Boris Karloff: “shocked by unkindness and never less than polite”

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This is my late addition to the spectacular Boris Karloff Blog-a-Thon going on at Frankensteinia. I have been losing myself in all of the links. Great stuff – make sure you head on over there and read. Keep scrolling!

Peter Bogdonavich wrote a gorgeous essay about working with Karloff in Targets (Karloff’s last film) – and it’s such a touching look at a man who took great pride in his work, had tremendous humility towards his vocation, and never once dissed the monster who made him famous. He felt lucky to have played that monster – even though it typecast him forever. He felt lucky to have the chance to work – whenever a job came along.

A couple of years ago, there was a “Boris Karloff Week” here in New York, celebrating the 75th anniversary of Frankenstein. I had a ball going to all the films at the Film Forum, and it was so wonderful to sit in the dark, staring up at the silver flickering screen, surrounded by movie buffs young and old, celebrating this wonderful beloved actor.

Here’s an excerpt from the piece in the NY TImes about the retrospective:

But roles like that didn’t come frequently for Boris Karloff, and he managed somehow to avoid being consumed by bitterness himself. In one of his last pictures, Peter Bogdanovich’s “Targets,” he plays an old horror star named Byron Orlok, who is finally, after years of increasingly terrible movies, preparing to hang up his monster suit. That’s something Karloff never did: he worked to the end – which came in 1969, when he was 81 – and remained, to the end, a dutiful and uncomplaining ambassador of horror. A strange fate, perhaps, for an ordinary human being, but Karloff was an actor, with an actor’s peculiar wisdom. You can feel, in the scrupulous craftsmanship and moving correctness he brought to even his most thankless parts, a kind of humble gratitude, a knowledge that he had, at least, managed to dodge the worst horror of his profession.

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A couple months ago, I wrote a post about the “Boris Karloff bowling scene” in Scarface, directed by Howard Hawks. I submit it again, here, for the Boris Karloff Blog-a-Thon.

It’s a wonderful sequence, spare and violent, ominous and yet elegant – not one shot too many, a perfect mix of mess (the sound of the bowling alley mixed with the crowd with the strange eerie whistling going on over it – the whistle that we now know means some bad shit is going to go down) and clarity. You don’t need to say too much or do too much to create an entire event. Story, story, story. Those old-time movie directors, secret auteurs though they all may have been (and I believe they were), never spoke in terms of art, although they obviously made art. They all talk in terms of STORY. Even down to the philosophy of the closeup, which Howard Hawks was quite eloquent about. There aren’t many closeups in his films. A closeup really meant something back then. Yes, it is the most efficient way to shoot a scene sometimes, but it’s not always the best, in terms of emotion. If you hold your closeups back, and use them sparingly, then they really have some impact. The first closeup of Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby comes almost 20 minutes into the picture. It’s the first closeup of anyone in the picture. Unheard of today, especially for a star of Hepburn’s magnitude. But when it first comes, that shot is meant to be subjective, or, editorial – it almost reads as an aside to the audience, like in the days of Shakespeare. You rarely see that kind of spareness with closeups nowadays, because a lot of film directors come from the television world, which is the world of closeups (and it makes sense there, with the small screen, and the limited format) – but it’s really wonderful to get into the groove of the old pictures, and realize how much they tell, without either banging you over the head with it, or leaving too much to the imagination so that the event becomes murky. In Scarface, Hawks gets it all just right.

Yes, the film is violent in an almost documentary fashion. But Hawks had a lot of fun here, with themes and motifs and symbols. The film is so full of X-es that I eventually stopped looking for them. They are in shadow on the wall, an X on Ann Dvorak’s back made by her dress straps, and more. It’s a motif that works on mutliple levels. It could be a cross (the shadows from the windows), which adds a troubling layer of potential martyrdom and noble suffering to the picture, and to the depiction of Tony. But here’s Hawks to Peter Bogdanovich on all of those X’es:

In the papers, in those days, they’d print pictures of where murders occurred and they always wrote “X marks the spot where the corpse was.” So we used Xs all through the film. When anyone connected with the picture thought up some way of using an X, I’d give him a bonus.

The theme is visible in the props, costumes, lighting design and motif of the film, but not in the dialogue at all. It works on you, as opposed to insisting itself on you.

And here, in the bowling scene, Hawks manages to get an “X” in the middle of the action, hidden, totally in context, so it works on multiple levels. He just bowled a strike. X means strike. But we also know what else it means, and so we know his days (even seconds) are numbered. X is about to mark his corpose. It reminds us of what is really going on. Brilliant.

The Boris-Karloff-bowling scene in Scarface is a masterpiece of storytelling, just in terms of the shots chosen for this short scene. There are about 15 shots all told. That’s all you need. You don’t need to do too much else as a director – at least not if you are confident of the EVENT you are trying to portray.

A director needs a collaborator in the actor to pull a scene like that off.

You couldn’t ask for a better collaborator than Mr. Boris Karloff.

Bogdanovich writes:

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 beautiful performance I was fortunate to see – and for which 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 Boris Karloff: “shocked by unkindness and never less than polite”

  1. paul unkle says:

    I have the most respect for Boris Karloff. I have collected his movie posters for years. I have met Sara Karloff on many occasions, she is such a dear. We talk several times a year. This past summer I helped her at a horror convention. There will never be another Karloff.

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