A quintet of shorter form portmanteau pieces from the dim and flickering twilight world of the monochrome anthology series.
I love anthology series, me. From Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery to the sci-fi thrills of The Outer Limits and the dying sputters of Bray under Roy Skeggs with Hammer's House of Horrors and Mystery and Suspense, I am so there for it.
13 Demon Street: The Vine of Death (Curt Siodmak, 1959)
13 Demon Street is an odd little homunculus - fronted, like Thriller (a.k.a. Boris Karloff Presents) by a veteran of Golden Age horror: in this case Lon Chaney Junior - and created and written by genre stalwart Curt Siodmak (father of the modern motion picture lycanthropic legend with 1941's The Wolf Man, but also the man behind the 1942 sci-fi/horror novel Donovan's Brain, which has been adapted into film no less than three times [as 1944's The Lady and the Monster starring none other than silent cinema tyro Erich von Stroheim himself as the mad scientist, 1953's Donovan's Brain and 1962's The Brain]. Produced in Sweden for Scandinavian television, the extant episodes of this rarity - though recorded with the European cast speaking English - feature hardcoded Swedish subtitles.
Beginning like every episode with a glimpse of the exterior of the windswept and Mockingbird Lane-esque house at 13 Demon Street, we enter through the creaking door via a moving camera shot that is reminiscent of though obviously nowhere near as ambitious as the title sequence of the beloved 1989 to 1996 HBO Tales From the Crypt series of all our childhoods to be confronted in the shadows of a darkened room by Lon Chaney himself as our daemonic narrator, who introduces the episodes with sometimes witty, epigrammatic comments. Three episodes of the series ('Condemned in the Crystal', 'The Girl in the Glacier' and 'The Photograph') would later be bundled into the 1961 portmanteau feature film The Devil's Messenger, again featuring Chaney being regaled with the trilogy of tales by a lost soul (Karen Kadler) at His Satanic Majesty's request.
The episode under consideration here is 'The Vine of Death', which was one of the few instalments of the series to receive an official home video release - as a bonus feature on the DVD set of Boris Karloff's The Veil (more on which later). After being informed by lumbering Lon that we are about to witness the story of "a man who, innocent and trusting, wanted to plant a flower - instead of which he dug his own grave" we segue to Copenhagen where we are introduced to archaeologist Frank Dylan (Swedish actor Ingemar Pallin, doing a creditable American accent) who is hard at work planting in his indoor garden / greenhouse when he is interrupted by acquaintance Wallace Forten (Loritz Falk, credited as Larry Falk). Frank has had to dig a pit five feet deep, giving the reason that he has to install soil that he's had specially shipped all the way from the Malayan jungle. He has possession of some calcified tropical vine bulbs dated to between three and four thousand years old that were discovered in an ancient grave and wishes to try and incubate them. At this point Frank's beautiful young wife Terry (Pat Clavin, who'd had some genre experience in a small role in 1958's The Electronic Monster) enters to complain about the house's garbage disposal not working again, to which the neighbourly Wallace eagerly volunteers his services to cover for Frank's lack of plumbing nous.
Once alone together, it soon becomes obvious that Wallace is very eager (can't blame him really) to reignite his and Pat's past torrid affair, though she seems less keen. When Frank finishes work early, keen to plant the Mirada bulbs, he finds his wife and friend in a compromising -m though resistant on Terry's part - clinch and a domestic row ensues that ends with Wally stabbing the aggrieved academic to death. Terry's panicked instinct to call the police is swiftly quashed by Wally, who decides that the best solution is for them to bury Frank in his ready-made grave in the greenhouse. After planting the Prof the guilty pair must fend off the investigations of Detective Johnson (Don Molin), who takes an interest in the hothouse when he finds the Mirada death vine -which is fabled to strangle its prey - has begun to sprout fro Frank's secret sepulchre, Of course everything wraps up somewhat predictably in the usual comeuppance . just desserts style of E.C. comics such as Tales from the Crypt as murderous sex pest Wally is throttled in the green embrace of the creeping vine - prefiguring the Alan 'Fluff' Freeman segment of Amicus' Dr Terror's House of Horrors of half a decade hence.
