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Acknowledgements
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(Richmond Reed Carradine 1906–1988). American actor.
Acted in: Bride of Frankenstein (Whale 1935); Ali Baba Goes to Town
(David BUTLER 1937); The Hound of the Baskervilles (Sidney
Lanfield 1939); Whispering Ghosts (Alfred Werker 1942); Captive
Wild Woman (Edward Dmytryk 1943); Revenge of the Zombies
(Steve Sekely 1944); Bluebeard (Ulmer 1944); Voodoo Man
(William BEAUDINE 1944); The Invisible Man's Revenge (Ford
BEEBE 1944); Return of the Ape Man (Phil Rosen 1944); The
Mummy's Ghost (Reginald LE BORG 1944); House of Frankenstein
(Erle C. KENTON 1945); House of Dracula (Kenton 1945); Face
of Marble (Beaudine 1946); Casanova's Big Night (Norman
Z. McLeod 1954); Half Human (Inoshiro HONDA
1955); The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. De Mille 1956); Dark
Venture (John Calvert 1956); The Black Sleep (Le Borg
1956); Around the World in Eighty Days (Michael ANDERSON
1956); The Unearthly (Brooke L. Peters 1957); The Story
of Mankind (Irwin ALLEN 1957); The Cosmic Man (Herman
Green 1959); The Invisible Invaders (Edward L. CAHN 1959);
The Incredible Petrified World (Jerry Warren 1959); Invasion
of the Animal People (Virgil Vogel and Warren 1960); Curse
of the Stone Hand (Warren 1965); House of the Black Death
(Le Borg and Harold Daniels 1965); The Wizard of Mars (David
Hewitt 1965); Man with the Synthetic Brain [Fiend with
the Synthetic Brain] (Al ADAMSON 1965); Munster, Go Home!
(Earl Bellamy 1966); Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (Beaudine
1966); Psycho Circus (introducer of video version entitled
Circus of Fear) (John Moxey 1966); Hillbillys in a Haunted
House (Jean Yarbrough 1967); Dr. Terror's Gallery of Horror
[Return to the Past] (Hewitt 1967); Mummy and the Curse
of the Jackals (Oliver Drake 1967); The Death Woman (Jaime
Salvador 1967); Autopsy of a Ghost (Ismael Rodriguez 1967);
Blood of Dracula's Castle (Adamson and Jean Hewitt 1967);
Diabolical Pact (Jaime Salvador 1968); Madame Death
(Salvador 1968); The Astro-Zombies (Ted V. Mikels 1968);
Bigfoot (Robert F. Slatzer 1969); Five Bloody Graves
(Adamson 1969); The Vampires (Frederico Curiel 1969); Is
This Trip Really Necessary? (Ben Dendit 1970); Hell's Bloody
Devils (1970); Horror of the Blood Monsters (Adamson
1970); Myra Breckinridge (Michael Sarne 1970); Vampire
Men of the Lost Planet (Adamson 1970); Shock Waves (Ken
Wiederhorn 1970); Shinbone Alley (animated; voice) (1971);
Portnoy's Complaint (voice) (Ernest Lehman 1972); Legend
of Sleepy Hollow (short; narrator) (1972); Moon Child
(1972); Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex (Woody
ALLEN 1972); Richard (Lorees Yerby and Harry Hurwitz 1972);
Silent Night, Bloody Night (Theodore Gershuny 1973); Hex
(Leo Garen 1972); Blood of Ghastly Horror (1972); Moonchild
(Alan Gadney 1972); Blood of the Iron Maiden (1973); Terror
in the Wax Museum (George Fenady 1973); Mary, Mary, Bloody
Mary (Juan Lopez Moctezuma 1973); Legacy of Blood (Carl
Monson 1973); Journey into the Beyond (documentary; narrator)
(Rolf Olsen 1973); The House of the Seven Corpses (Paul Harrison
1974); The Killer inside Me (Burt Kennedy 1976); Crash!
