Author Archive: Retro

Public Domain Cartoons - Betty Boop

Before Willem Dafoe and Anthony Hopkins, Boris Karloff was the go-to character actor when it came to portraying all facets of the seedier side of hum

In Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), private detective Eddie Valiant is slumped at a table at the Ink and Paint Club, awaiting suspect Jessica Rabbit’s performance,

when a voice calls from off-screen, “Cigars? Cigarettes?” With just two words in that warbling baby voice, Eddie knows who the cigarette girl is before he sees her: Betty Boop.

Why Betty Boop Still Tickles Our Fancy

“What are you doing here?” Eddie asks Betty. The 1930’s star is out of place in the 1947 film noir setting.

“Work’s been kinda slow since cartoons went to color,” Betty bashfully rolls her shoulders.

Betty Boop in fact starred in one color cartoon, Poor Cinderella of 1934. That it was Fleischer Studios’ first foray into color speaks to Betty’s popularity. Poor Cinderella boasts lovely painted backgrounds, a [...]

Boris Karloff: Enduring Screen Icon

Before Willem Dafoe and Anthony Hopkins, Boris Karloff was the go-to character actor when it came to portraying all facets of the seedier side of humanity.

In Universal Studios’ The Mummy (1932), Boris Karloff plays an Egyptian named Imhotep who is revived after 2,700 years of slumber when an archeologist’s assistant reads aloud the hieroglyphics of a cursed scroll. Some version of this story has been regurgitated onscreen nearly every decade since, but the title character has never been performed with Boris Karloff’s astonishing pathos, grace, and intensity. These represent merely a fraction of the attributes that make Karloff an abiding legend of the silver screen.

The Mummy’s loony premise doesn’t seem to faze him as an actor; he enunciates his dialogue with the same focused severity required to play King Lear. Lines like “My love has lasted longer than the temples of our gods” might elicit overacting from lesser

Public Domain Movies With Bela Lugosi

Whether one views him as an iconic master of the macabre or a troubled performer who never got the attention he deserved, Bela Lugosi's name still rings bells -- typically large ones, perched atop the spire of a weathered Gothic castle.

Bela Lugosi: Enduring Screen Icon

Born Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó in 1882 to a middle-class family in Lugos, Austria-Hungary, Lugosi dropped out of school at age twelve to pursue his dream of becoming a thespian. For the next two decades, Lugosi traveled throughout the continent and beyond, acting in stage productions and early silent films before eventually ending up in America, where he landed a career-making role in the 1927 Broadway production of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Though the quality of Lugosi's artistic output waxed and waned in the thirty years that followed, his on-screen image remained largely tethered to the aesthetics of Count Dracula. Nevertheless, Lugosi boasts a diverse filmography [...]

Mad scientist makes a small-time crook invisible in order to steal radium, a necessary ingredient in his invisibility formula. Unfortunately, the formula has some unpredictable side-effects… Dir. Edgar G. Ulmer

In 1960, a military test pilot is caught in a time warp that propels him to year 2024 where he finds a plague has sterilized the world’s population.