John Carradine

You have to feel at least a little bad for the man. He worked with Cecil B. DeMille and John Ford, not just once each but repeatedly. He was in some stone-cold classics, including stone-cold classic horror movies. The man was in the James Whale Bride of Frankenstein, for pity’s sake. And then his career dried up for some reason, and he ended up making not one but two dreadful horror movies with Tor Johnson. (They would have made a French Foreign Legion picture with a truly bonkers cast together in 1936, but Carradine’s scenes were deleted.) Wikipedia says he was trying to finance a touring theatrical company, but surely DeMille movies pay the bills just as well as, say, The Black Sheep, which he made in the same year as The Ten Commandments.

Carradine’s life seems vague. A lot of his Wikipedia page is “according to his son David” and “according to his son Keith” and so forth. Reading between the lines, one sees a deeply unhappy man. His father died when he was two; his stepfather regularly beat him. According to David, he ran away at fourteen. He study as a sculptor and artist before making his way to Hollywood. Initially, he was doing set design for DeMille, but once DeMille heard his voice, he became part of the company. There followed literally hundreds of screen appearances interspersed with a lot of stage performances and four unhappy marriages.

It’s hard not to feel sorry for the Carradine children when you read his biography. His first wife apparently had repeated illegal abortions without his knowledge because he wanted a large family and she didn’t; he spent time in jail for contempt of court for not paying alimony to her. In the forties. The two children they did have spent time in foster homes; after the second divorce, his sons spent time in a home for abused children. It doesn’t say who was abusing them, but it does say that their mother wasn’t allowed to see them for eight years. His third wife died just before their divorce would have come through in a house fire.

Even in dreck like Astro-Zombies, his talent is apparent. He’s doing what he can with the material. But it’s a lot easier to be talented in Stagecoach than Red Zone Cuba. (Or Night Train to Mundo Fine, to give it its other title.) In the ‘50s, he’d start picking up TV work, and of course he did Kung Fu with David; in fact, on one episode, he’s one of three credited Carradines, and a fourth appears as Archive Footage. His TV career actually went back to the ‘40s; he did Shakespeare twice for Philco Television Playhouse. But boy did the rise of the TV Western boost his career for a while there.

Clearly John Carradine was complicated. He is, however, this year’s “wait, I haven’t written about them yet?” It’s an October tradition around here. His career simultaneously dried up and blossomed, because while the good offers appeared to have been fewer and further between, he was still in literally hundreds of roles. Did he make seventy uncredited appearances to boost his numbers as high as he’d claimed? Eh, I suspect not; there’s also no real evidence he tested for Dracula or Frankenstein in the lead roles. He seems to have been prone to exaggeration. Still, he died of a heart attack after climbing the Duomo, so at least he definitely died with some class.