In acknowledgement of tomorrow's 100th anniversary of Peter Cushing's birth, I have decided to join my friend Pierre Fournier's Peter Cushing Centennial Blogathon by reprinting here -- for the first time anywhere -- the following essay, originally written for the November 1994 issue of FILM COMMENT.
WHEN PETER CUSHING, O.B.E., died at a Canterbury hospice in
the early morning hours of August 11, 1994, devotées of the fantastic cinema
experienced an unprecedented loss. The great figureheads of horror—Chaney,
Karloff, Lugosi, Price—were a sympathetic lot, but their careers are remembered
as campaigns of villainy. Cushing, on the other hand, was unique in that he
will be remembered as horror's first truly heroic actor. Whether creating life
as Baron Victor Frankenstein in THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957) and its
five sequels, or destroying the Undead as Dr. Van Helsing in HORROR OF DRACULA
(1958) and four of its sequels, Cushing—more vividly than any other
actor—seemed to inhabit the sliver of space between the fingers of
Michelangelo's God and Adam; at his best, he was like the Arm of God,
channeling a greater spiritual current into the genre's battles of Good vs.
Evil than they had ever known before, or probably ever will again.
DRACULA, 1958
Born May
26, 1913, in Kenley, Surrey ("between the towns of Ham and Sandwich,"
as he was fond of noting), Peter Wilton Cushing became enamored at an early age
with movies, particularly the American westerns of Tom Mix. At 25, he decided
to become an actor, and jumping past British regional theater, sailed to
Hollywood on a one-way ticket. He was not unlucky: his first job was acting
opposite Louis Heyward in THE MAN WITH THE IRON MASK (1939)—feeding
Hayward the dialogue of his twin brother and later being matted out of the
split-screen shots by Hayward himself. The tyro was so well-liked by the cast
and crew that he was given a line and a brief sword-fighting scene as the Royal
Messenger. Hayward and wife Ida Lupino befriended Cushing offscreen, giving him
free room and board and introducing him to company as their "son."
Their camaraderie enabled the struggling actor to land two more plumb assignments
in Hollywood's most golden year: bit parts opposite Laurel & Hardy in A
CHUMP AT OXFORD and Carole Lombard in VIGIL IN THE NIGHT (released
1940). Eighth-billed in the latter film, Cushing was soon accepting work in
features and shorts that failed to bill him at all. Homesick, broke and
concerned for his country's fate in the face of war, Cushing bade his Hollywood
friends farewell and worked his way home—pausing in Canada to labor in a motion
picture art department, painting swastikas for Michael Powell's THE 49th PARALLEL.
Back in
England, Cushing was declined for active wartime service and resumed acting in
the Entertainment National Service Association, where he met Helen Beck, a
willful blonde actress whom he married in 1943. Experience on the stage
strengthened Cushing's acting skills, bringing him to the attention of Laurence
Olivier, who cast him as Osric in his 1947 film production of HAMLET.
Expecting this coup to result in an avalanche of film offers, Cushing
was gravely disappointed: he didn't make another film until six years later,
when he won a small role in John Huston's MOULIN ROUGE (1952). Even that
opportunity did not arise until Helen, sensing a growing despair in her
inactive husband, wrote letters to several British production companies to
inform them that Peter Cushing was available for hire. Though unknown to the
general public, Helen was correct in sensing that his work was familiar to
industry insiders, and the ploy resulted in several serious offers.
NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR, broadcast December 12, 1954
Between
1951 and 1956, Peter Cushing was the centerpiece of 23 dramas broadcast live by
the BBC on Saturday nights (with a Thursday night repeat performance—also
live). He became Britain's first television star, winning the industry's
"Best Actor" award for three consecutive years and, far dearer, the
eponym "Mr. Television." He capped his reign with a legendary
performance as Winston Smith in NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1956), which
survives on kinescope only in its Thursday night edition. Cushing once
criticized this repeat performance as an exhausted, mechanical walk-through of
the original Saturday broadcast, but, shown last year on BBC as part of a
tribute to producer Rudolph Cartier, it remains the definitive dramatization of
Orwell's dystopian novel—an achingly human, yet terrifying exploration of
nostalgia in an age yet to come.
During the
early 1950s, Cushing distinguished himself in a number of small film roles—most
notably, as Deborah Kerr's cuckolded husband in THE END OF THE AFFAIR
(1954)—but he was beloved in England for appearing in remakes of foreign
theatrical hits, customized to suit the British viewing public. Thus, when
Hammer Film Productions decided to jump-start the comatose horror market with
the first color remake of Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, Cushing was their first
choice for the title role. Directed with surgical candor and fairy tale grace
by Terence Fisher, THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN was greeted with flaring
tempers by the same critics who later suggested that Powell's PEEPING TOM
be swept down the nearest sewer. As time has shown, they were seeing neither
film for what it was—but rather shrilly lamenting a presumed decline from the
upper crust origins of Cushing and Powell.
THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN, 1964
As played
by Cushing, Baron Frankenstein was the genre's first authentic anti-hero.
