The BALBOA THEATER presents
AS SURE AS MY NAME IS BORIS KARLOFF
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This selection of 26 of Boris Karloff's greatest films is
the largest Karloff retrospective ever held in America!
Featuring frequent co-star & fellow horror icon Bela Lugosi (in 5 films).
Other co-stars include
Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Lon Chaney,
Basil Rathbone, John Carradine & Lionel Atwill.
Unless otherwise noted, all prints are in vintage black and white and 35mm.
Showtime schedule(with many classic posters) and announcement of special guests at www.BalboaMovies.com
Friday, June 2
OPENING NIGHT WITH SARA KARLOFF The tribute to BORIS KARLOFF opens with a special appearance by Sara Karloff. Ms. Karloff will talk about her famous father and be showing some rare home movies and a full evening of surprises including trailers, documentaries, TV clips and shows. A once-in-a-lifetime experience.
INTERVIEWER: You have a family?
BORIS KARLOFF: I have a daughter, who's married to a young man in the American Air Force, and at the moment they live outside of Phoenix, Arizona, and she has presented me with two grandsons, quite small.
Has your daughter ever complained to you about being in so many of these roles?
BORIS KARLOFF: Oh, Heavens, no!
Never wondered if you "couldn't get some other type of roles?"
BORIS KARLOFF: Oh, no!
Your family enjoys them as much as everyone else?
BORIS KARLOFF: Yes.
Saturday, June 3
FRANKENSTEIN (1931) The classic film that terrorized depression era audiences and launched Karloff on his long career as the world's premier horror film star. 71m.
How soon after you made The Criminal Code came your part in Frankenstein?
BORIS KARLOFF: Well in all that mess of work, I had the opportunity to make a test for the monster in Frankenstein, which was in the summer of 1931, and that really kicked the goal for me! I was at Universal doing a small part in Graft, having lunch in the commissary, when someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Mr. Whale would like to see you at his table." Well, Jimmy Whale was the most important director on the lot. I think he had seen me in The Criminal Code, but I didn't ask him, and he didn't tell me. He said he wanted me to make a test for the monster. Well, they liked the test and I got the part.
And the rest is history. Now, do you find that people still associate you with Frankenstein's monster almost exclusively?
BORIS KARLOFF: Yes, not exclusively,
but they always think of that. And I think I'm a very fortunate man that they
do. I think any man, any actor, who can become identified with a role, or not a
particular role, but, how should I put it, with a whole line of parts, is a
very fortunate man.
So you haven't resented that?
BORIS KARLOFF: Good heavens, no! I mean, after all an actor is in business to sell his services isn't he? Well now, if you make tobacco, or if you make shoes or something, you spend millions of dollars to try to get a trademark that can be accepted. If an actor gets a trademark handed to him on a silver platter he's a jolly lucky man!
THE BLACK ROOM (1934) An enchanting Gothic melodrama that seems to have come to life off the engraved pages of a beautiful old storybook. Karloff gives a virtuoso triple performance as the evil Baron Gregor, his kindly bother Anton and as Gregor posing as Anton. —Greg Mank, Hollywood Cauldron 67m.
Sunday, June 4
BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935) The absolute peak of Universal's classic horror, a film that has it all: a fine cast working from a literate script, Whale's excellent direction that mixes his sly humor and pathos into the blend, beautiful camerawork and a lush score by Franz Waxman. Widely regarded as one of the best horror films ever made. 75m.
There were two sequels to the 1931 Frankenstein?
BORIS KARLOFF: Oh, they've made a dozen of them.
Oh, really, a dozen of them.
