THE BELA LUGOSI COLLECTION

By: BRIAN THOMAS
Review Date: Sunday, October 02, 2005

Universal has marked this single disc Bela Lugosi 5-film festival as part of "The Franchise Collection", but Lugosi was never treated as the subject of a franchise by the studio. The Hungarian idol never got much respect from the studio that made him a movie star. Lugosi was an instant sensation in DRACULA, but received less money than juvenile lead David Manners. After turning down the role of the monster in FRANKENSTEIN, the part rocketed Boris Karloff to superstardom, and Universal immediately threw more weight behind their new star, throwing Lugosi scraps for his name value on marquees from that point forward.



Another refugee from FRANKENSTEIN was director Robert Florey. After developing the project as his own, Florey was edged out when Universal contracted Karloff's countryman James Whale. As a consolation, Florey and Lugosi ended up with MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE, an imaginative adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe mystery story. Poe's tale of murder by ape forms only a part of this nightmarish tale. Instead of having the ape escape from a sailor, the monkey is at the command of Lugosi as a mad scientist seeking to prove his evolutionary theories by "mixing the blood" of human and animal. Operating under the cover of a sideshow, Lugosi's satanic psycho presides over a chamber of horrors, indulging in abduction, torture and murder in an atmospheric tableau that ends in a thrilling chase across the Paris rooftops.



The Poe influence continued with the ambitious THE BLACK CAT, though only extending to the felinophobia exhibited by Lugosi's character, a political prisoner seeking revenge on the former friend that betrayed him. This production teamed Lugosi with Karloff for the first time, and there's no mistaking who got the meatier role. Karloff portrays Hjalmar Poelzig, Lugosi's former commanding officer, architect, sadist, necrophiliac and Satanic high priest. Lugosi has a heroic role here, playing a desperate game to protect a pair of innocents when they become embroiled in his schemes against Poelzig and trapped in the madman's futuristically designed mountaintop house of horrors. Not that Bela is a total square shooter here he really gets his hands dirty in the climax but it's interesting to see him play hero now and then.



He's far from heroic in THE RAVEN, another Poe-inspired vehicle. Lugosi plays ingenious surgeon and Poe enthusiast Richard Vollin, who falls in love with young patient Irene Ware. Failing in his efforts to woo her away from her fiancé Lester Matthews, Vollin goes off the deep end, coaxing the young couple, along with family and friends, to step into a deadly trap. Not that Vollin was all that stable to begin with he has a fully functional dungeon full of torture devices from Poe's tales beneath his house, accessible via a series of secret passages. "Yes, I like to torture!" enthuses Lugosi in one of his most manic performances. Though the first title card announces "KARLOFF and LUGOSI", this is one of the few instances where Lugosi has the upper hand, with Karloff supporting as a criminal disfigured by Vollin and forced to help in his schemes. Take things a step further into graphic territory and you'd be at the level of gory 1970s horrors, and it's easy to see here how films like this one inspired so many Vincent Price vehicles.




On the B side of this economic flipper disc, we find THE INVISIBLE RAY, a Karloff/Lugosi vehicle with equal parts horror and science fiction. Both men portray European scientists, with Karloff's Dr. Janos Rukh suggesting something of old world alchemy and sorcery. Rukh invites some former rivals to his fantastic Carpathian to witness a demonstration of new device that gives a glimpse of cosmic events through time and space. He uses it to find the location of a meteorite containing an extraterrestrial element a thousand times more powerful than uranium. He succeeds in finding and harnessing "Element X", but at a cost: his body glows with poisonous radiation, and his slightest touch brings death. Though Lugosi provides a way of keeping the condition in check, the radiation, combined with jealousy over his wife Frances Drake's attraction to young scientist Frank Lawton, drives Rukh mad (again, a short trip). Faking his own death, Rukh plots to kill all those he believes betrayed him using his X-derived power. The principles aren't given too much room to inspire awe in the audience, but this one is still a favorite due to its gimmickry, special effects, and some stunning matte paintings.



1940's BLACK FRIDAY is particularly galling in its humiliation of Lugosi. When Karloff balked at essaying the lead role of split personality Prof. George Kingsley, who is increasingly possessed by the personality of gangster Red Cannon after an emergency brain transplant, it was decided that Lugosi could never cover his thick accent enough to swap roles. And so, Karloff was given Lugosi's part as the increasingly sinister brain surgeon, while the lead went to character actor Stanley Ridges. Lugosi was saddled with Ridges' much smaller supporting role as one of Cannon's rival gangsters, with the additional dishonor of a publicity stunt that averred Lugosi played his death scenes assisted by hypnosis.



Putting five features on one disc seems chintzy, but the features are short and don't suffer in quality, looking better than they ever have before. This is especially gratifying for BLACK CAT and RAVEN, which have been hard to find since their disappointing time-compressed double feature release on tape and laserdisc in 1986. Though disappointing in the lack of extras (even the trailers are the Realart reissue versions), the collection is otherwise given handsome packaging, with the disc seated in a digipack album with a cardboard outer sleeve.



With four Lugosi/Karloff pictures included, Universal Home Video could have easily replaced MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE with one of their Karloff films awaiting DVD release TOWER OF LONDON, for example, or THE CLIMAX to make this a BORIS KARLOFF COLLECTION. But they didn't. Perhaps they're saving those Karloff films without Lugosi for another Franchise Collection (let's hope so). But then, they might have realized that products with Lugosi's name now regularly outsell Karloff merchandise. Or maybe they've finally realized the worth of the star they so misused all those years ago. It's not the honor Bela Lugosi deserves as a screen icon, but it's a lot better than what we've come to expect.



Copyright © 2005 Brian Thomas, author of the massive book VideoHound's DRAGON: ASIAN ACTION & CULT FLICKS.

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