Yes, it had come to this. At one time, in the early 1930’s, one of the most recognizable Hollywood stars in the world. Dracula! A line for the ages: “Listen to them, the children of the night; what music they make!” An improbable sex symbol, despite being nearly fifty, Hungarian, and spectacularly unattractive. Still. An icon. A legend. A part hundreds would have killed for, provided they didn’t have to endure the same post-film oblivion. The descent into poverty, obscurity, and heroin. From fevered heights to the indignity of the Old Man. No, not even a name. Just a type. The type who gets all of fifty-four seconds of screen time and it’s still too much. Far too much. More disturbingly, these fifty-four seconds weren’t even intended for the film they ended up occupying. Just some silent test footage for another project altogether. But director Ed Wood saw something. Could sense the greatness. And when that same old man died two days before production began, what might have been lost forever spurred on an undisputed classic.
Naturally, we’re talking about Plan 9 from Outer Space, the greatest bad movie of them all. A cult obsession so revered, it’s no longer considered bad. It just is. Locked in time, preserved in amber, and awaiting each new generation with its unrivaled insanity. A movie meant to be a filmmaker’s own Citizen Kane, only without any of the necessary talent. Fire and passion, yes, and a fanatical determination to bring it to the masses, but instead of Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles, you’d have Tor Johnson and Vampira. Stock footage and never-ending continuity errors. Stilted dialogue and wooden acting. And yes, Bela Lugosi. They were his fifty-four seconds, after all. He’d attend a funeral, look at the sky, cry a bit, then smell a flower. Finally, despite still quite obviously remaining in his front yard (though off camera), he’d be hit by a car. The screeching tires and shattering screams would prove it. He barely had time to mourn. Less than a minute to end a career. Millions of fans, reduced to a grimace or two sans dialogue. Goddamn the world and its cruelty.
Few know how much Bela was paid for his footage. Even at scale, less than a minute won’t buy you lunch at Bob’s Big Boy. It certainly wouldn’t be enough to go into Bela’s arm. It’s likely he didn’t get anything at all, since everything was intended somewhere down the line. It’s enough Bela was upright. Roused from his bed to open the curtains and see a bit of purpose. But Ed and Bela were like that. Tight as a drum, thick as thieves. Ed would do for Bela what Tarantino later did for Travolta. Both saved his bacon and resurrected the cheers. Only Bela wouldn’t hear them. Imagine, for a moment, if Lugosi hadn’t been felled by that heart attack in the summer of ’56. Alive and kicking, or at least alive. Those sad, dying eyes watching theaters filled to the brim with excitement and good cheer. The festivals. The autographs. The pats of the back when all you got from 1935 forward were dismissive shoves. A new purpose, and reason to step off the horse.
You can reasonably argue that fifty-four seconds of silent footage not even meant for Plan 9 is pushing the boundaries of The Unsung, but two facts are unavoidable. One, Wood used that footage to craft a masterpiece. Craptastic, beyond question, but how many other films from 1958 are you discussing right now? And two, it becomes known that Lugosi’s character, nameless as he is, still bagged a looker like Vampira during his tragic life. It is her funeral, after all, he is attending. And it’s her slim, big-breasted (and very much dead) body that first appears as evidence of an extra-terrestrial plot. And by dying, Lugosi finds grandeur at last, forever connected to one of the most hilarious body doubles in the history of the craft. Hell, we even know his name: Dr. Tom Mason, a chiropractor, because Ed Wood wouldn’t dare hang around legitimate medical men. No, only quacks and fools for this guy, the kind Wood felt most deserved his hot checks and six-hour, catering-free shoots.
So, yes, Unsung, without apology or equivocation. Unsung because it’s Bela. Unsung because it’s Wood. And Unsung because when you have the bad luck of dying too soon, the best way to be elevated to the cinematic heavens is to be replaced by a man a foot taller and a good two decades younger. Fans will scream, “That’s not Bela!” and while not much, they’re still saying your name. Noting your absence. Wishing it had been you to kill a bunch of goofy cops in a plan for world domination.
Better yet, the final time we saw Mr. Lugosi in a movie house, his halting gait was accompanied by the half-cocked, insistent tones of Criswell. Yes, that Criswell. Soothsayer, visionary, buffoon. A man so lacking in guile he could utter, without a trace of embarrassment, “And remember my friends, future events such as these will affect you in the future.” Bela and Criswell connected, joined at the hip forever. Peas in a pod because that’s how life ends up sometimes. And then, one fine day many decades later, you’d be played by Martin Landau. And by god, he’d win an Oscar. Bela’s Oscar, in many respects. It may have ended here, with Plan 9, but in all the best ways, it was just the beginning.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.