom’s documentary about Hammer Films. Cushing passed away on August 11, 1994, the very same week that the film was broadcast in England.

At the top of this post is the splendid cover by Quinton Winter for a recent issue of Fortean Times. It features an article, The Human Face of Horror, by Stephen Volk and an extract from his novella set in Cushing’s beloved Whitstable. There is also a look at Cushing the artist, his watercolors and illustrated scripts, and a Fortean appraisal of “Weird Whitstable”. The issue is well worth seeking out.

Now, on to the Blogathon! Check back often. We have a fabulous group of participating bloggers and I’ll be updating here with new links as they come in every day and all through the week. 

The Unknown Cushing

Here’s a highly original kickoff for a Blogathon devoted to an International Horror Icon… The eminent Richard Harland Smith of TCM’s Movie Morlocks looks at Peter Cushing’s non-horror roles! He also uses the word “contumely”.

Beautifully written and damned informative, The Peter Cushing Nobody Knows will have you hunting down titles like Cone of Silence, Violent Playground, Cash on Demand, and End of the Affair, all showing Cushing at his best, and not a wooden stake in sight.

A Cushing Double Feature

Craig Edwards spelunks Pop Culture and promises to explore the films of Peter Cushing all this week on his Let’s Get Out of Here blog. 

His first post focuses on Cushing’s interpretation of Dr. Who, perhaps non-canon, but good enough for two films in ’65 and ’66. Neat posters and eye-popping trailers are on show at Craig’s Saturday Night at the Movies.

The Comic Book Cushing

Cushing’s Dr. Who again, in Daleks vs The Martians, a wild comics adaptation from 1996, offered here by the good folks at The Secret Sanctum of Captain Video. 

While you’re visiting, click through recent posts and read the Dell Comics adaptation of Jason and the Argonauts, posted in homage to the great Ray Harryhausen, who left us recently. And if you dig deeper, you’ll find more strips related to Harryhausen, Hammer Films and Peter Cushing. Tons of goodies here, and there’s more coming from The Secret Sancrum this week!

Announcing The Peter Cushing Centennial Blogathon: May 25-31, 2013

The Peter Cushing Centennial Blogathon is now LIVE!

Click HERE for all the latest posts and links.

Bloggers are still welcome to join in until Friday, May 31.  Instructions below...

I am inviting fellow bloggers to join me in a Blogathon — May 25 to 31 —celebrating the life and career of actor Peter Cushing (1913-1994) in this, his centennial year.

The image at top is the new Peter Cushing stamp, part of the “Great Britons” series from The Royal Mail. There are many events scheduled in celebration of Cushing’s Centenary — and we’ll be linking to all of them — but now is the time for us horror and film bloggers to step up and honor Cushing with our own Blogathon!

Need I mention, among appearances in some 130 films, Peter Cushing was Baron Frankenstein and Dracula’s nemesis, Doctor Van Helsing. He was also Dr. Who, Dr. Terror, Dr. Blyss, Dr. Maitland — who was cursed by The Skull, and Dr. Perry — who traveled to the Earth’s Core. He fought The Mummy, he confronted Ingrid Pitts’ Carmilla and he pursued The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas. He was the Sheriff of Nottingham, Sherlock Holmes and Holmes’ creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. On television, he was Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four and he appeared in Space: 1999 and The New Avengers. And, of course, in the first Star Wars film, he was the formidable Grand Moff Tarkin who ran the Death Star and bossed Darth Vader around!

Our Blogathon will feature your personal recollections, your profiles of Cushing, your reviews of his films and performances. Post your thoughts, your artwork, your homages. If you need an example of a Blogathon, check our Boris Karloff Blogathon Archives.

Only two weeks to go until we launch, short notice, I know, but then we’ll have a whole week to post, and it’s OK if we spill over to June 1st and 2nd.

Attention Bloggers: Here’s how to participate…

1. Promote the Blogathon! Run one of the Cushing Centennial badges on your blog. There are 6 to choose from at the bottom of this post. You may, of course, resize if necessary. If you need a special size badge, let me know.

2. You MUST link the badge to this URL: http://tinyurl.com/pqcwxcl. It will link back to this announcement post and to the Blogathon updates when we go live, on May 25.

If you are not participating, you can still post a badge and help us get the word out! Let me know if you do.

2. Let me know you are participating. Please email me here and give me your blog URL.

3. Make your Blogathon post at any time between May 25 and May 31, inclusive. At the top or bottom of your post, please include a line saying that your post is part of the Peter Cushing Centennial Blogathon, at this URL: http://tinyurl.com/cpqj4kl.