BORIS KARLOFF: Oh, heaven's yes, but I was only in the first three. I was in Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, and The Son of Frankenstein. It was quite the proper order. It was all very respectable. The Bride came first, and many people liked The Bride of Frankenstein better than the first one, but I don't know. I've always preferred the original film. In the first one the monster didn't speak, you remember. But when we made the sequel, they had me speaking all sorts of dialogue. Time and time again I argued that the monster shouldn't speak. If he spoke, he would seem much more human, and my argument was that if the monster had any impact or charm it was because he was inarticulate. A great, lumbering, inarticulate creature. The moment he spoke you might as well take the mick or play it straight. But you don't have much say, and the director won that argument.
THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1932) Restored by the Library of Congress
Karloff's first starring role features him in the thankless role of Morgan, the brutish butler, but the film itself is an unending delight of comedy bits from a superb cast of England's finest: Charles Laughton, Melvyn Douglas, Raymond Massey, Gloria Stuart, Eva Moore and the great Ernest Thesiger as Horace Femm, the eccentric master of the house. 71m.
Have you turned down parts in some of the later horror films?
BORIS KARLOFF: Yes, just recently they asked me to be in a re-make of The Old Dark House, but it was simply not to my liking. I sent them the script back, because I wanted no part in it. The original was from a novel by J.B. Priestley and I played the fiendish butler who was a mute. Charles Laughton was in it, so was Ray Massey. You know, I've been in some rather awful pictures, switching brains back and forth as mad scientists and what not, and when you play a mad scientist you cannot achieve much in the way of subtlety. So now it's high time to pick and choose my vehicles. Sometimes when I'm reading a script I think. "oh Blimey, that line's going to give me trouble." So sometimes you have to make a clean breast of it and say, "look, we have to reword this, for some reason or other this damn thing always trips me up. So you rephrase it if you can. It's not as though it was written by Terence Rattigan, or someone like that. Even the best of writers runs into difficulties with contradictions—and sometimes a line is just difficult for me to say.
Monday, June 5
SCARFACE (1932) Howard Hawks directed & Howard Hughes produced this gangster classic, with Paul Muni, George Raft and Karloff as the rival gang member who gets rubbed out in a bowling alley. 91m
GRAFT (1931) Karloff's sinister make-up as the gangster in this Universal film led to his being screen tested for the Frankenstein's monster. 65m.
Tuesday, June 6
THE BODY SNATCHER (1945) This eerie Val Lewton—produced chiller features Karloff in one of his finest roles as the unscrupulous lower class Edinburgh cabbie who delights in the control he is able to exert over the upper class Dr. MacFarlane (Henry Daniell), whom he supplies with illegally obtained corpses. Karloff's last film with Bela Lugosi, directed by Robert Wise. 77M.
What directors you've worked with stand out in your memory?
BORIS KARLOFF: Well, two come to mind. Two young men who I worked with at RKO, under a producer named Val Lewton. They were quite young men and were just beginning as directors they had been cutters. They've both gone a long, long way. One is Robert Wise (The Body Snatcher), and the other is Mark Robson (Isle of the Dead and Bedlam). They've done fine, fine work, and I had the chance to be with them early on. It proved to be the very best working combination in my life. They were cultured and articulate, and we'd thresh things out, go into reasons, and I think the ultimate results bear every trace of that. The Val Lewton films measured up to what I consider a worthwhile artistic standpoint. More recently, there's a young director in England—his name is Robert Day—who directed the two English films I did, whom I think of very highly indeed.
THE WALKING DEAD (1936) — 16mm
When an innocent Karloff is electrocuted, Edmund Gwenn restores him to life and Karloff seeks vengeance on the real killers. Directed by Casablanca's Michael Curtiz. One of the most surprising, moving and truly spiritual horror films of the time. —Greg Mank, Hollywood Cauldron. 66m.
THE WURDALAK (1963) Color
This stylish exercise in lush color cinematography and vampirism, featured Karloff as Gorcha, the stern patriarch of a Serbian family beset by Wurdalak's. The final episode of Mario Bava's horror trilogy Black Sabbath.
You made Black Sabbath for director Mario Bava. Did you enjoy working in Italy?