(Charles BAND 1977); The Sentinel (Michael Winner 1977);
Doctor Dracula (Adamson 1977); Satan's Cheerleaders
(Greydon Clark 1977); Missile-X (1978); The Bees (Alfredo
Zacharias 1978); Monstroid (Kenneth Hartford 1979); Nocturna,
Granddaughter of Dracula (Harry Tampa 1979); The Vampire
Hookers (Cirio H. Santiago 1979); The Boogey Man (Ulli
LOMMEL 1980); The Monster Club (Roy Ward BAKER 1981); The
Howling (Joe DANTE 1981); The Nesting (Armand Weston
1981); The Best of Sex and Violence (host) (Band 1981); The
Secret of NIMH (animated; voice) (Don Bluth 1981); Dark Eyes
[Satan's Mistress; Demon Rage] (James Polakof 1981);
Frankenstein's Island (Jerry Warren 1981); The Scarecrow
(Sam Pillsbury 1981); House of the Long Shadows (Pete Walker
1983); Evils of the Night (Mardi Rustam 1983); Boogeyman
II (1983); Monster in the Closet (1983); The Ice Pirates
(Stewart Raffill 1984); The Tomb (Fred Olen Ray 1984); The
Vals (1985); Reel Horror (Ross and Claire Hagen 1985);
Revenge (video) (Christopher Lewis 1986); Demented Death
Farm Massacre ... The Movie (voice) (1986); Hollywood Ghost
Stories (narrator) (James Forscher 1986); Bigfoot (documentary;
narrator) (1986); The Secrets of Dr. Taverner (1986); Monster
in the Closet (Bob Dahlin 1986); Revenge (Christopher
Lewis 1986); The Ice King (1986); Evil Spawn [The
Alien Within] (Kenneth J. Hall 1987); Star Slammer—The Escape
(Ray 1987); Buried Alive (Gerard Kikoine 1990); Teenage
Exorcist (1990).
Acted in tv movies: Haunted
Hollywood (documentary; narrator) (1966); Daughter of the Mind
(Walter Grauman 1969); Crowhaven Farm (Walter Grauman 1970); The
Night Strangler (Dan CURTIS 1973); The Cat Creature (Curtis
HARRINGTON 1973); Stowaway to the Moon (Andrew V. McLaglen 1975); Death
at Love House (E. W. Swackhamer 1976); Christmas Miracle in Caulfield,
U.S.A. (1977); The Seekers (1979); Goliath Awaits (Kevin
CONNOR 1981); The Horror of It All (documentary; guest) (Gene Feldman
1983).
Acted in tv episodes: The
Adventures of Dr. Fu Manchu (pilot) (1950); "The Half-Pint Flask" (1950),
"Meddlers" (1951), "The Lonely Albatross" (1952), Lights Out; Trapped
(tv series; host) (1951); "Stone Cold Dead" (1950), The Web; "Come into
My Parlor" (1953), Suspense; "A Touch of Evil" (1958), Suspicion;
"The Howling Man" (1960), The Twilight Zone; "Masquerade," "The
Remarkable Mrs. Hawks" (1961), Thriller; "Herman's Raise" (1965), The
Munsters; "The Montori Device
Affair" (1966), The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.; "The Galaxy Gift," Lost in
Space (1967); "Alias 'The Scarf'" (1967), The Green Hornet; "The
Prince of Darkness Affair" (1967), The Man from U.N.C.L.E.; "Comeback"
(1970), Land of the Giants; "The Big Surprise" (1971), Night Gallery;
episode of Far Out Space Nuts (1975); "Gault's Brain" (1978), The New
Adventures of Wonder Woman; "The Reluctant Dragon," segment of
"Misunderstood Monsters" (animated; narrator) (1981), CBS Library; "The
Whistle" (1982), Fantasy Island; Haunted House (tv series;
narrator) (1986); "Still Life" (1986), Twilight Zone; "Shadow House"
(1988), Short Stories.
