"FAKE"ENSTEIN NEWS

I spent my lunch break at work the other day reading that week's issue of The New Yorker, a magazine I enjoy for many reasons. The writing is usually of a stellar quality, the film reviews are first rate, and the political leaning is definitely to the left. And oh, those wonderful cartoons!

One of the articles that I read was entitled The Strange And Twisted Life Of "Frankenstein" by Jill Lepore. In the article, Lepore gives us a glimpse into the life of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley who began writing "Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus" when she was only eighteen years old. The biographical details are well done as is the publication history of the groundbreaking novel and it's place in our collective imaginations. Lepore brings a new reading of the novel and it's numerous adaptations (especially for the stage and on film), in which she sees the monster as a slave figure.

To support this, in my opinion, somewhat questionable thesis, Lepore asserts the following: "In later nineteenth-century stage productions, the creature was explicitly dressed as an African. Even the 1931 James Whale film, in which Karloff wore green face paint, furthers this figuring of the creature as black: he is, in the film's climactic scene, lynched."

Um, no Miss Lepore, he's not as the image above quite clearly shows otherwise. During the climax of the film, Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) and the monster (Boris Karloff), are pursued by an angry mob of frightened villagers carrying pitchforks and torches. The chase moves from back lot real-life locations into that wonderful fantasy landscape that I call "Earth Universal". The chase ends at the foot an immense, expressionistic windmill. Henry and the monster enter and engage in a duel to the death. The monster throws Henry from the burning windmill (his broken body is seen hitting one of the blades of the mill, before falling to the ground). The monster, now surrounded by flames (the thing he hates and fears the most, a point explicitly expressed earlier in the film), is trapped. He rages about helplessly until a huge beam falls upon him, pinning him to the floor where he is trapped and soon roasted to death.

I'm pretty sure that doesn't fit any definition of the term "lynched". In fact, the only time a "lynching" of any kind appears in the film, is early on when Henry and his demented assistant Fritz (Dwight Frye), cut down the body of an executed criminal from a gallows, a body which will soon house a criminal brain. The fact that the monster meets his death by fire (and not at the end of a rope), provides the material for the opening sequence in Whale's masterpiece of a sequel BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935), in which the horribly burned and scarred monster arises from the ruins of the scorched windmill, an action that takes place mere minutes after the end of the first film.

In short Miss Lepore, liar, liar, pants on fire. I don't know if you've ever even seen the film you write about (it doesn't appear that you have) or that you saw some mysterious alternative print that you and you alone have seen in the last eighty-seven years. Miss Lepore incorrectly states an easily provable fact in order to fit her pre-conceived argument in which the monster must, at all costs, be made to be seen as a slave.

Even if that means inventing a "lynching" that never occurred. Shame on you Miss Lepore because up until you made that damning statement towards the end of the piece, I was willing to go along with your argument. Now, the entire piece is forced into question because if you got this one point so horribly wrong, I can only wonder, what else did you lie about in this essay?

THE GRIFTERS

THE GRIFTERS, director Stephen Frears brilliant neo-noir from 1990, comes with an impeccable pedigree. It's based on a novel by pulp crime master Jim Thompson. The screenplay is by the legendary Donald E. Westlake, a man who knows his way around a con or two. It's produced by Martin Scorsese (one can only wonder what this film would have looked like if Scorsese had been behind the camera). Hell, it even has a score by old Hollywood master Elmer Bernstein. Add in a stellar supporting cast including Henry Jones, Pat Hingle, J.T. Walsh and Charles Napier and you've got a sure fire winner.

But the engine that drives this con job is the powerhouse cast of John Cusack, Anjelica Huston and Annette Bening, a threesome who comprise the points of an isosceles triangle built of lies, lust, greed and naked avarice. Roy Dillon (Cusack), is a small time con operator, working the grift alone and only occasionally but never for huge amounts. But if you're a good con man (and Roy is), you can live fairly comfortably on your ill-gotten gains. His hot-to-trot girlfriend Myra (Bening), is a hyper sexualized nympho, with experience working the long con. But to pull off an elaborate con game she needs Roy for a partner and Roy refuses to team up.

