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Corridor
of Horror |
DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 1,
No. 25 |
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Curt Siodmak arrived in America in 1937, a Jewish refugee from Hitler's nightmare world, and soon created his own world of stylish cinematic nightmares. |
IS IMMORTAL!  Siodmak wrote this 1941 hit, first in a series |
Horror/Sci-Fi Fans Mourn Siodmak,
who dreamed of The Wolf Man
By
RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
Word is just beginning to get around that the great Curt Siodmak
died quietly on Sept. 2 at his home in Three Rivers in Northern
California. It was a shock to those of us who knew him in his
lifetime because most of us were sure Siodmak was going to be
the first man to prove physically immortal.
After all, he'd just celebrated his 98th birthday, so he was well on his way. Anyway, we already knew he was a pop culture immortal. Since physical immortality was something that certainly fit into his stories about tormented souls that never die, I often wondered if he'd stumbled onto the secret of eternal life while doing some deep research among the musty files of the cabala in his native Germany.
I think Siodmak always was amused to be so revered for work that serious people supposedly never took seriously. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure he was glad to be revered for something, even if it was for writing films like "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man" or, even more improbably, for writing some cockeyed pseudo-poetic mumbo jumbo for the great Russian actress Maria Ouspenskaya to mutter as Maleva the Gypsy Woman in Universal's 1941 thriller called "The Wolf Man."
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By the time I met Siodmak in 1971, where he was a writer in residence at Stanford University for one wacky summer, his colorful ideas about monsters and their misadventures already were deeply rooted in my cerebral cortex. I had read a battered copy of his great sci-fi novel "Donovan's Brain" while I was in the fourth grade and it held me spellbound. My parents had kept me from seeing many of his classic horror movies from the early 1940s, but I caught up quickly as soon as the remarkable RealArt company began to re-issue them in the early 1950s where they could be seen on "amazing" double bills that usually played only on Wednesday and Thursday nights or turned up as the big attractions at "midnight shows" around Halloween or Friday the 13th.
I knew that Siodmak's movie monsters usually were involved in adventures that were very much like German folk tales. I also knew that many of them--especially his greatest creation, Lawrence Talbot aka The Wolf Man, were souls in torment. So, it was no surprise for me to hear from his own lips the psychological reason why that might be his specialty: He was a Jew who had fled Nazi Germany, the place where the nastiest German myths were coming true and six million of his own people were about to become genuine souls in torment.
It's strange how some careers develop. Siodmak's is a perfect example. He grew up on the dark Germanic legends. He knew the cabalistic tales like "The Golem," the Jewish precursor to Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," and he lived not far from the headwaters of the Danube, where the first tales of vampires, werewolves and ghouls may have originated. As a young man, though, his head was far more bent toward the emergence of modern science and the wonders it promised for the future.
"I wrote my first short story when I was only eight," he told me one day in his condo apartment at Stanford. "I studied mathematics and I suppose that was the foundation for my science fiction."
In the 1920s, when Germany was between world wars and creativity was at an all-time high, Siodmak turned toward film, the chosen art form for so many wildly creative German artists, perhaps because it was possible to coalesce so many different new methods of creative expression into one project. He had achieved early success as an author of short stories and novels and was persuaded to write for the movies, probably by his brother, Robert, who was eager to make a name as a director. He co-authored a bold picture called "People on Sunday" with another young screenwriter named Billy Wilder. His brother directed it. (Two other young filmmakers involved were Fred Zinnemann, who later would win Oscars in America for "From Here to Eternity" and "A Man for All Seasons," and Edgar Ulmer, whose 1946 "Detour" is now recognized as a classic of American low-budget cinema.)
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The acclaim for that film kept Siodmak involved with the movies, leading to his first international sci-fi hit, "F.P. 1 Does Not Answer" (1932), based on his own novel about a giant floating platform in the sea, used as a landing field by aircraft. Both Curt and his brother fled Germany in 1933 when Hitler came to power, taking up residence in France, then England, before coming to America.
His second great sci-fi classic was the British "Transatlantic Tunnel," which he wrote before coming to the U.S. It envisioned a massive tunnel drilled under the sea between England and the U.S.
Siodmak told me he was bewildered by his first American assignment: "Her Jungle Lover," a sarong and sand vehicle for Paramount's new star, Dorothy Lamour. His English was pretty rudimentary then, but everybody realized there wasn't much need for dialogue in a Lamour picture.
"Dorothy was only 17 then--and quite a lovely little thing in those days," Siodmak told me.
Earning $350 a week, he felt pretty successful and made plans to bring his wife and family to the States from England. By the time, they arrived, though, he had lost his job at Paramount and had moved into a cottage in the Mojave desert, where he began writing his novel "Donovan's Brain" in hopes it might save him from financial ruin.
Actually, it did, although Siodmak told me it was rejected all over the place before Black Mask, the magazine that helped popularize the "hard boiled" school of detective stories in America, paid him $2,000 for the right to serialize it in 1941. If you haven't read "Donovan's Brain," you've surely read, seen or heard some version of it, either adaptation or ripoff: A vicious industrialist is killed in a plane crash, but his brain is kept alive in an electrified tank of serum, finally exerting influence over others through its powerful brain waves.
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Republic Pictures filmed Siodmak's novel as "The Lady and the Monster" in 1944 with Erich von Stroheim, Richard Arlen and young former ice skater Vera Hruba Ralston, the mistress (and later wife) of Republic studio boss Herbert J. Yates. It has been filmed again and again, most notably in 1953 with Lew Ayres as the scientific experimenter and Nancy Davis, later First Lady Nancy Reagan, as his love interest.
After its success as a magazine serial, "Donovan's Brain" was published in hard cover and has rarely been out of print since. It established Siodmak as a hot property in the world of weirdness, leading to his contract with Universal to write "The Wolf Man" as a star vehicle for Lon Chaney, Jr., the son of Universal's famous "Phantom of the Opera" star of the 1920s.
"Chaney always hated me for that," Siodmak told me. "It took him six hours every morning to get the makeup on and two hours at night to get it off."
It was Siodmak's idea to make the werewolf vulnerable to a silver bullet. This is now an essential part of werewolf folklore.
Universal put The Wolf Man into four more films and has been licensing the image of the Wolf Man ever since, making millions upon millions out of the character. Siodmak told me he never received a penny beyond his $350 a week salary while writing the picture.
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"Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man" and "Bride of the Gorilla" are examples of Siodmak-written horror "programmers."
What Siodmak brought to the Universal monsters was his own special brand of internal torment. Talbot, who is bitten by a gypsy werewolf (Bela Lugosi), hates what he becomes: A man who becomes a wolf when the moon is full. Through the rest of the wolf man films, Chaney has a brow furrowed with worry that the moon will come out at the worst possible time.
In his "The Invisible Man Returns" (1940), the first "monster" role for Vincent Price, the "monster" is reluctant--a good guy who just happens to get screwed up by the invisibility formula. Siodmak remembered that as his first embarrassing run-in with special effects. The effects people told him they could do anything that he put on paper, which he considered ridiculous.
"So, I set out to write something I knew they couldn't do--show the invisible man taking a bath!" he told me.
Unfortunately for Siodmak, they did it quite neatly and he had to admit defeat. Later, he gained even more respect for the effects guys. It came when they were filming his "The Invisible Woman," starring John Barrymore, who was then near the end of his career--and pretty much a hopeless alcoholic.
"They had to build a system of wires to hold Barrymore up during the shooting," Siodmak told me. "He was such a lush!"
In "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man," Siodmak wrote two sympathetic monsters. The Frankenstein monster, played by Lugosi, is supposed to be a stumbling blind creature, although they cut out Siodmak's dialogue that explained why the monster had gone blind.
These are fun films, more fables than horror pictures, and nothing like the grotesque blood bath slasher movies of today. They reached their nadir after "House of Frankenstein" (1944), which was based on Siodmak's original story, "The Devil's Brood," a serial-like adventure that brought most of Universal's monsters under one roof: Count Dracula (John Carradine), the Wolf Man (Chaney), Frankenstein's Monster (Glenn Strange), the Mad Doctor (Boris Karloff) and the Hunchback (J. Carrol Naish), though the latter wasn't the famous Notre Dame hunchback.
Purists look back on other films as being the best of Siodmak's work in that period of the war years: "I Walked with A Zombie" (1943), the truly terrifying thriller that Siodmak wrote for producer Val Lewton at RKO, borrowing the basic story of "Jane Eyre," even though he claimed never to have read the Charlotte Bronte novel; "The Climax" (1944), a lavish, color knockoff of "Phantom of the Opera," starring Karloff as a sinister physician in the Vienna Opera House, and "The Beast with Five Fingers" (1946), in which guilt-ridden killer Peter Lorre imagines a disembodied hand coming to seek revenge on him.
After 1946, the horror movie business dried up for several years and science fiction began to replace it with audiences. Siodmak moved right with the trend, writing the occasional horror movie like "Bride of the Gorilla," but mostly doing science fiction stories like "Riders to the Stars," "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers," "The Magnetic Monster" and many others. His novel "Hauser's Memory" was turned into a TV movie in 1970. He also directed some of his own scripts, like the unfortunate "Curucu, Beast of the Amazon."
When I met Siodmak he was still in his 60s and was quite bright, energetic and lively. He was beginning to enjoy his late-arriving popularity as a horror/sci-fi icon, but still had a healthy sense of humor about it.
"I've only seen about 50 percent of the films I've written," he told me at one point, which certainly says something about his overall feeling about them.
In later years, it came out that Siodmak had worked for the O.S.S. and its successor spy agency, the CIA. One always came away from him with the notion that he had many stories left to tell, perhaps some of the best about himself.
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In 1998, Siodmak finally was lionized in his native Germany for his many accomplishments at the Berlin International Film Festival. (His late brother, Robert, who became one of America's greatest directors of films noir, also was honored.) In 1999, Siodmak earned Germany's highest honor, the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit. This was half a century after Nazi Germany had banned all his works.
When Siodmak died, he was still heavily involved in life and with his work. His autobiography, "Wolf Man's Maker," will be published this year. He's survived by Henrietta, his wife of 75 years, a son, Geoffrey, and two granddaughters.
When I think of him, I still remember his cheerful remarks about being a survivor. They epitomized his personality.
"I'm not a rich man," he told me. "All those nights I lay awake trying to get from scene to scene, others were lying awake figuring how to cheat Siodmak out of his money. As it turns out, I'm the pallbearer for all my friends who are now millionaires."
© 2000 by Ron Miller.
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