by Art Chantry:
in pop horror and exploitation movies, there’s alway seems to be THE guy who plays the weird-oh roles. i’m not talking about the STARS (lon chaney sr. & jr., bela lugosi, boris karloff, christopher lee, peter cushing, barbara steele, vincent price, etc. etc.) i’m talking the evil assistants, somnambulists, mad lackeys and demented fuckup punks and psychos.
AC:lorre was a star, tho. he was close, but too famous to fit in the category. but, the facial familiarity here may make frye the ‘poor man’s peter lorre”.
these guys i’m talking about are often obscure enough that they aren’t household parlance, but they are usually adored by fandom. i’m talking about people like sybil danning, jeffery coombs, michael j. pollard, karen black, gary oldman, carroll borland, tor johnson, dick miller, elisha cook, jr., etc. – the people who made careers out of playing strange characters over and over again, never seeming to achieve full bore stardom. they are the folks content to just play every weirdo fuckup role they could get their sweaty little mits on. they seem as obsessed as the characters they play.
this is dwight frye. he’s sort of the ‘bull goose looney’ of twisted character actors. he was in so many of the early universal horror movies that he became synonymous with them. – renfield in ‘dracula’, fritz in ‘frankenstein’ and ‘bride of frankenstein’ (pictured here), ‘the invisible man’, ‘the vampire bat’. he even played in the stage version of dracula and (in one of his few non-horror movie roles) played wilmer the ‘boy toy gunsel’ in the original film version of the maltese falcon.
he died very young of a heart attack, do not much is really known about him. he’s just one of those really strange working actors of the early cinema who played all these intriguingly fuk tup™ people in some amazing classic movies. i’ve always wanted to know more about him, tho. he’s one of those sorts of guys. like, was he really as weird as he comes off?
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