Writing the damn novel
9 February, 2010
I haven’t really blogged anything about writing so far, despite the blog’s subtitle. It’s probably because I’m “chicken-shit”.
I started a novel over the Christmas holiday, managed to get five chapters done, but, now I’m back at work, I’m writing virtually nothing. I could write if I didn’t have to work, but the fact is I DO have to work. I’d like to be a full-time writer so I wouldn’t have to do anything but write, but to get there is the tricky part. I have to write salable novels while I’m still working. And I can’t expect finishing one novel to set me free – I have to figure out how to write while working for maybe the next five years (at least), after which hopefully I can quit my job and write full-time.
I figured out part of my problem the other night. One reason I haven’t been writing is that it’s not something you can just turn on when you sit down at the keyboard. You have to keep your enthusiasm for the whole thing, and by “the whole thing” I mean the details of the story, not just general “I want to finish the novel” sentiments. So you have to keep the whole story in mind constantly, always going over the details and how the characters will act in all the different scenes. Obviously this is something that is much easier to do for a short story than a novel. But fuck it, I’m writing a novel, so I have to figure a way to keep the details of the novel in the front of my mind continually.
I’ve tried writing while at work – that is, I’ve got my Word files at work, and have come in planning to do some writing, but somehow never done anything. It’s partly because I’m under observation at work, by my boss, which makes me self-conscious and prevents the unselfconscious relaxation necessary to write. It’s also just that I’ve never written at work, so the situation is very unfamiliar. It’s also because my workspace at work is ironically not very comfortable for working: the desk is too high and too small, and the lights are too bright.
Tonight, when I get home, I’m going to get out my novel plan and just read it. No pressure to actually get words down, but just get the shape of the whole thing back inside my head, where it belongs! Wish me luck.
I’ll write a bit more about the specifics of my novel in my next post.
Stupid passwords, stupid people
22 January, 2010
The Sydney Morning Herald has a story up today about a report of the most common passwords (download the report PDF here). The gist is that a lot of people are using overly simple or predictable passwords, which are easy to crack. Here’s the list (the number in brackets is the number of instances of that password being used in the sample of 32 million):
1. 123456 (290,731)
2. 12345 (79,078)
3. 123456789 (76,790)
4. Password (61,958)
5. iloveyou (51,622)
6. princess (35,231)
7. rockyou (22,588)
8. 1234567 (21,726)
9. 12345678 (20,553)
10. abc123 (17,542)
11. Nicole (17,168)
12. Daniel (16,409)
13. babygirl (16,094)
14. monkey (15,294)
15. Jessica (15,162)
16. Lovely (14,950)
17. michael (14,898)
18. Ashley (14,329)
19. 654321 (13,984)
20. Qwerty (13,856)
Now, there are a number of observations we could make here. For instance, the top password was used by 290,731 people, which seems like a lot, but is only 0.00908534375% of the sample. But I guess if you add up the people using easily-guessed numerical sequences, the percentage would be a bit higher.
The observation I can’t help making is that passwords can reveal things about the user’s personality. For instance, people called, or in love with people called, Nicole, Daniel, Jessica, michael, or Ashley, are likely to be less knowledgable about or concerned with computer security. And (assuming these are direct transcriptions), these people don’t like to capitalise the name “Michael”.
We may also observe that these people find the phrase “I love you” is one that springs to mind automatically, when the question is “Please choose a password for your account”. This suggests a lack of intellectual seriousness (joke!).
I’m disappointed but not surprised that a lot of females, plus a few gay males, like to think of themself as a “princess”. I was more confused by the phrase “rock you” being a popular password, until I noted that these samples were all hacked from a website called rockyou.com. I dread to think what kind of site that might be.
“babygirl” is presumably a self-given nickname in the same vein as “princess”. “monkey” is more likely to be a nickname for someone else. Or else, as with “I love you”, it’s a verbal expression that seems ready to launch itself at any moment to the surface of consciousness, for reasons I cannot immediately discern.
“Lovely” is a weird choice for a password (especially if it’s deliberately capitalised). I can’t imagine it being the choice of many males who are not highly effeminate. Notice that there are no masculine equivalents in the list, e.g. “terminator”, “rambo”, “hellyeah”, “laydeez”, or, indeed, “ilovepussy”. Either men are cannier with their passwords, or they are the ones who picked all the numerical passwords, or the people who frequent rockyou.com are mostly female, or else there are some males there, but they are completely illiterate.
