Lugosi has gotten a lot of respect in recent years as the Great Thespian Done Wrong by Hollywood machinations, just as Ed Wood has gotten more than his share of props for "rescuing" the onetime Austro-Hungarian heartthrob and showing him some respect at the end of his long, strange trip.
In this clip, though, we can see that only two years after his greatest triumph Bela was already quite willing to trash his own image - although there is something in his glance at about 1:16 that does convey a shade of existential sorrow, as if in realization that he's starting down a slippery slope.
Frankly, the only thing that frightens me about this number are those damn mannequins. Well, that and the piano player...
*Transylvanian accent absolutely required.
What I always found odd was that in an era when you could have Betty Boop with that thick accent, Clara Bow's career skidded to a halt because of that accent. Why couldn't Bow have become Betty Boop?
ReplyDeleteThat piano player couldn't have made a bigger hash out of this piece with potatoes and corned beef. Did he learn his lines phonetically?
ReplyDeleteWell, it wouldn't exactly have been a step up for poor Clara to become a voice artiste, but you're quite right that it's always seemed sad that through Betty, Clara ended up with a kind of second-hand career that only got bigger and bigger, even as in real life, such as it is, everything fell apart. She was, as Shelley Winters so often said of Marilyn Monroe, a very troubled goil...
ReplyDeleteAnd as for the piano player, where's Bill to tell us all about him?
I got nuthin'. Thought it was Eddie Cantor for a moment, but no. Perhpas just one of the gang from Fleischer Studios drafted into service for a bit to film the short.
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