BORIS KARLOFF: Very much, except it was brutally cold, and the hotel was a sort of marble palace. They didn't warm it up with just one match being struck! It was there that I got quite ill. I came back to England at the end of the film—I was able to complete it, but with a good deal of difficulty. I was desperately ill that summer. I had a very narrow squeak, and it left my lungs very short winded. I had gotten pneumonia.
In the Italian version of Black Sabbath there is quite a different ending. You come back as the host to bid the audience farewell, but you're riding a horse, in your Wurdalak costume. Then the camera slowly dollies back to reveal you're actually riding a fake horse in the studio!
BORIS KARLOFF: Yes, it was a most amusing ending, really. Sort of getting on this rocking horse and everything. But the producers in Hollywood didn't like it, and they had a very valid point. If there had been any suggestion of comedy in any of the three stories, then this would have tied in. But there was no suggestion whatsoever, and this would have come as such a shock that it would have destroyed the film. I don't know if they were right, but I think they knew what would work best over here (in America).
Wednesday, June 7
THE MASK OF FU MANCHU (1932) This pre-code brew of sexual perversity and sadistic torture was sponsored by W.R. Hearst's Cosmopolitan productions, with Karloff as the mad oriental Dr. and Myrna Loy as his nympho daughter. 72m.
After Frankenstein you played Dr. Fu Manchu?
BORIS KARLOFF: Yes, I did it once. I was loaned from Universal to MGM, where we made The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932).
Did you speak any Chinese in that film?
BORIS KARLOFF: Good heavens no!
I was wondering if they put some
Chinese words in your mouth.
BORIS KARLOFF: No (laughs).
Did they have a Chinese advisor on it?
BORIS KARLOFF: Good Lord, no! It was a shambles. It really was. It was simply ridiculous. I shall never forget that. For about a week before we got started, I kept asking for a script, and I was met with roars of laughter at the idea that there would be a script. I went on (the stage) in the morning we were to start shooting, and I went into the make-up shop and worked there for a couple of hours, as a matter of fact, getting this extremely bad make-up put on. Fu Manchu's make-up was ridiculous. While I was in the make-up chair, a gentleman came in and handed me about four sheets of paper, which was one enormous, long speech. That was to be the opening shot in the film and I was seeing it for the first time, then and there. And it was written in the most impeccable English. And I said, "this is absolute nonsense, I can't learn this in time," and he said, "oh, it'll be all right." So I got the make-up on and on my way from the make-up shop to the stage, I'm intercepted by somebody else who took those pages away from me and gave me some others that were written in pigeon-English (laughter). They had about five writers on it, and this was happening all through the film.
A case of too many cooks spoiling the broth.
BORIS KARLOFF: Some scenes were written in beautiful Oxford English, and others were written in God knows what! (Laughter).
THE LOST PATROL (1934) John Ford directed this WWI Arabian Desert drama, with Karloff as a religious fanatic who goes over the edge. 71m.
You did a film called The Lost Patrol.
BORIS KARLOFF: That was directed by Jack Ford, which of course speaks for itself.
The great John Ford!
BORIS KARLOFF: A wonderful man. A wonderful director.
I'm trying to recall that film. Wasn't it about a foreign legion group in the desert?
BORIS KARLOFF: No, it was the First World War and it was just an army patrol that got lost.
On the Eastern front?
BORIS KARLOFF: Well, yes in the Arabian Desert.
Who was in that film with you?
BORIS KARLOFF: There was Victor McLaglen, Reginald Denny and Alan Hale. They were all in it.
Thursday, June 8
THE RAVEN (1935) Karloff plays second fiddle to Bela Lugosi's mad Dr. Vollin, who lets out all the stops as a man obsessed at building Poe's torture devices. 62m.
THE RAVEN (1963) An inventive horror parody directed by Roger Corman, boasting Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and Jack Nicholson who spar with Karloff as the charming but maniacal Dr. Scarabus—who truly shines in his tour de force duel of magic with Price. 86m.
