Hello!

Halloween approaches … thanks to Wayne Schmidt, we actually have a nice holiday- themed top banner photo up today. Like several  CineSavant confrères,  Wayne really gets into Halloween fun, and we appreciate the assist.

Advisor & collaborator Gary Teetzel has stumbled across a nifty TV show starring Boris Karloff:

“Speaking of Boris: The 1950s were not a great time for Karloff in terms of movies. Feature roles during this period were few and far between, and the decade saw some of his weakest efforts:  Island Monster,  Voodoo Island,  Sabaka,  Frankenstein 1970. But Boris kept busy with stage and TV work. For my Halloween contribution, here he is as a not-so-mad scientist in a 1958 episode of ‘Studio One,’  The Shadow of a Genius.“

“Karloff plays a scientist on the brink of winning a major award who must cope with family difficulties and the shocking discovery that he may have accidentally stolen ideas from a deceased colleague’s work. It looks like Boris is in fine form. Of special interest: The episode was scored by that young, up-and-coming kid Jerry Goldsmith.”

The show co-stars Eva Le Gallienne, Patricia Barry and Skip Homeier, with Herbert Anderson and Morris Ankrum. It was directed by Ralph Nelson:

Coincidentally, Joe Dante just circulated this nice 2019 link to a ‘Flapper Press’ article by John C. Alsedek. It’s about Boris’s radio career, which started in horror but took an unexpected, very happy turn — You know, For Kids:

Correspondent Jeff Allee sends along a YouTube posting that caught our attention. He says it is now common knowledge, but being that CineSavant monitors the Cutting Edge of everything important in the culture, we never heard of it until now.

Art echoes reality, in this case 66 years before the fact. It’s an episode of the Robert Culp western TV show Trackdown from May of 1958, about a predatory charlatan who defrauds an entire town. Dabbs Greer and Neyle Morrow co-star. The despicable charlatan is played by Lawrence Dobkin. Hey, the leading lady is Claudia Barrett, of  Robot Monster fame.

The weird connection is that the villain’s name is Trump. An unrepentant conman, Trump holds the town for ransom, promising a fake barrier against an outside threat he’s conjured up out of nothing. It’s … a little unnerving. The townspeople buy the scam 100%, and panic ensues. Trump inspires a local lawman to become a greedy opportunist as well.

At our house, we watch reruns of the long-running TV show Law and Order. We must have seen 5 episodes in which the Trump name surfaces, always when a detective wants to make a joke about the most dishonest, unprincipled businessman in New York City. Ain’t politics strange?  We’re truly living in Bizzaro World, or an episode from The Twilight Zone.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson