Let No Man Write My Epitaph...I'll Film It Myself: Part III

When faced with the inevitable, actors are sometimes offered the privileged opportunity to look death in the eyes and carve their own epitaph. Since fate is fickle, there are, unfortunately, instances when an actor ‘s last hurrah is bluntly realized as a swan song gone wrong.

Boris Karloff was frail and literally on his last legs when he appeared in four Mexican-produced thrillers shortly before his death. Juan Ibanez directed the south-of-the-border footage for "House of Evil," "The Fear Chamber," "The Snake People" and "The Incredible Invasion," while Karloff’s scenes were filmed in Los Angeles by Jack Hill, a college classmate of Francis Ford Coppola’s who apprenticed with B-movie mogul Roger Corman and later directed the blaxploitation flicks "Coffy" and "Foxy Brown," starring cult favorite Pam Grier. The actor was so ill that he was usually shown seated, leaning, or in a wheelchair. All four cheapies were released posthumously in 1969.

Basil Rathbone, in The Film Encyclopedia by Ephraim Katz, was dubbed "the American screen’s villain…an ideal archenemy for many of Hollywood’s leading heroes, crossing swords and exchanging innuendoes with such stars as Errol Flynn (‘Captain Blood,’ ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’) and Tyrone Power (‘The Mark of Zorro’)." Gifted with a rich, sonorous voice that favored his polished, often aloof presence, he became best known as the cinema’s definitive Sherlock Holmes, a role he grew to vehemently dislike, fearing that typecasting as Holmes would ruin his career.

Born in South Africa and educated in England, Rathbone became adept in classical and Shakespearean theater. He received a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his performance as Tybalt in the 1936 screen version of "Romeo and Juliet."

According to Leonard Maltin, writing in The Movie Encyclopedia, Basil Rathbone’s last films included "the uniformly worthless ‘Queen of Blood’ (1966) (featuring a young Dennis Hopper), ‘Voyage to a Prehistoric Planet’ (1966), ‘The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini’ (1967) and (above, with John Carradine and Joi Lansing) ‘Hillbillys in a Haunted House’ (1967)," pitting country music star Ferlin Husky against a spy ring after an atomic formula. Costarring Lon Chaney Jr. and John Carradine, with appearances by fellow country western musicians Merle Haggard and Sonny James, the movie was the highly anticipated sequel to "Las Vegas Hillbillys," starring Husky and Mamie Van Doren.

Rathbone’s final movie role, neglected in most filmographies, was in "Autopsy of a Ghost," a 1968 Mexican horror-comedy. In The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, author Michael Weldon remarked, "John Carradine plays…Satan with horns. Basil Rathbone is a ghost looking for a perfect love…A blond robot falls for the 75-year-old Rathbone. The comedy ends with a nuclear holocaust. Those funny Mexicans!"

George Sanders was born in 1906 in St. Petersburg, Russia, to British parents, who uprooted the family to England during the Russian Revolution. Sanders, at first, set out to be a success in business, but, in the wake of unsatisfactory attempts in the tobacco and textile markets, he decide to pursue acting in the early 1930s.

Sanders migrated to Hollywood in 1936 and rose to stardom as a leading man, debonair cad, and villain. According to Leonard Maltin, he was "a suave, urbane performer who oozed cynicism from every pore." He could play Nazi officers as capably as the hero of "The Saint" and "The Falcon" series of crime thrillers. (Above) He garnered the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role-of-a-lifetime as a sarcastic Broadway theater critic in "All About Eve" (1950), although Maltin noted that "his most enduring work may…be his vocal performance as the villainous tiger Shere Khan in Walt Disney’s ‘The Jungle Book’ (1967)."

Shortly before killing himself in 1972 with an overdose of sleeping pills, Sanders made one last screen appearance as a visibly listless devil worshipper named Shadwell in 1972’s "Psychomania" (otherwise known as "The Death Wheelers"), an offbeat horror-comedy about an undead motorcycle gang who rise from their graves to terrorize local villagers. Sanders began his suicide note with the words, "Dear World: I am leaving because I am bored." Commenting on the actor’s demise in The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, Michael Weldon commented that Sanders "did not return on a motorcycle."