BORIS KARLOFF: In The Raven, my character had to wear this long velvet cape, an immense garment that seemed to weigh a ton. After dragging the bloody thing around behind me for a day or two on the set, I approached the director, Roger Corman and suggested in my most gracious fashion that the character I played would look much more sinister and effective without the cape. But Roger caught on. He knew why I wanted to get rid of the thing. He just looked at me and said, "wear the cape Boris." So that was that. Right after The Raven I did The Terror. It was a real quickie, done in two days. Corman had the sketchiest outline of a story. I read it and begged him not to do it. He said, "that's all right, Boris, I know what I'm going to do. I want you for two days on this." I was in every shot, of course. Sometimes I was just walking through and then I would change my jacket and walk back. He nearly killed me on the last day. He had me in a tank of cold water for about two hours. After he got me in the can, he suspended operations and went off and directed two or three films to get the money, I suppose, to complete this one. Then off he went and shot the rest of the story somewhere on location in northern California. What he really wanted to do was to shoot the sets of The Raven, which were still standing, and were so magnificent. They were done by Daniel Haller. And as they were being pulled down around our ears, Roger was dashing around with me and a camera, two steps ahead of the wreckers. It was very funny.
Friday, June 9th to 15th
THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (1973) A beautiful restoration of Victor Erice's Spanish classic. In Castile circa 1940, a traveling movie theatre brings Frankenstein to a small village and two young girls, come to believe the Monster is still alive and are determined to find him. 95m.
Friday, June 16
TARGETS (1968) Color
Karloff plays an aging horror star whose low-budget films can't possibly keep up with the real-life horrors of America in 1968. Peter Bogdanovich directs and co-stars. 90m.
GODS AND MONSTERS (1998) Color & Panavision
Bill Condon's beautifully realized fictional bio of director James Whale's, focusing on his final days & memories of directing Karloff in The Bride of Frankenstein. "To a new world of Gods and Monsters " —Dr. Pretorious. 105m.
Saturday, June 17
FRANKENSTEIN (1931) Sheer genius, one of the most remarkable performances in the history of the cinema —Christopher Lee
BORIS KARLOFF: Typical of the embarrassment attendant upon my sort of career was an incident that occurred shortly after the filming of Frankenstein. Mrs. Karloff and I had gone up to San Francisco to visit one of her school friends. To our surprise, we found that Frankenstein, which we had not yet seen, was playing across the bay, in Oakland. What could be more natural than to invite our friend to a performance? I had of course, seen rushes of the picture, but never a connected version, and as the film progressed I was amazed at the hold it was taking upon the audience. At the same time I couldn't help wonder how my own performance would weather all of the build-up. I was soon to know. Suddenly, out of the eerie darkness and gloom, there swept on the screen, about eight sizes larger than life itself, the chilling horrendous figure of me as the Monster! And, just as suddenly, there crashed out over the general stillness the stage whisper of my wife's friend. Covering her eyes, gripping my wife by the shoulder, she screamed: "Dot, how can you live with that creature?"
THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935)
What did you feel about the acting possibilities in the role of the monster, with this tremendous make-up on and moving around so slowly and ponderously?
BORIS KARLOFF: It was extremely
interesting because it was a challenge. Here you were, playing an inarticulate
creature with a half-formed brain that was barely functioning, but was, bit by
bit, beginning to function more and more, and still you had to communicate with
the people, to the other characters in the story and with the audience. And
the only way you could do that really was with your eyes. And then we had the
problem, that if you're eyes were alive and normal and I hope fairly
intelligent (laughs), then it would simply destroy the make-up, and it would
destroy the illusion. And that's why they used putty over the eyes, to distort
them, in a way to veil them a little bit, so they wouldn't be too clear or too
sharp. It was most interesting!
