"There is hardly a film genre that the versatile Herbert Lom has not appeared in...Yet Lom's rather exotic features and mysterious, spellbinding eyes make him the ideal actor for horror pictures..."

Herbert Lom has entertained movie fans for decades, of course, and has become rather a horror film star as well.  That's not surprising because when it comes to writing as well as acting...

(Once again, we are pleased to introduce a new writer to the HORROR-WOOD fold.  Harvey Chartrand is a freelance writer and the editor of Ottawa Life Magazine. His stories have appeared in Filmfax, Outré, Rue Morgue Magazine, Take One Magazine, The Globe and Mail, The National Post and The Jerusalem Post.   Chartrand has also performed in the movies House Of Luk and Kiss Of Debt, the TV show Butch Patterson Private Dick, and in more than 350 murder-mystery dinner theatre productions across North America.)

By HARVEY F. CHARTRAND

Herbert Lom has been one of world cinema's foremost character actors for 60 years. He will soon emerge from a lengthy acting hiatus to appear in The Birth of the Pink Panther with Mike Myers as the imbecilic Inspector Clouseau. Lom may also appear in a film based on his novel Dr. Guillotine: The Eccentric Exploits of an Early Scientist (published by Trafalgar Square Books in 1993). English director Robert Young (Fierce Creatures) has an option on Lom's thriller and may direct this biopic of the strange idealist who invented the 'head-chopper.'

What compelled Lom to write the story of the inventor of this infernal execution device?

"Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin was an idealist," Lom explains. "He had the best intentions. He wanted to save people from suffering. He was a scientist, a member of the French Parliament, a doctor and an inventor. To be beheaded before his invention came along was absolute torture, because the executioner had to chop the head off with a sword several times. Only the aristocracy was being beheaded. Ordinary people were torn apart by horses; they bound your hands and feet to four horses and then they pulled you in four different directions and dismembered you. Or they burned you at the stake. So Dr. Guillotin invented a machine which he claimed would ensure a death that was 'as quick as the flick of an eyelid.' The guillotine was most effective and used until fairly recently."

Any reader of Dr. Guillotine (initially wooed, perhaps, by the striking image of the naked and guillotined French Revolution-era murderess Charlotte Corday on the dust jacket) will hope that Lom writes more such macabre books. The story concerns Dr. Guillotin's gradual development of the towering machine named after him, Corday's idealistic trip to Paris to help in the revolutionary cause, and Jean-Paul Marat, the power-hungry yet impotent autocrat who, due to a hideous skin condition, spends most of his life in a tub of water. In vivid prose, Lom depicts revolutionary Paris, and Dr. Guillotin's clandestine research in a basement laboratory entered through a swinging fireplace in his home.

There is hardly a film genre that the versatile Herbert Lom has not appeared in, from heavy drama to howlingly funny slapstick comedy. Yet Lom's rather exotic features and mysterious, spellbinding eyes make him the ideal actor for horror pictures.

Among Lom's outstanding performances in the horror/outré genre, several stand out: the pitiful Professor Petrie in Hammer's 1962 remake of The Phantom Of The Opera; the vile nobleman Henry Fengriffen in And Now The Screaming Starts! (1973); the mad doctor who makes killer dolls in Asylum (1972); the dignified Captain Nemo in Cy Enfield's macabre fantasy Mysterious Island (1961); the quarrelling twins in Dual Alibi (1946); and the barbarian chieftain in Nibelungen, Book 2: Kriemhild's Revenge (1966).

In Jesus Franco's El Conde Dracula/Count Dracula (1970), Lom subtly conveys the ambiguity of vampire hunter Professor Van Helsing, in his obsessive behavior, so similar to Dracula's quest for blood. (Lom co-starred with Christopher Lee in this Spanish production, which was not a Hammer Film.)

