Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) - Newspaper Ad [Oakland Tribune - July 27, 1948]

As baffling in retrospect as it might seem, star Lou Costello was adamant in NOT wanting to do this film. It took a hefty increase in salary and the hiring of a trusted director to get him on board. Good thing, as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein went on to become on of their most popular, and famous, films.

Come on, they even brought Bela Lugosi back to play Dracula! Although the studio evidently had to be talked into that bit of casting.

The Lost World (1960) - Newspaper Ad [San Francisco Examiner - July 24, 1960]

Producer-director Irwin Allen glued some plastic fins onto some live, and no doubt disgruntled, lizards, shot them with macro lens, and christened them DINOSAURS for this loose adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's classic adventure tale.

This might be on par with the colorful and campy television productions (i.e. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Lost in Space) that made Irwin Allen something of a household name in the sixties, before he became the legendary Master of Disaster in the seventies. I have yet to see it, but my experiences watching reruns of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Lost in Space, and Allen's lackluster and characterless direction of the both The Swarm and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, do not fill me with hope.
 

The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) / X the Unknown (1956) - Newspaper Ad [San Francisco Examiner - July 30, 1957]

John McCarty, in his seminal book Splatter Movies Breaking the Last Taboo of the Screen, shared how his "young, monster-movie addicted eyes were quick to spot a series of starkly lettered handbills that had been tacked to the trees and telephone poles." [Splatter Movies, Pg. 16]

Those handbills were hyping the imminent release of today's subject du jour, a double-bill of two terrific, top tier Hammer Film productions: The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and X the Unknown (1956).

Going in order of production, 1956's X the Unknown, the 'B' feature of this double-bill, began as a sequel to The Quatermass Xperiment,  a moneymaker for the company. Only there was one small detail Hammer Film had not factored into the equation. Screenwriter Nigel Kneale, who had created the character of Bernard Quatermass and retained the rights, refused to have his creation appear in anything that he himself had not written. 

Even with any and all marketable connections and/references to The Quatermass Xperiment excised, X the Unknown is able to stand on its own as a cracking good monster movie. 

First-time screenwriter Jimmy Sangster, having penned a sturdy and reliable script for X the Unknown, was then entrusted with scripting Hammer Film's first color film, 1957's The Curse of Frankenstein. 

Curse took a very different approach than the 1931 Universal film and its sequels, for reasons that were both legal and artistic. In this film Baron Victor Frankenstein turns out to be every bit as dangerous and deadly monster as his witless creation.

Audiences ate it up and Hammer Film, seeing that it had struck gold, proceeded to mine the Gothic Horror genre for every penny it could uncover.

Moby Dick (1956) - Newspaper Ad [ San Francisco Examiner - July 10, 1956]

I remember watching Moby Dick on television and being blown away by it. So blown away that I immediately checked the book out from the local library and attempted to give it a read. I made it through one or two chapters, at most, before giving up. Not bad for somebody that was, most likely, in middle school at the time.

Twelve or so years later, maybe, the novel was assigned reading in an American Literature course I was taking at San Francisco State University. Surprise, surprise, surprise, but I made it through the entire, albeit seemingly endless, book this time around.

While I cannot say that I felt it was the transcendent reading experience the professor teaching the class found it to be, I was surprised at just how much the climax of Peter Benchley's novel Jaws seemed to have cribbed from the climax of Moby Dick. Really.

A few years after that I read Ray Bradbury's novel Green Shadows, White Whale, which was a fictionalized version of his experience working with John Huston to craft the script for the movie adaptation of Moby Dick that I had just so happened to watch and love so many years before.

Bradbury incorporated a great many of his Irish stories, which were inspired by the time he spent in Ireland working on Moby Dick, so the resulting book is more a phantasmagoria of sights, sounds, and experiences than it is a structured story. Which is pretty much par for the course for most, if not all, of Bradbury's novel length works. 

Green Shadows, White Whale was the second novel penned by a disgruntled and traumatized screenwriter dramatizing what it was like working with, or for, John Huston. The other was White Hunter, Black Heart by Peter Viertel. While I have seen the Clint Eastwood movie adaptation, I have yet to crack open the actual book it was based on.

I need to do that, some time.

The Birds (1963) - Newspaper Ad [Oakland Tribune - March 31, 1963]