She wrote for Sherlock Holmes, Kharis, The Mad Ghoul, and the Weird Woman. Her name was Brenda Weisberg, and during the war years, she was the sole female screenwriter for Universal’s horror output.
During World War II, Universal Studios was as busy a factory as any defense plant in the country, churning out entertainment for servicemen, civilians and their families by the celluloid mile. Features, shorts, serials, cartoons, newsreels, and promotions for War Bonds, the Universal cameras never stopped turning. Like Columbia Pictures, Universal was considered second tier compared to MGM, Paramount or Warner Brothers. A “B” studio that occasionally put money into larger productions. For every THE SPOILERS with John Wayne, Randolph Scott, and Marlene Dietrich or ARABIAN NIGHTS, there were a dozen quickly made adventures (BLACK DIAMONDS, NORTH TO THE KLONDIKE), comedies (ALIAS THE CHUMP, TOO MANY BLONDES), or Johnny Mack Brown westerns.
Universal’s sure-fire box office hits came from Abbott and Costello and the classic stable of monsters. The comedy duo had exploded with laughs and music in the low-budget BUCK PRIVATES while THE WOLFMAN, released around the bombing of Pearl Harbor, was the smash that ushered in Universal’s second horror wave, shouldered by Lon Chaney Jr.
Chaney’s star vehicles were divided among different production units within the studio according to their budgets. George Waggner and Western specialist Paul Malvern produced the bigger films such as SON OF DRACULA and HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, while the smaller films, including the Inner Sanctum mysteries, were the province of producer Ben Pivar. Born in Britain, Pivar had followed his film editor brother Maurice to Universal, first as an assistant, then an editor, and then a producer while Maurice became an executive, supervising the editing of all of Universal’s products.
As an editor, Ben Pivar knew the Universal stock footage library backwards and forwards, and could initiate adventure films and westerns based on the existing material. Pivar was responsible for an enormous amount of releases which meant an enormous number of screenplays. Many of the writers in Pivar’s stable came from pulp magazines and radio, or were freelancing, grinding through series mysteries for other studios. The one woman who was writing low-budget genre films at Universal was Brenda Weisberg, and she would be a perfect fit for the Pivar unit.
Born in Rovno of the Russian Empire [now Rivne, Ukraine] in 1900, but raised in Ohio and Arizona, Brenda Weisberg came to the movies through her work in newspapers, initially selling original stories to Universal for their own incarnation of The Dead End Kids without Leo Gorcey. After the classic ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES at Warner Brothers, Dead End Kid Billy Halop had become a popular teenage star on his own, working successfully with Humphrey Bogart in CRIME SCHOOL and YOU CAN’T GET AWAY WITH MURDER. Halop, Huntz Hall, Gabe Dell and Hal Chester were brought to Universal for LITTLE TOUGH GUY, directed by Harold Young (THE MUMMY’S TOMB) and written by Brenda who had crafted a juvenile delinquency drama, not a silly comedy like the later East Side Kids and Bowery Boys films for Monogram.
Brenda had found her niche, writing a total of seven features and one serial for Halop, Hall, and their pals. YOU’RE NOT SO TOUGH, directed by Joe May (THE INVISIBLE MAN RETURNS) emphasized humor, while MOB TOWN, directed by William Nigh (who guided the MR. WONG films with Boris Karloff) was a tight, gangster drama in line with Halop’s films at Warner Brothers. Universal also cast Dick Foran and Anne Gwynne, giving the movie a little extra “B” polish, which Brenda’s script deserved.
In the middle of these assignments, Brenda co-wrote her first serial for chapter-play specialist producer Henry MacRae, JUNIOR G-MEN OF THE AIR also starring Halop, Hall and the gang facing villain Lionel Atwill. Working with a structure from Griffin Jay (RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE), Brenda’s experience had taught her how to fashion the right dialogue for the young, tough actors, giving snappy answers to Halop, and the slow-witted comedy to Hall. Under MacRae and director Ray Taylor, who had both guided the FLASH GORDON serials, Brenda rose to the tough occasion of writing a long-form serial, and was quickly handed another, OVERLAND MAIL, her first western and first film starring Lon Chaney Jr.
Brenda would work on separate chapters of the Chaney Western, tailoring her scripts to old footage from Universal Westerns with new material to match it. Beyond character, plot, and dialog, the serial writers had to be technically savvy as well, knowing how to write scenes around the stock footage and the best way to integrate it into the productions. After the Western, Brenda jumped back to rough house comedy with 1943’s KEEP ‘EM SLUGGING, starring Bobby Jordan and directed by veteran Christy Cabanne (THE MUMMY’S HAND).
KEEP ‘EM SLUGGING was the kind of material that Brenda knew like the back of her hand, but the Little Tough Guy films and the serials proved Brenda could handle any genre, and she soon wrote four Universal horror movies in a row, and established herself as a B-Movie-Writing-Queen.
THE MAD GHOUL is absolutely one of her best works, and one of the best of the Pivar “B” films, if not the best. The dour, savage story of medical student David Bruce being victimized by his mentor George Zucco is one of the darkest, and most brutal, Universal horrors. Much has been made about the tragedy of the fate of Lon Chaney’s Larry Talbot, or Robert Paige’s hapless Frank in SON OF DRACULA, desperately trying to prevent his love from becoming a vampire. But THE MAD GHOUL creates an even grimmer story.