Suspense: Dead Ernest (Robert Stevens, 1949)
Broadcast - "live, as it's performed", in the immortal words of RokTV's Harfynn Teuport - on May 3rd 1949, I do believe that this kinescope telerecording is the earliest piece of television I've ever seen (obviously, the medium of film is something else entirely). Taken, like many instalments of Suspense, from a radio script (this one originally penned by the extraordinarily monickered duo of Seeleg Lester and Merwin Gerard) as early US television does seem to have been as much radio with pictures as its UK equivalent was televised stage performances, this adaptation by Reginald Denham and Mary Orr actually marks something of a change from many episodes of Suspense I've seen thus far in that it escapes the television studio interior-bound settings of most of them with quite a few sections of exterior location filming. This sort of outside filming would usually shot silently, with dialogue confined to medium or close-up inserts filmed in studio, so it's always a fascinating Frankenstein to watch be knitted together in the gallery.
Opening - after the customary ridiculously quaint sponsorship ad spot for Auto-Lite car batteries ("you're always alright with Auto-Lite!") - with the aforementioned outdoors on-location footage on the (mean) streets of New York, we meet couple Ernest (Will Hare) and Margaret (Patricia Jenkins) outside a cinema, where Ernest Bowers is dropping off his wife to enjoy an afternoon feast of "Newsreel, sports short, travelogue, Bugs Bunny and a double feature" - the double feature in question being 1948's One Sunday Afternoon ("have a good romantic fling with Dennis Morgan" Ernest tells Margaret - not Denis Norden, as I misheard!) and Whiplash - while he heads off for Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers. As he leaves for the ball game, his dutiful wife makes sure that he is wearing his medical bracelet and has the letter explaining his medical condition in his jacket pocket in case of emergencies; for Ernest, like Madeleine Usher, suffers from catalepsy and can at the drop of a hat slip into a deathlike coma.
As Ernest leaves the studio-bound box office and returns to film to cross the actual road, he fails to heed the very real traffic and is involved in a close-call car collision that leaves him insentient and insensate in the street. The crowd of rubbernecking onlookers that gather round him as well as a policeman take him for dead, his bracelet disc having cone loose and slid into the gutter and the note in his jacket going unnoticed as the aforesaid coat, which the cop had used as a makeshift pillow whilst trying to revive him, is surreptitiously taken by unscrupulous tailor Murdoch (Barry Macollum, giving an 'Oirish' performance so stereotypical it could almost be offensive if he wasn't actually Irish in real life). Taking the garment and scuttling back to his shop, Murdoch sells it on to young newlyweds Henry (Tod Andrews) and Fran (Margaret Phillips, a rather lovely Welsh actress who made quite a career on US TV from the late '40s through the early '60s, appearing in shows such as Lights Out [more on which anon] and One Step Beyond as well as further instalments of Suspense). Arriving home, they discover the document in the pocket detailing Ernest's catalepsy and pleading that his body not be subjected to embalming or autopsy for a period of 72 hours lest he not be dead.
Failing to get through to the Bowers' doctor on the number supplied in the missive (the errant medic thoughtlessly being away on holiday as his patient patiently awaits the dissecting knife on the mortuary slab) the dynamic duo race against the clock to reach the morgue before the dormant Ernest is eviscerated in his torpor and pumped full of formaldehyde by the pathologists (Fred Stewart and Joshua Shelley), who have taken the telephone off the hook to listen to the ball game that the soporous supposed stiff should have been watching himself.
A nicely tense little episode reminiscent of Poe's 'The Premature Burial', as well as later fare such as the 'Breakdown' episode of more prestigious anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 'Dead Ernest' is an intriguing and brief enough time filler with a gripping premise as well as a fascinating artefact of early television drama.
Lights Out: The Lost Will of Dr Rant (Laurence Schwab Jr.)
Like Suspense before it, Lights Out started out on radio before making the jump to the screen starting with four specials in 1946 acting as prelude to a full series of half hour episodes beginning in 1949. Hosted initially by Italian-American actor and veteran gangster film heavy Jack LaRue, the reins were taken over after the first year by radio announcer and personality Frank Gallop (charmingly and evocatively referred to as "the hollow-voiced man with the ectoplasmic eyebrows" by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram) who appeared onscreen as a disembodied head against a black background eerily lit by a solitary flickering candle to preside over the evening's proceedings.
