That’s it for now from the shadows-MonsterGirl
Postcards From Shadowland No.1
Category: 1940s
From The Vault: Flesh & Fantasy (1943)
FLESH AND FANTASY 1943
Released by Universal in 1943 Flesh and Fantasy is by brilliant director Julien Duvivier, and co-produced by Charles Boyer, and still remains an obscure forgotten horror gem.
Fatalistic, philosophical, Impressionistic, and hauntingly romantic, it dabbles in destiny and the dynamism of fate’s meddling hand in our lives. Are we all free souls, or is life predetermined for us? Part social commentary with an edge of ironic charm, utilizing elements of the supernatural to drive the narrative.
The three episodes star Robert Cummings and Betty Field, Edward G. Robinson and Thomas Mitchell, & Charles Boyer, and Barbara Stanwyck. Robinson and Stanwyck are two of my favorite actors!
The film revolves around 3 vignettes, the first written by Eliis St. Joseph, the second adapted from Oscar Wilde, and the third written by László Vadnay.
Turning out a collection of eerie stories told by Gentlemen at their club. The stories are framed by Robert Benchley as Doakes and David Hoffman as Davis.
The first stars Betty Field as Henrietta a dowdy woman who comes upon a mysterious mask during Mardis Gras and then goes to a party festooned with regalia, turbulence, and a romantic game of cat-and-mouse with the handsome Michael (Robert Cummings) A beautifully tragic tale of loneliness and the essence of what beauty is. The use of masks creates a nightmarish landscape of human disconnection.
The second vignette is an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s, Lord Arthur Saville’s Crime, which stars Edward G. Robinson as Marshall Tyler, a lawyer who is told by a Fortune Teller Septimus Podgers (Thomas Mitchell) that he is going to kill someone. Also at the affair is Dame May Whitty as Lady Pamela Hardwick and C. Aubrey Smith as the Dean of Norwalk.
Playing out the obsessive victim, Tyler devolves ever increasingly into a world of malefic paranoia in that way that Robinson is so good at. He spirals into madness as he is surrounded by reflections and warning shadows, and an impending dread, that creates a sense of the film being a Horror/Noir hybrid. The use of shadow does invoke a bit of Jacques Tourneur’s style as well.
In the third installment, Charles Boyer plays an acrobat in the circus named Paul Gaspar, who has a premonition of fatal consequences surrounding his high-wire act. Gaspar has a dream one night before his performance that he falls to his death, and so he decides to take a cruise, where he meets the woman from his dream, Joan Stanley played by Barbara Stanwyck, who was the one person he could still hear screaming as he plunges to his death! This episode concludes the film with a dreamy and grim set of atmospherics.
Flesh and Fantasy predate by two years another wonderfully suspenseful ensemble of ghostly stories, Dead of Night 1945 starring Michael Redgrave in the iconic short tale of the ventriloquist and his frightening dummy sidekick!
There are thousands of wonderful obscurities in my collection, this is just one of them!
See it for yourself-MonsterGirl
From The Vault: The Man in Half Moon Street (1945)
“I’ll share your madness because there’s grandeur in it. And I have faith – and love.”
THE MAN IN HALF MOON STREET (1945)
Nils Asther (Night Monster 1942, Bluebeard 1944) plays Dr. Julian Karell a 120-year-old scientist who has found a way to prolong life. Julian falls madly in love with Eve Brandon (Helen Walker Nightmare Alley 1947, Call Northside 777 1948) Unfortunately he needs new glands in order to survive, and not head toward decrepitude and die!
Written by the great Barré Lyndon and directed by Ralph Murphy. Hammer and Terence Fisher offered us a remake in 1959 The Man Who Could Cheat Death starring Anton Diffring, Hazel Court, and Christopher Lee! Man in Half Moon Street includes a dramatic score by the wonderful composer Miklós Rózsa!
Dr. Kurt van Bruecken: “We are not scientists anymore. We are murderers.”
There are oodles and oodles of fantastic films in my collection, this is just one of them!
MonsterGirl forever young at heart!
MonsterGirl & Meleva the Gypsy!
MonsterGirl is on the go! I’ll be back in a few weeks folks! Stay tuned…
I’m about to leave the beautiful coast of Maine and settle in for a while in Caldwell NJ! So MonsterGirl is on the move again, but not silent for long.I’ll be blogging and recording my music soon enough! But while this journey isn’t Wanderlust on my part, it certainly sort of brings out the true gypsy blood in me!!!!
So here’s to Maria Ouspenskaya as Meleva! I don’t have the earrings, but oy do I have the Babooshkas on hand. So hang in there, and I’ll be posting more in the next few weeks, once I get settled into my new digs.
PS: It’s an 110 year old Victorian and I swear it’s haunted!!!! It’ll make for some inspiring posts, I bet!
Maria Ouspenskaya plays Meleva the Gypsy in George Waggner’s 1941 Universal Horror Classic The Wolf Man 1941
Written by the prolific Curt Siodmak and starring Lon Chaney Jr. as the ill- fated Lawrence Talbot the Wolfman, Claude Raines as Sir John Talbot Sr and Bela Lugosi as Bela the gypsy! Also starring Evelyn Ankers.
Here’s a to howling successful move to N.J friends!-Joey (MonsterGirl)
Obscure Scream Gem: Strangler of The Swamp (1946) “Oh, this swamp breeds more rumors than mosquitos.”
Old legends – strange tales – never die in the lonely swamp land. Villages and hamlets lie remote and almost forgotten. Small ferryboats glide between the shores, and the ferryman is a very important person. Day and night he is at the command of his passengers. On his little barge ride the good and the evil; the friendly and the hostile; the superstitious and the enlightened; the living and – sometimes – the dead.
Directed by Frank Wisbar from his own story, also co-written for the screen by Leo J. McCarthy. Make-up by Bud Westmore. Also co-starring Effie Laird as Martina Sanders, Nolan Leary as Pete Jeffers, Frank Conlan as Joseph Hart, Therese Lyon and Virginia Farmer.
This is a hauntingly beautiful re-make of director Frank Wisbar’s own 1936 German film Faehrmann Maria a retelling of the legend of Death and The Maiden. Which started Sybille Schmitz, the memorable victim of Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1931).
It’s an effectively creepy story from the Poverty Row Film Company PRC who brought us The Devil Bat and The Flying Serpent. While this is a low budget B movie, it is quite effective to watch as the ghost of Douglas seems to dissolve in and out of the darkness.
There is an essence of the slow and dreamlike stylization that is similar to Dreyer’s work, at work here in Strangler of The Swamp. The setting is a lonely backwoods swamplands where the villagers live under a terrible curse left by a wrongly accused man hung for a crime he did not commit.
Three women from the village including Martina Sanders glide down the bayou on the ferryboat with Joseph Hart, evoking a mythical quality as if used as augury like that of The Furies designating Joseph’s ill fated path for his sins of false witness and murder.
MonsterGirl’s Father’s Day: Quote of the day! The Red House (1947) Edgar G. Robinson as Pete Morgan
The Red House 1947
Pete Morgan: “I picked up the whip and beat him till he wasn’t handsome anymore, till he was dead, finished.”
Written for the screen and directed by Delmer Daves (Dark Passage 1947) this is a tautly wound horror/thriller featuring one of my favorites, the gruff everyman Edgar G Robinson as Peter Morgan, a very ‘unbalanced’ guy.
Pete ( Edgar G Robinson) and sister Ellen Morgan ( Dame Judith Anderson) have raised pretty Meg ( Allene Roberts) as their own child after her parents ran off and abandon her as a baby.
Meg now a young woman gets her friend Nath (Lon McCallister) to come help out doing odd jobs on the farm because her father Pete has a wooden leg and is getting on in years.
One night, Nath decides to use a shortcut home through the woods, which enrages Pete who warns him to stay clear of the red house, for fear of the unspeakable horrors associated with the dilapidated old wreck.
But like all great horror thrillers, Meg and Nath ignore his warnings and start digging around anyway and of course, the two begin falling in love, which is not only a problem for Meg’s mysterious caretaker, but for Nath’s sexy girlfriend Tibby played by a very young Julie London.
What is the dark secret of the red house, and what is deranged father Pete Morgan hiding after all these years?
Happy Father’s Day from MonsterGirl!
MonsterGirl’s Quote of the Day! The Glass Key (1942)
The Glass Key 1942
CLYDE MATTHEWS: “Isn’t all this beating likely to be fatal?
NICK VARNA: “Not unless we want it to be“
Directed by Stuart Heisler (Tulsa 1949, The Star 1952), penned for the screen by Jonathan Latimer based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett.
Alan Ladd is Ed Beaumont who sets out to find the truth behind his friend’s murder, and the divine sylph Veronica Lake is Janet Henry in this classic Noir Crime Drama!
Brain Donlevy (Kiss of Death 1947, Dangerous Assignment 1952)plays Paul Madvig who decides to clean up his past while running for re-election. He refuses to take any muscle from gangster Nick Varna (Joseph Calleia Gilda 1946, Touch of Evil 1958) Instead he throws his support behind politician Ralph Henry (Moroni Olsen)
Things heat up when Ralph’s gambling son, Taylor Henry played by Richard Denning, who loves Paul’s sister Opal Madvig, (Bonita Granville)is murdered.
Nick Varna takes advantage of the dire financial situation of The Observer to strong-arm publisher Clyde Matthews (Arthur Loft) to use his newspaper to crucify and create suspicion around Paul Madvig’s involvement in the murder. Also starring William Bendix.
The Film Score Freak Recognizes Jo Gabriel’s ‘Moments Like Drops’ and Cocteau’s Dreamy Fairytale ‘La Belle at la Bete’
Here is a mash up of my song ‘Moments Like Drops’ that appears on my album The Amber Session, blending scenes from Jean Cocteau’s masterpiece of epic love, La Belle at la Bete 1946
Here’s to Beauty and Here’s to the Beasts!!!!!! Jo Gabriel (MonsterGirl)
More Men Doing Science….!
MonsterGirl’s Quote of The Day! Nocturne 1946 ‘I aint no lady’
Nocturne 1946 Starring George Raft, Lynn Bari and Virginia Huston, and Myrna Dell. Directed by Edwin L. Marin
Police detective Joe Warner investigates the shooting of womanizing composer Keith Vincent. But he doesn’t believe the evidence, that it was a suicide. He goes on the hunt for one broken love affair after another…
Susan Flanders ( Myrna Dell ) – ” He was a lady-killer, but don’t get any ideas, I ain’t no lady!”
MonsterGirl-I’m no lady!