TIM LUCAS: MGM's DVD of THE GHOUL comes out at a very interesting moment in time -- almost simultaneously with Paramount's TARGETS, Columbia's THE DEVIL COMMANDS and MGM's THE RAVEN/COMEDY OF TERRORS double feature. Suddenly, the spirit of Boris Karloff is suddenly very much in the air. As we're discussing this, in October, this month's featured actor on Turner Classic Movies is Boris Karloff.

KIM NEWMAN: Tim's right about the Karloff flood at the moment. Besides the titles he mentions, there's also the (admittedly hard-to-find) disc debut of SCARFACE (a second disc lodged in the vast packaging of the DePalma film's Special Edition). Watching again these bookends to a career in horror, and concentrating on Karloff himself gave me a new appreciation of how subtle a player he could be within a broad-strokes genre.

TL: Bela Lugosi has so completely eclipsed Karloff as a horror icon in recent years, I often wonder--whenever my thoughts turn to him--what would have to happen to turn the tide back to where it was when Karloff was still alive. When Karloff died in 1969, as I'm sure most of us recall, no horror star was bigger. But on the strength of a lot of films that are curiosities rather than classics, Lugosi has surfed the tide of Ed Wood's cult celebrity in the 1980s to Waiamaia heights. Martin Landau's performance in ED WOOD also restated his greatness for a new generation, something that Karloff's cameo in GODS AND MONSTERS did not do. Many of us still await the inevitable spectacle of Jeremy Irons turning up in a biopic that will show Karloff doing God-knows-what to better endear him to the South Park/Osbournes generation.

KN: I've also been feeling that King Karloff is in danger of being seriously underrated. I've just read Arthur Lennig's updated Lugosi bio--an outstanding book, and among many other things the first sensible discussion I've read of that tussle over heirs rights to the image of ancestors--and it strikes me that Lennig carries over Lugosi's lifelong resentment against Karloff even as he denies Lugosi actually felt that way. At every chance, he insinuates shady doings or mean motives on Karloff's part. The thing is that, fascinating as the gossip is, we really care about the films and Karloff was just a more versatile, deeper actor. He made schlock (THE APE) and he even walked through a few (THE CLIMAX) but when he showed up and concentrated (as he almost always did), he was the greatest horror star the genre ever had.

JOHN CHARLES: You're certainly right about the Lugosi/Karloff situation these days. I adore Lugosi but, let's face it, he was not exactly a diverse performer and was downright awful in some films. In contrast, I rarely have such a problem with Karloff, who endowed his monsters with a humanity that couldn't have been lost on many viewers. Even when his gesturing in THE GHOUL is on the pantomime level, he still effectively communicates pain and suffering. I've only had that sense from a Lugosi performance on occasion (eg., Ygor in SON OF FRANKENSTEIN and GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN).

TL: All may not be lost. Gord Shriver, who has written extensively about Karloff for CULT MOVIES (and quite well, I'm told; I hardly ever see the magazine myself), just got a publishing deal to deliver a Karloff book. He mentioned this on the AOL Classic Horror Film Boards, and I told him I thought a new Karloff book was one of the things that was necessary now to salvage the grand old man's reputation.

RICHARD HARLAND SMITH: I think Karloff's passing was the first celebrity death my 8 year-old mind ever registered. I remember I was in the kitchen of our family's first real home with my mother when the announcement came in over the radio. I knew Karloff only from THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., but I knew exactly who had died and I did experience something like a sense of loss. I still have my copy of THE FRANKENSCIENCE MONSTER, Forrest J Ackerman's memorial chapbook, which I bought with my allowance shortly thereafter.

