ARTIFICIAL MONSTER.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21112, 20 February 1932, Page 11 (Supplement)

ARTIFICIAL MONSTER.

TRIUMPH OF " MAKE-UP." LON CHANEY ECLIPSED. Many of the creations of Lon Chancy i are classics irt the motion picture 1"» si - ness. John Barry more, his brother Lionel and Be!a Lugosi have also contri- , buted masterpieces of make-up, bub it' i is doubtful if anything like the ingem- , 011s and frightful make up of Boris Ivarloff for the monster in " Frankenstein " : has ever been attempted. Lon Chancy wore a rubber suit to preserve tlie hunchback form and hairy ugliness for his role in the " The Hunchback of Notre Dame." But Karloff had a built-up and a facial distortion which Hollywood experts agree caps tli© climax. Clianey's hunchback was ugliness personified. Keroff's monster in " Frankenstein," on the other hand achieves a diabolical fascination in which the element of terror dispels any impression of ugliness. Ever since Universal discovered the unexplored field of terrorism in motion pictures, with its production of " Dracula," it has wondered how far the public would let it go in horror. In making " Frankenstein," Carl Laemmle junr. resolved to go several steps further than " Dracula " had gone. All of the horror of " Frankenstein " centres in the monster that Frankenstein made. Many months were devoted to devising the make-up, appearance and action of tl-s remarkable creature. It was supposed to have been made by Frankenstein from bits of humanity gathered from graves, gallows trees, dissecting rooms and morgues, and animated by galvanic or electric action, by means of a principle that he alone had discovered. In order to represent the heterogeneous nature of the different parts of this body, make-up men used every passible ingenuity to make the body look as though the arms did nbt match, the legs were not mates, the body out of proportion, the shoulders of unequal height, and the head a conglomeration of features none of which had been diesigned to go together. The hands, for instance, were covered with red and purple stitches, the feet were encased in shoes built up by four inches of sole and five of heel. The nionsteir towered six feet seven inches, whereas Karloff himself is but six feet tall. The width and thickness of the body were also built up to correspond with the unusual height. A make-up was built over the shoulders, waist and hips; in fact, over every part of the body in which the skin was not exposed to the camera. When this build-up was strapped on and the ungainly clothes strapped over it, there was a space of six or eight, inches of wrist and five or six of neck which had to be carefully painted and made-up every time Karloff put on the intricate paraphernalia. The head itself was built into one head almost four inches higher than Karloff's own head, by means of a box-like dome which came down fully to the, eyebrows and was there moulded and worked into Karloff's own features. This unnatural looking brow had been flattened on the lop to represent the place where Frankenstein had inserted the brain. On either side of the neck, a sort of a spigot was attached, held in the back by invisible wires. Also, the nose and lips were artificially enlarged out of all resemblance either to Boris Karloff or to any other human being.