“Qwerty” was presumably the choice of people who’ve done typing courses, or are interested in the history of the keyboard. What do you think?
A brief rant about Internet Explorer 8
3 December, 2009
Thanks to my work admin, I am stuck with IE8. I swear IE has been going downhill since 4.5… Here are some of my favourite stupidities:
Toolbars seem to be less customisable than before: the address bar is at the top of the screen and you can’t move it. The search bar, which I never use, can’t be removed. The favourites button can’t be removed (it calls up the Favorites explorer bar, which basically duplicates the Favorites drop-down in the menu bar). I can’t move/remove any toolbar icons (unlike in Word, for instance).
The address bar will only drop down if Autocomplete is enabled. I hate autocomplete. Drop down addresses are displayed in over-large font (a limited number of addresses, in the order IE8 think is best), and there is an INVISIBLE delete button beside each address (to the right). The Compatability Mode icon keeps flashing up messages I don’t need to see.
OTOH, we get “searchability”, which seems to me to be enabling stupidity – you can now do so many different things from the address bar that it’s impossible to tell what you’re doing. Whoopdedoo.
Trust me, I’m the reasonable ideologue
30 October, 2009
Bret Stephens uses his column to bait “global warmists”.
The spark for this particular column is an item in the new book SuperFreakonomics, by Levitt and Dubner. They report a new solution to global warming proposed by Intellectual Ventures (a company which largely serves as a clearinghouse for technological and scientific patents): pumping sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, in order to mimic the global temperature-lowering properties of the Mt. Pinatubo volcano.
After this announcement, various prominent global warming activists are quoted as calling the idea crazy. You can already see where Stephens is going with this, can’t you? He gets in a good dig with the First Commandment of global warming, which is Thou Shalt Not Call It A Religion, and then adds a handful of disputed facts to show that global warming is not an issue, if it is an issue it’s not our fault, and we can’t do anything about it either way.
This logical approach, quite common in the anti-global warming camp, always reminds me of Sir Humphrey Appleby’s eternal wisdom, the standard Foreign Office response in a time of crisis:
In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there’s nothing we can do.
Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it’s too late now.
Stephens goes on to suggest that people who warn of the global warming crisis are all after a piece of the public-spending action. In some cases this may be true, though both scientists and professional activists tend not to find work difficult to get in any case. He doesn’t mention the possibility that people who’ve grown enormously rich via polluting industries (or who hope to do so) have at least equal incentive to find the facts as favouring their side of the argument. These rich people also have a lot more resources with which to promote their interests.
Finally, Stephens comes out and calls global warming activists and their many “fellow travellers” Marxists, as both ideas feed “man’s neurotic fear of social catastrophe while providing an avenue for moral transcendence”. I have no doubt that there are many mindless ideologues in the global warming camp, but True Believers are found in every avenue of life, and their existence is no proof of the falsity of their ideas. Many anti-global warming campaigners are obviously on the band wagon for the chance to relive the culture wars of old, regardless that the issues at stake do not exactly co-align.
What of the proposal itself, to pump sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere? Here are the obvious counterarguments, which I hope you will see are not merely ideological kneejerk reactions:
1. Sulphur dioxide has negative environmental effects: it contributes to acid rain (which is why industry in the West has been reducing its coal and petroleum emissions since the 1970s), which has a negative effect on foliage and water supplies, this eventually causing harm to living creatures. Atmospheric sulphur dioxide is also associated with increased respiratory symptoms and disease, difficulty in breathing, and premature death.
2. Continually pumping sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere will require a large ongoing supply. If global warming causes increase in strength, more will be required. It may be easier to just set off a volcano.
3. If global warming is “solved” by sulphur dioxide, action to reduce emissions may be halted (will be halted, if we are honest about these things). As emissions increase unchecked, more sulphur dioxide will need to be used to offset the problem, which will exacerbate the issues mentioned in point one.
So, a less caustic substance would be better. But even so, the cause of the problem would increase.
But according to Stephens, the problem itself doesn’t exist in the first place, so why has he written a column about the “solution”?
Well, he is an ideologue, and his concern is with ideological combat, not the problems of the real world. Ideologues on both sides of the argument would best be ignored, leaving the grown-ups to manage the problems without their “help”.
