Boris Karloff, old time movie photos and questionable academy awards
Back from vacation and it's all happening.
Boris Karloff was, according to the detectives at Wikipedia, in 174 friggin’ films. The guy worked from 1919 to 1968 - 49 years - which puts him at an average of almost four movies per year. That’s just the average, though. In 1931, he kicked out 14 movies, including Frankenstein where he played the pseudo-titular monster.
So here’s this guy rolling through the 1920s and movies you and I will likely never see - The Yellow Ticket, anyone? How about The Utah Kid? - and yet, you’d know his voice in an instant. In 1966, he was the narrator for The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.
He’s also easy to mistake for Herman Munster if you only see this one photo and also don’t really know what either Herman Munster or Boris Karloff look like - for instance if you’re me.
This picture has been hanging in my local coffee shop - Vigilante - on and off for years. I used to kinda hate it, then I liked it and now I sorta love it. The picture is Karloff on a break - cup of tea, cigarette, weary face. The crop in this version, which is identical to crop in Vigilante, makes it look like he’s sitting in a recliner, waiting for the next shot to start.
That’s the power of editing.
In reality, Karloff was caked in make-up, prosthetics, glue and all kinds of other bits and pieces. He couldn’t sit, so his break was taken standing in the little contraption shown below. Someone lit the cigarette for him, I’m guessing because there was stuff all over his hands.
The process of getting him made up took about three hours in the morning and then another hour or two after shooting to remove it all. The bolts glued to him stuck so well that he seems to have suffered from scarring on his neck the rest of his life.
(The images here are actually from Bride of Frankenstein in 1935. By then, the makeup was a little less cumbersome.)
The photos come from the Universal Studios archive and, like a champion researcher, I can’t find a name for the photographer. It’s possible it was Ray Jones, who became the lead still photographer for Universal in 1935. It might also just be a still taken by the cinematographer, who was often tasked with behind-the-scenes shots.
Jones and portrait photographer George Hurrell were both working in the industry around the same time. We ran across Hurrell at the National Portrait Gallery earlier this year - get after it - when it ran an exhibit on the stars of Golden Age Hollywood.
The difference between the two was the scope of the work. Portrait photography was the fancy, posed stuff that you might see on a billboard. Behind-the-scenes photographs were taken by the “still photographer” who also covered other non-portrait events (openings, parties, late night benders, etc.).
Jones was a still photographer and has thus garnered less attention than his glitzy portrait colleagues - he might also just not have been incredible, but I think he’s got some impressive work.
I was going to drop in a line about how he was “the first still photographer to win an Academy Award,” per his biography, but I cannot find a single reference to back that up. So maybe he didn’t?
But then again, it looks like maybe the Paramount still photography team won a technical award in 1947 - the year Jones died - for film speed use, so maybe he was part of that group.
Long story short - Karloff movies are going on the watchlist, keep your future internet biography up-to-date and cropping an image can completely change people’s impression of it.
I’ll be back soon with an update on the Hirshhorn’s new permanent collection exhibit and more absolute nonsense.