Speaking of The Grinch: Boris Karloff

Peter Bogdonavich, in his wonderful book, Who the Hell’s in It: Conversations with Hollywood’s Legendary Actors, devotes a chapter to Boris Karloff.

Here’s an excerpt:

Through four decades during his lifetime, and now more than thirty years later, the name Boris Karloff has not only identified a star actor, but conjured up a certain sort of character as well, a very particular representative image. The identification certainly began with the sensation of Frankenstein, but this was deepened through the years by equally intense, brilliant performances in horror movies that most often were less than inspired. Yet he brought the same concentration and sense of responsibility to things like The Haunted Strangler (1958) as he did to more complicated roles in films like John Ford’s The Lost Patrol (1934); or, on the Broadway stage, with wickedly funny self-parody in Arsenic and Old Lace in the forties, or in the fifties with children’s story-book menace as Captain Hook in Peter Pan and with poetic realism as the Dauphin to Julie Harris’ Joan of Arc in Jean Giraudoux’s The Lark — a beuatiful performance I was fortunate to see – and for whic h he received a Tony nomination. In 1966, his superb narration for the brilliant Chuck Jones feature cartoon of Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas helped to make that work an abiding classic.

Considering the majority of the movies in which he was cast (about 140 in all, including 40 silents, starting as an extra in 1916), it is not so remarkable that he almost always transcended his vehicles; but that audiences the world over still treasured him after so much screen junk is unique. They knew that Karloff’s star presence in even the worst of these gave them a measure of his consdiderable talent, grace and wit. Therein, of course, was the great irony of his horror image: it was absolutely nothing like the man, any more than the sinister-sounding stage name which William Henry Pratt chose for himself, the surname Karloff by itself sending chills up the collective spine throughout the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties. It still does.

Yet the audience also knew in some way that this consummate beyond-evil heavy was actually a tasteful, knowledgeable British gentleman — shocked by unkindness and never less than polite — with a sense of humor about himself and his roles, and only genuine gratitude to the public for their long-lasting affection. It was one of the reasons he kept working right through his eighty-first year. He was just an actor, he would say, who had been lucky enough to find a particular place on the screen and, as long as people wanted him, what right did he have to retire?

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1 Response to Speaking of The Grinch: Boris Karloff

  1. DBW says:

    The Great Boris Karloff. I don’t recall ever seeing him in anything that he wasn’t compelling. When I was a teen, one local station used to have all-night movies on the weekend. They were almost always horror flicks. My best friend then had a sister who was a year younger than we were. Their parents had been divorced, and they lived with their mother. Just about every weekend, his sister would have several friends stay over, and I would stay with my friend. We would all stay up partying, and watching All-night Theatre. You always knew you were in for a treat if there was a Karloff flick on. His films even got me to focus more on the movie than my friend’s sister and her friends—Let me tell you, that was quite an accomplishment. Ahhh, what wonderful debauchery.

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