12/9/2006

How’s that holiday shopping going? You’ve got Hanukkah coming up fast, and Christmas is just about 2 weeks away… (hope you’ve ordered that Sven t-shirt by now, so it’ll arrive in time.) You can tune in to the Sven show tonight for a break (or to watch while gift-wrapping)-for the next couple weeks, we’ve got a couple cool vintage, lesser-seen horror films , featuring two of the founding fathers of the Universal horror legacy- Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi! This week, it’s the 1935 chiller- “the Raven” ( ignore TVGUIDE.com’s wrong listing- this ISN’T the Vincent Price/Peter Lorre comedy.) You get Bela as a surgeon with a rather unhealthy attraction to Edgar Allan Poe’s work- and , an even more unhealthy attraction to a young woman whose life he saves after a car accident. Bela gets a stroke of evil good luck when a criminal- Boris- finds him, and asks him to do a plastic surgery job on his face, so he won’t have to stay on the run. Bela uses this to get Boris to do his evil bidding (is there any other kind of bidding, other than eBay?) He purposely makes Boris look hideous, dangling the carrot of restoring his face-IF Boris helps him get revenge on the girl who jilted him, her boyfriend, and her father- a judge who told Boris to back off from his young offspring. It doesn’t help that Bela has built models of many of the torture devices that Poe wrote about- including the grisly cutting device from “the Pit and the Pendulum”- and they all come into play before the movie concludes! I’ve mentioned that Bela Lugosi had a sort of axe to grind with Boris Karloff- we’ll talk about that in tonight’s show- but there were a few reasons, though they had nothing to really do with Boris, for the bad feelings. Bela was a big star of stage and screen back in the old country-Hungary- and had immediate success when he immigrated to America and starred in the stage version of Dracula. But- he signed with Universal Studios under a contract that really didn’t pay him fairly, And he often alienated co-workers simply through his lack of a deep understanding of English , which also affected his business decisions. He was a very proud man, with a bit of an ego. He often resented that Karloff was considered a better, more versatile actor than he. His heart-breakingly tough life in later years, of course, was documented in the “Ed Wood” film. You’ll see many examples of Bela’s work- including his “Dracula” role- on our show as we roll out more of the Universal classics. I think you’ll agree that Bela deserves more respect than he got during his lifetime. Tune in tonight at 9 on WCIU, especially if you’ve never seen him as anything other than Count Dracula. I’ll wrap this up- you wrap up those presents while you watch tonight- and take a break tomorrow to check back here for more blog. Anyone for blog with egg nog?