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Tod Slaughter: Barnstorming Butcher of Melodramatic Menace continued.

The ensuing year would see two non-horror entries into his diary, Song of the Road and Darby and Joan (both 1937) but from what I gather, his characterization didn't stray too far from his usual performances. His next foray into the macabre was It’s Never Too Late To Mend the same year, unusually directed by one David McDonald, but using once again screenwriter HF Maltby and much of the by now regular supporting cast, such as DJ Williams as the elderly farmer and Marjorie Taylor as the object of the fiend's unwanted affections: the fiend of course being you-know-who as what else but a wicked village squire, but this time using his role as the local JP to imprison and torture people rather than actually killing them. Tod's performance here is somewhat restrained by his earlier standards, possibly due to the film's funding by a Christian society who obviously wanted it to be a realistic depiction of the judicial system's ills - although he is still allowed to go bonkers during the final reel and threaten to turn a gun on everyone whilst cackling insanely up to the point of his own arrest. The film is unusual for its time in that it actually appears to have been written with a serious point other than entertainment in mind, and could be seen possibly as the UK's first social message movie, not to mention that as a horror film it belongs to that select group of rarities in which death plays only a minor part in the proceedings. It also predates Mark Robson's Bedlam (1946) in which Karloff would handle a similar role with considerably more subtlety, by the best part of a decade, and therefore shows that British cinema in the 1930s had just as much chance of influencing things Stateside as the other way round.

This sojourn into social comment completed, Tod returned to working with the director with whom he felt most at home - George King- and by the end of the year they had dispatched The Ticket of Leave Man, which again takes prison and crime as its basis, but is actually less of a horror movie and more of a straight drama. From this point, Slaughter and King were on a roll - Sexton Blake and The Hooded Terror (1938) which pits him as the aforementioned Terror against George Curzon's boyhood detective hero, is a cracking adventurous romp (although sadly the only Blake film in which our man gets to appear) and even manages to drag the lovely Greta Gynt into the proceedings, whilst The Face at the Window (1939) is by far and away the apex of everything they ever achieved together, as good a horror movie as any in any decade and actually for once even quite scary!! The only way to follow this tour de force would be to return to more plundering of literary classics, and true to form Crimes at The Dark House (1940) an extremely unsubtle and bludgeoning adaptation of Wilkie Collins' The Woman In White, is a gem, with The Slod (playing who else but 'The False Percival Glyde') firing on all cylinders ("I'll feed yer entrails to the pigs!!") for what would possibly be the last time.

The outbreak of World War II saw a five year hiatus in which films depicting horror, terror and deprivation were, if not banned, at least actively discouraged so as not to lower morale, and thus saw our (anti)hero receive very little work: by the time he returned to our screens in the much longer The Curse Of The Wraydons (1946) an extension of the Spring Heeled Jack myth, things were not quite the same and would never be again. Whilst still as hissable, booable and heh-heh-hehable as ever, the years (not to mention the beers) had taken their toll on Slaughter - by now aged 61 - and for the first time in his career he looked tired, although labouring as he was under the slow and torturous direction of the inept Victor M Gover, a man with not even half of King’s flair (which is saying something when you think about it) one fails to see how even a great actor could have failed to be slightly lethargic. Furthermore, it is quite humorous to imagine that this by now drastically overweight man, who, let’s face it, was never a lithe young thing even in his heyday, has the magic power to jump over buildings - he looks like he has enough difficulty negotiating staircases. One can only surmise what his personal life entailed, as in this day and age it is impossible to find anyone, with the exception maybe of Aubrey Woods, still alive who worked with him - but as one would expect from someone with such cult of personality, tales of debauch, decadence, opium, alcohol and a squillion illegitimate children from Crewe to Carshalton abound. All supposition aside it’s fair to say that Slaughter indulged in most of the pleasures of the lifestyle of a star of film and theatre (don’t forget, he was still active on the boards even throughout his movie career) and, like anyone in his sixties, was probably feeling the side-effects by now.

What we must also take into account is that things were changing by this time- the world had just seen a bloody and horrible war, including what is still to this day history’s most sickening and shocking holocaust, and in terms of ‘horror’ dressing up in a cape and cloak, impersonating characters from Victorian literature and cackling “You’ll never take me alive” and “Damn yer britches” at the audience was simply no longer enough. 1940s audiences demanded if not more realism then at least less fantasy from their horror movies, even if most of them were still set in country houses and cobbled streets- and, what’s more, the barnstormingly OTT style of acting favoured by Slaughter and his compadres was fast going out of fashion, something that may not have been helped by the fact that half of the nation’s music halls that hadn’t already been levelled by the Luftwaffe were closing down. To give him his credit though, he was well aware of this, and it therefore seems no coincidence that his next feature film - which would also prove to be his last - would not only utilize the skills of a younger, fresher writer with new ideas (John Gilling) but also adopt a far darker, grittier and more openly malicious tone. The Greed of William Hart (1948) is set in Edinburgh (although still quite obviously filmed, like everything else of the time, on a back lot somewhere between Iver and Stoke Poges) and is The Slod’s token take on the Burke and Hare myth, with the names changed for unspecified legal reasons. In all fairness, although he still looks visibly old and weary, and his accent veers from Oirish to Scottish to West Country of its own free will, he delivers a respectably menacing performance here that for once doesn’t plumb the depths of theatricality- and the same goes for the supporting cast too, featuring the aforementioned Woods as the obligatory ‘Daft Jamie’ and Jenny Lynn, by now the real-life Mrs Slaughter, as Hart’s hapless wife aka ‘Sleep’n Beauty’, all of whom seem to be really making an effort. That said, the film is in equal parts as unsatisfying in terms of bonhomie as it is credible in delivery, so maybe his unmistakable sheer chutzpah is what we really admire (and want) from him after all.

