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(1865–1940). American actor.
However, in 1910, Thomas Edison's film company decided to
experiment with a horror film—a loose adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
(1818)—and company player Ogle was a natural choice to portray the monster;
also, following the pattern of the day, he did his own makeup. The result, as
observed in this recently rediscovered film, was a striking performance.
Created by a strange process of gradually adding flesh to a skeleton, not by
sewing parts of dead bodies together, Ogle's monster has none of the stiffness
of Boris KARLOFF and his innumerable successors; long-haired and agile, he
seems more like a mutated ape, an impression augmented by the curious way in
which he holds his arms. In the course of ten minutes, within the confines of
two simple sets, Ogle contrives to be both menacing and, in the scene when he
sees his own dreadful visage in a mirror, sympathetic, which is what any successful
Frankenstein monster must accomplish. It might have been the beginning of an
interesting series of silent horror films. Unfortunately, Frankenstein inspired indignant
protests and outright bans, leading the Edison Company to return to an exclusive
focus on family-friendly fare. One result was an early version of Charles
Dickens's A Christmas Carol, with Ogle as Bob Cratchit—dutifully
scribbling away in the background at the standard Victorian desk, and gesturing
with pleasure at the immense bird that the reformed Scrooge brings for
Christmas dinner, but otherwise given little to do. Reference books inform us
that Ogle went on to play Death in a drama entitled The Great Physician,
and that he played some role in a film about a scheme to derail trains by
frightening conductors with an eerie skeleton, The Phantom Signal, but
these are undoubtedly only two of the many lost Ogle films. His last major
performance, and the only chance contemporary audiences will have of getting a
really good look at him, came in the modern segment of Cecil B. DeMille's epic The
Ten Commandments. Soon thereafter, as he passed the age of sixty and silents
were replaced by talking picture, Ogle retired from the screen to live the rest
of his life in complete obscurity. One wonders what he thought of the way that
Karloff had reinterpreted his role, or if he even remembered the few days he
had devoted to his own pioneering film. But long after he had died, as horror
films grew more popular and more respected, people became very eager to see
Ogle's performance as the Frankenstein monster, though it was believed to be
lost, and they were delighted when a single reel of the film was accidentally
discovered—leading to the paradox of an actor who today, almost seventy years
after his death, is more famous than he ever was during his own lifetime.
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