Sunday, June 18
THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY (1947) Technicolor
Samuel Goldwyn produced this comedy with Karloff as a fake Dr. who terrorizes the daydreaming Danny Kaye by attempting to convince him he is insane. 110m.
You were in a comedy, Samuel Goldwyn's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, with Danny Kaye.
BORIS KARLOFF: Oh, yes…I was doing my old stuff in there, you see. I was frightening Danny, playing a psychiatrist, and so on.
THE BOOGIE MAN WILL GET YOU (1942) Peter Lorre co-stars in this farce modeled on Karloff's sensational Broadway hit, Arsenic & Old Lace. 65m.
Monday, June 19
THE MUMMY (1932) A beautifully atmospheric chiller with Karloff as Im-Ho-Tep, a resurrected Egyptian mummy who seeks the reincarnation of his lost love. 72m.
BORIS KARLOFF: The Mummy was another awful make-up job. For the sequence where the dead mummy comes to life, it was between eight and nine hours to get ready for it. You really had to get to the studio the day before. Thank God that sequence only took about a week to shoot!
Were the lights back then as strong as the klieg lights are now?
BORIS KARLOFF: They were different kind of lights they were carbon lights. They were dreadful! They were really dreadful. Toasted your eyes. In Frankenstein, during the laboratory scenes, I was never as nervous as when I lay half naked, strapped to the operating table. Above me I could see the special effects men shaking the white-hot scissor-like carbons that simulated the lightning. I prayed very hard that no one got butterfingers.
THE GHOUL (1933) Karloff is an Egyptologist who is prematurely buried and returns to take his revenge. w/ Cederic Hardwicke, Ralph Richardson & Ernest Thesiger. Long believed lost, a beautiful new print was recently discovered in London. 80m.
Tuesday, June 20
THE CRIMINAL CODE (1931) This Howard Hawks prison drama with Walter Huston gave Karloff his first big break in a showy role that he first played on the L.A. stage. 95m.
In 1930 how did you land a part in The Criminal Code with Walter Huston?
Well, I got a chance to be in the play The Criminal Code, which had been in New York already, and only a few small parts needed to be cast out here on the coast, and I had the good luck to get one. It happened to be a showy part—small, but showy. And from that I got the chance to play the same part in the film. In those days they had no contract players they only had freelance players. So as I had been seen in the play, I had the opportunity to do the part in the film, and that is the thing that sort of turned the tide for me. After that work began to pour in, because it was a successful film.
And Howard Hawks, who used you again in Scarface, directed The Criminal Code.
BORIS KARLOFF: Yes, made by Howard Hawks at Columbia, and by golly, that's the one that really set me on the road. We did The Criminal Code in 1930, and then work of all kinds began to pour in. Nothing very exciting, but at least it was work, which was the important thing.
THE GUILTY GENERATION (1931) Gang boss Karloff vies for control of bootlegging operations with his rival Leo Carrillo, as their kids fall in love with each other. Romeo & Juliet before West Side Story. 81m.
THE MAN THEY COULD NOT HANG (1939) 68m.
BORIS KARLOFF: I did a whole raft of stories at Columbia some years ago (The Man They Could Not Hang, The Man With Nine Lives). A sort of man who's on the verge of a discovery that he feels is going to be for the good of mankind. Maybe some scientific thing, you see. And it goes wrong, and in going wrong, he goes wrong. And in the last act, very reluctantly, you have to destroy him. It's as though you had to shoot a faithful dog who has gone mad. Well, that isn't a monster, but a man who starts out with a good idea, and that was also the case in The Haunted Strangler. If I remember it, he was writer and I believe he felt there had been a miscarriage of justice. He felt it was wrong that in those days, poor men were convicted of crimes, of which perhaps, they were quite innocent, but they hadn't the means to defend themselves. And it just went sour.
Wednesday, June 21
THE BLACK CAT (1934) Karloff and Lugosi at their feverish peak in this stylish Edgar G. Ulmer directed cornucopia of necrophilia, Satanism, and flaying of human flesh. 66m.