Meticulously developed over the course of a half-dozen films (all but one
directed by Fisher)—THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, THE REVENGE OF
FRANKENSTEIN (1958), THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN (1964; directed by
Freddie Francis), FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN (1967), FRANKENSTEIN
MUST BE DESTROYED (1969) and FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL
(1974)—he is also its most fully-delineated character. The Baron, like many
other Cushing characters, is a man whose mind is aflame with the vision of a better
world. His determination has nothing to do with restoring life to the dead—he
conquers that one easily enough—but as the films progress, he becomes
quixotically concerned with rescuing from oblivion the values of humankind that
are stolen from us every day by age, death and disease: talent, experience,
genius. Toward the achievement of that end, the Baron is blindly dedicated,
candidly misanthropic and ultimately ruthless. His unpredictability,
progressive scientific intelligence, and unwillingness to suffer fools gladly
make him a close cousin of Sherlock Holmes, another role that Cushing played
with great success in films (1959's THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES and
1984's THE MASKS OF DEATH) and on British series television.
After THE
CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, Cushing and co-star Christopher Lee were promptly
cast in another, more exciting remake—HORROR OF DRACULA (1958)—which
many fans still hold to be the definitive filming of Bram Stoker's perpetually
filmed novel. Here, Cushing confronted Lee's Dracula in his other signature
role of Dr. Van Helsing, wielding the cross without the condescension of Edward
Van Sloan, or the bombast of countless other interpreters, but with a
formidable religious conviction. When we consider the outstanding actors (including
Olivier and Anthony Hopkins) who found no more to the character than a broad
ethnic lampoon, Cushing's resolute, athletic, well-armed soldier of Christ
becomes all the more remarkable. Van Helsing's greatest moment occurs at the
film's finale—an idea suggested by Cushing himself—when, seemingly cornered by
Dracula, he bounds onto a banquet table, races to a window and rips the
curtains down, engulfing the vampire in a blast of morning sunlight. For once
the genre had managed to create a hero as dashing and unpredictable as his
adversary.
DRACULA A.D. 1972, 1973
Cushing and
Lee became the Karloff and Lugosi of the postwar era, making a score of scary
films together, including Hammer's oneiric remake of THE MUMMY (1959),
the gripping Freddie Francis film THE SKULL (1965) and NOTHING BUT
THE NIGHT (1972), the only film made under the banner of Lee's short-lived
Charlemagne Productions. Their final collaboration was the joint narration of FLESH
AND BLOOD: THE HAMMER HERITAGE OF HORROR, a video documentary about their
old stomping grounds, which aired by the BBC on two consecutive Saturday
nights—bookending the week that Cushing died of cancer—allowing the actor's
career to end where his fame had begun.
When
Cushing's wife died of emphysema in 1971, his screen persona—always metaphysical—darkened
and became inseparable from his mourning. No more heroes; he was drawn to
playing widowers, antique dealers, men with dead children, old soldiers and
booksellers, men with ancient codes of chivalry, amputees. He kept the pain
close to the surface: as the pathetic widower Arthur Grimsdyke in TALES FROM THE
CRYPT (1972), he speaks to a photograph he addresses as "Helen,"
and in THE GHOUL (1974), he used an actual photo of his late wife as a
prop, reportedly suffering a breakdown while filming a tearful soliloquy about
his (fictional) wife's suicide.
After years
of tragic self-indulgence, Cushing was enticed by George Lucas to play the
empirically evil Grand Moff Tarkin in STAR WARS (1977). He would follow
it with a dozen other movies, but Tarkin is the last top-flight Peter Cushing
performance—every bit as cold and imperious as the Baron on a disagreeable day.
For all its ALEXANDER NEVSKY Storm Troopers, the most purely
Eisensteinian moment in STAR WARS is the final shot of Tarkin, just
before the Death Star explodes: Cushing's pensive, avian features caught in
arch, expressionistic profile as he listens for the Big Bang.
STAR WARS, 1977
After Peter
Cushing, the elementary definitions of Good and Evil—which had dominated the
fantastic cinema since its inception—were no longer acceptable. Working from a
basic Christian belief that God made everyone, and that Satan tempts us through
our weaknesses, he took the genre's sense of character on a quantum leap toward
a new complexity, forcing the spiritual war that takes place within us all onto
higher ground—namely, the silver screen.
Perhaps for
these reasons, while recently screening Steven Spielberg's SCHINDLER'S LIST, I found
myself wondering what Cushing—in his prime—might have done with Liam Neeson's
role. At first, I found the daydream perverse, but as Spielberg's masterpiece
unfurled its deeply felt concerns with the issues of Good and Evil, and their
respective mysteries, I understood that it was fully compatible with the
prevailing concerns of Cushing's own oeuvre. Indeed, as Neeson displayed
the facets of his memorable character—a cigarette, a fashtidious German
accent, the romantic yet baleful gaze of a soul trapped in twilight—I realized
that Cushing had indeed been that person onscreen many times before.
As that
film says in its own way, a man who makes a difference is never gone.
Text (c) 1994, 2013 by Tim Lucas
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