Plato’s argument for censorship
24 September, 2009
“Children cannot distinguish between what is allegory and what isn’t, and opinions formed at that age are usually difficult to eradicate or change; it is important that the first stories they hear shall aim at producing the right moral effect.” (Republic, Book Two, 378).
Source: Plato vs. Grand Theft Auto
Muslim men hate women
28 August, 2009
That muslim men hate women is the only conclusion I can arrive at, based on things I’ve heard in passing, and this nauseating article (I mean that the subject is nauseating, not the prose). Really, what benefit is there to society, by letting these ways take hold in the West? How long will Europe remain tolerant – until there is a sufficient Muslim vote to introduce sharia law? We can’t fight this awful trend until we have the courage to stop demeaning ourselves and praising other, more “authentic” cultures. We need to be proud of (and indeed more fully aware of) the Western virtues of freedom of thought, expression, and the search for knowledge, which we take for granted but which arrived only by centuries of struggle. Otherwise, just as a person with low self-esteem will always become a victim, all that is of worth in the West will be suppressed and trodden underfoot.
The ugly truth about the American health care industry
20 August, 2009
An insightful interview with a 20-year employee of the American health care industry, now resigned and speaking out for health care reform.
Notable passages from the interview:
It doesn’t have to be stated directly to [corporate bureaucrats] that you will be paid a particular bonus if you deny X number of claims; it’s known, and it’s part of the culture.
…
For elective procedures in many of these countries, yes, you might wait longer for some elective procedure. You might wait longer for an MRI than you would in this country because, on a per capita basis, there are often more machines here than in some of those other systems. But life expectancy in almost every one of these other countries is greater than ours. People do not have to wait long for urgent or necessary care.
…
Reform without the public option would be far less meaningful and effective. The public option may not go as far as people would like in some ways, but we need a mechanism that controls costs and makes healthcare more available to citizens. It would go a long way toward keeping the insurance industry more honest, as the president has said.
…
It doesn’t make a lot of sense. On the one hand, [Conservatives are] saying that [a public option] would put the private sector at an unfair disadvantage, while they’re also saying that the private sector can operate more efficiently. They are trying to have it both ways. But the reality is that the free-market simply does not work in the healthcare sector as it might in other sectors. A public insurance plan wouldn’t need to have the sales, marketing, and underwriting expenses—and would certainly not need to pay executives exorbitant salaries, and would not need to set aside a significant chunk of every premium dollar to pay shareholders—that private plans do.
…
The reason I started speaking out is I knew the insurance industry would come out with guns blazing to kill reform. I knew the tactics they’d be using and buzzwords they’d be repeating—especially through their shills in Congress, media and business. It’s the same old playbook. I know it because I essentially helped write it. … Because we’re talking about billions and billions of dollars at stake for those companies and investors.
…
Medicare is far more popular than almost any private health insurance program in the country. And people in [Veteran's Administration programs] are certainly very grateful. But many of them don’t know that it’s a public program.
…
One of the big PR firms [for] the insurance industry is APCO Worldwide. They’ve represented the industry for quite a long time. They’re skilled at setting up front groups to spread disinformation to challenge proposals. So they will get talking points into the hands of conservative radio talk show hosts and editorial writers at conservative publications. It all comes from the health insurance industry, but they spread this stuff in such a way that their fingerprints are not directly on it. … The tragic thing about these town hall meetings is how some of these angry citizens are being manipulated. When you see these stories about the meetings and how the participants are so concerned about government takeover of our healthcare system, they use the very words that were fed to them by the health insurance industry, not realizing that that’s where they came from, not realizing that they are unwitting pawns of the industry. Because they hear that stuff from people they believe are credible, like Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck.
NY critics go in for Francis Bacon bashing
22 June, 2009
With the arrival of the Francis Bacon retrospective at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, it seems the new fashion is to deride him, in an attempt to undermine and indeed eradicate his reputation. Chief suspects today are Jed Perl in the New Republic, and Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker (though you have to pay to read the whole article and find out how bitchy he really was, so I’ll be concentrating on Perl).
Typically for art critics, their devastating points are knowing allusions instead of anything concrete. They raise a veritable haystack of strawmen to knock down, and, as far as the actual paintings go, show themselves to have been rendered either blind or unfeeling by their occupation.
Perl says Bacon “owns” the “wrongheaded” tradition of the artist as romantic rebel, for the last half century. I’m not sure how he expects anyone with basic art knowledge to accept this, as (1), despite his insinuation that this was a special pursuit of Bacon’s, every artist aspires to this role, and (2) there are plenty of other, more famous artists eligible for the role, most notably Jackson Pollock (whom the US critics still don’t have the nerve to put down).
(“They are little more than rectangles of canvas inscribed with noirish graffiti.” I wonder how many canvases of literal graffiti have been praised by Perl over the years?)
“He zeroed in on those moments when Van Gogh and Picasso were pushing their glorious anarchic energy to the brink of incoherence [but] Bacon willfully ignored their ordering intelligence, preferring to sacrifice pictorial sensibility to literary sensationalism.” Schjeldahl made the same accusation of literary-ness, which made me nostalgic for Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word, which pointed out the ubiquitous use of this slur by modernist critics, who do so without accounting for what this term means and why is is so awful. I suppose it’s a slightly more specific term than “pictorial sensibility”, which as far as I can tell means “the sense of being a picture”.
“The Bacon mystique is not grounded in his paintings so much as in a glamorous list of extenuating circumstances.” This was also one of Schjeldahl’s jibes, that Bacon’s celebrity accounts for his reputation as a painter. Well, however much you repeat it, it remains unprovable, and certainly untrue in my case. I’ve encountered my share of homosexual sleaze, and to be honest Bacon’s shabby adventures bore me. A Bohemian who drank and liked rough trade? That’s hardly headline-grabbing stuff, is it?
(I’ll just briefly note here that no intelligent person takes an artist’s catalogue notes seriously. The stuff about wanting to express directly through paint was what critics of the time wanted to hear, shallow creatures that they are.)
Next Perl accuses Bacon of pandering to “intellectuals and jet-setters”, and of being “carefully calculated”, and in the painting of the death of his lover, “he gives his work a tabloid frisson.” Gee, can you see what he’s subtly implying here? He’s a fake, a sell-out – he’s not Real (this accusation based on no observable facts).
Let’s dissect this sentence: “[He runs] signs and symbols through the shredder,” i.e. he’s casual and doesn’t take Art seriously, “producing puzzles and enigmas,” i.e. he’s deliberately vague in order to fake the sensation of meaning, “flotsam and jetsam floating in a chic void,” chic corresponding with the “jet-setters” of the previous paragraph to imply he’s merely in it for the money. I remind the reader again that no evidence is produced for these arty-sounding insinuations.
“Bacon’s version of the man-all-alone-in-an-unfriendly-world routine takes on a retro appeal. … “Oh, that again.” ” Now Perl has taken a different tack: even if you used to like Bacon, you surely couldn’t now – it’s just old hat, isn’t it? Yesterday’s rags. The fashions have moved on! (Yes, he is in fact saying “If you like Bacon, you will be unfashionable”, which I sadly suppose is an argument with much power to move.)
“This emotional dissonance fits right in with a postmodern taste for muddleheaded irony” – so what kind of dissonance would fit with genuine irony?
Bacon’s Pope paintings have “a howling 1950s look” (1950s? How dated).
“By the 1970s, Bacon’s surfaces are smoother, at times looking almost airbrushed.” Airbrushed 1970s? Certainly redolent of a tacky panelvan painting – touché!
“The stretches of flatly applied paint in tan, gray, pink, and orange suggest the streamlined chic of the 1970s, when furnishings and clothes were done up in Ultrasuede. These paintings are high- style bummers, bad dreams with fashionable upholstery.” 1970s, Ultrasuede, the dated word “bummer” – you can just see Bacon in purple velvet flares now, can’t you? How gauche he must have been! That Perl guy sure knows about art.
(In his next paragraph, he basically hammers home that Bacon had the same handful of pictorial elements he kept reusing. That this could be said of almost any artist is something he doesn’t bother to mention.)
Now Perl employs a lot of airy-fairy words to compare Bacon with Giacometti. Can you guess who comes off better? On every point of divergence, Giacometti is a saint to Bacon’s abject scrabbler. And get this: while Bacon’s technique is “coarse methodical belligerence”, Giacometti has “graphic precision”.