Sadly, El Conde Dracula was hampered by a low budget. "They didn't have the money to keep Christopher Lee long enough to play his scenes with me," Lom reveals. "By the time I arrived in Barcelona, he had already left. So I had to act the main dramatic scenes addressing the script girl! I think it shows in the end result--actors notice it, but maybe not the viewing public. For an actor like me, it is part of the horror of making horror films, believe me!"

The scene in El Conde Dracula in which Van Helsing suffers a stroke is the most moving moment of the film. Lom plays the physical collapse in a minimalist way, without words or sounds, his physical torture conveyed only by his trembling hands and eyes brim-full of pain. It is a superb example of silent screen acting.

Lom is also memorable in Michael Armstrong's Mark Of The Devil (1969), in which he plays the thoroughly evil Witchfinder-General Count Cumberland. It is a literal shock to encounter the eyes of this fanatic for the first time, or to behold his frenzied rage as he attempts to rape a girl suspected of being a witch. One cannot hide from the intense Lom gaze. It mesmerizes you--even in the many mediocre films in which Lom has appeared, always lending a bit of class to the proceedings while he is onscreen. (Interestingly, the court hypnotist Franz Mesmer figures prominently in Dr. Guillotine.)

Without question, Mark Of The Devil is Lom's most controversial film -- acclaimed as a work of genius and denounced as a 'how to' of medieval torture techniques. (Stomach distress – or 'barf' -- bags were handed out to audience members during the film's opening run.)

"I was horrified at how cheap and nasty the whole thing was," Lom states. "Reggie Nalder (the assassin in Alfred Hitchcock's 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much) played my henchman, and he certainly merited being called 'the ugliest man in the movies.'"

Lom's distinguished cosmopolitan features, the intensity of his eyes, and his deep and commanding voice were certainly good reasons for casting him in the showcase role of The Phantom Of The Opera (1962). His scarred face hidden behind a mask and only revealed at the end, Lom makes full use of his remarkable eyes and voice to convey the Phantom's intense loneliness and pain (and love for the singer played by Heather Sears).

"It was wonderful to play such a part, but I was disappointed with the picture," Lom says. "This version of the famous Gaston Leroux story dragged. The Phantom wasn't given enough to do, but at least I wasn't the villain, for a change. Michael Gough was the villain."

Lom also recalls Hammer Films as a "cheap little outfit."

"For one of my scenes, the Hammer people wanted me to smash my head against a stone pillar, because they said they couldn't afford one made of rubber," Lom reveals. "I refused to beat my head against stone, of course. This caused a 'big crisis,' because it took them half a day to make a rubber pillar that looked like stone. And of course, it cost a few pennies more. Horror indeed!"

In 1970, Lom portrayed the decadent Lord Henry Wotton in Dorian Gray, a contemporary take on Oscar Wilde's famous cautionary tale, set in 'Swinging Sixties' London. Helmut Berger (Ludwig, The Damned) starred as the libertine who remains young despite his debauchery, but whose portrait ages horribly.

"Helmut was so young!," Lom relates. "He kept asking me to tell him how to speak his lines. I said: 'You mustn't speak them as I would speak them.' Helmut was wonderful star material, a very handsome young man. I wonder whatever happened to him."

Lom does an excellent job playing another Phantom-like character in Gordon Hessler's Murders In The Rue Morgue (1971) – this time, as the hideously disfigured Grand Guignol actor René Marot, who gets his jollies splashing sulfuric acid over the faces of prostitutes and showgirls. Freely adapted by mystery writer Henry Slesar from the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name, the film was produced by American International Pictures and shot on location in Madrid--not Paris, where the story is set.

"I don't remember if the picture was bad or indifferent, because I never saw it," Lom says. "All I know is that there was absolute chaos on the set. One of the producers even asked me to direct the picture, please! I said: 'No thank you, I am not going to pull your chestnuts out of the fire!' Murders in the Rue Morgue was a shambles."

