Tag: Elsa Lanchester

Rats! Rats! Rats! You’ve Got a Friend in Willard and Ben

RATS! RATS! RATS! YOU’VE GOT A FRIEND IN WILLARD AND BEN
It makes sense that a sequel to the 1971 hit Willard appeared within the next year.

It makes sense that this sequel focused on the rat Ben and would be called Ben, given the previous film’s rather downbeat ending.

It also makes sense that Phil Karlson directed Ben, since Karlson directed such gritty films as Kansas City Confidential, 99 River Street, and The Phenix City Story, all involving characters who might be considered dirty rats.

Karlson never directed any character badder and meaner than Ben, though. Not any of the tough guys played by John Payne, Preston Foster, Neville Brand, Lee Van Cleef, and Jack Elam in Kansas City Confidential. Ben don’t need no stinking mask, for one. Ben also has an infinitely larger gang anyway and they’re real hungry as demonstrated throughout Ben. Nor Tennessee sheriff Buford Pusser from Walking Tall, which Karlson made right after Ben. Joe Don Baker must have come as quite a relief after Ben, who quickly became a has been after his two film roles and multiple songs about him. Ben must have wanted even more dough to return for a third film. That dirty rat!

Ben also won a PATSY Award for his performance in Ben, which undoubtedly contributed to his ego problem.

Anyway, I didn’t much care for Ben, because it quickly established a dread pattern after the obligatory flashback to the events that ended Willard. Here’s that pattern: Rat attack. Cutesy poo musical number. Rat attack. Cutesy poo musical number. Rat attack. Cutesy poo musical number. Rat attack. Cutesy poo musical number. Rat attack. Cutesy poo musical number.

Sounds like a real winner, right? Yeah, if you like a bunch of bad ideas bouncing off each other for 90 minutes.

You can also throw in some police chatter, a journalist character who’s seemingly working on just this one story (though it’s hard to blame him, I mean it’s not everyday that millions of street rats terrorize a city), and a little boy named Danny and his sister (played by Meredith Baxter before her marriage and hyphenated name, before her TV mother fame, before her Lifetime movie career, before her coming out) and his mother who all seem like refugees from a Disney live-action project.

Oh yeah, like Willard before him, the little boy possesses the ability to communicate with rats, especially Ben. Oh yeah, once again, the lonely little boy has a heart condition.

Danny proves responsible for the musical numbers scattered throughout Ben and he even gives Ben a puppet show. Wow, just wow.

A 13-year-old Michael Jackson sings “Ben’s Song” over the end credits and “Ben” competed against songs from The Poseidon Adventure, The Little Ark, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, and The Stepmother for Best Original Song at the 1973 Academy Awards. “Ben” lost to “The Morning After” from The Poseidon Adventure, believe it or not, and having heard both songs, I don’t believe it since “The Morning After” defines godawful. Unfortunately so does most of the movie Ben.

I’ll give Karlson and animal trainer Moe Di Sesso their due for amplifying the rat count to 4,000 for Ben. Eight times the rats as Willard, but that’s the only area in which Ben triumphs over its older brother. Granted, one human year translates to approximately 30 in rat years, so maybe that’s why Ben’s motion picture career stopped after two films in two years.

Rating: One star.

— What else can I say other than I liked Willard and I would not be surprised if I found out that it played as one-half of a double bill with fellow 1971 cult film Harold and Maude.

Both are weird little items with a delightfully morbid sense of humor and I only say delightfully because I like both films, and they have offbeat lead characters who push the patience of every adult.

Bruce Davison stars as Willard Stiles, who must contend with a harridan mother (Elsa Lanchester) and a bully for a boss (Ernest Borgnine). Willard develops a close relationship with Ben and Socrates, who unfortunately for Willard are rats. See, Willard finds out that he can communicate directly with rats and that he enjoys their company more than his fellow human beings, especially his overbearing mother and all her overbearing friends and his asshole boss. His mother wants Willard to get rid of them damn rats and his boss, well, he develops genuine distaste for Rattus norvegicus after Willard’s rats crash his party one night.

Willard also begins a tentative, very tentative relationship with his lovely temporary co-worker Joan (Sondra Locke). In the end, Willard should have pursued Joan more than Socrates and Ben. No doubt that our lad Willard would have lived a whole lot longer.

As interesting as it was to watch Davison and Locke early in their careers and Lanchester (The Bride from The Bride of Frankenstein) late in her career, Borgnine proved to be the key component in the success of Willard. For a picture like Willard to work any whatsoever, we need a character that we love to hate and Borgnine’s Al Martin suitably fills that need. For us to fully anticipate and then relish his inevitable death, Borgnine needed to work us into a frenzy every time he’s onscreen. Borgnine does that and then some, especially when he seizes upon Socrates and kills him with delight. We know then, more than ever before, that Martin will meet a spectacular demise.

Borgnine won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1956 for his extremely likable performance as the title character in Marty, directed by Delbert Mann. Sixteen years later, in a picture directed by Daniel Mann, Borghine mined the opposite end of the character spectrum for Martin.

