Hammer Horror?

For one of the soon to be illustrious monsters for their slate of horror movies, Universal turned to the writing of H.G. Wells, bringing to life his novel The Invisible Man (1933), with the director of 1931's Frankenstein, James Whale, given another opportunity to envision one of their fiends for cinematic life. Combining technical precision, maniacal madness, and more than a touch of Whale’s famed black comedy, the classic tale follows an on the run Doctor, Jack Griffin (basically just Claude Rains’ masterful voice doing all the work... though he wasn’t the original choice – Frankenstein stars Boris Karloff and Colin Clive both said no), who finds his way to a tiny British village.

A somewhat surprising take from Hammer Film Productions, especially considering how many rather traditional Dracula centred vampire horror movies they made throughout the years, 1974's Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, written and directed by Brian Clemens, breaks the mold... or perhaps it stakes the mold. Set in a rather vague time period – most likely somewhere within the 18th-19th centuries, Clemens builds a world in which many varieties of vampires exist. With a cold open showing a rural village and countryside being afflicted by an unknown caped creature who is sucking the age and beauty out of its young women, the town’s doctor, Marcus (John Carson), has the good sense to send a message to his old friend Captain Kronos (Horst Janson), who, along with his trusty sidekick Professor Hieronymus Grost (John Cater) – who unfortunately has been born with a hunchback, as well as recently rescued Carla (Caroline Munro) – who was sentenced to the stocks for dancing on the Sabbath, this ragtag triumvirate becomes the team to hunt such evil things.

No one in their right mind would ever cast one of the biggest young starlets of the 1930s – Constance Bennett, to play an ordinary plain Jane secretary in a movie. . . but, of course, that’s exactly what Hollywood decided to do in 1930 with the Pre-Code romantic dramedy Sin Takes a Holiday, directed by Paul L. Stein. Bennett plays Sylvia Brenner, a near constant on-call secretary working late nights for a snooty playboy divorce lawyer named Gaylord Stanton (Kenneth MacKenna). Liking nothing better than playing the field with both married and unmarried women (though it seems like he prefers the former better), and then having some fun joking around with his group of friends, including the somehow even snootier barrister Reggie Durant (Basil Rathbone – this at the end of his matinee idol first run... making it big five year later... add another four years and he’d take on his most famous role of Sherlock Holmes), this lifestyle soon backfires on him after a divorcing dame client, Grace Lawrence (Rita La Roy), is looking for a proposal from him as she starts her immediate rebound.

Like a severe and utterly serious version of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satirical dark comedy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, you would think that Fail Safe would have been the original release in theatres that was then later spoofed, yet that is not the case. Released approximately six months later in the same year, as you might imagine, it led to very poor returns at the box office – dare I say it (as the film deals with this subject matter)... it was a bomb! Despite that, over time, it has become a bonafide classic. Based upon Eugene Burdick’s 1962 novel of the same name and directed by Sidney Lumet (Dog Day Afternoon), he introduces us to our main players by way of little vignettes.

Often deemed to be the last classic film made by the great Buster Keaton, The Cameraman (1928) was the final time the silent legend would have anything close to full creative control over one of his own features... as he folded his independent studio to sign with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) – who promptly made him their third highest paid star. Though his future would soon turn very bleak, this first film with the new studio was his own idea.