Fuck Winter—Halloween’s coming!

Moving apartment, packing and unpacking boxes of belongings, I rediscovered a few old LPs and cassette recordings of the likes of Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and David McCallum telling tales of terrible things I’d long forgotten. Suppressed memory, you might say. It was quite a discovery, happy and sad, like finding photographs of long lost lovers and knowing the reason you split and why you were such a dick. Recordings of horror stories which were once so very, very important but now much less so. Perhaps

These were recordings of the very best reading great tales that could entice, enthral, and entertain.

I still listen to such today. Downloading podcasts of The Horror from Relic Radio, or listening to Old Time Radio classic tales by Wyllis Cooper and Arch Obler for Lights Out, or those other shows like Suspense, Himan Brown’s Inner Sanctum, The Witch’s Tale, The Hermit’s Cave, or E. G. Marshall and his three-act The CBS Mystery Hour.. Today’s equivalent is the wonderful podcast series Tales from Beyond the Pale devised and produced by Larry Fessenden and Glenn McQuaid.

It’s not that entertainment was somehow better in the past, it is rather there was a bigger and more diverse range of imaginative material produced than all the tawdry remakes, or the repetitive Marvel superhero movies or the tick-box detective shows/sci-fi series available 24/7 today. Imagination has had its wings clipped by money, politics and Twitter mobs, and will never fly to giddy heights in a cage.

But back to the point of this post: Halloween’s coming. And here to get in the mood is a gallery of vintage album covers featuring some of biggest names in movies and entertainment (Karloff, Lugosi, Price, McCallum) reading classic tales of terror and imagination. Plus a few novelty records to show not everything was golden in the past…
 

 

 

 
More eerie album covers, after the jump…
 

 
Peter Lorre almost succeeded in disguising himself when he appeared on panel show What’s My Line? in 1960. As his voice was always instantly recognizable, Lorre answered his inquisitors’ questions by a simple “hm-hm” or “uh-huh” sounds. However, one question about a new movie proved his undoing and Lorre was unmasked as “a sad-eyed, innocent villain.”

Lorre was promoting his latest movie Scent of Mystery, which starred Denholm Elliott, Beverly Bentley, Diana Dors and Paul Lukas. The film was the first “Smell-O-Vision” feature (“First they moved (1895)! Then they talked (1927)! Now they smell!”) that offered audiences the thrill of scratching ‘n’ sniffing various aromas off the back of a card at key moments during the movie’s screening.
 

 
Some of the smells available for sniffing were roses, apples, wood shavings, lemon, tobacco, perfume and garlic. Apparently there was no stench of fart or glue—that would come later with John Waters’ “Odorama” feature Polyester in 1981.
 

‘Scent of Mystery’ soundtrack CD booklet with Smell-O-Vision scratch card.
 
Lorre seemed quite pleased with the finished result, saying he did not normally promote movies but this was something rather special. Scent of Mystery was written by cult writer Gerald Kersh, who rarely wrote anything dull. The film was eventually re-released without “Smell-O-Vision” as the mundanely titled Holiday in Spain, which some reviewers thought only made the movie rather surreal:

... the film acquired a baffling, almost surreal quality, since there was no reason why, for example, a loaf of bread should be lifted from the oven and thrust into the camera for what seemed to be an unconscionably long time…

Continues after the jump…

 
As a fan of the fabulously sinister reefer-smoking Austrian actor Peter Lorre, I was delighted to find this little clip of him singing. Peter Lorre singing? Although it seems almost unthinkable, in the 1920s the diminutive Lorre was a stage actor sometimes even appearing in musicals such as Happy End, the (flop) followup to Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera.

After gaining a level of cinematic notoriety for playing the serial child murderer in Fritz Lang’s M, Lorre was forever typecast as the creepy character, but here he gives this little ditty about the police a decidedly jolly air.

The singing kicks off about 40 seconds in.
 

Barry Nelson, the “original” James Bond, seated at left

Although this will probably not come as too much of a surprise to fanatical James Bond fanboys, the very first time 007 was portrayed onscreen it was by an American actor named Barry Nelson! Yep, a Yank James Bond, as seen on a live 1954 television adaptation of Casino Royale that was part of a CBS adventure series called Climax!

