Tag: Boris Karloff

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All Strip, No Blushing

Well, I may be two decades too late, but I shall enter it anyway. The hue and cry about Dick Tracy, or, rather, the outcry about his hue. Should a comic strip, once adapted for the screen, be flickering in shades of gray or flash before you in spanking Technicolor? Are strips quintessentially monochrome, or is their melodrama best played out in red, yellow, and blue? The latter approach was taken by Warren Beatty and the creators of the 1990 Tracy picture, which did fair business at the box office, but had a production design that proved disastrous for merchandizing. Disney stocks fell, as I recall; and I don’t think Madonna was to blame. Was it a mistake to put rouge on the old squarejaw? Was there much darkness in Chester Gould’s creation to begin with?

Sixty years earlier, on this day, 21 November, in 1947, radio listeners tuned in to follow Tracy on the “Case of the Deadly Tip-Off,” a mystery involving the disappearance of Slim Chance, America’s most famous radio commentator. Apart from its intriguing premise, the requisite cliffhanger (the 21st being a Friday), and a punoply of cartoonish names), the radio serial has little comic strip appeal; its voice talents and effects artists seemed particularly listless that day.

Rather than being stultified by such dross, I clapt my eyes on the more promising sounding Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (1947), which stars Boris Karloff opposite 1930s movie serial Tracy Ralph Byrd. It is a follow-up to the 1945 return of Dick Tracy, a somewhat anticlimactic adventure whose cast was headed by the colorless Morgan Conway. It is comic strip week here at broadcastellan, you know. Besides, I am pretty much scraping the bottom of my “100 Movie Pack” of “Mystery Classics,” a DVD set I snatched up on a trip to Gotham earlier this year.

What struck me upon screening this otherwise undistinguished 1945 thriller was its noir lighting and the occasional noirish camera angle. However carelessly inked the script, the thrills were augmented by a chiaroscuro I did not expect from a comic feature. The shadows looked particularly intriguing when cast like doubt upon the face of the ever-suspect Milton Parsons, a ghoul of a supporting player I enjoy reencountering in the darker alleys of popular culture.

Meanwhile, as I am preparing for my next escape to Manhattan, anticipating to have my entertainments curtailed by the current stagehand strike, I noticed that the earlier Dick Tracy serials are now being shown at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, where, on my previous visit (in June 2007) I took in an episode of Spiderman.

I wonder whether the producers of The Shadow are going to follow in the footsteps of Beatty’s Tracy or model their version on the glossy treatment of the failed 1994 resuscitation of Lamont Cranston (a glimpse of whom, as impersonate by Alec Baldwin, I caught last night on ITV 3). Being no expert in the field, I always considered comic strips to be bright (and was pleased to meet Blondie in such splendid color); but, emerging from the shadow of the darksome Deathridge and the sinister Splitface, it is . . . back to the drawing board.

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That Sarong Way to Do It, Ms. Lamour; or, When Sound Leaves a Bad Taste in Your Eyes

Well, it was time to close the first broadcastellan poll. The question I asked was: “If you had to give up one of your five senses, which one would it be?” Here are the results (25 votes): Sight (12% / 3 votes); Hearing (12% / 3 votes); Touch (4% / 1 vote); Smell (40% / 10 votes); and Taste (16% / 4 votes). Since I always insist on the opportunity to question a question, rather than accepting it outright, I added the (to me) facetious “So what, I’ve got a sixth sense,” a way out taken four times (16% / 4 votes). As I said before, I chose to give up my sense of vision; but last night, when it came to choosing an anniversary to go on about, I was reminded of the havoc the sound of a voice can wreak on a vision of beauty. Dorothy Lamour’s, for instance.

On this day, 28 October, in 1948, Ms. Lamour was heard as host and star of the Sealtest Variety Theater, chatting with Jack Carson, singing a few chirpy tunes, and camping it up with Boris Karloff in a pre-Halloween sketch. Only a few days earlier, Karloff had been given a chance to prove his versatility to the American radio audience by playing the lead in an NBC University Theatre adaptation of H. G. Wells’s comic novel The History of Mr. Polly. Now he found himself reduced once more to parodying his monster image, even though his avuncular voice was not the least bit intimidating. Nor, for that matter, did the famous lady in the sarong sound to me anything like her screen image.

Coming across as an efficiently cheerful salesperson or a routine-hardened night club performer putting on a pair of comfortable shoes while waiting in line to cash her paycheck, Lamour did not get her timbre into temptress mode and, aside from a few charming if not always genuine laughs, made few efforts to enhance a clunky script littered with more or less appalling gags. Her voice sure took the G out of Glamour that night.

The “sarong formula” (mocked above in a 1942 Movie-Radio Guide cartoon by Jimmy Caborn), did not work on the air. Some screen sirens or Hollywood hunks are decidedly less rousing when forced to rely solely on their vocal chords to make us swoon or convince us to buy whatever product the radio show in which they starred was peddling.

Such a smelly chestnut of a radio show should overwhelm the sense of nostalgia lingering in anyone’s nostrils, I thought, and aired my listening disappointment in a new poll. Say, when would you rather be, if not today?

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On This Day in 1948: Boris Karloff Gets Himself In and Out of a “Beastly Silly Wheeze of a hole!”

“Hole!” said Mr. Polly, and then for a change, and with greatly increased emphasis: “‘Ole!” He paused, and then broke out with one of his private and peculiar idioms: “Oh! Beastly Silly Wheeze of a hole!” —H. G. Wells, The History of Mr. Polly (1909)

Well, we’ve all been there, I guess; call it a rut, a depression, or down in the dumps. A hole by any other name is just as deep. To look on while someone you love is stuck in one can make you as miserable as dwelling there yourself; it seems difficult to find a way out either way. One could throw a book, I suppose, in lieu of a rope. Light enough to be hit by without sustaining injury, but profound enough to make what you might call an impact, The History of Mr. Polly is just the right volume to toss. While not exactly a guide to better living without chemistry, it sure is comforting—a friendly reminder to anyone who is deeply dissatisfied with the “hole” of life that it is possible to get out or on with it somehow.

In Mr. Polly’s case, getting out involves a botched suicide attempt, arson and insurance fraud, an unreliable pistol, a pair of stolen trousers, and the fortuitous departure of an abject scoundrel. I didn’t suggest there’s an easy way out, and neither does the author, H. G. Wells.

Middle-aged, mismatched, and miserable, Mr. Polly has very nearly gone crackers; but he learns, at last, that a change of luck or pace is not beyond his own powers. On this day, 17 October, in 1948, Boris Karloff assumed the role of the man in the proverbial ditch, seizing the rare opportunity to step onto the stage for a noteworthy stab at reinvention.

Karloff could probably identify with Wells’s antihero, considering that the actor had been in the beastly hole of typecasting for far too long and was, after a string of horror movies, in danger of becoming a mere caricature. The Grinch of box office calculations had absconded with his thespian options.

The NBC University Theater, a radio program that featured adaptations of literary works of fiction and provided brief lectures between the acts, gave the soft-spoken Londoner an opportunity to take off the Halloween costume he’d been dealt by Hollywood’s costume department and put on the mask of comedy instead.

Some three years later, when Anthony Pelissier’s motion picture adaptation of the novel opened in New York City, the audience was faced with a Mr. Polly who had the features and figure of John Mills; but on radio, it was Karloff who inhabited the role in a moving study of malady conquered and hope restored.

Let’s assume life is a broadcast studio. Consider the possibilities. Grab that microphone, my friend. I’ll be listening.