David Bruce, desperately in love with Evelyn Ankers, is deliberately victimized by the man he trusts most because he too wants to share Evelyn’s bed. Zucco’s destruction of Bruce, and sending him on a killing spree because he’s been rejected by Evelyn, is remarkable for its purely evil motivations, which Zucco plays with smooth relish. Brenda then adds the mutilation of corpses to the story, the flesh of a human heart to be distilled into a “Ghoul antidote,” that’s remarkable for its frank gruesomeness.
THE MAD GHOUL is a stand-alone, not a continuation of Paula the Ape Woman or Kharis, that deserves kudos as being a cut above almost all the Pivar productions. Utilizing sets from larger Universal films, THE MAD GHOUL has an expansive look, with extras filling in scenes and excellent production design and art direction, all beautifully photographed by Oscar winner Milton Krasner (THE GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN, HOW THE WEST WAS WON). The talented James P. Hogan directs admirably, but sadly did not live long enough to see his horror gem completed, as he died before THE MAD GHOUL was released.
With its fine direction and good performances, all on a tight budget, THE MAD GHOUL remains a stalwart of Universal horror because it has real emotional current running through its scenes, and that is thanks to the fine work of Brenda Weisberg. Because of her ear for dialog, Brenda was assigned to WEIRD WOMAN, the third of the Inner Sanctum mystery series starring Lon Chaney Jr. Based on Fritz Leiber’s superb CONJURE WIFE, writer W. Scott Darling (THE GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN) fashioned an adaptation that Brenda transformed into a screenplay, actually riding against the tropes of the Inner Sanctum series by making Chaney almost a supporting character, despite the films being designed for him.
WEIRD WOMAN, as is appropriate for its title, is a “Woman’s Picture” in the best sense of the label. All of the action, all of the mystery, is tied to the female characters of the film. The original story of witches controlling the destiny of their husbands was mutated into a tale of a professor (Chaney) who marries a girl from a South Sea Island (Anne Gwynne), and brings her back to his college town where mysterious happenings, including a murder, unfold and she’s blamed by an old flame of the professor’s (Evelyn Ankers) for bringing tribal magic with her from the islands and using it against the college community.
While Chaney is nearly always on-screen, trying to debunk “native superstitions,” Brenda Weisberg’s script focuses on Gwynne as the young island bride, Ankers’ jealous ex, and the wonderful Elizabeth Russell as the wife of a professor who commits suicide out of shame for plagiarizing a book he’s just published. These women, along with the great Elizabeth Risdon as the down-to-earth Dean of Woman, toss Brenda’s dialog like so many knives, sometimes drawing blood and sometimes having their nasty comments boomerang back.
If Chaney’s professor is only marginally interesting, then Brenda more than makes up for it with the female characters as they try to one-up each other, which is the joy of the movie. Directed by the able Reginald Le Borg, WEIRD WOMAN remains one of the favorites of the Inner Sanctums, as it’s one of the only films that actually have a supernatural element that can’t be explained away.
From one successful series to one of Universal’s most famous, THE SCARLET CLAW is, arguably the best and most atmospheric of the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes films, as its concerned with a monster, and not fighting Nazis on the home-front. Brenda devised the story of a glowing creature that is terrorizing a Canadian village as a cover-up for a string of murders. Roy William Neill directed Brenda’s story with his usual skill and sense of dread, especially in the beautifully rendered scenes of the monster with a phosphorous glow courtesy of effects genius John P. Fulton.
Brenda returned to the Pivar unit to script one more adventure for the mummy Kharis, and his search for eternal love, for THE MUMMY’S GHOST, directed by Reginald Le Borg. A sequel to THE MUMMY’S TOMB, GHOST is regarded as being the best of the Chaney/Kharis outings because of its unusual ending steeped in romantic tragedy, and the sultry presence of Ramsey Ames. Again, Brenda Weisberg brings a sense of desperate emotion to the film, as the spirit of the Princess Ananka inhabits Miss Ames, leading to disastrous results.
Le Borg directs in snappy style, emphasizing great low-angle images of Kharis as he breaks through fences and walls or goes berserk in the Scripps Museum when the soul of his love is lost to him. John Carradine makes a fine obsessed high priest, but one of the movies true delights is Barton MacLane as a detective, firing off Brenda’s dialog the same way as he handled his lines in THE MALTESE FALCON.
After THE MUMMY’S GHOST, Brenda Weisberg focused on family films, musicals and comedies before moving to Arizona to marry and retire from the movies. Away from Hollywood she happily focused on community theater, even as THE MAD GHOUL, and others, were being included in Shock Theater packages across the country, revived in the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland, and even sold in 8mm home-movie editions.
The Queen of the Ben Pivar unit passed away at the age of 96, but her accomplishmentlives on. In a field dominated by men, Brenda Weisberg made her mark with her Universal horrors.
C. Courtney Joyner is an award-winning author and screenwriter with more than 25 screenplays to his credit including The Offspring starring Vincent Price, and Prison directed by Renny Harlin. His short stories have been widely anthologized and his novels include the SHOTGUN western series, and the adventure NEMO RISING. A film historian, he was the movie/tv editor for TRUE WEST magazine for three years, and has recorded commentaries, written documentaries and appeared on more than 200 blu-ray releases. Recent non-fiction books include WESTERN PORTRAITS with Steve Carver, PERSPECTIVES ON ELMORE LEONARD, and the upcoming WARNER BROTHERS FANTASTIC.
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