In my more arrogant moments, I cling to the notion that, like my childhood attachment to comic books as a secret vice, any focus I might have had as a child on monster movies was a transitory thing. Just as I sometimes wish that I still had that secret stash of those now priceless copies of Spiderman, Supergirl, and Silver Surfer that Mother  threw away as soon as they were unearthed, occasionally a reminder of classic monster movies will touch something dormant in me.  I had such a moment earlier this month when I unexpectedly came across the following TCM listing on the 13th of October:

The Circus Queen Murder (1933)
Cast: Adolphe Menjou, Greta Nissen, Dwight
Frye. Dir: Roy William Neill. BW-65 mins.

I just knew. This was a movie that called my name, especially after I spotted the name of Dwight Frye in the cast list. Frye‘s extraordinarily indelible performances, blending the grotesque, the poignant and the funny in his characterizations in classic horror movies of the thirties have always fascinated and repelled me. He was particularly memorable as the benighted  “Renfield” in Dracula (1931), and as “Fritz”, the pitiable hunchbacked dwarf in Frankenstein (1931) who retrieves a defective brain for the monster, and as “Karl” who assists Colin Clive and Ernest Thesiger in the highly amusing burlesque in Bride of Frankenstein (1935), all of which helped to make these now nearly 80 year old “entertainments” memorable and fresh to this day and each of which confirmed his typecasting. Perhaps Frye played such parts too well, for he never quite escaped them.

My first encounter with Frye was in the Bela Lugosi film of Dracula directed by Tod Browning as the actor created the role of Renfield, the hapless, rather effeminate real estate agent who travels to Lugosi‘s castle to complete a transaction renting Carfax Abbey in England to the Count. His earnestness only earns him a new career path as a vampire’s slave, giggling maniacally at the foot of a seemingly abandoned ship, ferreting out any spare flies and fat spiders for a snack, and, after consorting with thousands of red-eyed rats, to eventually face his own end at his bored master’s hands with, despite, “all those lives on my conscience! All that blood on my hands!” Seeing this film for the first time a few decades ago on tv, I don’t remember being frightened or particularly intrigued by the man in the cape, Bela Lugosi. He seemed to be a strange old guy, who didn’t really seem to understand English; but Renfield was another story. That laugh, which my sister and I used to try to imitate, and his mad pleading with his guard in the loony bin he lands in or with his “master”, seemed much more compelling to us. Is it any wonder that casting agents, faced with further horror movie roles to fill, would think so often of Dwight Frye from then on? Not that it was always planned that way by Frye.

Long believed by film historians to have been lost, The Circus Queen Murder was the second of two ‘B’ films produced by Columbia Studios starring the natty Mr. Menjou as Thatcher Colt, a stylish Philo Vance-like police commissioner (not a DA as described above). This character was created by ’20s playwright and mystery writer Fulton Oursler, (who wrote mysteries under the pseudonym of Anthony Abbot). Writing under his own name, Oursler was better known for decades as a Christian author of such tomes as The Greatest Story Ever Told as well.  The first film made from one of the delightfully raffish mysteries “Mr. Abbot” cranked out, was  called Night Club Lady (1932). Like the recently broadcast circus mystery movie, it also focused on Adolphe and his faithful and efficient secretary, Kelly, (who, of course, loved the boss), a character played with some considerable warmth by forgotten starlet Ruthelma Stevens. Going on a much needed vacation in the randomly chosen upstate New York town of Gilead, (looking for that storied balm, no doubt), Menjou and Ruthelma, (who really should have changed her first name), pass the time on a rainy train trip by practicing lip reading across a crowded railway car. When about to arrive in Gilead, the train pauses long enough for the pair to spy a second rate circus near the tracks, whose horse-drawn wagons are struggling through a prodigious rain storm. Soon, of course, Menjou is asked to look into some mysterious events at the moth eaten circus.

While I like a good mystery any time one is offered, The Circus Queen Murder might more appropriately be described as a horror film due to the plot and the presence of a singular, intense actor–Dwight Frye–who stands out in any cast, but particularly in this one. Frye, playing an aerialist with a fleabag traveling circus, finds himself jilted by his bareback rider and trapeze artiste wife, “Josie La Tour”, played by Greta Nissen. A former ballerina and Ziegfeld Girl, who had an unconventional but interesting face for the movies, Nissen was almost a star of Hell’s Angels (1930) until producer Howard Hughes, appalled by her Norwegian accent, replaced her with a more conventional choice, Jean Harlow. While no great shakes as an actress, based on this movie, Nissen, near the end of her time in the movies, makes for a slightly shopworn, tawdry figure of obsession for poor Dwight. She is so callous to his character’s love for her that she threatens to have him committed in the next insane asylum they pass on their tour. His jealousy of her is so intense, that Flandrin even has it in for Nissen‘s dog, whose disappearance prompts her most emotional outburst. Sharing her favors with the darkly appealing Donald Cook, another man on the flying trapeze, (though this one wears all too appropriate little devil horns on his satiny costume) and fending off a shady investor who wants to make time with her, Nissen is so busy she almost falls out of her low cut pre-code negligee several times while being interviewed by Menjou, who is brought in by the circus to investigate a series of threatening notes that have appeared.