The episode 'The Lost Will of Dr Rant' holds the unique position in the (un)hallowed halls of eerie tales fame as being the first ever television adaptation of an M.R. James story, preceding the BBC's arts flagship Omnibus presenting Jonathan Miller's 'Whistle and I'll Come to You' by some seventeen years. By a weird twist of fate, 'twas only the night before I viewed this very episode that I happened to rewatch - for the first time since its initial broadcast - the 2013 BBC A Ghost Story for Christmas adaptation of the very same story, which went out under the tale's original title: 'The Tractate Middoth'. This wasn't an intentional 'compare and contrast' exercise or anything, but complete coincidence. The dark and eldritch things do move in mysterious ways.
Broadcast on May the 7th 1951, we begin proceedings with the customary intro from the spectral and candlelit Gallop inquiring as to whether the audience is looking for "a good book to relax with tonight" before assuring that there exists a "strangely curious one..." - with which we transition to a library where Bill (Leslie Nielsen - yes that Leslie Nielsen, way before the Zuckers' Airplane! stuck him in the parody comic circuit and still five years away from Altair V - the eponymous Forbidden Planet) is dealing with the strangely irascible John Eldred (Russell Collins). Mr Eldred is after a very particular tome, but is reluctant to go upstairs alone and search for it himself. Ever helpful, Bill volunteers to fetch the text - a Talmudic treatise known as the Tractate Middoth (more properly Middot, or 'Measurements', the tenth section of the Kodashim and dealing with the dimensions and chambers of the Second Temple in Jerusalem) - only to find himself confronted by a gruesome spectre of the macabre in the decrepit form of the late Dr Rant (Fred Ardath), the man who in life donated the text to the library.
Collapsing after his encounter with the supernatural, Bill decides to take a vacation to let his shattered nerves recuperate. Encountering Mrs Simpson (Eva Condon, in a role essayed by Doctor Who's own Leela Louise Jameson in the 2013 version) and her lovely daughter Mary (Pat Englund, no relation to Robert of Elm Street fame as far as I can ascertain) who run an underpopulated guest house on the train - I mean that he encounters them on the train, not that they run a guest house there - he decides to board with them and discovers that Mrs Simpson's uncle was the self-same Dr Rant. The departed doctor had concealed his last will and testament in one of his ancient books in some sort of sadistic treasure hunt, pitting his niece and her cousin John Eldred against one another to discover the book guarded by his malevolent spirit. Pledging to aid the ladies in their quest for their inheritance, Bill races against time to reach Eldred before he reads the text only to find the old man collapsed with the volume clutched in his hands and therefore gains a girl with a vast inheritance and an extensive private library - what more could a man ask for?
Tales of Tomorrow: Frankenstein (Don Medford, 1952)
One of many TV anthology series of the '50s to capitalise on the then-current craze for science fiction and atomic horror (this was, after all, the era of such pulp titles as Other Worlds, Thrilling Wonder Stories and Fantastic Adventures; the cinema crowds cheering to the adventures of Anne Francis and Leslie Nielsen in Forbidden Planet and Anne Robinson [no, not that one - she'd have been about ten years old at the time] and Gene Barry tangling with Martian invaders and Americanisation of British literature in The War of the Worlds), Tales of Tomorrow was a sort of pulpier prototype Twilight Zone that lasted for eighty-five episodes over two television seasons from 1951 to 1953. Broadcast live as televised theatre on the ABC network, with a corresponding radio show of the same title on the wireless, the show sadly has many lacunae as episodes were not archived for posterity but thankfully some Kinescope recordings survive.
The sixteenth episode of the first season, broadcast on January 18th 1952, 'Frankenstein' quite obviously is a rendition of the much-loved and much-adapted Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley tale and - like pretty much every large or small screen rendition of the story - takes a great many liberties with the original text.
