Universal Studio Monsters

[Mrs Vindecco]

While I was recently in Glasgow I was browsing through one of the major bookout stores when I found the book Universal Studio Monsters: A Legacy of Horror by Michael Mallory and much to my joy there was a chapter about Dwight Frye.

As this a bookstore and not a library, plus I was with my husband and son I did not get a chance to read it. It was pricey but I was wondering if anyone had read it and if it's worth buying.

Here's the link:

www.amazon.com/Universal-Studios-Monsters-Legacy-Horror/dp/0789318962/ref=cm_cmu_pg__header

[Luna]

While I am not certain I do believe that the chapter pertaining to Dwight in this book was available somewhere on-line. I have a vague memory of reading it and it seemed pretty standard. I don't think that the author offered very much new. However, I could be wrong about this memory as the old mind is going! I looked at the link that you were kind enough to share, and read through some of the reviews, and it seems to be a pretty decent book pertaining to Universal horror, so I would probably pick it up myself if I had the cash!

[Mrs Vindecco]

I actually got this book for Christmas and meant to write about it sooner. For fans of the Universal series it is a fantastic, nostalgic look at the golden age of horror but there is really nothing in here that is new or informative. Some great pictures and lovely prints of posters. There is a chapter on Dwight Frye, which is good in as much that he is noticed but Una O' Conor also get's a chapter so that's the least he deserved. I've rewritten the whole chapter for anyone that's interested.

page 170.

Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney Jr were not the only actors who were forced to wrestle with the problem of typecasting as a result of their successes in the horror film genre. There was also Dwight Frye, the diminutive, distinctive actor who had once been a Broadway ingénue, but who- until the arrival of Peter Lorre in Hollywood- was the guy producers went to whenever they needed a wild-eyed lunatic, with or without a twisted back.
Frye was there from beginning of Universal Horror, playing the fly-eating Renfield in Dracula, Fritz the hunchbacked lab assistant in Frankenstein, and Karl, the grumbling grave robber in Bride of Frankenstein. In between he took such roles as the hot-tempered gunman Wilmer Cook in the first version of The Maltese Falcon (1931) and the bat-obsessed imbecile Herman in the independently produced (but shot on the Universal lot) horror epic The Vampire Bat (1933).
Of that last role, Frye bemoaned, “If God is good, I will be able to play comedy, in which I was featured on Broadway for eight seasons and in which no producer of motion pictures will give me a chance! And please, God, may it be before I go screwy playing idiots, half-wits and lunatics on the talking screen!” The good news is that Frye managed to continue his career without going screwy. The bad news is that his career, and his life, had only another decade to go.
Dwight Iliff Frye was born in 1899 in Salinas, Kansas. A musical prodigy, his attentions turned more to the theatre in his teen years. By 1923 he was not only appearing on Broadway, but was being touted in the New York Times as one of the best performers of the season, alongside the likes of John Barrymore, Jane Cowl , and Jeannie Eagles. Earlier that season he appeared in the New York premiere of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. Within a few short years, Frye was a bona fide toast of Broadway. All that would change upon coming to Hollywood. In Frye’s first film, 1928’s The Night Bird, he was merely an extra, playing a guest in a wedding scene, but it put him on the Universal lot for the first time. After playing a couple of inconsequential roles in films, he was given the part of Renfield in Dracula.

It is doubtful that Frye realized the impact he was going to make as Renfield, who begins the picture as a pleasant, if rather fey, businessman and quickly devolves into a raving madman. The shot of Frye’s maniacal Renfield in the hold of the doomed ship Vesta, his pale blue eyes glaring insanely into the camera lens, his unnerving sing song laugh forced up through a death’s head grimace, is the most tangibly terrifying image in the picture. His fate in Hollywood was sealed.
Beginning with Frankenstein, in which he played the dwarfed, hunchbacked, scarred but somehow strangely amusing, assistant to Dr Frankenstein, Frye became part of James Whales stock company of actors. Whale gave him a cameo in The Invisible Man (1933) and an equally small role in The Road Back (1937), the sequel to Universal’s 1930 hit All Quiet on the Western Front. Frye also turns up briefly in Whale’s The Man in the Iron Mask (1939). What might have been their greatest collaboration, Bride of Frankenstein turned out less satisfactorily, at least for Frye, whose role of Karl, Dr Frankenstein’s grave-robbing assistant, was severely truncated in the final print.
After Bride of Frankenstein, Frye’s career went into a tailspin. His Broadway resume was no help in finding him leading roles, in comedy, horror or any other genre. While he continued to work, the parts were largely thankless, often uncredited, and sometimes identified by role descriptions rather than character names such as Villager 2 or “Second Mug”. Frye began to turn up in short subjects , and had a tiny bit in the 1940 Saturday matinee serial The Drums of Fu Manchu, and participation in such venues was a signal that an actor was either on the way up or on the way down. There is a persistent rumour that he fell so far as to play a clothed bit in a stag film but this has never been confirmed.
The intense actor would make two more appearances in the Frankenstein series (not counting the scenes he apparently filmed for 1939’s Son of Frankenstein, which were edited out). In 1942’s The Ghost of Frankenstein he was a nameless villager but in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, released the next year, he visibility, billing and an actual character name “Rudi”. He also had one of the most jaw-fracturing lines in Universal Horror history: “As much as I’d like to kill the monster, I’d hate to crawl around those dark catatombs of Frankenstein’s castle in the black of the night.” Only an actor of Frye’s experience could put that over.

During the war, Frye took a night job with Douglas Aircraft as a tool designer, to support his wife and son and also aid the war effort. But he remained intensely frustrated by his floundering career. He began to experience heart problems, but as a practising Christian Scientist, he simply ignored them. Finally a break came; he was cast as Newton D. Baker, President Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of War, in the 1944 biopic Wilson. It looked like the beginning of a comeback, but before he could start filming, Dwight Frye suffered a fatal heart attack. He was only 44 years old.
No matter how frustrated he became in his later years, Dwight Frye never lost hope that his career situation would someday improve. At least he left the world with the knowledge that it finally appeared to be so.

[Luna]

Carrie- Thank you so very much for sharing the entire chapter here. It was a lot to type and I appreciate the effort greatly. It seems that my memory was correct that there was not anything within the chapter that was really informative or new, but all the same it was well written and very lovely. Especially the closing paragraph about Dwight never giving up hope. He was a beautiful person inside as well as out. Better than I could ever even hope to be.

[leah2359]

I just purchased this book online, it has been sitting in my Amazon cart since January.

[Mrs Vindecco]

It's a good book with nice photos just not enough Dwight