From the first appearance of Frye as Flandrin, arguing in the rain with the smug Cook about his interference in Flandrin’s allegedly happy marriage, we learn several things: There is almost no mystery in this movie, since we know that the eternal triangle is the only thing supporting the wispy plot here. The viewer can safely conclude that Flandrin the Magnificent is crackers. One can also discern fairly quickly that Dwight Frye, unlike the majority of actors who might mill around on screen, was incapable of giving a half-hearted performance. Directed with style and speed by Roy William Neill, best remembered for directing most of the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies,  The Circus Queen Murder is photographed, at times in almost poetically framed shots such as the scene showing an empty circus tent, by master cinematographer Joseph August. Director Neill, whose last movie would be one of my favorite film noirs, Black Angel (1946) with Dan Duryea, manages to add some pre-code touches of sin and appealing seediness to this film as well.  Neill and Frye would work together again ten years later in one of the actor’s final and better films, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943). In the 1933 film, we also meet a troupe of 14, (or is it 13?) cannibals traveling with the circus who communicate only with–you guessed it, Flandrin (Dwight Frye), since somehow, he’s the only one who speaks their lingo. Aside from the usual instances of casual racism that this exotic facet of the story introduces, it also allows detective Menjou to make the amusingly dry observation that “It’s a well known fact that cannibals differ from the rest of us in their dietary customs.” While Menjou and company are trying to sort out various disappearances, including that of the mad Flandrin, (and boy, is he missed), the circus follows that ragged show biz maxim and goes on. As Donald Cook, (looking none too athletic), ascends the ropes above the audience to perform his act, we see that the small, wiry figure of Flandrin (Dwight Frye) has found a strategic spot in the opening of the tent pole on top of the big top, where he can watch the proceedings and manipulate their outcome. With a demonically absorbed expression on his face while peeping through the tent, Frye‘s Flandrin reminded me of a satanic version of a “putto”, one of those armies of oddly knowing baby angels found floating around Baroque ceilings in the late Renaissance. Without disclosing all the details of the film’s rapid conclusion and the fate of all the characters, I will add that Frye as Flandrin does become what he has clearly longed for: the center of attention, with all eyes turned toward him in what Menjou explains to the crowd, is “positively his last public appearance.” Like the monsters he served so well (after a fashion) in the memorable horror movies mentioned, Dwight Frye became, however briefly, in this one film, a very human “monster” on display in the center ring, just this once.

In the same year that he made the low budget The Circus Queen Murder,  Mr. Frye, plaintively explained to a reporter that:

“If God is good, I will be able to play comedy, in which I was featured on Broadway for eight seasons and in which no producer of motion pictures will give me a chance! And please God, may it be before I go screwy playing idiots, half-wits and lunatics on the talking screen!”

Yet, it would appear, that in Dwight Frye‘s case, God was not particularly good or merciful, though perhaps the deity was a fan of this accomplished actor, whose squirmy, near hysterical thumb nail portraits of misfits, miscreants and masochists are among the best on film.

Born in Kansas in 1899, as Dwight Iliff Frye, he grew up in Colorado, studying piano and voice, with the hope of becoming a concert pianist eventually. By 14, he became smitten with the theater, haunting the local repertory company, studying acting, and eventually becoming an actor under the aegis of O.D. Woodward in Denver and later Spokane, Washington. After stints in vaudeville, and other stock companies, he eventually made his Broadway debut in 1922, in a role in a comedy called  “The Plot Thickens”, for which Frye received praise as a juvenile burglar in training from Algonquin Round Table member and theater critic Alexander Woolcott for his “fretfully whining” the line “oh, papa” particularly well. Originating the role of “The Son” in Pirandello‘s innovative, experimental play “Six Characters in Search of an Author” later that same year, Frye began a long run of noted appearances in plays and musicals, (including Jerome Kern, P.G. Wodehouse & Guy Bolton’s “Sitting Pretty”), and, while his expressive features, versatility and relatively short stature made him a reliable choice for supporting roles, he occasionally played leads too, notably in “A Man’s Man” in 1925 about the struggles of an ordinary man for success at a time of rampant materialism.  Frye also appeared in prestigious Theater Guild productions opposite actors such as Edward G. Robinson, Fredric March and even Bela Lugosi in a 1926 bit of folderol called “The Devil in the Cheese” about an archeological expedition mixed up with some brigands (and no vampires in sight). By the late ’20s, Dwight, like many New York actors with theatrical chops, was drawn to the West Coast, where he hoped to find work as an actor in the new talkies, following his marriage to fellow actress, Laura Mae Bullivant in 1928.

