Word: karloff
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...EDGAR G. ULMER'S "Classic chiller," Boris Karloff plays opposite Bela Lugosi. You therefore expect, and get, a wide range of bizarre deeds--for starters, Satanism and skinning alive. The more extreme of these deeds are supported by a host of lesser strange touches, partly in Ulmer's visual style and partly in the fine acting. These touches make the film the masterpiece it is. They constantly reveal the personalities of the characters--especially the two leads, whose traits and drives take in all mutations of moral position and psychological experience. Karloff initially seems perverse and decadent; Lugosi, virtuous...
...these are in one sense just good film-making; they exploit a given dramatic situation. Choosing a certain camera angle or a certain lighting merely extends the expressive possibilities which the script offers the director. But in Ulmer's case exploitation becomes flights of pure imagination. In one scene Karloff goes to put out the cat. He walks down a dark hall into a gallery lined with glass cases. Passing from one, in which a blonde woman in a white frock is suspended, to the next, his reflections in the glass and the woman's frame each other and make...
ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (ABC, 9-11 p.m.).* Helen Hayes and Lillian Gish dish out the poison in this TV version of Joseph Kesselring's hit play. Fred Gwynne takes over Boris Karloff's role...
...received a lot of press coverage over the last few months, undeservedly I think, since the film itself is every bit as perversely eclectic as its marketing. The camera pulls back to a full shot of a family dinner, and Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life is recreated; Karloff's monologue recalls Welles' in Mr. Arkadin as surely as we recognize Strangers On A Train when the sniper's ammunition falls just out of reach (shades of Bruno and the cigarette lighter...
Finally, on the debit side, the film's construction depends overmuch on cross-cutting between Bobby and scenes of Byron Orlock, an aging actor determined to retire, beautifully played by Boris Karloff. We learn early that there is going to be a confrontation of the two at a drive-in, and tend to want to get it over with once the set-up has been established. To some extent, this is suspense generated slickly by Bogdanovich, but mostly it's irritation at having to wade through tentative cross-cutting toward a climax...