When
Herbert Charles Angelo Kuchacevich ze Schluderpacheru, better
known as Herbert Lom, died last week at
95, most folks had assumed he had been gone for a while, as he
effectively quit acting back in the early Nineties. Lom could be a
very menacing and “mysterious” presence on film, but he is best
known for doing a phenomenal job as Sellers' harassed boss in the
Pink Panther films and for playing in an endless slew of mysteries,
thrillers, and horror pictures.
He
was born in Czechoslovakia as the son of a count (!) in 1917. By
1939, he'd already appeared in small roles in two Czech films, but he
wanted to “make good” and someday meet Greta Garbo (he finally
did, but after she had been out of the biz for many years).
His
1939 journey to England with his girlfriend changed his life forever
– the trip sadly ended her life, as she was turned back at Dover
and wound up dying in a concentration camp (Lom spoke fondly of her
in one of the last newspaper interviews he did, nearly six decades
after the end of the war). He parents survived the war and joined him
in England in peacetime.
Lom
had an auspicious debut in British cinema, playing Napoleon in The
Young Mr. Pitt (1942); he later played Nap again in War
and Peace (1956). He worked steadily in British film and TV
for the next half-century, with two of his early roles catching
attention elsewhere, as a therapist in The Seventh Veil
(1945) and as a refined but dangerous gangster in the wonderful noir
Night and the City (1950).
His
varied career found him singing onstage as the King of Siam in the
West End production of The King and I and writing
two novels (about Christopher Marlowe, and the inventor of the
guillotine).
As noted, he played in a LOT of thrillers and horror films, including
not one but two versions of Agatha Christie's Ten Little
Indians (the 1974 and 1989 versions; the trailer for the former can be found here).
Perhaps
his worst credit (I'm going to take a bet this is the worst by far –
and that includes Mark of the Devil, about which
more below) – is Going Bananas (1987), a
comedy with Jimmie Walker and Dom DeLuise (here's a Lom-less sequence that
is mind-boggling).. But let us
not dwell on the worst moments of Lom's career, and instead celebrate
the finest. Or at least the most notorious...
****
A
year before he supported James Mason in The Seventh
Veil, the two appeared together in Hotel
Reserve (1944). Here you see Lom as an average, ordinary
husband – of an all-to-gorgeous babe (start the clip at 2:14):
Lom
was a member of two great ensembles in Fifties British films. The
first was obviously The Ladykillers (with
Guiness and Sellers, 1955) and then Hell Drivers
(1957),
with
Stanley Baker and Peggy Cummins, as well as a then-unknown trio of
future super-spies: Patrick
McGoohan, Sean
Connery,
and
David McCallum.
Those
films are a lot easier to digest than a movie that Lom probably made
a lot more money doing, namely El Cid (1961). Here
he tells off crucifixion victim Raf Vallone (why not?):
Lom
played many larger-than-life characters. In Mysterious
Island (1961), he inherited the mantle of Captain Nemo from
his old castmate James Mason:
In
Count Dracula (1970), the somewhat lame adaptation
of Stoker by the always-working Jesus Franco, Lom inherited the
mantle of Van Helsing from Peter Cushing (and Drac has a mustache –
Why? Because it's a Jess Franco film!):
And
speaking of Franco, here's the trailer for his lurid (but still not
entirely satisfyingly sleazy) women's prison film 99
Women (1969), starring Lom and Mercedes McCambridge amidst
all the chicks in chains:
The
most notorious of all of Lom's films was the West German horror pic
Mark of the Devil (1970), directed by a Brit
(Michael Armstrong). The film was promoted in the U.S. with the
distribution of “vomit bags” that were given to every person who
bought a ticket.
I
remember wanting to go to the film as a kid just to get the bag,
since it was such a sublimely gross idea. I'm sure the movie would've
messed my mind up, but I wanted that bag! I later found an old one
laying on the street and was forbidden to bring it home by my mother.
Ah, memories...
I've
never sat through the film, but the trailer makes it look like any
number of cheesy Euro horror flicks. The gore effects were the main
thrust of the film, but Udo Kier's piercing eyes are clearly the most
important effect for those of us who are mesmerized by Udo:
Lom
was SUCH a familiar face that he appeared in a Benson and Hedges
“small cigar” TV ad:
In
terms of monster-movie mythology, Lom was assigned a very important
role in 1962: he was the screen's third Phantom of the
Opera. The film is up in its entirety on YT (twice!) and is
worth a look. It is not a great horror picture, but Lom does his best
as the Phantom and has a very cool full-face mask:
And
the last clip has got to be Lom in his best-remembered role as Chief
Inspector Charles Dreyfus in the Pink Panther
films. The character is in all but the first of the series and was
the invention of Blake Edwards and coscripter William Peter Blatty
for the film version of the play A Shot in the Dark
(1964), which was retrofitted for Sellers' Inspector Clouseau
character.
Lom
was quoted as saying that he did the series for 20 years, but they
ran out of good scripts in the first ten years. Actually there were
no Pink Panther films between Shot in '64 and
The Return of the Pink Panther in 1975 (a boon for
both Sellers and Edwards, whose careers were floundering).
The
films after Sellers died were godawful. Trail of the
Pink Panther (1982), a piece-o-shit collection of Sellers
outtakes extended into a feature. The Curse of the Pink
Panther (1983) was another awful pic featuring Ted Wass as
an accident-prone NYC cop who goes looking for the missing Clouseau.
I love the work of Roberto Benigni, but one of his worst-ever
vehicles was Son of the Pink Panther (1993), where
he plays Sellers' son, who bedevils Dreyfus like his dad did. As I
argued in my obit for Edwards,
his
career was filled with extremely bad, indulgent films among the few
great ones.
Here
is a fan's wonderful montage of the best Lom moments from the Pink
Panther pics. It was put together in 2009 by someone who adopted the
YT moniker “Dreyfus fan” and shows exactly how expert a straight
man Lom was, and why he will forever be remembered for that role:
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