THE INVISIBLE RAY (1936) — 16mm
Karloff dominates Lugosi here, in the first of his misunderstood scientists, whom the world perceives as mad. John P. Fulton contributes outstanding F/X work for this early S-F effort 81m.
NIGHT WORLD (1932) A Grand Hotel style drama set in a prohibition nightclub owed by gangster Karloff, featuring Mae Clarke doing dances choreographed by Busby Berkeley! 60m.
Did you know Bela Lugosi very well? Did you get together with him socially?
BORIS KARLOFF: Well no. I knew and I worked with Bela Lugosi in four or five pictures, but outside of the studio we didn't meet. You know Hollywood is an enormous, rambling, big place spread out all over southern California. You perhaps do a picture with somebody, and your paths don't cross again for a year. It depends what your individual tastes were.
So the similarity of roles you played didn't bring you together?
BORIS KARLOFF: No, good heaven's no! I spend my spare time, in those days; I used to play a lot of cricket, for years, which I don't think would have appealed a lot to Bela.
It's very sad how he died in
poverty.
BORIS KARLOFF: Yes, it was. He had a tragic, tragic life, that man. He really did. I've always felt extremely sorry for him. In a way, he was his own worst enemy. He was a fine actor. He was a brilliant technician, a brilliant technician in every sense of the word, but he hadn't moved with the times. He was the leading man, I believe, in the state theater, I think of Budapest when he was a young man, with a fine, fine European sort of reputation, but he just didn't move with the times. When he came to America, he didn't really learn the language as well as he might have. He was in America much longer than Peter Lorre, who was also Hungarian, and Peter learned the language with no difficulty. In fact we all worked together in a film with Kay Kyser, You'll Find Out.
So, not having a total command of the English language limited Lugosi's career?
BORIS KARLOFF: Yes it did. I think it handicapped him enormously. It was a pity. Unhappy man, unhappy life.
Was Bela Lugosi his real name?
BORIS KARLOFF: Yes, I think so. (Lugosi's real name was Bela Blasko).
Thursday, June 22
SON OF FRANKENSTEIN (1939) A high-powered horror cast delivers the goods in Karloff's farewell as the monster. Basil Rathbone is the son who revives the creature, Lugosi is Ygor, the demented shepherd and Lionel Atwill the one-armed Inspector Krogh. 99m.
BORIS KARLOFF: In The Son of Frankenstein I didn't like that they changed his clothes completely. They wrapped him up in furs and muck, and he just became nothing. I mean the makeup, like the clothes, had become part of him. If you accepted the convention that he lived or came to live, as it were, at the end of the film, after practically being destroyed, you could accept that he wore the same clothes. After that I pulled out because I could see the writing on the wall, as to what was going to happen to the character. There is just so much you can develop in a part of that nature, and it was a case of diminishing returns. The monster was going to wind up, as he did, a rather comic prop in the last act—and I thought, "well, this isn't any good," and I wouldn't play him anymore.
HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1944) Karloff as the mad Dr. Niemann, who hijacks a traveling chamber of horrors that includes Count Dracula, and later revives both Lon Chaney's Wolf Man and Glenn Strange as the Frankenstein monster. 71m.
Wasn't there one called The House of Frankenstein that you did?
BORIS KARLOFF: Oh, that was made some years later and in that one I think I played Dr. Frankenstein himself. (Karloff actually plays Dr. Niemann, a deranged disciple of Dr. Frankenstein).
The scientist who created the monster?
BORIS KARLOFF: Yes, I've done that twice for my sins (the second time was in Frankenstein-1970). But I only played the monster three times.
Who played the monster in House of Frankenstein?
BORIS KARLOFF: Glenn Strange and in the meantime it had been played by both Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr.
Lon Chaney Jr. the son of…
BORIS KARLOFF: Of the great Lon Chaney!