Little bit comedy, little bit mystery, and all 1940s style, this 1941 movie is not as intense as the 1934 movie with Boris Karloff. One of Bela Lugosi’s lesser roles, but he, as always, makes it his own. Here’s the movie pressbook along with the ad supplement.
Comic reader version: Download The Black Cat Pressbook
See more pressbooks From Zombos’ Closet.
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Tall, dark, and gruesome gets 'em every time.
Photograph courtesy of Professor Kinema archives.
I felt very sad when I found this wonderful glimpse into another time, tucked away in one of Professor Kinema's filing cabinets. Have we lost the innocence?
Professor Kinema pulled out a Xerox copy, buried deeply in his archives, of this pressbook for The Ghost of Frankenstein. The movie stills in the copy didn't scan well, but overall you will find this a treat, especially when you consider how difficult it is to find this pressbook, and the cost when you do. (Note: I'm not sure if this copy contains all of the pages in the original pressbook.)
What piqued my interest the most, however, is the wartime publiclity angle on page 7. Will the Nazi Frankenstein Monster Follow the Famous Legend and Destroy Its Makers, timely monster contest.
"Cash in on the times with a patriotic contest calling for letters stating how and when entrants think the Frankenstein Monster created by the Axis and now endangering the world will turn on its Nazi makers just as the screen monster in "The Ghost of Frankenstein" turns and destroys its creator."
This folder styled campaign manual for Night of the Blood Beast and She Gods of Shark Reef double bill is approximately 11 x 15 inches when folded, and highlights the sensational poster art depicting damsels in distress. The use of strategically placed Leilani flowers in the She Gods of Shark Reef Poster is inspiring, isn't it?
Here's a shot of the the opened folder showing the slightly overlapping For Profits! column. Unfolding the page on the right opens the folder into three sections, with the middle section holding the separate promotion sheets for each movie for an impressive commercial presentation.
Zombos Says: Good
Watching the action unfold in director Len Wiseman’s Total Recall, I couldn’t help but compare it to the Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sharon Stone star vehicle of the same name. But that movie was in 1990, when writers could play around the science fiction edges with cheekiness and guile and directors couldn’t overplay their hand with computers and saturate us with non-stop action hurtling through uber landscapes filled with mini and mega structures moving with tantalizing, but numbing, techno-complexity and velocity. But now is now, after all, and cinematic now is filled with the heat of global meltdowns, the incessant beating of warring drums, a tiresome fusillade of political bull dung flying in all directions, and a lot of sour and dour events preoccupying our thoughts. So it’s only natural science fiction movies, super hero movies, and movies formerly filled with imagination and inspiration, now, have tuned down the inspiration while hustling us faster, and very predictably, through a patented and familiar imagination.
Instead of becoming involved with characters through association or taking wild rides to Mars and having our eyes comically bug out from the lack of oxygen, we’re enveloped by hover car chases–albeit breathtaking hover car chases–evocative, rainy, cityscapes dotted with dreary hanging apartments that seem to sprout out of the congested city’s concrete megastructures like weeds thriving in the incessant rain, and homogeneous huddled masses yearning to find a free space in all the hubbub or, at least, a cool palm phone. So yes, this Total Recall‘s production design by Patrick Tatopoulus is stunning and easily runs away with the film while leaving its script a tad short on wit and gumption, but tall on action of the bullets flying, people dying, and big send off explosions kind.
The Fall figures heavily in all this pyrotechnic destruction and sets up the Metropolis-like dystopian dynamic for the two class structures–the wealthier United Federation of Britain and the poorer Colony–both vying for habitable land after Earth is decimated by chemical warfare. The Fall is a gigantic gravity elevator that travels through the planet between the two nations, bringing Colony workers to and from “below,” to toil at building synthetic police (THX 1138 anyone?) for the UFB. The Fall provides the film’s more intense moments and thorough special effects, but the plausibility factor is nil and a pivotal (I’m being literal here) standoff borders on the periphery of silliness: elite commandos conveniently fail to realize something important about the daily commute and they lose their advantage because of it.
Plausibility wobbles again when factory worker Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell), plagued by a violent dream with a mysterious woman and dissatisfied with his assembly line life, heads to ReKall, the happy memories franchise. He gravitates to their secret agent memory product, but implanting fake memories over real, similar ones stops the process cold and sends Quaid on a bumpy and lumpy journey to discovering who he really is. In-between all his huffing and puffing as he runs from his wife (a guns-blazing and hips hugging typecast Kate Beckinsale) and UFB President Cohaagen’s (Bryan Cranston) police force, he stops long enough to find clues to his past in places I thought the police should have gotten to first, like his safe deposit box and his former apartment, since they know who he really is even if he doesn’t.
The woman in his dream, Melina (Jessica Beal), much like Maria in Metropolis, provides the romance and the reason for his actions. Unlike Maria, she also wields a mean handgun, drives a hover car better than Mike Mercury, and kicks ass more believably than the wispy Beckinsale. Melina helps Quaid find Matthias (Bill Nighy), the leader of the resistance against Cohaagen’s political meanderings. Unfortunately, Matthias is not as interesting as his namesake in the original and doesn’t have a mutant humanoid brother living in his belly.
With the main storylines of both Total Recall movies being similar, what’s the difference here to warrant a remake? If blazing action, dispensed heavily through computerized imagery and wild futuristic technology is your bag of popcorn, than this movie is definitely for you.
Put Return of the Ape Man in a midnight spook show with a few Three Stooges shorts and I'm in heaven. Really.
Stunningly morbid poster art and the sickly green coloration to the cover highlights this 11 x 17 inches pressbook for The Oblong Box. Note the commercial importance of Vincent Price's persence in the movie, conveyed through the watermark on the synopsis page.
Here's my first sighting of Halloween 2012 at a Michaels Store. An aisle's worth of shelves was being cleared to make way for more gruesome goodies, but they had started on the endcaps. Can you smell the candy corn?
I found this theater standee for Hotel Transylvania oddly enhanced by being next to The Odd Life of Timothy Green. I know which one I'd want for my Halloween party.
This neat pressbook for Toho Studios Atragon is 11 x 17 inches, printed in landscape orientation. I'm a sucker for movies with super technological vehicles and Atragon is one of my favorites. Besides, you've got that unique Toho Touch for concise special effects and storyline (see Famed Special Effects Team Give Atragon Top Thrills article).
One page sheet has been neatly cut from the pressbook. The seller I purchased this from said all the copies of this pressbook he has seen have that same page-sheet removed. So there you have a mystery! I'm open to any solutions you may have. Sorry for clipping the last sentence on one page, and the pages do not appear in their correct order.