One of the first appearances that Dwight Frye made on celluloid was in one of the first movies in the gangster cycle that erupted with the dawn of sound in Doorway to Hell (1930). Though it starred Lew Ayres and James Cagney, they are well matched by Frye‘s violent physicality as a tommy gun toting gunsel in the movie. Dwight would go on to appear opposite Cagney in two other films, The Great Guy (1936) and Something to Sing About (1937), both of which were made during Cagney‘s time away from Warner Brothers, following his discontent with his typecasting. Frye‘s role in Something to Sing About as “Mr. Easton”, an effete makeup man is particularly amusing and was reportedly a parody of the Westmore brothers techniques on movie sets.

Frye also had another chance to show his tough guy moxie in the role of “Wilmer Cook” (above with Dudley Digges on the right) in the excellent early adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1931) (aka Dangerous Female), which featured a properly insolent Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade. Dwight infused his Wilmer with a flightier manic energy than that exhibited by Elisha Cook, Jr. in the more famous, later version of the story, but both are intriguingly eccentric types.

Unlike his fellow movie actors, Ayres, Cagney, or Cortez, however, Dwight Frye does not appear to have enjoyed the stability and buildup that a  long term contract at a studio might have offered him during his years in Hollywood. Perhaps for this reason, his stereotyping in horror roles and without a strong agent to promote him, Dwight seems to have struggled to find work almost continually on screen, appearing in uncredited parts even after his remarkable performances in several movies. After becoming a father in 1930 and the deepening Depression made constant work more of a necessity, Frye began to appear more in low budget films as well as A level movies. Though he sought better parts at one of the larger studios such as Warners, MGM and occasionally worked with good directors such as Tod Browning once and James Whale in six movies, he also settled repeatedly for remunerative quickies such as The Western Code (1932) (in which you can see for yourself how ill equipped Frye seems to have been to play a cowboy):

What is remarkable about Frye is not only his commitment to every role, large or small, in a genre picture made in about a week or a more ambitious drama, Dwight just poured on the melodrama with a hint of humor when the cameras turned. One example of this fierce acting style can be seen in this Edmund Lowe vehicle from 1932, called Attorney for the Defense, in which Frye searingly plays a man unjustly accused of a crime:

After finding himself once more appearing in a horror film, The Vampire Bat (1933), at the poverty row studio, Majestic Pictures, with several good actors, including Melvyn Douglas, Fay Wray and Lionel Atwill, in a role as–what else–a village idiot, I suspect that he may have decided to have some fun with his part. Frye‘s “Herman Gleib” was played, as usual, to the hilt, but with more than the usual fillip of humorous undertone. The movie, which is in the public domain and can be seen in its entirety here, is about a fictitious German town where giant bats appear to be attacking the citizenry. It features some particularly bad dialogue for the very peculiar Herman, including lines such as “You give me apples. Herman give you nice soft bat” as well as “Bats good. They not hurt Herman. Soft. Like cat.”

Sadly, though Dwight Frye continued to work in ever increasing small parts in movies, (sometimes unbilled), with only occasional better roles, the actor’s life ended in 1943, while riding home on the bus from the movies with his only child, a son, Dwight David Frye. The actor, who had been too young to serve in World War One and was kept out of service in the Second World War due to a bad heart, had been making ends meet by working at a defense plant rather than as an actor. On his death certificate, his occupation was listed as “tool designer”, not actor.

To this day, his bravura work attracts the fealty of everyone from film historians to goths to metal head music fans. They are all charmed, no doubt, by the vividness of Dwight‘s acting as well as the amusing off-shoots of his work, which includes an Alice Cooper song called “The Ballad of Dwight Fry”(The Nightmare) , a dreamy little ditty that reflects the actor’s more lurid characters rather than the man himself, who from all reports, was a hardworking, quite sane man, (who probably would have forgiven the rock star for misspelling his last name).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The following are upcoming films on TCM which feature Dwight Frye:

Something to Sing About (1937)  Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 7 AM ET
Tough Guy (1936)  Saturday, January 3rd, 2009at 6 AM ET
The Man in the Iron Mask (1939) Sunday, January 4th, 2009 at 8am Eastern

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This video is a well done compilation of clips showing Dwight Frye‘s range of film appearances, many of which are not in horror movies. Enjoy, and Happy Halloween!: