City of Nets (40 page)

What happened was also prophetic. Jack Warner's response to Miss de Havilland's suit was to blacklist her. He did this by notifying every other studio in writing that she was under exclusive contract to Warner Bros., and although she was suing to break that contract, Warners would insist on its rights until the litigation was settled. The obvious result of Warner's letter was that Miss de Havilland remained unemployed and unemployable, and her legal bills were to reach twelve thousand dollars, which Warner did not pay. There were protracted hearings. Warner's attorneys even dragged in Miss de Havilland's private life, asking whether she had declined
The Animal Kingdom
because of an affair. When Gang asked that all this be stricken from the record, the judge refused, observing that “it's nice to have a little romance in the hearing, isn't it?”

In March of 1944, the court ruled in Miss de Havilland's favor. Jack Warner appealed the verdict, and once again wrote to all the other studios, threatening a lawsuit against anyone who hired the rebellious actress. Nobody did. Unable to work, Miss de Havilland decided to spend her time touring military bases in Alaska. Warner, by now vindictive beyond all reason, approached General Hap Arnold, head of the Army Air Forces, and tried to get Miss de Havilland barred from the tour. Arnold quite sensibly declined. In the fall of 1944, Miss de Havilland set off to entertain the troops in New Caledonia, in the South Pacific. She was in Suva, in the Fiji Islands, when she collapsed with viral pneumonia, suffered a fever of 104, coughed blood, shrank to ninety pounds. And it was there that she learned that the California Supreme Court had ruled in her favor. She was free of her contract. She had won. Jack Warner had lost, and by implication, the whole studio system had lost. It was only a crack in that system, but the cracks were spreading.

There was another crack in the system, which would ultimately prove considerably more important—in fact, devastating—but these future effects were still unknown, unanticipated, unfeared, for the crack had been there more than a decade. At issue was whether the big studios, which had started as rebels against Thomas Edison's “Trust,” had now formed an illegal trust of their own, monopolizing the business, suppressing competition. They had, of course, but that remained to be proved. And though it was symbolically significant that a Jack Warner could blacklist an Olivia de Havilland, the most important aspect of the monopoly was that the producers controlled their own distribution system. As of 1940, a Justice Department survey of thirty-five major cities showed that Paramount owned thirty-five first-run movie houses, Warner Bros. thirty-five, 20th Century–Fox thirty, RKO twenty-nine, and Loew's (M-G-M) twenty-four. There were also independent chains and individual theaters, but they could buy only what they were offered, and the studios offered only “block booking,” that is, one or two popular movies plus a cluster of B pictures, westerns, whatever the studio wanted to sell. The theater owners, moreover, had to buy what they were offered without seeing it. This was how the great showmen made their money.

The long and complicated effort to break up the Hollywood monopoly began in 1933 with an obscure suit in Camden, New Jersey. It was filed by an independent distributor named the Victoria Amusement Company, which had been unable to get the pictures it wanted from Warner Bros., and which charged in Camden Federal Court that Warners was part of “a motion picture trust” that was trying to “impair and destroy” all independents like the Victoria Amusement Company. More than fifty attorneys representing various interested parties descended on Camden to argue the case, and it was finally dropped. Perhaps some money changed hands, perhaps not.

The suit served, however, to interest the Justice Department in whether Hollywood's practices really did violate the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. After a five-year FBI investigation, it decided that they did. In July of 1938, the chief of the department's antitrust division, Thurman Arnold, charged the eight biggest film companies, twenty-four subsidiaries, and 133 individual executives with violating the Sherman Act. Hollywood's first response was to send its figurehead, former Postmaster General Will Hays, to see President Roosevelt and complain that if the Justice Department deprived the studios of their distribution systems, they would be “wrecked at a blow.” Roosevelt brushed him aside.

The same conflict was taking place in Congress. Starting in 1935, several bills were introduced to regulate Hollywood, or at least to outlaw block booking and blind selling, and each measure attracted flocks of lobbyists from both sides, not only the studios and the theater owners but also civic and educational organizations. In the spring of 1939, the Senate passed a ban on block booking, but the House delayed.