4. VERY IMPORTANT: Soon as you post, you MUST email me the URL to your post. If you make more than one post, you MUST email me the URL to each and every individual Blogathon posts you make. It is impossible for me to check all the blogs just in case a new post has gone up. Simply said: If you don’t mail in the URL, your post will not be listed.  

That’s it. If you have any questions, email me.

Now join me, won’t you, in celebrating the great Peter Cushing’s 100th Anniversary!

Mary Shelley, by Fernando Vicente

A Mary Shelley in caricature, with movie monster flattop, neck bolts and Bride hairstreaks. Shelley’s sad-eyed likeness comes from Richard Rothwell’s painting of 1840.

Spanish artist Fernando Vicente is perhaps best known for his harrowing Vanitas series of portraits superimposing anatomical detail onto glamorous models, the women quite literally exposing their inner selves. Another series of images combines portraits and mechanical drawings, substituting gears and machinery for body parts. Any of the flayed images and the mechanical reconfiguration could serve as Frankenstein illustrations.

The Mary Shelley portrait is just one of many remarkable caricatures by Vicente. Follow the links to see more of the artist’s amazing work.

Fernando Vicente’s website, and a blog, featuring an immense selection of caricatures.

Fernando Vicente’s Anatomical Art, on Trendland. 

Brigitte Bardot Meets Frankenstein

The Frankenstein Monster checks out Brigitte Bardot’s assets in a photomontage illustrating a short humor piece — call it skin mag whimsy — for Hi-Life magazine, cover dated May 1959. The author is Forry Ackerman, moonlighting from his duties as editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland, then only 3 issues old.

In Frankenstein’s Bebe?, Ackerman imagines a movie where the barely articulate Frankenstein Monster builds his own mate. “A virgin Brigitte,” reads Ackerman’s colorful prose, “burgeoning into a life of nubility, nude as the Marilyn Monroe calendar on September Morn as she lies supine on the operating table…” The Mad Doctor/Monster presses “a twitching ear to her bewitching poitrine to detect the first heartbeat.”

A former model, young Brigitte Bardot became an instant sensation and an international sex symbol — nicknamed Bébé, from her initials — with her appearance in Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman in 1956. Ackerman’s title for his imaginary Frankenstein/Bardot film, Frankenstein Created Woman, predates the Hammer film of the same name by eight years! Furthermore, Ackerman imagines the Bébé Bride wearing “a pseudo-bikini hastily contrived from some medical gauze in the lab”, a perfect description of the flimsy costume worn by Susan Denberg in promotional stills and the poster from the Hammer entry of 1967.

Switching to screenplay format, Ackerman recounts the closing moments of his mind’s eye movie as Bébé's bosom “heaves convulsively with her first breath of life!” The Monster growls, “You — girl. I — make — you!”, whereupon Bébé, who, has it happens, had been given the brains of a nymphomaniac, unfastens her “diaperette”, and the film ends on a Technicolor closeup,  “Her gluteus glorious suddenly leaps to life… The Frankenstein Monster meets the barefoot girl with cheeks of tan! It is THE LIVING END!”

Hi-Life was published out of New York City by Wilmot Enterprises, one of countless men’s mags peppered with nudie pictures, discount versions of the massively popular and revolutionary Playboy magazine first published in 1953. Ackerman might have become acquainted with the title as a literary agent. That’s how he met Famous Monsters publisher James Warren, placing work by his clients in Warren’s own Hefner-inspired men’s mag, the short-lived After Hours. The two men hit it off and Warren hired Ackerman as editor of Famous Monsters, launched in February 1958.

In another Hi-Life/Forry/Famous Monsters connection, the March 1963 issue of Hi-Life carried a jokey article about the popularity of horror movies called How to Make a Monster, by one Harry Schreiner. The title of the article used Famous Monster’s very distinctive logo. It’s unlikely that Ackerman had any involvement, or that he or FM publisher Warren would have condoned the swipe.

With big thanks to collector George Chastain for sharing his copy of Hi-Life.

Excerpts from Hi-Life on Perverse Osmosis.

A collection of Hi-Life covers on Stagmags.

The Posters of Frankenstein : Small Run Bride of Frankenstein, 1935

Here’s a nice, small-run typographical poster for Bride of Frankenstein — Adults! 15 cents! — playing in October 1935 at Bird’s Rivoli, a movie house in East Tawas on Saginaw Bay at Lake Huron. The week’s worth of films advertised were all new, all from 1935.

Independent, out of the way and catering to a small-town crowd, films never ran long — Bride played only four times over two days — and it made no sense to spend money and send away for lithographed posters and lobby cards. Simple cards like this one, printed locally, did the job. Only a handful would be produced, jazzed up with yellow, green or orange colors, for front-of-house display and, perhaps, distribution to nearby stores and pasting on fences within the community.

