July 21, 2017

The Great Landau

You know of course about Ed Wood:




But Landau was even prouder of his role in the forgotten (but unbelievably well-cast) Mistress.  I watched some of it while I was in Europe and concluded that 1) the movie deserved to be forgotten, despite some very interesting moments (Ebert liked it, though); and 2) Landau's performance as a scraping-by agent was awesome.  Here is the movie:



May I suggest sirs review the scenes at at 7:00-11:20 and 17:30-19:47.

Note that Landau (as he explains here) never showed his teeth as Lugosi, but for Mistress wore the "smile mask" throughout the first half of the film.

2 Comments:

Blogger VMM said...

I completely forgot he played Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood.

PULL ZE STRING!

July 21, 2017 at 8:40 PM  
Blogger The Other Front said...

That is probably my favorite role in any movie. You've got a Jewish child of Austrian refugees playing a Hungarian monster movie actor living out the last months of his career on the skids in LA. It goes without saying (as every schoolchild knows) that Lugosi left Hungary with some urgency after the failure of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919.)

It's like Casablanca in one character.

July 21, 2017 at 9:48 PM  

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