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Post by dem bones on May 3, 2008 6:23:16 GMT
Tod Robbins - Who Wants a Green Bottle And Other Uneasy Tales (Phillip Allan' 1926) Many thanks to Robert Weinberg for kindly granting me permission to use this scan. Silent, White And Beautiful Who Wants a Green Bottle? Wild Wullie The Waster Toys A Bit of Banshee The Son of Shaemas O'Shea Cockcrow Inn Spurs As was the case with H. R. Wakefield and his They Return At Evening, all but one of Robbins' contributions to the anthologies came from an earlier collection, Who Wants a Green Bottle And Other Uneasy Tales, itself a revamped and extended version of Silent, White And Beautiful (Boni & Liveright, 1920). His novels included the twice-filmed The Unholy Three which was reprinted under the Creeps banner as The Three Freaks. According to E. F. Bleiler, Browning was an american but spent most of his career living in France and England where he established himself as one of the day's most reliable pulpsters. There is a whimsical style to much of his work which tends to dilute the horrors and his sea-monster fantasy, The Whimpus, praised as outstanding by Bleiler, is not a story I'd have reacquainted myself with out of choice (although it was far more enjoyable than I'd remembered it), and Toys, Cockcrow Inn, Silent, White And Beautiful and Spurs are certainly worth a read. Tod Browning, who directed both versions of Robbins' The Unholy Three as a silent in 1925 and a talkie five years later, would also film Spurs, as the notorious Freaks (MGM, 1932), a huge budget disaster on release which all but destroyed his career, but is now regarded as one of the classics of the genre. Browning certainly horror's up the original and the genuinely disturbing moments, notably the freaks' outrageous revenge on the scheming Cleopatra, are entirely his.
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