They Remembered Forgotten Films…

••• Charley Brady •••

ONE

A couple of weeks ago I was talking on the phone with Adam Scheffler, art director and founding father of the parish of Silent Cinema Galway. And amongst other highly erudite topics, we got around to musing about catchy film taglines.

Just for the self-indulgent record, my favourite film director Sam Peckinpah generally wrote his own poster eyecatchers and surely two of the best were: NINE MEN WHO CAME TOO LATE AND STAYED TOO LONG (The Wild Bunch); and THE KNOCK ON THE DOOR MEANT THE BIRTH OF ONE MAN AND THE DEATH OF SEVEN OTHERS (Straw Dogs). I’m also rather partial to the blatant and slightly hysterical two words on the poster for Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: IT HAPPENED! A lie, but effective.

In this case, it wasn’t really film blurbs I was thinking of, but old film magazines. And so of course the great Cult Movies came to mind.

Now I’m not for a moment knocking Forrest J. Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland. Any kid like me who was growing up in the ‘60s and had a love for the horror and fantasy genre never missed the chance to pick up a copy, although they were usually well out of date by the time I found one, usually in a Glasgow market place or thirty miles away in my home town of Ayr, which was back then a prosperous fishing village. (They would turn up in odd little places in the back streets of Ayr’s small dockside since old American magazines and colour comic books were used as ship’s ballast in those days. Strange, but true.)

Forry’s brainchild – and yeah, he had a writing style that let us feel that we knew him by his first name – was the go-to for the wonderful old Universal films of the 30s, as well as what was then the more modern (and often shocking!) Hammer Horror films of the 50s/60s, where we could salivate over a fanged Christopher Lee on the cover with a scantily clad young lady swooning in his arms.

And Forry never neglected silent films. Far from it. Indeed, he never stopped raving about his all-time favourite movie, the 1927 Fritz Lang masterpiece Metropolis. To my knowledge, at the time of his death in 2008 at the ripe old age of 92, he had seen it around 200 times, both on his own and at various conventions around the world, to which he was constantly being invited and where he was a gregarious and entertaining guest. After all, this was a guy who was born in 1916 and who became interested in the infant fantasy field in the 20s, when he was little more than an infant himself.

I often think that his German wife, teacher-translator Mathilda Wahrman (Wendy, as Forry called her) must have been some kind of Teutonic saint. Did she start tearing her hair out as their Los Angeles home, the Acker mansion, gradually filled to bursting capacity with her husband’s collection of film stills, horror/fantasy memorabilia, and life-size cut-outs of the Wolf Man, Frankenstein, and Dracula? And – of course! – that scarily dominatrix-like robotic metal maiden from Metropolis was lovingly rebuilt over 600 hours to finally take pride of place in the living room. Was Mrs. Ackerman jealous? She probably should have been!

It's very likely an urban legend, but I love the story of the last straw being when the long-suffering Wendy opened the fridge door one day to find that all the food was gone and replaced by reels of films and packages of cinema photos from the 20s and 30s. They did in fact separate but stayed both close and married until Wendy’s death in 1990; and although there was tragedy along the line, I like to think that they were happy after their fashion.

It was also through Forry’s magazine that I first heard of one of the most famous of all ‘lost’ silent movies, Tod Browning’s 1927 London After Midnight with Lon Chaney. The last known copy was destroyed by a fire at the MGM vault in 1965 and only some tantalizing stills remain today. Yet I still hope to see a copy before I fall off the twig. After all, the 1910 Frankenstein was considered lost in the 70s, only for a copy to turn up. In fact, I’ve seen it at Silent Cinema Galway no less than three times in the past nine months. So, there’s always hope.

My main gripe as a kid who took his love for this stuff far too seriously was with the groan-inducing puns that Forry filled the pages of Famous Monsters with. Today, of course, I just see them as part of the charm; but back then I wanted something along the lines of Calvin Thomas Beck’s Castle of Frankenstein, which I had heard took this stuff very, very seriously indeed. No puns from Becks, who deserves an article all of his own. Indeed, he and his mother – who was never voluntarily separated from him – were long rumored to be the inspiration for Norman and Norma Bates in Robert Bloch’s novel, Psycho. Without, presumably, the taxidermy and shower stall fixation.

Sadly, back in that pre-Internet, pre-eBay days I never was able to track down a copy.

TWO

It wasn’t until the 90s and I was – in theory, anyway – an adult, that I stumbled across an issue - #24 - of Cult Movies. And a glance at that cover will be enough to show you why I almost had a massive brain embolism on the spot. On top of which it promised articles by Frank J. Dello Stritto, an amazing example of the fan’s fan. He was at that time working on an oil rig in the North Sea, off the coast of Aberdeen, Scotland; yet he somehow found the time to write the most incredible in-depth pieces on those marvelous old movies of yesteryear. And man, did that guy have an obsession with Bela Lugosi! Even today I think of him as the go-to authority - in company with writer Gary Don Rhodes - on that great horror icon.

And then, emblazoned above the magazine title was that tagline I immediately fell in love with: WE REMEMBER FORGOTTEN FILMS.

The inside front cover carried a full-page photo (there was an accompanying article) of comedian Ben Turpin, who needs no cross-eyed introduction to silent movie buffs. And in the books section, there was a review of Frank Thompson’s Lost Films: Important Movies That Disappeared, which had me weeping in frustration at what we have lost whilst simultaneously giving thanks that such an important record exists. For example, did you know that there was a 1911 film called The Immortal Alamo that was shot in San Antonio, near the actual mission? Or that there was an early film made about Custer’s Last Stand, The Flaming Frontier from 1926?

Issue #26 had a rather clever gimmick: the first half of the publication consisted of the by-now standard but fascinating pieces on various decades of the horror film, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man somehow sitting easily with Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein (don’t ask!); but then turn your copy upside down and you have a whole other magazine, this one devoted to vintage Science Fiction, with an enormous piece on the making of the original Godzilla from 1954; a tribute to Kurt Neuman’s Rocketship X-M which, made in 1950, beat George Pal’s Destination Moon into outer space by a bare few months; and of course, they just had to let good old Forrest Ackerman loose again on Metropolis.

During our recent blissful hot spell, I dug out my collection of Cult Movies (along with such marvelous rival publications as Scarlet Street, Monsters from the Vault, Midnight Marquee, Journal of Frankenstein, and Castle of Frankenstein and sat in the glorious heat while wandering nostalgically through the crypts and tombs of Memory Lane Cemetery as my precious magazines stayed safely in the shade. God, I love doing that.

And perhaps I shouldn’t refer to these writers and publishers as rivals. I like to think that they are joined by a common love of an often overlooked and even despised genre.

I doubt that there was ever a fortune to be made out of this stuff, so I am eternally grateful to guys like Buddy Barnett and Michael Copner, who were the dynamic duo and driving force behind my early copies of Cult Movies; and I am equally grateful to all the other writers and publishers who have kept this flame alive when it was often weak and on the verge of being snuffed.

Do we remember forgotten films?

Oh yeah. Damned right we do.

charleybrady@gmail.com