For the live CBS broadcast, Ian Fleming was paid just $1000 for the rights to his novel. Co-starring with Nelson as the villainous “Le Chiffre” was none other than Peter Lorre, whose typically weasley malevolence is the real reason to watch this (as always, Peter Lorre is great in this role). There’s a “Felix Leiter” character, but he’s the British agent and he’s called “Clarence.”

To add to this topsy-turvy Anglo-American sacrilege, Nelson’s not-so-suave Bond (he’s just terrible and horribly miscast) is referred to as “Jimmy” several times! Jimmy!    (When Casino Royale was made into the 1967 spy movie spoof, Woody Allen’s character, the wimpy nephew of David Niven’s Sir James Bond, was also called “Jimmy Bond.”)

This production was presumed to have been lost since its original 1954 live telecast, until an incomplete version on a kinescope was uncovered by film historian Jim Schoenberger in 1981 and aired as part of a TBS James Bond marathon. Eventually the entire show was located (minus a few seconds of credits) and MGM included it as a DVD extra on their release of the 1967 Casino Royale.

An urban legend persisted for years that following his death scene, Peter Lorre got up and walked to his dressing room, unaware that he was still in the shot, but this was debunked by Snopes.com. (The story had more than a grain of truth in it, this DID actually happen, but it was on a different live televised episode of Climax!)
 

 
According to the great director Fritz Lang, it was his meeting with Joseph Goebbels, the Mad Man of Nazi propaganda, that led him to flee Germany the very same day.

As Lang tells it, this fateful meeting came sometime around Goebbels’ ban on Lang’s 1933 film, The Testament of Dr Mabuse, which was outlawed for its veiled attack on Hitler and his vile policies. Amongst the oft quoted similarities between Lang’s film and the insane Furher, was Dr. Mabuse’s devilish plan for a 1,000 years of crime, and Hitler’s desire of a 1,000 year Reich. The unstated connection between brutal criminality and looney-tunes Nazis was there for all to see.

It’s a good story, but one that has little bearing on fact, as it now appears that the meeting never took place. Goebbels’ diaries have no mention of the alleged meeting, and Lang’s escape from the jackboot of National-Socialism didn’t happen until several months after the alleged job offer from Dr Joe.

More damaging in hindsight was Lang’s failure to make any reference to his own Jewish ancestry. His mother, Paula was Jewish, though she converted to Catholicism after marrying Lang’s father, Anton. Instead Fritz described himself as an “Austrian director”, at a time when the persecution of those of Jewish faith was a brutal reality on the streets of Germany. Indeed describing himself as an “Austrian director” could have been construed as aligning himself with the birth country of the Furher.

Later, while living in the safety of the United States, Lang said in his entry for Current Biography - “While many famous Jewish directors had to flee Germany because of the ‘Aryan’ work decrees, Lang, a Christian, fled only because he is a believer in democratic government.”

Okay, so Lang could argue that man made laws had no rule over him, as he believed in the Higher Court of his Christian God. Fine. But why persist in re-telling a fanciful tale forty years on?

Almost everyone tells lies, and the lies are not important. Some people are loved because of their ability to tell great lies, and we listen expectantly for them to tell their biggest and best whoppers. And so it is with Lang, as he tells tale after tale in this entertaining and immensely watchable interview with director of The Exorcist, William Friedkin. From running away from home, to surviving by his wits, to making his classic films Metropolis and M, to meetings with criminals and murderers - one killer kept the hands of victims under his bed, to his meeting with the Nazi Mad Man, to Hollywood and after, Lang, looking rather like Dr Strangelove, describes his hugely fantastic life.
 

 
With thanks to Wendy James
 

 
O, Vincent Price - wasn’t he fab? He had this terrific ability to sound both menacing and amused at the same time. It was part of the reason why his performances were always so enjoyable to watch, he brought a dark humor to the most chilling of horror, as seen in Theater of Blood, Tales of Terror, or House on Haunted Hill. No matter how gruesome the thrill (pet dogs fed to their owner, a puppet skeleton scaring a victim into an acid bath), one instinctively knew that at heart Price was fun, guaranteed to always be good company. As can be seen from this short interview from French TV in 1986, where Mr Price talked about working with Roger Corman, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, Basil Rathbone, James Whale, reminiscing about past successes and unmitigated failures.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

 
Part deux of Monsieur Price, after the jump…
 

Peter Lorre, Peter Lorre, you can trust him, he’s a brick, he’s a brick! (From Pat Fish.)