Further more, “Giacometti does not prejudge experience in the way that Bacon does. … Freedom is a possibility in Giacometti’s universe, and this can pose a daunting challenge, especially for museumgoers who expect to be told what to feel.” Museumgoers who presumably feel much safer and more secure with Bacon’s writhing raw meat nightmares than Giacometti’s stick figures. So Bacon is accused of being safe and mainstream, as opposed to Giacometti’s (entirely nebulous) freedom.
Perl’s next paragraph would take far to long to analyse thoroughly, except for its last sentence: “The organic nature of painting, the end-to-end logic that characterizes all painting, whether in Rembrandt or in Mondrian, is rejected in favor of a modernist re-staging of a fin-de-siecle freakshow.” Ignore the final phrase for a minute. What does the rest of this sentence actually mean? What is the “end-to-end logic that characterizes all painting”? Is “end-to-end logic” really synonymous with “organic nature”? If you know what words actually mean, you know the answer is “no”. This highfalutin language is meaningless, and the use of educated-seeming blather is a fundamental part of Perl’s critical technique. It hardly needs stating that the last part of the sentence is also ultimately without meaning, except as a generalised conjuration of negative association.
Finally, Perl reveals that he has expended all these words in the service of Real Art. “The actual matter of art–the artisanal concerns, the structural assumptions–are all too often seen as reactionary and academic, something for pedants and conservatives to bother about.” Well, I agree with this, actually, but I’m not sure how tearing down Bacon to raise Giacometti serves this purpose.
“Bacon … is the real academic–a pasticheur and parodist of avant-garde attitudes.” For the bewildered – no, that is not the definition of “academic”, in any of the shades of meaning that term possesses. But Perl is associating Bacon with the dry artifice of academe which modernist critics spent the 20th century repudiating (while all the time building the new consensus which all the art schools parroted).
What of Bacon’s painting in themselves? Can Perl regard them without regard for artistic fashion, association of celebrity, “literary associations” (yes, the quotes mean I think it’s a meaningless term), and the image he has generated for himself of Bacon as some sort of fame-chasing charlatan?
“The paintings, however, are so bloodless that all they can possibly do is send you back to the story itself. There is nothing in the paintings themselves to hold you there. In Bacon’s work, content trumps form every time. The emotion is as formulaic and pre-digested as in any Victorian picture of a dying child.”
So that’s a no, then.
For myself, I knew nothing of Francis Bacon’s reputation when I first encountered his paintings. They hit me directly, and made me feel that the painter must be in sympathy with my own sense of the world. Looking back, I can see there was a certain adolescent appeal in that bleak, existentialist horror. That appeal remains, I admit, but the totalness of his commitment to the vision still convinces. The background colours suggesting sickly bodily fluids; the wrenched bits of meat, vaguely human, placed just-so in the middle of the scene; the hopeless faces, the drab domestic furnishings, the space separating all the forms – no one else does it like this. No one else shows the horror of life in all its ill-fitting, gawky, heartless, empty reality.
And this is no mere rotting shark, this is a creation of the artist’s own hands and heart. But his brush technique doesn’t relate him to any of the respectable movements of his time, and his use of pop materials isn’t poppy enough for him to get out through that escape route. So of course he’s not acceptable. But how could any living soul not be moved by the mortal passion play he enacts before us?
If you don’t get it, that’s fair enough. You are probably far too healthy and well-adjusted for this to make any sense to you. Bacon really isn’t meant for people constructing an analysis of the development of painting through the 20th century. He doesn’t fit. His misfortune is that he’s painting to communicate, not to fulfill his obligation to “the tradition that values the artist above the art”, whether that tradition is antique or modern. That’s why everything he does is “wrong”. And now he is not alive to defend it with his personal charm, Bacon’s work is becoming the ultimate “outside art”.
The Universal “Monster mash” movies of the 1940s
4 May, 2009
Monster mash (AKA Monster rally): an entertainment exploiting the appearance of two or more popular horror monsters; especially the films produced by Universal Studios in the 1940s, all of which included an appearance by Frankenstein’s Monster.
The 1930s saw the first talking horror pictures, which came chiefly from Universal Studios. These films were also notable because a scientific explanation, with which silent Hollywood horrors had typically concluded, was now excluded in favour of a supernatural aura previously unknown in mainstream American cinema.