STEPHEN R. BISSETTE: Your remarks about Karloff remind me how inappropriately personal Karloff's passing also seemed to me in 1969. I felt it more strongly than I felt the passing of my own relatives up to that point in my life. I was 14 and, though I knew that was completely wrong, I could not account for the strong sense of loss. A few of my closer friends and classmates brought in clippings from the paper, and seemed not at all surprised at my depression and confusion. My girlfriend-to-be (at the time) was the most eloquent, saying, "Well, I figure he was a sort of grandfather to you, really." By that evening, I realized the fact of the matter was that Boris had, in a way, taught me more about death than any living person had up to that point in my existence, via his roles and films. I've never felt that kind of unexpected blow again at a celebrity's passing. Boris has forever held a special place in my heart, and always will. Much as I understand the revival of Bela's stature, Boris will forever remain for me the better actor, the richer storyteller (I grew up as much with his children's records and GRINCH as anything else in his pantheon), the man who lived his life to the fullest, and enjoyed what he had, communicating that joy and passion in everything he did.

TL: We're all so familiar with the Universal classics by now that we, or at least I, tend to look right through them, or take their fine qualities for granted. They have become rituals rather than active experiences. THE GHOUL gives us a fresh showcase for the splendid artist Karloff could be: subtle, but also capable of great bravura. But, for me, the movie's great moment is when Ernest Thesiger (giving an endearing performance of his own, with his usual quota of delicious lines) watches the door of the crypt at the moment of Karloff's resurrection... and the door opens, Karloff staggering out into the moonlight. It triggers the imagination so, just to stare at the door and wonder "Is it going to open? Is it?" and then it does... it reminds me of Gance's J'ACCUSE when what appear to be the ravings of a nutcase are actualized with the reproachful return of all the wartime dead. It's rare for a movie to convince one equally that something supernatural might, or might not, happen; it makes the happening all the more powerful.

JC: I agree with Steve's review that the film is stagey, though I didn't really find it much more so than many pictures from this era (for a livelier UK Karloff outing, Steve should check out the sharply written and very entertaining THE MAN WHO LIVED AGAIN from 1936). While the ripe and static nature of some scenes would prove something of a hinerance for contemporary viewers, I think Kathleen Harrison's comedy relief would prove to be a bigger obstacle. During those precious bits where her shrill spinster rattles on about romantic Arabia, I found myself imagining a Monogram version of the film with Leo Gorcey providing the larfs ("Should we open the tomb? Maybe it ain't supposed to be open til Christmas!").

SRB: Don't get me wrong! While acknowledging the film's slow pace, I found it mesmerizing and thoroughly engaging.

BILL COOKE: I was doing a little research on this film recently for a presentation on British Horror and, according to David Pirie in A HERITAGE OF HORROR, THE GHOUL, while made in England, was not distributed there. A HERITAGE OF HORROR is a rather old book, so does anyone know if this was truly the case?

RHS: According to Bryan Senn's GOLDEN HORRORS, THE GHOUL was released in the UK on July 24, 1933 (about 6 months before it's American premiere), while Denis Gifford cites this as as a trade show date.

KN: Karloff came back to Britain for THE MAN WHO CHANGED HIS MIND, but knew his career was in Hollywood. Similarly, Lugosi--always desperate for work--scored his largest-ever paycheck for MYSTERY OF THE MARIE CELESTE but didn't consider staying in Britain and British films. (There was a war coming, of course.) In the Lennig Lugosi book, one of the sticks used to beat Boris is that Lugosi became an American citizen while Karloff kept his British nationality... though he does cite Lugosi's retention of his Hungarian identity and social circle as a character strength.

One of the interesting elements of Karloff's screen character, and, I suspect, his offscreen life, is his clouded Britishness: an Anglo-Indian with a very British name (William Pratt) and accent and born in Britain, he was also liable to be classed as not entirely white (the expression of the time was "a touch of the tar-brush"). The surviving photographs of Karloff as a child show someone who could have passed for entirely Asian. Though I suspect he would have been exposed to a certain degree of racism at public school (where Indian faces wouldn't have been common but certainly weren't unique), I wonder if his selection of a non-English-sounding pseudonym wasn't an attempt to distance himself from his Britishness?

TL: In his early sound films, Karloff played a number of ethnic characters, such as the Indian in the Charlie Chan film BEHIND THE CURTAIN. I've often felt that much of what made Karloff and Lugosi figures of fright to 1930s American audiences was their emphatic "otherness."

