With many thanks to Ollie, I was also very impressed with the documentary Universal Horror. These are the films of which I'm most familiar and the various clips used certainly showcase each "monster" in his (and her--in the case of Dracula's Daughter) best light. But for me the highlight, among many, was the home movie footage of Karloff as the Frankenstein monster clowning on the set of Son of. The footage is in color (!), which allows one to see the green makeup genius Jack Pierce used for the Monster's flesh, which when filmed in black and white, turns the green into a deathly-looking grey.Yesterday I watched the documentary Universal Horror (1998, K. Brownlow). Not being a expert in the matter, it was fascinating to discover so many great pictures. As usual, there is an excellent editing throughout the documentary where meaningful interviews are intercut with film clips providing the perfect illustration for the spoken word. (It sounds trivial, but look at most modern featurettes and you will be hard pressed to find such quality!) On the silent front, I was really caught by an unfamiliar Rex Ingram called The Magician which looks really superb visually. The clip from Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde (1920) with John Barrymore is of super quality unlike most DVDs available on the market. And the interviews are a treasure trove: I was so happy to recognise Rose Hobart who played in Mamoulian's Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde (1931). You will learn how Karl Struss used colored filters to alter Fredric March's features as he did it in Niblo's Ben Hur (1925). I was totally fascinated by the Spanish version of Dracula (1931) shot at the same time as the American version. This is really a film I want to discover ASAP: the camera movements look staggering. This is how documentaries should be made and seldom are....alas.
Slightly curious as to why Kevin Brownlow might want to make this documentary, it turns out to make perfect sense for he traces the development of the horror film from its silent days. In fact, the first half hour of the 90-minute documentary is filled with glorious clips from the silent era, and even as the documentary continues and new monsters are explored, Brownlow goes back and pulls another silent clip that may have been the inspiration for the character and/or story. As with his other documentaries, he uses a narrator (Kenneth Branaugh--who himself had played Victor Frankenstein), but also uses interviews with surviving actors and filmmakers to tell the story. (Oddly, since he's not known for his horror roles, except maybe in Poltergeist or, perhaps, The Return of the Living Dead, James Karen has a lot of interview screen time. Wasn't he the voiceover for the old Pathmark supermarket commercials?) It should also be noted that while the documentary is focused on the Universal films, Brownlow explores the other studios' horror output, too, which, of course, is a great thing!
With so much material to cover in the Brownlow doc, one might think a monster or two gets short shrift, but on each of the specific Universal Legacy Series (Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy and The Wolfman, all of which include Universal Monsters), there are also a number of shorter documentaries focusing specifically on each monster, actor, and overall greatness.
Woops, never mind me - I saw the title & thought this was a post about my mother-in-law.
