Silent Horrors: The Man Who Laughs (1928)

I had every intention of getting this review up yesterday, but ran into a few roadblocks along the way. The DVD recorder was in use for the better part of the day, capturing the Karloff films I didn’t already have in my collection (I could have used the DVD player on the computer, but I was…

Tell them Boris sent you!

In one half-hour, Turner Classic Movies will kick off a mini-marathon of films starring the one-and-only Boris Karloff. Most of the films consist of quickies he made for Columbia (I think Universal loaned him out once a year to do films for the Lady with the Torch) but there are a few nuggets among the dross: The…

Silent Horrors: The Cat and the Canary (1927)

John Willard’s hardy old stage chestnut—first performed in New York City on February 7, 1922—has been around the block, cinematically so to speak, on at least four different occasions: 1927, 1930 (as The Cat Creeps), 1939 and 1978. I’ve now seen all of them except the 1930 version—which is considered a lost film—and my favorite is the one made in 1939 because it…

Salute your shorts!

The Warner Archive announced some of their new titles last week, and one of the more interesting releases is a 3-DVD set of some of the classic Robert Benchley one-reelers that I’ve discussed previously here on the blog. Warner says there’s 267 minutes of material on the set, but they don’t list what shorts are included (I tried to dig up…

Silent Horrors: Waxworks (1924)

Paul Leni’s Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks, 1924) tells three tales surrounding the figures in a wax museum—the owner of which has hired a writer-poet (William Dieterle) to come up with some “ballyhoo” to promote the exhibits. The first figure is Middle Eastern despot Harun el Raschid (Emil Jannings), a powerful caliph who decrees that a baker (also Dieterle) be destroyed…

Silent Horrors: Faust (1926)

In Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe’s play Faust, a scientist who becomes frustrated with the limits of learning and knowledge sells his soul to The Devil in order to overcome these barriers—the price being that once Faust reaches the zenith of human happiness, he will forfeit said soul (Faust agrees to this, believing it will never happen). The…

Lou…we hardly knew ye…

My fellow film/television blogger Edward Copeland sums it up best (and, in fact, was kind enough to send me a heads-up in case I hadn’t heard about it) when he remarks about character great Lou Jacobi: “His face is much more familiar than his name, but to some extent that is to be expected for a character…

Silent Horrors: Sparrows (1926)

Since it’s beginning to get closer and closer to Halloween, I took some time this weekend to ponder as to whether or not I should post something along the lines of a “scary movie” theme to get into the “spirit” of the season. Several of my esteemed colleagues have done some novel Halloween-themed posts; my current…

Do they do The Mouse in The Great Beyond?

Milton Supman, better known as Soupy Sales, has shuffled off this mortal coil at the age of 83 and as I type this, the world appears to be just a bit gloomier than the day before. An individual on Facebook commented that “A generation of gentle delinquents mourn his passing”—and I think that simple, eloquent statement just about…

“You ponce in here expecting to be waited on hand and foot, while I’m trying to run a hotel here!”

Thanks to a heads-up from Mark Evanier, I spent an enjoyable portion of this morning reading a wonderful Rolling Stone interview (Eric J. Plosky is the interviewer) with one of my comedic idols, John Cleese. It’s essential reading, and the part that made me fall out of my chair is when Plosky asks Cleese whether or not Fawlty Towers actually helped or hindered…