(Lom's worldwide success as Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus alongside Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther series gave him the opportunity to parody these 'madmen roles'. In The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), Lom is seated behind the organ, playing the instrument furiously, an unmistakable reference to his earlier performances as the Phantom, René Marot and Captain Nemo.)

Lom's next foray into the macabre was the classy Amicus Productions horror anthology--Asylum (1972), directed by Roy Ward Baker and based on stories by Psycho author Robert Bloch. In The Mannikins episode, Lom played a mad doctor who builds tiny, murdering, robotic dolls.

"This one I enjoyed because it was well written," Lom recalls. "It was one of those films with a lot of name actors--Peter Cushing, Charlotte Rampling, Britt Ekland, Patrick Magee. Of course, they couldn't get eight stars for 10 weeks, so they were employed one after the other for three days each, but they paid you good money for those three days. Asylum was good exposure for me and it is still shown quite often on television. I remember the special effects people had fun making a little doll that looked like me--which is not so easy--and it had to move along the floor."

Lom then portrayed the evil 18th-century aristocrat Henry Fengriffen in Amicus' And Now The Screaming Starts (1973), based on English horror writer David Case's novel Fengriffen. Lom's cameo performance as the debauched nobleman--who lays claim to a peasant bride on her wedding night--is a harrowing and unforgettable depiction of pure, undiluted evil.

Lom teamed up with Christopher Lee once again for Dark Places (1974), a tepid horror thriller directed by Don Sharp. The plot follows the misadventures of an heir to an estate (Robert Hardy) who searches for a hidden fortune in the house of a deceased maniac. As he does so, images from the house's past begin to haunt him, and his own personality is slowly overshadowed by that of the former, homicidal occupant, played by Lom.

In 1983, Lom traveled to Toronto to work with David Cronenberg-- "Canada's Baron of Blood"--in The Dead Zone, one of the best film adaptations of a Stephen King novel. Lom was marvelous as Dr. Sam Weizak, who ministers to the psychic Christopher Walken after he emerges from a five-year coma.

Lom enjoyed working with Cronenberg. "He was keen to work with me and I was certainly keen to work with him. Cronenberg is a genius for projecting a sinister and frightening quality on the screen, and yet he is the sweetest family man, the kindest man to work with. He would direct the most horrible nightmare scenes, and then his little children would come to see him for lunch and sit on his lap. Actually, The Dead Zone is not a bad movie at all, and it often plays on television."

In 1989, Lom stepped in to replace Jack Palance as Ludwig, a tycoon who hosts the Masque of the Red Death. This disappointing South African remake of the Poe tale, co-starring The Avengers' Patrick Macnee, was ineptly directed by Alan Birkinshaw (Horror Safari) on the same sets used for his atrocious remake of House of Usher (1988), featuring Oliver Reed and Donald Pleasence.

In 1990, Lom made a very strange horror movie in Italy called La Setta/The Sect, written by the great giallo horror director Dario Argento (Deep Red) and directed by Michele Soavi (Cemetery Man). Bearded and even more forbidding than usual, Lom played a mysterious gentleman intent on luring Kelly Curtis into a Satanic cult.

"I loved making The Sect," Lom says. "How can you go wrong with the world-famous horror expert Dario Argento? Kelly Curtis is also very talented, and she should be as famous as her sister, Jamie Lee Curtis."

Now 83, Lom has no intention of retiring, and says he will go on pulling faces till he drops! It's good to know that this old pro has a few more films left in him.

"You know, I always do my best, no matter the quality of the film," Lom reflects. "One thing I hate is when directors come to me before shooting a take and say: 'Herbert, give me your best!' And I think: 'But it's my job to give my best. I can't give anything else!' Whether it is good enough for those who sit in the cinema is quite another matter," he adds, with a wink.

Thanks, Harvey.  We know it was a pleasure for you to interview Herbert Lom and it was certainly a pleasure to run the interview.  We look forward to his next project with great interest.

Article copyright © Harvey F. Chartrand

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