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Tod Slaughter: Barnstorming Butcher of Melodramatic Menace continued.

Tod Slaughter was no great innovator- at least not consciously. He wasn’t even a great actor by anyone else’s standards, although capable of turning in performances of restraint when called upon such as those given in It’s Never Too Late to Mend and even parts of The Face at the Window. More often than not, he surrounded himself with inferior players, such as Marjorie Taylor, Lawrence Hanray and John Warwick, in order to make himself shine brightly - and it worked. Some film critics talk about the relationship that truly great thespians, such as Richard Burton, had with the camera: not only did the Slod not really have one, quite often he wasn’t even aware of it. Little surprise then that he chose to align himself with directors of a decidedly un-cinematic bent. As far as he was concerned, he was still onstage, cackling, leering and annunciating with near-perfect-but-occasionally-slipping-back-into-Geordie diction at a massed crowd of hundreds who had all come to boo, hiss and shout “Behind you!!” at the villain of the piece - in his mind and possibly theirs, the greatest villain of all.

But more importantly than anything else, he was the first to give British horror movies and thrillers a definable identity, and their first true fan cult, which at a time when Karloff, Hitchcock and their compadres had fled across the great pond to make their fortunes, was what we badly needed. In doing so he brought enjoyment to millions, as well as making later generations aware of the existence of Victorian melodrama. Practically every image, whether serious or comic, we have in British culture of a movie ‘bad guy’ - hell, even half the ‘evil fiendish masterminds’ portrayed on the radio in Goon Show and Round The Horne sketches - is in some way due to Tod Slaughter, to the point where we find it sometimes difficult to separate it from the actor himself - and for that reason alone, we should seek out his films and fondly remember him. But most of all, we should dim the lights and prepare for some sheer unadulterated entertainment - still among the best ever committed to celluloid.

This is, of course, not an opinion that will be shared by ‘serious’ cineastes, even those who profess to be horror lovers (so screw ‘em!! What do they know anyway?), nor indeed the so-called ‘expert’ described in my opening paragraph. It will, however, be shared by anyone who ever professed a love of penny dreadfuls or English Gothic (in the true sense of the word here, not Andrew Eldritch), and sat, with a glass of port, by candlelight and a roaring fire, in living rooms from Thames Ditton to Ferguslie Park, daring for maybe 65 minutes to step into that magical, low-budget, stagey, costumey world of lissome lasses, corrupt lawyers, wily old farmers and evil, scheming lords of the manor, of gas lit cobbled streets and hidden passageways ‘neath becurtained drawing rooms, in which the babbling maniac - before he found himself inevitably cornered and flung himself to the mercy of the equally babbling Thames or Seine - reigned supreme.

D. R. ‘Wicked Lord of Yonder Village’ SHIMON