of romantic quality that makes strong
men leave civilization to shoot big
game,” Whale later said. After consid-
ering Bette Davis, who was rejected for
her supposed lack of sex appeal, Whale
chose Mae Clarke (then best known
for being smacked with a grape-
fruit by James Cagney in 1931’s Public
Enemy) to play the doctor’s love inter-
est, Elizabeth. Not surprisingly, find-
ing the right actor to play the monster
was especially difficult. After Lugosi’s
test screenings proved disappointing,
Whale searched for a replacement,
but no one seemed quite right—until
he found a struggling actor who was
barely surviving on orange juice and
raw eggs.B
orn in the London suburb of
Camberwell in 1887, William Henry
Pratt changed his name to Boris
Karloff while acting on the stage in
Canada. Since theatrical work was hard
to come by, he took on manual labor to
make ends meet. He eventually moved
to Los Angeles, where the motion pic-
ture industry was taking root. By 1931,
he had performed in dozens of films
but despaired of finding mainstream
success, when a chance encounter in
the Universal commissary changed his
career—and life—forever. “Someone
tapped me on the shoulder and said,
‘Mr. Whale would like to see you at his
table,’” he recounted.
Well, that’s Karloff’s version of
the story. According to James Curtis,
author of James Whale: A New World of
Gods and Monsters (1998), a more likely
scenario came from Whale’s long-term
companion, David Lewis. In 1930, Lewis
had seen a play called The Criminal
Code, which featured Karloff in what
CONTINUED ON PAGE 48A TITLE CARD FOR THE 1951
rerelease of Frankenstein
assures potential ticket buyers
that the film is “the original
uncut version.” What terrified
people in 1931 wasn’t quite
so effective—or offensive—in
the year that saw the release of
Howard Hawks’s horror classic
The Thing from Another World.45CO
UR
TES
Y (^) E
VE
RET
T