The session: Getting Slaughtered by Tod Slaughter!
films starring the "Monster Man of Europe, the criminally underappreciated Tod Slaughter
The Movies and Grades:
Necessary Warning -- there may be spoilers
The big question from this session is how Tod Slaughter has remained so unknown? Keith explained it away as his choosing to stay in England and return to the stage. At any rate, he could have been up there with horror film stars such as Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Instead, he seems to be little more than a footnote in cinema lore.
But what a footnote he is! With his rubber face and his expressions of feigned indignation, he is always interesting to watch, and entertaining. In these movies, he was, in many ways, the perfect villain. In his introduction, Keith noted that he was the prototype for the "Dastardly Dan" type character -- the guy who would tie a young damsel to a railroad track. And you can totally see it. He may not be literally twirling a mustache, but he should be.
These movies were not monster movies, unlike so many (but not all of) the films of Cushing and Lee. These were crime dramas. Tod Slaughter plays the villain, always willing to kill in order to make a buck. True to the Dastardly Dan persona, there's always a woman to serve as his innocent victim. And, of course, the villain has to get it in the end.
These films did seem a bit claustrophobic, and had the staging of plays. That's especially true of The Greed of William Hart, which is an adaptation of the Burke and Hare story. Keith, and others in the class, think that Burke and Hare was done better in The Flesh and The Fiends (1960), but I liked this version better.
These were fun stories told in an entertaining way. I went into this session with very low expectations, since Keith was featuring an actor I had never heard of, and showing code-era films. But I'm happy to say that this went way beyond all expectations.
Trailers (or, in their absence, other YouTube clips related to the films):
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