Unsurprisingly, the film fell between two stools - too ‘real’ for his hardcore following and too kitsch for younger audiences who had only recently been exposed to the cinematic wonders of John Boulting’s Brighton Rock. One can’t lay the blame for this at Tod’s door, though, as it’s obvious from his performance here that he’s really trying to “get with the programme” so to speak. Maybe veteran director Oswald Mitchell, whose heavy-handed traditional style clashes badly with Gilling’s streamlined script, and who would soon depart this world, was to blame here. Whatever the reason, this would be the last time Tod appeared in a feature-length production on the big screen: apart from two 30-minute shorts, A Ghost For Sale (1952), which largely consists of reworked footage from the earlier Wraydons, and Murder at the Grange (1953) which we will touch on later, the remaining eight years of his life were divided between his first love - the theatre- and the wondrous new-fangled invention he felt he could exploit to his advantage, in other words television. A live performance of Spring Heeled Jack was broadcast on BBC1 in 1950: rumours abound that it still exists somewhere, but like most other televised productions of the time, including of course the lamented pre-Hammer performances of Peter Cushing other than 1984, it does not appear to have been recorded in any fashion and therefore one would doubt that there is any truth in this. I’d be happy to be proven wrong, though!! More likely to be found somewhere, as they were broadcast both in the UK and US, were the two performances he gave as arch-criminal and fiendish mastermind Terence Reilly - no relation to composer Terry Riley - in the ‘featurettes’ King of the Underworld and Murder at Scotland Yard, which kick-started the Scotland Yard series on ‘the box’ and were both also made in 1952. Believe it or not, these were also directed by William Gover, although any tendencies toward overlong exposition that he had been allowed to indulge on the silver screen would, one imagines, have been severely reined in for TV.

I myself have not seen the abovementioned programmes, but reports from those who have suggest that Tod had once more ‘found his mojo’ and was thoroughly enjoying his new role: he definitely loved working alongside Patrick Barr (like himself, a veteran of 30s potboilers, such as The Gaunt Stranger and Midnight at Madame Tussauds), cast as his nemesis Inspector John Morley. The public obviously took to this with open arms, as both were invited to reprise their roles in the quota quickie upon which we have previously touched, Murder at the Grange: Slaughter is not actually credited here, which has led some to believe that he doesn’t appear in it, but he certainly does - only we the audience are not supposed to know that the kindly butler is in fact arch criminal Riley, and therefore announcing his presence in the film would have been a dead giveaway. Nevertheless, in what limited screen time he has, the old charm and fervour still shows through.

These were Tod’s last appearances in any form of starring role onscreen. He clocks up a guest appearance in the recently-unearthed Puzzle Corner No 14 (1954) - a kind of quiz show of the time, although whether for TV or cinema is unclear - once more playing Sweeney Todd and delivering the usual macabre monologue one had come to expect. Almost 70 by now, he is also heavily bewigged and grossly overweight - yet the ravages of time can’t hide or dull the cackle and menace which just never seemed to go away. This clip, which has been seen as recently as 2002, was thought to be his farewell to the screen, with an added poignancy stemming from the fact that the presenter actually says ‘goodbye’ to him - except it wasn’t. Recent research has shown that in January 1956 he appeared in Forecast Unsettled, an episode of the popular US mystery series Lilli Palmer Theatre. These were again hour-long featurettes, introduced by the great German actress/siren, and Tod plays one ‘Robinson Wills’: the episode was broadcast in May of that year, four months after his death, which would suggest that it was pre-recorded and therefore has a chance of turning up somewhere. One can only hope.

Still storming the stages of the UK in the midst of all this televisual tomfoolery, still assaulting audiences with his own peculiar brand of old-fashioned bludgeon and charisma, and still the king of all treacherous, lecherous villainy, Norman Carter Slaughter died - in harness - (well Derby actually) on 19 February 1956. Collapsing in his dressing room from a coronary thrombosis after a particularly frenetic performance of what else but Maria Marten, which he saw through to the very end, he was DOA at the nearest hospital, therefore going out exactly the way he had come in. Around this time, further south in Berkshire, two chaps by the names of Carreras and Fisher were planning their own adaptations of classic Gothic melodrama for a (then) relatively small company called Hammer. As did Tod’s reign of terror end, so did theirs begin later that year, in no small part due to the casting of two actors by the names of Cushing and Lee. They would turn British cinema upside down to an even greater extent than their barrel-chested predecessor. Continuing the strange, almost fateful logic of the British horror lineage, fifteen years later, an aspiring exploitation director and all round London scenester by the name of Peter Walker, who had admired Slaughter’s later work as a child, would commission his scriptwriters to write roles for an elderly actor by the name of Patrick Barr...