Details are scarce but promoter Herman Bird was active in Michigan, operating several theaters from the silent era and into the Fifties, including the Family Theater, and another Rivoli in Grand Rapids. Bird’s Rivoli on US23 in East Tawas was also known as the Bay Theater for a while. It closed some fifty years ago, its building surviving as a meeting hall. Ultimately, it was leveled and turned into a parking lot.

Related:
The Bride of the Bronx

The Frankenstein Special: Blue Skies (1946)

Call it ‘Astaire and Crosby Meet Frankenstein’ as comic Billy De Wolfe mimics the Monster in Blue Skies, a Paramount musical from 1946.

The Frankenstein cameo comes at 8:40 into the film. Bing Crosby, who runs a high-toned supper club, has to deal with a boisterous drunk. He signals his sidekick, waiter De Wolfe…

Here’s the clip:

Bulked up in his backwards coat, hair smoothed down, cheeks sucked in, De Wolfe transforms into a convincing Karloffian Frankenstein Monster, sans makeup save for a green light on his face. The stunt is all body language.

Blue Skies is Hollywood fluff rendered in gorgeous Technicolor, it’s flimsy romantic triangle plot a vehicle for a generous catalog of Irving Berlin songs and dazzling dance numbers that included Fred Astaire’s classic Puttin’ On the Ritz — later famously parodied in Young Frankenstein (1974).

Billy De Wolfe (1907-1974) honed his song and dance act in Burlesque, graduating to musical theater, Broadway, and on to a relatively short but showy film career — a dozen film in the Forties — perfecting his signature foppish, fastidious character in pencil mustache. He was much busier in television as a sitcom foil, talk-show raconteur and variety performer, often appearing in drag as “Mrs. Murgatroyd”. Through it all, De Wolfe toured extensively on the nightclub circuit. There is no record of his act, but as an impressionist, he may very well have originated the Frankenstein routine for his one-man show.

The extremely inebriated gentleman in the clip is Jack Norton (1889-1958), a ubiquitous bit player whose specialty was the comic drunk. He appeared wild-eyed, weaving perilously across the set, fumbling cigarettes, bumping into furniture and slurring his lines in countless film, with notable tanked turns opposite The Marx Brothers (A Day at the Races, 1937), and W.C.Fields (The Bank Dick, 1940). He also appears perfectly plastered in James Whale’s The Great Garrick (1937) and blotto in The Ghost Breakers (1940), with Bob Hope. In real life, Norton never touched the stuff.  

Rondo Awards Announced FRANKENSTEINIA is First Runner-Up for Best Blog!

The Rondos are, by far, the most prestigious awards in the classic horror field, casting a vast net — 35 categories! — to honor the best in classic horror research, creativity and film preservation. In this record year, over 3400 voters participated. The winners of 2013 were announced on Monday.

I am proud indeed to report that FRANKENSTEINIA has placed as First Runner-Up in the Best Blog category. The Rondo for top blog most deservedly goes to The Collinsport Historical Society, Wallace McBride’s truly outstanding and beautifully designed site devoted to Dark Shadows and things related.

In Frankenstein Rondo news, the Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein Blu-Ray edition was crowned as Best Classic DVD. Universal Classic Monsters: The Essential Collection wins for Best Classic Horror Collection and the accompanying booklet, The Original House of Horror, wins as Best DVD Extra.

A Rondo for Best Toy, Model or Collectible goes to sculptor Jeff Yagher for his amazing Bride of Frankenstein.

Frankenstein-related Honorable Mentions go to Dr. Shocker’s Frankenstein vs Wolf Man Political Debate, Fan Event category, and Steve Niles and Bernie Wrightson’s Frankenstein Alive, Alive, in the Horror Comic category. Tim Lucas’ Video Watchdog review of the Dracula and Frankenstein Blu-Rays gets an Honorable Mention in the Best Article category and, by the way, Mr. Lucas was also honored as Best Writer.

In the five years I’ve been blogging, FRANKENSTEINIA has collected seven Rondo nominations. In the Best Blog category, we’ve landed an Honorable Mention, a Best Blog win for 2010, and we’re First Runner-Up for the third time. Along the way, we also scored an Honorable Mention for the Boris Karloff Blogathon as Best Fan Event, and a nomination for Best Article. All of those translate, I realize, into a lot of votes, for which I am humbled and very grateful. Thank you, all, for your continued support.

Most of all, there are no words to express my gratitude and admiration for the monumental task of running the Rondos, shouldered every year by David Colton on behalf of the Classic Horror Film Board. Thank you, David. 

The full list of Rondo winners.