Thurman Arnold, whom some regarded as a leading light of the New Deal and others as a pretentious publicity-seeker, brought the Justice Department's case to trial before Federal Judge Henry W. Goddard in June of 1940. “If we are to maintain an industrial democracy we must stop the private seizure of power,” he warned, “and that is exactly what we have in the film industry.” He even suggested that the studio chiefs deserved to face criminal charges, but he added that “it seems a little late to start” a criminal prosecution.

The Hollywood forces responded with various kinds of bombast. The attorney for M-G-M, John W. Davis, the Democratic presidential candidate who had lost to Coolidge in 1924, spoke scornfully of Arnold as a “knight in shining armor” and shook his fist at him. Paramount attorney Thomas D. Thacher wanted it known that his client had “progressed in the extraordinary perfection of its product . . . and in the excellence of conditions surrounding its exhibition.” After several days of argument, Arnold surprised many observers by accepting a rather feeble compromise, which ended not only the litigation but also the congressional action. In a consent decree designed to last three years, the government agreed to drop its attempts to separate the studios from the theaters, and the studios agreed to limit block booking to five films, to stop pressuring theaters to take films they didn't want, and to halt any further expansion of their theater ownership.

There it might have ended, but during the three years covered by the consent decree, the studios went right on applying pressure on the theaters. Or so the Justice Department said. So in August of 1944, Justice started all over again. It reactivated its complaint against Paramount and others, charging once again that the Hollywood system was illegal.

 

Thunder and lightning. In the darkness, an old coach creaks and lurches along a mountain road. By a flash of lightning, we see that the antique lettering on the side of the wagon says “Professor Lampini's Chamber of Horrors.” Darkness again. In the distance a medieval castle, all turrets and ramparts. The camera abandons the rickety coach and closes in on the castle. We see a warder with a lantern, and we follow him down a long, dark corridor lined with barred cells. Suddenly a long arm flashes out from one of the cells and grasps the warder around the neck. Gurgles and groans. Closeup on a white-bearded man who has seized the struggling warder. And now, at last, the white-bearded man speaks the first words in this grotesque movie: “Where is my chalk? Give me my chalk!”

It is Boris Karloff, the evil Dr. Gustav Niemann, who has been sentenced to fifteen years in this dungeon for having experimented in transplanting human brains. His brother, it soon turns out, once worked for the famous Baron Frankenstein and “learned his secrets,” and even though Dr. Niemann has been locked up in this dungeon, he is trying to continue planning future experiments on a blackboard. Hence his rage at the loss of his chalk.

In the adjoining cell, there is a hunchback named Daniel (J. Carroll Naish), who calls Karloff “master” and dreams of being made tall and straight. “If I had Frankenstein's records to guide me,” says Karloff, “I could give you a perfect body.” Almost on cue, a bolt of lightning strikes the ancient fortress and knocks a big hole in the wall. Dr. Niemann and Daniel totter out through the rubble and find themselves free men. And whom should they encounter in the pelting rain but Professor Lampini, whose peripatetic chamber of horrors is stuck in the mud? A stout shove by Daniel helps get the show back on the road, so Professor Lampini can hardly help giving his rescuers a ride, and telling them a bit about his treasures, notably the coffin that contains the staked skeleton of Count Dracula.

Fascinating, says Dr. Niemann, who is determined to roll on to Reigelburg, where he has some scores to settle with the doctors and bureaucrats who had him locked up. But we're not going to Reigelburg, says Professor Lampini. A long pause. Then, at a nod from Dr. Niemann, Daniel lunges toward Professor Lampini, his hands stretched forward to strangle. “No! No!” cries Professor Lampini. The next morning, we see a clean-shaven Dr. Niemann setting up shop in Reigelburg, pretending to be Professor Lampini, demonstrating such marvels as the staked skeleton of Count Dracula. Rubbish, says Burgomaster Russmann, one of those narrow-minded children of the Enlightenment. That night, Dr. Niemann pulls the stake from the skeleton, and the skeleton quickly turns into the black-caped figure of John Carradine, ready to go hunting. And we haven't yet come near to Frankenstein's ruined castle, where Dr. Niemann will discover the fabulous monster, entombed in ice. Curt Siodmak, another one of those versatile refugees from Berlin, concocted this delectable absurdity, and it was to be called
The House of Frankenstein.