Enter Lilly Dillon (Huston), Roy's mother, from whom he's been estranged for many years. Only fourteen-years-old when Roy was born, Lilly is more a big sister (and potential love interest to Roy, twisted as that may be), than a real mother. Lilly is a runner for a Baltimore based horse racing syndicate headed by the sadistic Bobo Justus (Hingle). While covering the betting action at the tracks in Southern California, Lilly sends back Bobo's cut on a regular basis but is also skimming off the top. When Bobo finds out, the shit hits the fan.

Lilly and Myra hate each other and constantly battle for Roy's affection, skills and money. Things get dark and dicey in the third act and only one of these three sharp operators is left alive when all of the smoke has cleared.

Oliver Stapleton brings a noir sheen to the sun splashed landscapes of Los Angeles and parts south. Westlake's screenplay (which differs from the book in several key ways), is nonetheless a well built machine, the gears clicking and humming along right up to the fatal denouement. Frears direction is stylish without being overwhelming (there are very few "look at me, I'm directing!" shots) but the real attraction here is seeing these three cut-throats brought to vivid life by the leads.

THE GRIFTERS received four Academy Award nominations: Best Director (Frears), Best Adapted Screenplay (Westlake), Best Actress (Huston) and Best Supporting Actress (Bening). This is one razor-sharp (and definitely for adults only) piece of work. Highly recommended.

BEAT

I was totally unfamiliar with both author Stephen Jay Schwartz and his 2010 crime novel BEAT but when I stumbled across a copy at a local library book sale, I decided to risk one whole dollar and take a chance on what looked like an interesting book.

BEATis the second novel by Schwartz to feature LAPD robbery/homicide detective Hayden Glass. Having just finished (and thoroughly loving BEAT) I will definitely have to seek out a copy of the first book, BOULEVARD. In Hayden Glass, Schwartz has given us a different kind of detective hero. While there are plenty of novels featuring detectives with addiction problems (I'm thinking the Matt Scudder series by Lawrence Block in particular), I don't recall anyone having the guts to present us a hero with a sex addiction. Glass has one and it's a beast, a King Kong size monkey on his back.

Glass finds a beautiful young prostitute, Cora, on a website and begins an online relationship with her. His obsession with Cora soon leads him to meet her in person and their relationship deepens. Glass is truly, deeply in love with Cora (or so he tells himself) but Cora is the White Rabbit that leads Glass down a rabbit hole of brutal sex, Russian criminals and corrupt cops.

When Cora is beaten, raped and abducted before his eyes, Glass enters the San Francisco underworld of strip clubs, hookers, and peep shows in his quest to find and rescue his lovely young lover. Glass's obsession with both Cora and sex and the depiction of the seamy side of sex for hire recalls both TAXI DRIVER (1976) and HARDCORE (1979) (both of which were written by Paul Schrader, with Schrader directing the latter). Glass finds allies in Holbrook and Gunnar, two sympathetic SFPD uniformed cops and Abbey, a character from the previous novel, who now works in the San Francisco coroner's office. His enemies include Inspector Locatelli, a hard nosed cop determined to throw the book at Glass, two warring Russian brothers, both of whom control rather large empires of women and pornography, and FBI agent Caulfield, who is on the trail of corruption at the highest levels of the SFPD. The missing Cora, who witnessed a murder involving a city official, holds the key to the whole sordid puzzle and Glass will go to any lengths to find and save her. But when secrets about the young hooker are revealed, Glass is forced to question his real motives before finally finding solace in a real, genuine and loving relationship with Abbey.

Schwartz grabs you by the throat from the beginning and keeps the pedal to the metal throughout the whole twisty narrative. The action and sex is graphic and brutal and Glass is on the receiving end of more punishment (both physical and mental) than any one man could possibly withstand. But withstand he does, long enough to invade a fortress-like warehouse which houses a multitude of dark secrets in the blazing, action packed climax of the book.

Hayden Glass is one seriously fucked up dude but Schwartz finds the humanity and compassion buried beneath the layers of addiction and obsession and brings this flawed, beaten but never broken hero to bloody, vivid life. BEAT is not for the faint hearted and is definitely for adult readers. It's a dark trip into a grim netherworld that exists in cities all across America. Raw, brutal and unflinching, BEAT is highly recommended.

