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(1896–1980). American director.
For one thing, the available evidence suggests that Kenton felt obliged
to direct horror films, solely because his studio was assigning him to do so,
when he would rather be doing comedies. (After all, he had started his career
as an actor and gagman for Mack Sennett, and his later accomplishments in that
area would include a W. C. Fields film of mild genre interest, You're
Telling Me, featuring Fields as a dissolute inventor, and three of the
films that helped to establish Bud Abbott and Lou Costello as major stars.) And
as it happens, evaluating his best horror film, Island of Lost Souls,
one might argue that the film has an impact not because it is particularly
horrifying (it isn't), but because it so often teeters on the edge of
comedy—especially in the over-the-top performance of Charles Laughton, and the rituals
of the furry-faced actors reciting their laws. Indeed, the film could be viewed
as a predecessor to the Planet of the Apes films, which were similarly
effective in blending portentous drama with comedy involving actors dressed up like
animals.
But Kenton, like many people, had trouble getting along with Costello,
so he was shifted to another of Universal's film series, the Frankenstein
movies, which were still being produced solely because the studio felt obliged
to make them. For despite the departure of the talents that had made them artistically
successful, director James WHALE
and star Boris KARLOFF, no
company can abandon a franchise that is still capable of attracting audiences,
so writers like Curt SIODMAK
had to work overtime to devise ways to keep the story going at all costs. The
first of these later films, Kenton's The Ghost of Frankenstein, is not
entirely unwatchable, despite the inert performance of Lon
CHANEY, Jr. as the
Frankenstein monster, because Bela
LUGOSI effectively takes over
the movie, playing the hunchback Igor with a comedic energy that again might be
attributed to Kenton's influence. But when plot contrivances eliminated Igor to
instead cast Lugosi as the monster in the next film, Frankenstein Meets the
Wolf Man (1943)—a directing chore that Kenton avoided—the series lost
its last interesting performer, and the next two films essentially abandoned
any effort to maintain continuity with the earlier movies and instead employed
desperately convoluted stories that might have been more palatable had they
been played for comedy. However, with the emptily posturing John
CARRADINE as Dracula, the
inept Chaney as the Wolf Man, and the hapless Glenn
STRANGE as the monster, Kenton
was stuck with actors who were performing only because they felt obliged to,
with predictably dire results, although House of Frankenstein did
include Karloff in a perfunctory mad scientist role that gave him little to do.
So yes, as installments in a significant film series, we are obliged to watch House
of Frankenstein and House of Dracula, but if you are like me, you
will have no desire to ever watch them again.
Given his experiences with horror films and Abbott and Costello, Kenton
might have seemed the ideal choice to helm Universal's final Frankenstein film,
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), but after a forgettable
haunted-house mystery, The Cat Creeps, Kenton only made a few more minor
films, drifted into directing episodes of television series, and finally
retired in 1960. For no compelling reason, one feels obliged to remember him.
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