Absurdity—campy absurdity—was probably the only way Hollywood could deal with horror, because that was the only way it had ever known. Hollywood horror films, no matter how gory or pseudo-gory they were to become, never approached real horror. How could they—nurtured on the remembered images of a Lon Chaney scuttling about in
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
or
The Phantom of the Opera
? If it seems vaguely ironic that
The House of Frankenstein
appeared in 1944, the year in which the Red Army liberated Maidanek, the first of the horrifying Polish death camps to be captured, perhaps it is only the accidental irony of coincidence. There is certainly a long tradition of critics trying to explicate the inner significance of Hollywood's horror movies. Parker Tyler, for example, suggested that Frankenstein's monster was a phallic symbol, rigid and threatening. But if this seems an excessively psychoanalytic view of a few
schlockmeisters
trying to make a few dollars, Stephen King has offered an interesting counterargument. “These were nightmares for profit, granted,” the creator of
Carrie
wrote in
Danse Macabre,
“but nightmares is nightmares, and in the last analysis it is the profit motive that becomes unimportant and the nightmare itself which remains of interest.”

It is hard to tell exactly where in the tribal memory the nightmare of the man-made monster originated. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley said she had gone to bed and could not sleep, and her imagination “possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the unusual bounds of reverie.” It had been an exciting evening in the villa on the outskirts of Geneva in June of 1816. Lord Byron, busily working away on the third canto of
Childe Harold,
had suggested to his cluster of friends that each should tell a ghost story. He himself told one, which later appeared at the end of his
Mazeppa,
and Shelley told one, but the nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley couldn't think of anything until that night, when her imagination possessed her and made her see a vision.

“I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together,” Mrs. Shelley later wrote. “I saw the phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.” Despite these pious objections, Mrs. Shelley went on to report that her vision included the sight of the created man confronting his creator “and looking at him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.”

Mrs. Shelley's monster was rather intellectual, and after eavesdropping on other intellectuals, it could quote freely from Plutarch's
Lives
or Milton's
Paradise Lost,
but when this saga was presented on the London stage in 1823 as
Presumption; or the Fate of Frankenstein,
the monster had already acquired his modern form; he was bluish in color, and his speech was limited to grunts. And so he remained up through Peggy Webling's
Frankenstein,
which appeared on the London stage in 1927. Carl Laemmle of Universal had wanted to film Mrs. Shelley's
Frankenstein
since the early 1920's. He saw it as a vehicle for Lon Chaney, his star monster, but Chaney apparently considered this Gothic melodrama too horrendous for him. Laemmle then settled on a Hungarian newcomer, Bela Lugosi, who had seemed ripely evil in the recently completed
Dracula.
Outfitted with a wig and covered with a coating of clay, Lugosi tottered around in a series of tests. Carl Laemmle, Jr., newly in command, thought the results ridiculous and canceled his father's whole project. So
Frankenstein
returned to that limbo of stories that somebody or other wanted to do but nobody knew how to do right.

Then along came James Whale, an English theater manager who had achieved a modest success in Hollywood by directing
Waterloo Bridge.
Universal asked him what he would like to do next, and out of about thirty moribund projects that were awaiting someone to harness lightning and bring them to life, Whale chose
Frankenstein.
“I thought it would be amusing,” he said later, “to try and make what everybody knows is a physical impossibility believable for sixty minutes.” Universal wanted Leslie Howard to play Frankenstein, but Whale insisted on casting a friend of his, Colin Clive. And then there was the question of the monster.