When I first published that comment, an indignant reader
wrote in to complain that, according to Carradine's comments in an interview,
it was pure economic necessity that drove Carradine to accept all those
roles, making it uncharitable to criticize him. But this claim cannot
be taken at face value: surely, no matter how alienated Carradine was
from his successful sons, David or Keith would have been willing to give
the old man room and board. Further, venerable performers in their declining
years have many options in seeking continued income, ranging from dinner
theater to tell-all autobiographies, that Carradine seemingly never considered.
We are forced to conclude that Carradine participated in all of these
execrable films because he wanted to; for him, perhaps, the inhabitants
of the Z-movie underworld functioned as a kind of surrogate family, where
he was always welcomed like an eccentric old grandfather. In fact, Carradine
is one of the rare performers who came to serve as a generic marker; if
you saw Carradine in a movie, you knew that it was a horror, science fiction,
or exploitation movie. Yet other actors in this category, ranging in distinction
from Boris KARLOFF to Whit BISSELL,
played that role with much more prominence and dignity; and while he somehow
managed to maintain his good cheer as he labored on, examining the sorry
chaos of his later career does offer an image of the punishment that a
vengeful God might devise for the afterlife of bad actors: being forced
to act in a series of movies, each one worse than the last, each venue
less prestigious, each part smaller and more absurd, on to infinity.
That same vengeful God seeking to punish bad film critics
might assign them to compile and research a complete John Carradine filmography;
I cannot be sure that my list is complete (every book I consult adds some
new horror—in every sense of the word—to the roster), and I cannot
claim that I have seen every film on the list—because, based on capsule
descriptions, it would require a dementia parallel to Carradine's to seek
out and watch every one of them. One must first recall, implausible at
it seems, that Carradine at one point made a bid for a career as a respectable
character actor in major films, with reasonably good performances in John
Ford's Stagecoach (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940).
But whether due to necessity or to choice, he soon succumbed to the siren
call of bad movies. Cast as Dracula in House of Frankenstein and
House of Dracula, he was dressed up to look exactly like the villain
in a stage melodrama and played the part with bulging eyes and stagey
flourishes in a manner that might be frightening to a small child; returning
to the role two decades later, he was more subdued and, surprisingly,
a little better in Billy the Kid vs. Dracula, but no performance
could salvage that ill-conceived project. As Carradine aged, he settled
into a succession of roles as mad scientists or traffickers in occult
forces: his acting was usually routine, but when given slightly better
material, like the sympathetic alien of The Cosmic Man, he might
haltingly rise to the occasion.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Carradine often worked in television,
where, aside for an unsuccessful pilot where he starred as Dr. Fu Manchu,
his most noteworthy parts were a role in The Munsters as Mr. Gateman
and an almost evocative performance as a monk who has captured the Devil
in the Twilight Zone episode, "The Howling Man." In his declining
years, he drifted primarily into low-budget films, where the quality of
Carradine's performances tended to be directly proportional to the quality
of his directors: for better directors—probably due more to their willingness
to rehearse and shoot retakes than to their greater ability to inspire
the actor—Carradine performed passably well; for inept directors—probably
due to their haste and lack of concern for quality—Carradine was a joke
(as in Monstroid, where his purposeless, perfunctory priest character
is basically ignored by everyone involved). It is not surprising, then,
that his most noteworthy later performance came for his most noteworthy
later director: in the segment of Woody Allen's Everything You Always
Wanted to Know about Sex that spoofed monster movies, he played a
mad scientist with zestful energy, cackling with glee about his creation
of a huge ambulatory breast to terrorize the countryside.
The odd thing about Carradine's career is that he displayed
no real appreciation for the genuinely unknown or genuinely unearthly;
rather, he tried to convey the strange and terrifying only with a tired
repertoire of acting tricks. The fact that such an actor could rise to
the status of daft elder statesman again suggests that horror and science
fiction films, despite a professed desire to shock and surprise, remain
curiously domestic genres, devoted more to reassuring audiences with familiar
faces than to upsetting their smug assumptions about the world.
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