Performed live on January the 18th 1952, the episode opens with the extremely story-appropriate Tales of Tomorrow opening title sequence, all crackling electrical arcs emanating from Kenneth Strickfaden-style mechanical equipment after a gloved hand throws a switch, before we are informed by the stentorian tones of announcer Allyn Edwards that we about to "thrill tonight to the most famous tale of a science-created monster" - framing Shelley's tale in its rightful context as begetter of science fiction literature as well as one of the world's finest Gothic horror tales. We have our modern Prometheus, Dr Victor Frankenstein (John Newland, who as well as starring in fare such as Tales of Tomorrow, Lights Out and Thriller would go on to direct episodes of the latter - including one that we shall shortly come to - as well as helming and hosting many episodes of One Step Beyond) sitting at table with his fiancee Elizabeth (Ooo-wee-oo and it's Mary Alice Moore! No, that doesn't really work anywhere near as well as Mary Tyler Moore, does it? Apologies to Weezer) and her father (Raymond Bramley); note the change in family dynamics from the saucy source material - Elizabeth and her father are most clearly just a fiancee and a prospective father-in-law here, rather than her being an adoptive sister raised alongside Victor by his/their parents, presumably to negate any potential queasiness or fainting vicar's wives over the whiff of adoptive incest if that's even a thing. Mind you, Mary Shelley herself seemed to think so when she got cold feet and rewrote a significant portion of the original novel in 1823 toning down much of the raw energy of the original. Needless to say, I prefer the 1818 text myself. Here, even Victor's young brother William (aggravating child actor Michael Mann - no, not that one, though if this precocious sprog grew up to to direct The Keep and Manhunter it would at least make it worth acknowledging his existence) is changed for some reason to his cousin, distancing the family bond.
After chatting about Victor's theories on how to create the perfect man and giving us some exposition about the castle where Frankenstein has retreated to carry out his research is in the middle of a lake and accessible only by boat. Elizabeth and her daddy (her actual dad, keep your minds out of the gutter!) depart and the good doctor repairs to his laboratory to reanimate his creation with the de rigeur arcing and sparking machinery. When the creature (horror legend Lon Chaney Jr., a bit worse for wear - as we will discuss - under very effective makeup by Vincent Kehoe that prefigures Robert De Niro's bald and stitched-together monster in Kenneth Branagh's film by some 41 years) revives for a bit of a confused stumble about the lab and tires itself out, Frankenstein straps it down to a gurney and thinks it secure enough to leave unsupervised, at which of course the monster escapes to stumble around the really quite effective painted cycloramas of the castle and putting the frights up comedy cockernee servants Matthew (the amazingly-named Farrell Pelly) and Elise (Peggy Allenby) before killing the latter.
We're going to have to address the reeling, drunken elephant in the room here, I suppose. The one thing that everyone - including those who've never seen the episode - knows about this production is that Lon Chaney's alcoholism which had dogged him almost his entire life ("He had that drinking problem" said Charles T. Barton, Chaney's director on Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, "all through his life, even when he was very young. I don't know why. I guess he knew.") was well out of controol at this point. The actor who had warned directors in the 1940s to "get as much out of me as you can before 1.00 P.M., because after that I can't guarantee anything" before getting blasted with drinking pals Broderick Crawford and Andy Devine had now reached the nadir of doing live to tape television absolutely blasted - the actual nadir being the bit where he lifts a prop chair menacingly and then gingerly puts it down muttering about saving it for the actual show, clearly thinking that he's taking part in a run-through. Mind you, no-one comes out this particularly well: Newland garbles quite a few lines towards the end, and that child is absolutely abominable. Noel Coward would have recanted his famous bon mot about the young Bonnie Langford if he'd ever seen this kid. At least Bonnie's always been a pro.
Pretty awful altogether, not helped by the poor quality of the surviving recording but trying to get a novel down to half an hour of TV is a pretty hopeless errand of an exercise unless all you want is a dramatised precis or live-action blurb. For a slightly more effective and sober attempt, there's always my review of the 1973 Canadian television Dracula which at least has a bit of dignity about it.
