Lionel Atwill Plays Himself
“See, one side of my face is gentle and kind, incapable of anything but love of my fellow man.
“The other profile is cruel and predatory and evil, incapable of anything but lusts and dark passions. It all depends which side of my face is turned towards you — or the camera.”
In the nineties, cult theater genius Ken Campbell would dub this the enantiodromic school of acting, but the speaker here is Lionel Atwill, horror star of the thirties and forties. “Pinky,” as he was known, was convinced he possessed a ind of physiognomic dexterity based around the very slight asymmetries we all have in our faces. Few observers could actually see the kindly side – though Atwill plays a sympathetic, well-meaning scientist in Dr. X, one of his most famous movies, he was clearly chosen because the piece is a whodunnit and he had to at least seem capable of nocturnal surgical atrocities. If you want an actor who seems capable of strangling and cannibalism, Atwill is your man. Though he possessed a kind of versatility, even his best-known comedy role, in Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be, involves playing a Nazi.
Like George Zucco, Atwill was less a true horror icon than a useful villain type who could be slotted into place whenever a mad scientist, smirking sadist or threatening authority figure was needed. His wooden-armed Inspector Krogh in Son of Frankenstein is the best-loved embodiment of this figure, every bit as funny as the parodic version played by Kenneth Mars in Young Frankenstein. His banter with Basil Rathbone is an overripe game of one-upmanship in the field of outrageous double entrendres, with Atwill winning just by the salacious twinkle in his eye, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the character and everything to do with the actor, an orgiastic smut-hound whose sexual excesses partially derailed his career.
If you want to test out your own enantiodromic properties, Ken Campbell’s method involves two mirrors and an objective witness: you double each half of your face in turn using on mirror, and observe the effect in the other. With the aid of the witnes you can then name each demi-personality. Campbell decided one half was Elsie, the incompetent housewife and the other was Lord Pigspurt, the spanking squire. Atwill, who probably formed his own theories of man’s duality while mucking about with mirrors during some arcane erotic ritual, looks to me like a double dose of Pigspurt.
by David Cairns