KN: Yet Karloff never seems to have suffered for his racial identity (no bans on his films in the South if he kissed a white leading lady) and certainly didn't go to the lengths Merle Oberon did to conceal her background (she passed off her Indian mother as a family servant). Even later, he played a few maharajahs (on THE WILD WILD WEST, for instance), roles he'd have passed up if he were trying to hide his background. Some of his strongest roles were as Anglicised Orientals, Fu Manchu (one of his wittiest outings) or Ardath Bey, for instance.

RHS: I like THE GHOUL a lot and while I don't necessarily dispute Steve or Kim's reading of the film as a bit of a plod, I'd wager to guess that the somewhat starchy rendering is more than half of the appeal for me. I like the aggravated feel of a lot of the film's dialogue. Everyone's always making these grand negative judgments: "Queer fancies"... "Unspeakable car"... "Horrible house"... "The rudest man alive"... "Scandalous and disgraceful burial"... "It's horrible!" And yet I like all these characters and disagree with criticisms that the film is over-peopled. (Bryan Senn made this charge in his book GOLDEN HORRORS, although he likes THE GHOUL generally speaking.)

KN: Coming from early in the cycle when the filmmakers could only have seen one or two American horror talkies, some of its eccentricities may just be what passed for genre requirements at the time. Like THE OLD DARK HOUSE, it owes more to THE CAT AND THE CANARY or THE BAT than DRACULA or even THE MUMMY. As with Tod Slaughter's films, there's a seam of black humor, a knowingness about the melodramatic trappings, that clearly includes the audience in the gag. I agree that there's a slight sense of plod typical of British films of the period (Hitchcock's excluded), but even Universal's films of the '30s move slower than, say, their competition over at Warner Brothers or, for that matter, their brisker 1940s horror output. It does have, a few years before BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, a heavy use of music (mostly borrowed, I suspect) to accompany the action, with the funeral scene especially effective.

RHS: One of the unsung heroes here is obviously cameraman Günther Krampf, who is credited alongside the better-known Fritz Arno Wagner for photographing Murnau's NOSFERATU (although SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE would have you believe he was bitten, drained and pitched off the scale mock-up of the Demeter). Krampf also shot (sharing credit with other cameramen) some parts of Weine's THE HANDS OF ORLAC and Heinrik Galeen's THE STUDENT OF PRAGUE before taking sole credit on Pabst's PANDORA'S BOX and Richard Oswald's ALRAUNE. Like the Philadelphia-born Thomas Hayes "Happy" Hunter (who haad replaced DW Griffith as house director at Biograph Studios), Krampf later emigrated to England, where he shot THE GHOUL, as well as THE TRANSATLANTIC TUNNEL and THE NIGHT HAS EYES before his death in 1950.

TL: Well, that--and the heavy greasepaint worn by the actors--explains to me why I felt THE GHOUL was even more expressionistic than the usual 1930s horror fare. Its look reminds me, in some ways, of the Italian horror film CASTLE OF THE LIVING DEAD [Il castello dei morti-vivi, 1964], which made Christopher Lee up to look like a hollow-eyed walking corpse or drug addict from a forgotten UFA epic.

RHS: THE GHOUL certainly bears the Expressionist stamp from its first frames: that brief street scene where the buildings in the background tilt back (à la THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI), the shadows on the stairs leading up to Mahmoud's rented room, and later the doorway and great jumble of a bookcase (which look like set dressings stolen from THE GOLEM) in Broughton's law office. Credit must also go to Krampf's former fellow UFA staffer Alfred Junge, who graduated to production design assignments for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger: CONTRABAND, I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING!, BLACK NARCISSUS, etc. (Three being a charm, Karloff's makeup was provided by Heinrich Heitfeld.)