Thriller: The Return of Andrew Bentley (John Newland, 1961)
Not to be confused with the British anthology series created by Avengers and Professionals supremo Brian Clemens which ran from 1973 to 1976, this homonymous precursor was a US show that ran on NBC between 1960 and 1962 and was also shown under the titles Boris Karloff's Thriller and Boris Karloff Presents - which tells one up front who the star hosting the weekly segments is going to be. The erstwhile William Henry Pratt whilst a silver screen star was no stranger to the tellybox, having presented a thirteen week run of Starring Boris Karloff in 1949, been the star of Colonel March of Scotland Yard from 1954 to 1955 and taken the hosting reins again for The Veil in 1958 (more on which here) amidst a myriad of guest turns in a panoply of other series.
Screened on the evening of the 11th of December 1961 this instalment has the excellent pedigree of a script by genre legend Richard Matheson, adapted from a short story penned by H.P. Lovecraft protege and expounder upon the Cthulhu mythos August Derleth that was originally published in that bastion of early 20th century pulp literature Weird Tales and anthologised in the Arkham House (a small press set up by Derleth and fellow Lovecraftan acolyte Donald Wandrei to publish the works of Lovecraft and his circle) collection Colonel Markesan and Less Pleasant People - the titular lead tale of wwich was also adapted into an episode of Thriller later in the same season.
We begin, as all gothic tales should, with the trip trop of horses' hooves as a carriage sweeps into the grounds of an ancient house. The manse is the property - for the time being, as his time on this mortal plane is fleeting - of one Amos Wilder (Terence de Marney, who had a long acting career but whom I mainly know from telesnaps and off-air audio recordings as church warden Longfellow from lost Doctor Who story 'The Smugglers'), who has invited his only surviving relatives to inherit his property before his impending ending. These comprise his nephew Ellis Corbett (John Newland again, directing the episode as well as starring) and his bride Sheila (take a bow Antoinette Bower), who are greeted by the strange old duffer who announces his intention to leave his home and considerable fortune to them with the stipulation that Ellis remain in the house for twenty four hours of every day, and check his burial place in the family vault beneath the house daily for any signs of disturbance - in case of which he has left sealed instructions to be followed.
So far, so eccentric rich relative one might think (the wealthy of course are never mad, only eccentric) but after telling Ellis and Sheila that they will never converse again uncle Amos takes poison and chooses to go out playing his organ. And why not? That's how I want to go too. Let someone else deal with the mopping up. The funeral takes place shortly thereafter and uncle Amos is interred beneath the house, Ellis following his post-mortem instructions precisely down to chalking magickal sigils upon the door of the vault to keep something out: said something swiftly rears its ugly head in the spectral form of the late Andrew Bentley (Reggie Nalder, a.k.a. Alfred Reginald Natzler, familiar to fans of horror and exploitation cinema from many things but perhaps most famous as the vampiric Kurt Barlow from Tobe Hooper's 1979 adaptation of Stephen King's Salem's Lot) who appears at night mooching around the bowels of the house and setting his daemonic familiar (Tom Hennesy) upon the unsuspecting investigating Ellis. The demon is actually quite disturbing; eyeless and all teeth like some Gigeresque xenomorph all clad in black, and shot through a vaseline-smeared lens for maximum eldritch and otherworldly effect.
With the help of local physician Dr Weatherbee (Philip Bourneuf) and vicar Reverend Burkhardt (Oscar Beregi Jr.) the Corbetts - sadly sans Sooty and Sweep, wrong Corbett family - must marshal their wills against Bentley's dark magic as the late mage, who was dispatched by uncle Amos upon discovering the extent of his diabolical plans, attempts to enter his demon into the dead sorcerer's body and wreak his ghastly revenge. And try to keep the house, it's clearly a good investment spectral wizards or not.
In summary then, we have run through a sampling of the delights available within the veritable cornucopia of the myriad anthology series of the 1940s, '50s and '60s outwith the obvious and commonly-viewed choices such as The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits and have only really skimmed the surface. In retrospect I wish I'd included something from John Newland's regular directing and presenting gig One Step Beyond in this selection.
Next time, Gadget. Next time...
All of the episodes discussed are -or were at the time of scrawling - available for free at archive.org - happy exploring.
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