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Ranking five lesser-known Dwight Frye movies (from best to worst)

The Maltese Falcon (1931)

The Maltese Falcon (1931) is the first film version of the famous crime novel, but it's been overshadowed in the public consciousness by the much more famous 1941 adaptation. As a film, the '41 version is much better than the '31 version; it is much more atmospherically shot than the older version, which eschews noirish shadows for brightly lit interior sets. Humphrey Bogart is also simply a more interesting and likeable Sam Spade than Ricardo Cortez, who spends the movie leering at every woman in sight and never really seeming properly concerned with the trouble he's found himself in.

Still, there are interesting things present in the 1931 movie which make it a worthwhile watch. In the 1941 version the homosexuality of Wilmer, Joel Cairo, and Casper Gutman is strongly implied, but remains firmly in the realms of implication; it doesn't really take a genius to realize that Joel Cairo -with his scented calling-cards and Freudian affection for his walking-stick- is not straight, but the film doesn't come right out and . . . let Cairo come right out.

In the 1931 version, created before the imposition of the Hays Code, the gangsters are pretty overtly gay. In the original novel, Wilmer (the role played by Frye in this version) is referred to as "the gunsel" by Spade. This phrase, a hobo slang term derived from Yiddish, was obscure enough that it went unchallenged from his editors and was included in both the 1931 and 1941 movie versions. But while the term "gunsel" has often been assumed to mean "gunman," what it really means is "a young man kept by an elder as a (usually passive) homosexual partner."

So the hot-tempered little thug which Gutman keeps around isn't his triggerman, he's his boytoy. (Well, his boytoy and his triggerman). And the '31 movie understands the assignment; not only is Wilmer given the kind of soft-focus close-ups normally reserved for dames, but Gutman is constantly petting him possessively and stroking his face. After he flees the kitchen he's been trapped in, Spade tells Gutman, "Your boyfriend's got away." When Wilmer is ultimately betrayed by Gutman, his helpless rage is made all the more meaningful by the awareness that he's not just a gangster who's been betrayed by his boss, but a young queer man who's been betrayed by his much older partner, in a world which is deeply hostile to him. Treated with contempt by everyone around him, including the hero of the story, I'd argue that his ultimate spasm of violence is ambiguous in its intentions: is he a scorned criminal out for revenge, or an exploited outsider with no one left to turn to?

2. The Crime of Dr. Crespi (1935)

The Crime of Dr. Crespi has what I like to call a "swiss cheese plot" in that it's absolutely riddled with holes, but still manages to remain enjoyable thanks to the massive amounts of horror movie cheese inherent to a movie starring Frye and Erich von Stroheim (another cult favorite of mine).

It seems like most all of Frye's horror/crime roles fall somewhere between overtly villainous parts and pathetic ones. This movie offers a rare heroic role, but it's still tinged with the aforementioned pathetic elements. In it, Dr. Crespi (Stroheim) develops a drug which makes someone appear to be dead for 24 hours, after which they immediately revive. He uses this drug to make a romantic rival appear dead, so that he can bury the man alive and marry his wife. His assistant, Dr. Thomas (Frye) suspects that something isn't right, but Crespi beats him up and locks him in a closet. He later lets Thomas out of the closet, whereupon Thomas goes and rescues the victim from a premature grave.

I ranked this movie on the higher end despite its narrative shortcomings because it offers a glimpse at Frye in a heroic, leading role- the kind of roles that he wanted but rarely got. And like I said, it does play into the pathetic typecasting he was subjected to, but it also refutes that audience expectation in an interesting way.

See, the reason why Crespi lets Thomas out of the closet is because he thinks that he's so broken that he'll accept Crespi's mistreatment of him without protest; that he's so passive that he'll be easy to abuse and manipulate. Thomas immediately leaves and seeks help for Crespi's victim, which is the obvious correct course of action. But because Crespi (and the audience, one assumes) expects so little of Thomas, the fact that he does the logical thing becomes something heroic.

3. By Whose Hand? (1932)

By Whose Hand? is a crime drama, and a fairly simple one at that; a murderer escapes custody just as a train is leaving the station from LA to San Francisco. On board, a group of passengers must figure out where the escaped killer is lurking, even as he strikes, one by one, killing off old associates. He must be stopped before the train reaches its destination.

The core issue with this movie is that everyone is annoying except for the criminals. Nat Pendleton plays the escaped killer, and Frye plays the convict who snitched on him. The killer runs around with a knife, and the convict manages to steal a detective's pistol, despite being handcuffed for a good portion of the film. Rather than being concerned for the innocent passengers, I found myself wishing they would have killed more of them. A good portion of the hour-long run-time is taken up with:

Annoying streetwise reporters

Annoying horny newlyweds

Annoying messy drunks

Annoying stereotypical black train porters

There are some genuinely funny/tense moments, but they are few and far between. At one point, Frye's character crams himself into an overhead bin to hide. He's a small enough guy that he can fit, but he's too heavy to keep it from slowly falling open as the policeman go down the aisle. I found the shot of the cops scouring the train car even as the snitch slips into view behind them, eyes wide, to be a particularly funny sight gag. But these little moments don't make up for the annoying (and sometimes offensive) core of this movie. Being surrounded by irritating strangers might be a realistic portrayal of public transit, but that doesn't justify the amount of time spent with these unfunny side characters. The main thing to recommend it is that it does actually sprinkle action throughout the story at a reasonable pace, which is more than can be said for . . .