The film's possible influence on later works have been discussed elsewhere previously: Bryan Senn noted the similarities here with certain plot points and setpieces in the 1973 William Nolan-scripted telefilm THE NORLISS TAPES and Jonathan Rigby rightly pointed out that Karloff's bar-bending entrance to chase Thesiger anticipates Christopher Lee's murder of Felix Aylmer in Hammer's THE MUMMY.

TL: The quality of this presentation is so much more acute than ever before, I can't help wondering how it might affect previously expressed opinions, made on the evidence of those earlier crap copies. I wonder if Senn's opinion has changed at all? Maybe he'll write in and tell us.

KN: In THE GHOUL, it's interesting to note that Karloff--along with Thesiger, Hardwicke and Ralph Richardson--is actually called on to do more acting than is found in Universal-style horror. Browning and Whale liked to cast and draw out personalities, but T. Hayes Hunter (about whom I know little) insists his cast play people other than themselves: note Thesiger's Scots accent and limp, the mix of hypocritical piety and larceny in his role, and Richardson's very funny above-suspicion curate act as a set-up for his punch-line bomb-detonation. The Universal films might flirt with blasphemy, but THE GHOUL actually goes for Christianity. Thesiger and Richardson both try to sound like religious and decent men but are conniving villains, while the religion of Ancient Egypt is at least shown to work. That spinster joke goes on too long, but it's interesting that the film acknowledges the genre's tendency to stereotype "foreigners" and then subverts it by having the Egyptian character comically play up to the "sheik" image. The joke is on the stupid Westerner whose attitudes would shape the presentation of all those fez-wearing lecherous high-priests in subsequent Mummy films.

RHS: Actually, I take issue with Kim's reading of Thesiger as a religious hypocrite. The way I see the character, Laing's is sincere in his catechism, but Karloff's death (and his own looming unemployment) and the lure of great wealth tempt him to steal the jewel. (Although why the guy has a readymade hidey-hole in his club foot is beyond me.) There's a mild subtheme of class consciousness at work here. Note that the family feud has left Ralph well-off but put Helen very close to poverty... check Anthony Bushell's expression when he struts into her dingy bedsit and you'll see something near to shame, or at least guilt as he realizes the economic toll of the long-forgotten "Christmas joke." I wonder if the point of THE GHOUL has less to do with shocks than about getting the family back together, a notion certainly supported by the film's final image.

KN: A recommended bit of associational material is Jonathan Coe's literary novel WHAT A CARVE UP!, which is a 1980s state-of-the-nation satire built upon the skeleton of the GHOUL remake referred to in the title. Aptly, the book's name is changed for US release, but sadly not to NO PLACE LIKE HOMICIDE but THE WINSLOW LEGACY. Coe writes very interestingly not just about WACU but the Frank King novel both films are based on -- and which he's the only person I've met who has ever read. And how many other serious books contain pages of homage to Shirley Eaton?

JC: I'm very happy that I didn't bother with that Czech-subbed version that Sinister Cinema has been selling for years. MGM's transfer does such a gorgeous job of preserving the intricate lighting and shadow scheme! I can just imagine what a sea of murk those old versions must be, blasting the contrast and mushing together all the levels of darkness.

TL: Richard and Steve had both enthused to me about the MGM disc weeks before I was able to see it, but when I finally did, it was... like passing through a magic door and discovering an unseen Universal classic from an alternate universe. As a kid, I discovered new horror classics all the time by keeping a hawk-like vigil over the pages of each week's TV GUIDE. A big part of being a horror fan was this constant broadening of one's knowledge of the past, seeing a movie you knew only from photographs come to life. So this disc gave me a feeling I haven't had in a long time. Naturally, I'm as thrilled by the presentation as everybody else. It's so good, in fact, it almost makes me wonder whether a transfer that makes greasepaint on an actor's face so obvious might be much sharper and more accurate than the filmmakers might have wished. I've been watching some of A&E's discs of the Gerry Anderson "SuperMarionation" programs, and the wires are so clearly visible... yet if you squint your eyes and dull their focus just a little, they completely disappear.

Copyright 2003, Video Watchdog. All rights reserved.