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Old Mother Riley Meets The Vampire (1952) (cont.)

Below are edited extracts from a revealing article  - 'My Son The Vampire : What a "drag" for Dracula' by Tom Weaver, which appears on The Astounding  B-Monster website. 

The article features an in-depth interview with Richard Gordon, a New York-based film distributor and a friend of Bela Lugosi.......

Tom Weaver : "Lugosi appeared in the movie out of necessity. His British stage tour of Dracula had ended in failure and bankruptcy for the producers, and the actor was left high and dry, without the money to return to Hollywood. Enter Lugosi fan and friend Richard Gordon, a New York-based film distributor whose solution to Bela's predicament was to persuade English producer George Minter to star Bela in a movie."

Richard Gordon : "I don't remember now whether it was my idea or George's to turn the Old Mother Riley picture into a vehicle that also was suitable for Lugosi; I suspect it was his, because I don't think it would have occurred to me. So that's how Lugosi came to be in Mother Riley Meets the Vampire. He was paid $5,000, he was contracted for four weeks, and they picked up his additional living expenses during that four-week period. And $5,000 in 1951 was a lot more than it is today, and it was enough to get him and Lillian [Lugosi's wife] back to the United States and to Hollywood. That was how the whole thing came about."

Tom Weaver : "Lugosi wasn't just "fitted" into the script for the Mother Riley picture that Minter was preparing, was he?"

Richard Gordon : "No. There was an existing script, but it didn't have a part for Lugosi in it. And so George, who was a very astute producer, figuring on the combination of Mother Riley and Lugosi, junked the script and had a new script written. Because of time pressure, and because neither George nor I really wanted Lugosi to be hanging around London waiting for something to happen, what they actually did was crib the idea from Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein -- the exchange of trunks and all that stuff. That's how it happened."

Continued 

For the full article... Click here.

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Old Mother Riley Meets The Vampire poster (1952)

Tom Weaver : "Did Lugosi have any complaints?"

Richard Gordon : "No, Lugosi was quite happy. He of course had some trouble adjusting to Old Mother Riley. On the first day, I think he had trouble making up his mind whether he was talking to a man or a woman, because (as usual) Arthur Lucan showed up in full makeup at the studio. Arthur Lucan was known for the fact that he never appeared in public except in his Old Mother Riley garb -- he would arrive at the studio fully made-up as Old Mother Riley, and when he left the studio in the evening, he would go home fully made-up as Mother Riley....when Arthur Lucan was asked why he did that, he said he did it so that when he went out on his own and when he was socialising in between films, he could more or less be anonymous, and people wouldn't be coming up to him all the time, because they wouldn't recognize him without the makeup. Lugosi probably never saw him without the makeup. I certainly never did.

Old Mother Riley Meets The Vampire (1952) film still

Continued