The first of these films was Dracula (1931), which, being hugely successful, was shortly followed by Frankenstein in the same year, and The Mummy in the year after. This initial trilogy saw a burst of low budget successors from other studios, but none had the impact of these three. Universal produced other horrors too, including Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), starring Bela Lugosi, but did not attempt to capitalise on its prime properties until 1935, when James Whale was convinced to direct a sequel to Frankenstein, his Bride of Frankenstein.
Bride showed that a sequel recalling previously known characters could be a commercial success (this had been known in the theatre for years, but apparently the lesson had not transferred to the screen). Bride also showed, importantly, that a horror film could be fun. Fun is perhaps the chief differentiating characteristic of this sequel, as embodied in the arch observations of Dr Thessinger, the Monster’s picaresque adventures through the countryside, and, perhaps most of all, a rollicking tone which could only originate from the director’s shear joy at letting loose, cinematically, thematically and dramatically.
The success of Bride of Frankenstein saw sequels also produced for Dracula and The Mummy, plus a couple of new properties, The Invisible Man (1933)and The Wolf Man (1941). Most of these sequels were not only inferior to their forebears, but mediocre in general cinematic terms. Dracula’s Daughter (1936) had a terrific star in Gloria Holden, but was otherwise a shabby “B” picture, let down most of all by its wooden male lead, Otto Kruger. Son of Dracula (1943) was a relatively lavish successor, which was successful in its Southern Gothic atmosphere, but let down by its cast, especially Lon Chaney Jr. as the eponymous Count “Alucard” – he seemed more sad than sinister, and this weak threat made for a poor protagonist. The best performance here was from male lead Robert Paige, who starts out unpromisingly as a conventional juvenile lead, but becomes more convincing as his circumstances begin to straiten.
Lon Chaney Junior was the weak link in a number of Universal horror films, beginning with the title role of The Wolf Man, and following this with roles including Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, and the Mummy. Resting his career entirely on his famous father’s name, he brought little to his roles except a strangely flabby face and an acting range limited to a constant hangdog expression, which passed for gravitas chiefly in the role of the accursed Wolf Man, which was his best part.
On the other hand, the 1940s Universal horrors show Bela Lugosi in a couple of his best performances preserved on film, as the jovial psychopath Igor. This character appears first in Son of Frankenstein (1939), which may have claim to be called the first of Universal’s “monster mashes”, seeing as it is the first horror film to feature several of the archetypal monsters, or at least grotesque characters brought to life by actors notably associated with horror (trailers from the height of the monster mash frenzy tried to bump up their monster count by enumerating generic types such as “the mad scientist!” and “the hunchback!”).
In this film, Lugosi defies critics who call him a clown with little acting ability. In the few film opportunities he had to demonstrate his range, he impresses as, variously, the aristocratic Count Dracula, the leering, jeering Igor, and the obsequious cabby in The Bodysnatcher. What Lugosi lacked was not so much acting ability as a good agent, since, despite his accent, he could have done well filling roles as diverse as Earthy Peasant, Herr Professor (AKA the explainer), and various types of Foreigner, instead of the badly written villain roles in the series of “poverty row” pictures that doomed his reputation.
Karloff is here too, of course, in his last appearance as the Monster. Sadly, after starting well, this film drags heavily in the second half, chiefly when the Monster is on screen. Karloff complained of having little dramatically to do in this film, which can indeed also be said for later incarnations of the Monster, all though not all those later films drag so much as Son. Basil Rathbone plays the Son, though mostly on one cranky note. Lionel Atwill adds to his cult notoriety as the wooden-handed, darts-playing police chief. The Monster ends up falling into a pit of sulphur beneath Frankenstein’s laboratory.
The first really successful monster mash was Ghost of Frankenstein (1942). Again, the only “official” monster on site is Frankenstein’s monster, now played by Lon Chaney, who seems to find even this shop’s dummy role a stretch. However, the very “sequelitis” of the film gives it that monster mash tone – here are the same characters, again, in another variation of the old, old story, again (the Monster even befriends a little girl, in a deliberate echo of the first film, though this time she doesn’t come to such a sticky end). Bela Lugosi’s Igor appears for the second and final time, and is again the bright spot and anchor of the movie. There are solid performances by Cedric Hardwicke as the other son of Baron Frankenstein, with Lionel Atwill as his thwarted assistant, and an appearance by B-movie lead Ralph Bellamy as the juvenile lead.