For sure, Borghine might be the first, last, and thus far only Academy Award-winning actor to be annihilated by rats.

That alone is worth the price of admission.

Rating: Three stars.

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

day 14, bride of frankenstein

BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935) Four stars
Boris Karloff movies could fill an entire year of daily movie reviews.

Karloff (1887-1969) undoubtedly is one of the most prolific actors who ever lived, working steadily from 1918 through 1968.

Karloff established an incredible work pace, especially in the 1930s.

Take, for example, the years 1931 and 1932 alone when Karloff appeared in 24 films, including such classics as FRANKENSTEIN, SCARFACE, THE OLD DARK HOUSE, THE MASK OF FU MANCHU, and THE MUMMY.

He was billed only as “Karloff” in several pictures after FRANKENSTEIN (1931) made him a phenomenon.

For example, a producer’s note before the start of THE OLD DARK HOUSE: “Karloff, the mad butler in this production, is the same Karloff who created the part of the mechanical monster in ‘Frankenstein.’ We explain this to settle all disputes in advance, even though such disputes are a tribute to his great versatility.”

Every time I watch both FRANKENSTEIN and BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935), I am just amazed once again by what Karloff was able to do with The Monster.

He’s absolutely phenomenal.

It took make-up artist Jack Pierce four hours every day to make Karloff into Frankenstein’s Monster, with a concoction of cotton, collodion, gum, and green greasepaint. Pierce and Karloff worked together on a multitude of films during the Golden Age of Horror (1930s and 1940s).

The IMDb identified eight Karloff trademarks and I especially like the eighth one: “Making audiences feel sorry for his evil characters by displaying extreme frailty and vulnerability, even when the material didn’t call for this.”

We feel a multitude of things for the Frankenstein Monster, and that’s at the center of the character’s greatness.

We especially feel for The Monster during BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, a rare sequel that builds upon and honestly betters the previous film.

Karloff did not want The Monster to speak, feeling that it would eventually destroy the character. He looks a little differently here than in the first film, because in order to speak more clearly Karloff did not remove the dental plate in his face like he did in the first film. His cheeks appear less hollow as a result.

While giving The Monster the ability to speak could have miserably backfired, it works (like just about everything else) in BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN.

The Monster is a quick learner and the writers give him some great lines.

“I love dead … hate living” and “Alone: bad. Friend: good!” might not seem like much on the page, but the way Karloff handles them, they affect viewers on a deep emotional level.

There’s much poignancy to be found in the plight of The Monster.

He’s more like an innocent child than pure evil in both FRANKENSTEIN and BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN.

He can’t help what God or Dr. Henry (Victor in the novel) Frankenstein in this case made him.

Like Karloff, Colin Clive returns for the sequel as Dr. Frankenstein and he’s reluctant to the extreme (after the events of the first movie) to participate in Dr. Pretorius’ scheme to make The Monster a bride. Finally, he does though, of course, and it’s back to the laboratory; production designer Charles D. Hall’s lab sets in the first two FRANKENSTEIN films have been endlessly influential.

Clive and Dwight Frye (killed as two different characters in FRANKENSTEIN and BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN) are two of the great scenery chewers of all-time, but this is largely Karloff’s and Ernest Thesiger’s show.

Thesiger plays Dr. Pretorius, Dr. Frankenstein’s former teacher and, of course, a rebellious mad scientist. He’s as explicitly homosexual as one could present in a 1935 film and, according to the book “The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror” by David J. Skal, openly gay director James Whale told Thesinger to play Dr. Pretorius as an “over-the-top caricature of a bitchy and aging homosexual.”

Frankenstein and Pretorius rank among the best screen mad scientists.

BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN can be enjoyed at face value or can be seen as a daring gay parable that sneaked just enough content past the censors.

In the 1997 Gary Morris article “Sexual Subversion: The Bride of Frankenstein” printed in the Bright Lights Film Journal, the author postulates that the movie “assaults the notion of the sanctity of standard sex roles and ‘family values.'” Whale thus made the only sequel that interested him.

“THE BRIDE can be read from a modern perspective as a homosexual joke on the heterosexual communities Whale — a gay man — served and benefited from: his ‘masters’ at Universal and the mass audience to whom he could present unconventional images and ideas and see them unknowingly endorsed and approved in the most direct way possible: from the moviegoer’s pocketbook,” Morris wrote.

Under this theory, Whale’s attacks on hetero institutions can be seen most vividly when The Bride (Elsa Lanchester) rejects The Monster near the end, including a famous hiss that speaks louder than a thousand words. (Reportedly, Lanchester based her spitting and hissing on the swans in Regent’s Park, London.)

Not everything passed the censors enforcing the Motion Picture Production Code: Any references to the sexual arrangements of Mary Shelley (Lanchester in her first of two roles), Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron (especially this line of dialogue: “We are all three infidels, scoffers at all marriage ties, believing only in living freely and full”) and “too revealing” shots of Lanchester’s cleavage were cut.

It’s still amazing what Whale put into the film.

Others have dismissed the gay parable angle in BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN.

That’s fine because any way you read it, though, BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN is a classic.