4. The Vampire Bat (1933)

You know how sometimes a greatest hits album is somehow less than the sum of its parts, because it takes a bunch of good songs and merges them into a directionless whole? That's basically what The Vampire Bat is. It suffers from the same preoccupation with unfunny side characters that By Whose Hand? does, but without a reasonable tempo of action throughout the movie. For a film that only lasts an hour, it feels weirdly long; I've noticed that this is a running theme with some of these horror B-movies. They take half an hour to set up the conceit of the genre elements, and to "build tension" (as much as possible, with their limited means), which requires that the entire climax and denouement must be crammed into the final 15-20 minutes of the movie.

Like I said, The Vampire Bat is a mix of horror tropes, not done particularly well. A vampire is terrorizing the most American-sounding German village ever, and the locals suspect Hermann, the village idiot who keeps dead bats in his pockets. (Frye, obviously). A huge amount of this short movie is spent with the goofy villagers as they try to figure out what's going on, and are increasingly frightened by Hermann, who is guilty of nothing more than being a few cans short of a six pack and possibly spreading rabies. (Seriously, don't put bats in your pockets, dead or otherwise). Hermann is pretty much a cookie-cutter Renfield/Fritz knockoff; the movie even includes a scene where he crawls to an old lady who has fainted in a clear call-back to Renfield's attack on the maid in Dracula.

(Spoilers for a 90-year-old movie below).

What seems like a run-of-the-mill vampire movie suddenly diverges into a run-of-the-mill mad scientist movie when it's discovered that there really wasn't a vampire at all, but rather an evil doctor draining the blood from his patients to keep an artifically-created organism alive. The villagers chase Hermann off a cliff in the movie's best-shot scene, their torches hand-tinted red in an otherwise black-and-white movie. The doctor kidnaps the heroine and is about to drain her blood when the hero breaks into his lab. Some hugger-mugger later and the evil doctor is dead and the girl is saved.

I've never been a fan of these movies that set up a supernatural explanation and then use convoluted plot gymnastics to reveal that there was really a non-supernatural explanation this whole time. I don't much like Mark of the Vampire for this reason, and I don't much like The Vampire Bat for the same reason. It's just such a stretch even in-universe that not only does this doctor need large amounts of human blood, but he must also kill his neighbors and then frame the local eccentric disabled guy for his crimes. Why does it need to be human blood exactly? If it does need to be human blood, why not draw blood from living subjects? And if people are dying, then why pretend it's vampires?

5. Dead Men Walk (1943)

Dead Men Walk is far and away my least-favorite movie on this list, because it is the only movie that not only bored me, but actively made me kind of sad. More than ten years after Dracula and Frankenstein, Frye is once again stuck playing a pathetic ineffectual henchman, this time named Zolarr. Zolarr is pretty much another Renfield/Fritz hybrid, with Renfield's raspy little exclamations of "Master! Master!" and Fritz's hunchbacked shuffle. But something is off. This movie was made only 18 months before Frye's untimely death, and he seems unwell; he's noticeably pudgy and his movements are slower.

I don't think that it's a simple matter of him being 44 and not 34- I'm not picking on him for being older, I'm bothered because he was really too young to seem so worn out. I can't help but think that his appearance is much more the result of his declining health. That's what makes the movie sad to me; after a decade of steady work and even in the grip of a progressing heart condition, the poor guy was still stuck playing sniveling freaks in Poverty Row horror movies. And I love a good sniveling freak, but I know that he didn't.

The movie itself is baffling and wooden. It starts seemingly halfway through the plot; the town doctor has just killed his brother, who was a Satanist. The brother returns as a vampire with Zolarr in tow, and proceeds to imperil the pretty young heroine. The doctor and her boyfriend team up to defeat the vampire and Zolarr.

The main problem with this movie is the script. It doesn't just rely on exposition; basically the entire movie is expository. Characters walk in randomly and say things along the lines of, "Could there be a vampire on the loose? A creature of the night, returned from the grave?" For what I assume are budgetary reasons, the vampire can't even transform, fly, or otherwise act vampiric; he just lurks in the bushes, watching the heroes like a dirty old man. Critics complain that Dracula was too stiff and stagey; Dracula looks like an action movie compared to this one.

The only real action in this movie takes place at the very end, when Zolarr gets an altar dropped on him and dies in a fire. The scene is shockingly grim for an otherwise bloodless film. For several minutes, he screams "Master! Master!" as the flames lick higher. It's a particularly brutal way to go for a character who never directly harms anyone. Can you imagine if audiences were treated to Renfield being burned alive at the end of Dracula? This movie isn't scary, it's just an unjustified bummer. Even more than that, it's boring and an unjustifed bummer. For me, that's the cardinal sin of movie-making.

#dwight frye #universal horror #poverty row #horror movies #the maltese falcon #the maltese falcon 1931 #the crime of dr crespi #by whose hand #the vampire bat #dead men walk #pre code era #pre code hollywood #r. m. renfield #renfield

Edgar G. Ulmer Movies

On May 14, 2004, The Devil Bat was screened on Stupid Movie of the Week.

Here's some new Bela Lugosi art!

Vintage Poster - The Gorilla

20th Century Fox (1939)

#Posters #Film #Gorilla #The Gorilla #Ritz Brothers #Gorillas #Horror #Humor #Art #Vintage #Patsy Kelly #Bela Lugosi #Lionel Atwill #The Ritz Brothers #Poverty Row #20th Century Fox #1939 #1930s #30s

Poverty Row

#PRC #film logos #second feature #b movie #poverty row

On Poverty Row in Hollywood circa 1926, California Studios and Bischoff, Inc., the home of H.C. Witwer Comedies, Biff Thrill Comedies, and Gold Medal Comedies. Located on Gower St. just south of Sunset Blvd.

#old hollywood #vintage hollywood #poverty row

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