The pacing of the narrative has also improved from Son, and, to be blunt, from Bride and the original as well – this new decade seems to have seen the first glimmerings of insight that films do not always have to move at a walking pace, but can rattle along like a fast-going train. At the time this was regarded as poor film-making, and mainstream cinema still tended to the deliberate and respectable. It wasn’t until the 1980s that cinema as “ride” became a mainstream phenomenon.
But the classic monster mashes, at their best, give an early glimpse of this new, effervescent character of story-telling. Ghost of Frankenstein is, along with House of Frankenstein, the most successful in this respect (both were directed by Erle C. Kenton). There may be weak spots, but we are carried over them by the enthusiastic rhythm of the piece as a whole.
Ghost concludes with Igor’s brain transplanted into the head of the Monster (following which the building explodes for some reason I don’t recall). The sequel semilogically sees Bela Lugosi now playing the Monster, while former Monster Lon Chaney returns as the lupinely challenged Laurence Talbot, AKA the Wolf Man, in Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man (1942). Reportedly, test audiences laughed when they heard the Monster speak in Lugosi’s voice. He had of course uttered a few words at the end of Ghost, but otherwise the Monster had not articulated verbally since the 1935 Bride of Frankenstein. Plus, of course, Lugosi’s Hungarian accent was by this time irrevocably associated with Dracula. As a result, Lugosi’s speaking scenes were cut entirely, except a few moments where you can see his lips moving silently. Even the Monster’s growls were dubbed by a presumably less accent-impaired actor. This is a shame, firstly because this historically unique performance has disappeared forever, and even more so because the surviving portion of the film is so woeful.
Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man was directed by Roy William Neill, best known today for directing Universal’s classic Sherlock Holmes series starring Basil Rathbone. Sadly, just as Rathbone belied this success by turning out to be one of Son of Frankenstein’s weak points, so Neill revealed that without a solid cast he could not produce a creditable motion picture. The film is reasonably well made, though lacking the pace of Kenton’s Ghost, but the lead actors (beside the mute Lugosi) are uniformly wooden, making this film resemble nothing so much as a compendium of bad acting. Chaney as the Wolf Man is probably the best thing here, let down by Ilona Massey as his uninviting love interest, plus the tedious Patrick Knowles as Dr. Mannering, and (from the first Wolf Man film) Maria Ouspenskaya’s amateurish turn as the Gypsy Lady. To be fair, the way in which they deliver their lines without any apparent concern for their meaning may be due to (1) lack of diligence on director Neill’s part, used as he was to the stage-bred cast of the Holmes films, who properly prepared for their performances, and could power their way through the story on sheer charisma; and (2) what is the silliest of all the Frankestein movies in terms of plot, leading to dialog which would have been awkward in the mouths of the most capable actors. Holmes veterans Lionel Atwill and Dennis Hoey (who played Lestrade in the Holmes films) are wasted here. There is also a truly woeful song-and-dance number to suffer through. In the end, the cast are done away with by an exploding dam, which presumably also carries away the revolting population of the nearby village of Visaria. Together with the chopped-up nature of the final product, this constitutes the weakest of the monster mash movies, and is best avoided except for the sake of having viewed the complete cinematic cycle.
Luckily, things pick up again with House of Frankenstein (1944), the other high point of the monster mash films. Karloff appears (as “the mad scientist!”), assisted by J. Carroll Naish (as “the hunchback!”), and together they are the best part of the film. The film is notable for its quaint episodic structure: in the first half, our above-named “heroes” escape prison, revive the skeleton of Dracula, and send him to do their bidding, only to see him get a permanent and fatal suntan. In the second half, they recover the frozen bodies of Frankenstein’s Monster and the Wolf Man, revive them too, and come to a sticky end. Director Erle C. Kenton directs with rare flare – the brief scene in which Naish falls through a castle wall into an underground cave is remarkable in its assured, dynamic movement, and sophisticated use of special effect-rigged sets.
