Rondo Hatton - The Creeper!

I recently acquired the complete set of Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies and one, The Pearl of Death, features Rondo Hatton as the Creeper! OK, he’s got about a minute of screen time and no lines, but he looms over the movie.

Apparently Rondo did a number of films as The Creeper, The Brute Man being the last, and I’m assuming he gets killed at the end of all of them.

But hey, it was work!

6 Likes

There were three total. In order, they were Pearl of Death, House of Horrors, and The Brute Man. Prior to that, he just did background bit parts. Two of the more notable instances occurred in The Hunchback of Norte Dame and The Ox-Bow Incident. