Friend of Jabootu Sandy Petersen writes:
In many of my old cheapie monster movies, I note with interest that Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff or some other actor I admire is featured. Then, when I watch the movie, Boris plays the butler or something minor and I hardly see any of him.
Why did the directors and producers of these films even bother to hire a horror star, and then misuse him in such a way? What were they getting out of it?
Two examples that really get my goat:
Scream and Scream Again – Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, and Vincent Price are all in this film. Peter Cushing shows up in exactly one scene. Lee gets maybe two, and none of the three ever have a scene together. At least we get to see a lot of Vincent.
Shock Waves – Peter Cushing and John Carradine both show up. But they never meet. John Carradine is killed off only a few minutes after the opening credits.
Sandy, being a sometimes frightening—if unstintingly benign—polymath, already knows the answer to this query, I expect, but it’s a topic worth a bit of exploration.
This is a common complaint of horror movie buffs, and most of us have our favorite examples. The recently released-on-DVD obscurity Mystery on Monster Island (1981) prominently features such genre faves as Peter Cushing, Terrance Stamp and Paul Naschy in the credits. Naschy is bumped off in the first several minutes of the film (a popular ploy*), and Cushing and Stamp have bookend appearances. The film features a hooded villain, who in the end is revealed to *cough* be Stamp’s character, a rather transparent attempt to disguise the fact that Stamp actually has at best several actual minutes of screentime.
[*This sort of thing was best parodied in the short-lived TV program Police Squad, in which a guest actor would be announced in the opening credits…”Guest Star William Conrad!”, and then immediately get killed before the show even started.]
Of course, the producers are the ones who “get something” from this. The directors—themselves hired hands—usually don’t. At best, I suppose, having Bela Lugosi play a red herring butler (1942’s Night Monster, for instance) could conceivably draw audience attention away from the real mystery villain. However, that’s putting more thought into these quickie productions than generally would really take place.The primary thing to note is that this sort of shell game was nearly always the work of smaller independent companies. Back in the day, Universal generally gave their horror stars, even the faded ones (such as Lugosi by the ’40s) at least somewhat prominent supporting roles: Ygor in The Son of Frankenstein and The Ghost of Frankenstein, Dr. Benet in The Invisible Ray, Dracula in Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, etc. Even when Lugosi got a smaller role in a Universal, it was at least generally a pivotal one, such as Bela the Gypsy in The Wolf Man, who is the doomed werewolf who infects series character Larry Talbot.
This isn’t to say that a) Universal didn’t bone the desperate Lugosi money-wise as much as they could, and b) that Lugosi didn’t zealously resent being downgraded to a supporting actor, especially opposite his quickly ascendant horror rival Boris Karloff. And certainly John Carradine’s Dracula was given short shrift in both The House of Frankenstein and, ironically enough, The House of Dracula. Still, Carradine was considered a secondary attraction at best to such Universal house stars as Lon Chaney, Jr. and Boris Karloff.
On the whole, though, this sort of drastic underutilization of stars is much more typical of independent fare. Universal was a major studio, a brand name as it were, and thus it was in there interest to meet fan expectations and bring them back for their next horror flick. After the end of the studio days, however, this sort of thing skyrocketed, especially in horror fare which was generally produced by smaller companies.
There’s a mathematical formula at work here, which is basically that hiring a ‘name’ actor affords you valuable advertising advantages, but is costly (at least for low budget films). So the smartest thing to do was to hire said actor, but only for a day or two, or a week at best, which meant giving him a smaller role. Thus you gain the commercial advantages of their presence, while minimizing what these advantages cost you.
Somebody like Lugosi was hired for his star power (such as it was), and then given a lot of play in the advertising materials. Even when Night Monster came out on VHS roughly fifty years later, for instance, Lugosi’s image dominated on the video box, despite the fact that he doesn’t have much to do in the film proper.
And while horror films are best known for this sort of thing, many genre films employed it. Even a big mainstream star like Henry Fonda rented himself out literally by the day for a slew of generally awful disaster movies in the ’70s, in which he was assigned roles that were for the most part carefully segregated from the other main characters so that all his scenes could be contained and shot in as quick of a fashion as possible. See Meteor, City on Fire, Tentacles and Rollercoaster. Lots of stars picked up quick paychecks like these.Even Hammer Studios fell prey to this. Fans often bellyache, and with good reason, at how restricted the screentime of Christopher Lee was in most of the Hammer Dracula pictures. Again, for good reason. Lee became a (fairly) expensive commodity, and Hammer only made money by sticking to their at best moderate budgets. If Lee cost so much per week, then writing his part so that the movie only required him on set for a week or two was financially essential. After a rollicking opening sequence, Dracula A.D. 1972 noticeably keeps Dracula more or less confined to a single location, which allowed for fewer camera set-ups and such, and the obvious concurrent savings.
Sandy’s two examples fall squarely into this model. Each was made by an independent, who hired fading horror stars to draw in fans, but didn’t have enough money to hire them for long. Scream and Scream Again was made by Tigon, who had enough coin to afford using one such star in a fairly large part (Price), as well as to spring for what were basically cameos by two others, Lee and Cushing.
The reason none of the three are ever onscreen together has to do with several things. First, if you can afford to have Lee and Cushing onscreen for only a couple of minutes apiece, then if you put them together in a scene (or with Price), then there are larger stretches of the film completely sans any horror stars. Tigon presumably thought fans would rather see one of the big names onscreen more of the time rather than necessarily see them doing anything interesting, such as act opposite each other. Or, frankly, it could be that they just didn’t care. By the time fans were in a position to complain about the film, they’d already bought a ticket to see it. Unsatisfied with the proceedings? Too bad, so sad.
As for Shock Waves, we’re talking basically the same thing. They could afford Carradine and Cushing, but for only so long each, and so split them up so that there was more of them to go around. Sadly, one film that tries to do it right, 1983’s House of Long Shadows, is not yet available on DVD. It’s a very creaky Old Dark House movie, and in fact the most recent remake of the venerable Seven Keys to Baldplate, oft filmed and first so way back in 1917. Even so, the film assembles Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, John Carradine and Vincent Price, and then at least makes an attempt to use them to good effect. It’s not a great film by any means, but was clearly made by fans of old horror movies, who actually tried to do right by the stars they hired.
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