John Carradine plays Dracula (AKA Baron Latos), not much more effectively than Chaney had done, but the fast action of the story stops us worrying about that too much. The Monster is now played (mutely) by Glenn Strange, who despite the little screen time he got in the role, is possibly my favourite incarnation of this character (his resemblance to Herman Munster probably helps!). The Wolf Man is Chaney again, and he spends his time complaining about his lot, as usual. There is also a plumply attractive gypsy girl, plus cult favourite George Zucco – he shines in the role of house of horrors host Lampini, before immediately being bumped off by Naish. In the end, Karloff’s mad scientist is dragged into a swamp and submerges along with the Monster, a surprisingly powerful scene, while Naish is thrown out a high window, and Chaney is shot with a silver bullet.
Only Chaney and Carradine return for the final monster mash, House of Dracula (1945), also directed by Kenton. Dracula visits scientist Onslow Stevens (“the mad doctor!”) in his seaside castle/laboratory, to ask for a “cure” for his vampirism. The doctor is assisted by a surprising innovation: a female hunchback (Jane Adams). Soon Chaney turns up, also seeking a cure, having somehow survived a silver bullet in the last film, and then the Monster is discovered in the sea caves under the castle. This film is often derided, unfairly, I think. The plot is plainly silly, but it is certainly more enjoyable than Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man, and makes a decent conclusion to the series. The only real problem is the abrupt ending, when the Monster comes to life for the shortest time so far, and perishes in flames only a minute later.
So the core monster mash movies are:
Son of Frankenstein (1939)
Ghost of Frankenstein (1942)
Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man (1942)
House of Frankenstein (1944)
House of Dracula (1945)
–of which best are the fourth and the second.
After these films, Universal included their monsters in a series of comedy films starring the team of Abbott and Costello, starting with Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein (1948), starring Lugosi as the Count, Chaney as the Wolf Man, and Strange as the Monster, and devolving through Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff (1949), Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951) and Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (starring Karloff again) (1953), to Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955). Some fans of the 1940s monster mash movies include these comedies within the oeuvre, but I am not a fan of Abbott and Costello, and I don’t consider these overt comedies to fall within the horror category.
In 1944, Bela Lugosi appeared in Return of the Vampire, playing a role which was Dracula in all but name, assisted by a werewolf companion. This film is supposed to be quite good (I haven’t seen it), and was apparently successful enough that Universal asked Columbia to cease making films that could possibly infringe on their intellectual copyright. We might consider this little-known team-up to represent one of the classic monster mash movies.
A note on the music.
While mainstream Hollywood movie music followed Korngold’s lead, in producing scores influenced largely by Richard Strauss, Wagner, and the ballets of Tchaikovsky, composers in shadowy genres like horror and film noir saw the opportunity to write music in a more contemporary style. While Waxman’s Bride of Frankenstein score was still largely beholden to the Late Romantic model, the 1940s saw opportunities in this vein increase, and we hear this in the Universal horror scores by Frank Skinner, Hans Salter, etc. Most of these scores have their requisite Korngoldian romantic moments, but in fact are largely in the same family of tonal modernism as composers Shostakovich and Prokofiev, Hindemith and Vaughan Williams. Career film composers do not have the same opportunities for respectability, but listeners with open minds will find much gratifying music in these scores, particularly as John Morgan and William Stromberg have done so much good work reconstructing and recording these scores for the Marco Polo and Naxos record labels.
I note that the film House of Dracula has no composer credit, only a credit for musical director to one Edgar Fairchild. However, there is at least one interesting piece of “original” music here, a piano performance of Beethoven’s Moonlight sonata that devolves (thanks to Dracula’s evil influence) into a Mephistophelean mood piece in the style of Debussy, before returning to Beethoven and then stopping abruptly. I hope some diligent person will transcribe and record this music separately at some point.
Universal horror’s little-known cousin.
I must take this opportunity to mention the little known RKO horror films of the 1940s. These were produced in response to Universal’s success in the monster genre. Responsibility was given to one Val Lewton, previously an associate of David O. Selznik, but a gifted producer and writer in his own right. In this unique deal, Lewton was given a free hand to produce the films he wanted – provided he use the lurid titles bestowed upon him by the studio publicity department. In response, Lewton produced a series of horror films notable for their intellectual subtlety, and emphasis on atmosphere over sensationalism. The two best films in this series of seven are the first two, Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie, both directed by Jacque Tourneur. Boris Karloff joined Lewton to star in the last three films, and in The Body Snatcher was teamed again with Bela Lugosi, who takes the rare opportunity to shine as the wheedling cabby. Any fan of early horror movies should take the opportunity to become acquainted with these little-known gems of the genre.