ONE SUMMER: AMERICA 1927

Bill Bryson's 2006 memoir, THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE THUNDERBOLT KID, about growing up in Des Moines, Iowa in the 1950s, is one of the funniest books I've ever read. We're talking laugh-out-loud, milk-spewing-out-of-your-nose funny. I read most of it on a plane flight to and from New Orleans and I'm sure many of my fellow passengers wished the guy with the window seat would stop braying like a jackass. If you haven't read THUNDERBOLT, you should do so by all means. Highly recommended.

Bryson's 2013 popular history ONE SUMMER: AMERICA 1927 came highly recommended and it's easy to see why. This rollicking, kaleidoscopic overview of the events and people of that long gone summer is full of rich, colorful stories, (some vignettes, some longer) that recount how that one long, wild, miraculous summer captured our collective imaginations then and now.

What's in it? A better question would be what's not. In over 400 pages of delightful, crisp, clean prose, Bryson vividly recounts the following: Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs, the Federal Reserve made the mistake that precipitated the stock market crash, Al Capone enjoyed his last summer of eminence, THE JAZZ SINGER was filmed, television was created, radio came of age, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, President Coolidge chose not to run,work began on Mount Rushmore, the Mississippi River flooded as it never had before, a madman in Michigan blew up a school and killed forty-four people in the worst slaughter of children in American history, Henry Ford stopped making the Model T and promised to stop insulting Jews and a kid from Minnesota flew across an ocean and captivated the planet in a way it had never been captivated before.

All of these things and more are brought to life in ONE SUMMER. Bryson devotes more pages to Lindbergh and Ruth and their respective accomplishments than any other figures in the book but that's okay, given their monumental achievements. Bryson gives short shrift to legendary pulp fiction writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, a storyteller, who, despite his flaws, his still read today more than one hundred years since his first book was published.  All in all, ONE SUMMER is a terrific read, entertaining, informative, funny in places, tragic in others.

But then there's this. In a recounting of how DRACULA was brought to the American stage, Bryson states: "It was also the making of Bela Lugosi, who devoted the rest of his career to playing Dracula. He starred in the 1931 movie and a great number of sequels. He also changed wives often-he was married five times-and became addicted to narcotics, but professionally he did almost nothing else for almost thirty years. Such was his devotion to the role that when he died in 1956, he was buried dressed as Count Dracula"

Where do I begin to address the lies in that paragraph? For starters, there was only one sequel to the 1931 DRACULA. It was DRACULA'S DAUGHTER (1936) and it did not star Lugosi. In fact, Lugosi only played Dracula on screen once more in ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN in 1948. As for doing "almost nothing else for almost thirty years", consider this partial filmography of some of Lugosi's best known horror films: MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1932), WHITE ZOMBIE (1932), ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1932), THE BLACK CAT (1934), MARK OF THE VAMPIRE (1935), THE RAVEN (1935), THE INVISIBLE RAY (1936), SON OF FRANKENSTEIN (1939), THE WOLF MAN (1941), GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN (1942), FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN (1943), RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE (1943), and THE BODY SNATCHER (1945). Lugosi made other low-budget, cheap horror films at various Poverty Row studios and ended up working with legendary filmmaker Ed Wood in his final years. And that's doing nothing?

Shame on you Bill Bryson for doing such a lazy, sloppy job of research. All of this information is just a click away. A few minutes of your time and you could have given your readers a fairer and much more accurate accounting of Lugosi's life and career. Granted, it's a small thing in the grand scheme of things but it bugs me to read something I know is wrong in a history book because it immediately puts everything else in the book, everything that I've been led to believe is correct, into doubt. If Bryson gets something like this wrong (and I know it's wrong because I'm a horror film fan), then what, pray tell, else did he get wrong in this otherwise fine book? Perhaps nothing, perhaps several things. It's hard to know for sure but one mistake, and such an egregious one as this, puts every word in ONE SUMMER into doubt.

While reading the book, I was prepared to give it a high recommendation as I really and truly enjoyed it. The Lugosi lies taint what is otherwise a worthwhile read. Read it at your own risk. Your knowledge of the various people and events in the book may be more than mine and you may find other errors.

 Or not.