Sultry, glamorous, husky-voiced Veronica Lake (1919-1973) soared to stardom in Hollywood film noir of the 1940s. She became a favorite pinup girl of World War II GIs, and her peek-a-boo hairstyle with tresses falling over one eye created such a widespread craze that the Government asked her to stop wearing her hair like that for the duration of the war because women working in factories were in danger of catching their hair in machinery.

According to The Film Encyclopedia, Lake "clicked best at the box office as the screen partner of Alan Ladd in a match-up of cool, determined personalities." They were paired in three films: "This Gun for Hire" (1942), "The Glass Key" (1942) and "The Blue Dahlia" (1946).

Once romantically linked with the likes of Aristotle Onassis and Howard Hughes, she saw her career slide in the late 1940s, and by the early 1950s she had disappeared from the public eye, except for occasional headlines of arrests for drunkenness and disorderly conduct. She was working as a cocktail waitress in a New York City hotel in the 1960s when she was rediscovered by a newsman.

Lake’s first film in 22 years, and her last, before finally settling in England, was the low-budget, shot-in-Miami Beach "Flesh Feast" (above). She co-produced and starred in the 1970 movie as a mad scientist (whose mother died in a Nazi concentration camp) experimenting with youth restoration using flesh-eating maggots. Real maggots were featured in close shots, while rice was used for group-maggot scenes. Michael Weldon noted, "The big surprise is that her secret new patient turns out to be Hitler, and the scientist destroys the exiled dictator with a swarm of maggots."

Joan Crawford (1904-1977), immortalized in the 1981 camp classic "Mommie Dearest," starring Faye Dunaway, worked as a laundress, waitress and shop clerk before she turned a Charleston contest into a dancing career. Performing in a Broadway chorus line, she was singled out by MGM for a movie contract. Driven by hard-nosed ambition and gifted with unflappable adaptability, Crawford endured as a top box-office star over an incredible span of nearly four decades. Leonard Maltin wrote, "In truth, she clung to leading-lady status longer than she should have, but it was a hard-won status and one she was loathe to abandon."

According to Ephraim Katz’s The Film Encyclopedia, "during the flapper era of the late ‘20s, she rivaled Clara Bow as the persona of Charleston-dancing flaming youth." Crawford later "represented Hollywood glamor at its shiniest." After being discharged by MGM as box-office poison, she reinvented herself "as a superstar at Warner Brothers in a new image, playing the suffering heroine of pulp melodramas and winning a 1945 Academy Award for her performance as the sacrificing mother in ‘Mildred Pierce.’"

In the 1950s "she played mature femme fatales, and in the ‘60s, when again she was considered through in the business, she came back triumphantly…as the costar of her former rival, Bette Davis, in the surprise box-office hit ‘What Ever Happened to Baby Jane.’"

Crawford’s final films were a pair of turgid chill-o-dramas produced in England. At age 63, she was ill-advisedly costumed in leotards as the histrionic ringmaster of a traveling circus plagued by bizarrely gruesome murders in "Berserk!" (1968). Michael Weldon called it "the tackiest yet for Joan, who, with her hair in a tight bun, manages to outyell the other actors."

In 1970’s "Trog," Crawford starred as a fervidly dedicated anthropologist who discovers the missing link, a troglodyte (prehistoric caveman), played by an actor named Joe Cornelius (no relation to the Cornelius character in the original "The Planet of the Apes") in a hairy apeman suit left over from Stanley Kubrick’s "2001: A Space Odyssey," who, once unleashed, goes on a killing spree. Trog enjoys classical music but runs amok when he hears rock ‘n’ roll. "When Trog is found in a cave," according to Michael Weldon, "a crowd gathers to watch and drink Pepsi," not surprisingly since Crawford, whose late husband had been president of Pepsi Cola, insisted on such product placement in her films.

Reviewer Ned Daigle noted, "‘Trog’ is truly ungodly. The performances are rotten, the Trog makeup is so bad it looks like it will slide right off the actor’s face, and everything proceeds at a snail’s pace to idiotic situations. It’s really sad to see such a huge star be consigned to the grade-Z abyss of films like this. But, hey, a girl’s gotta eat."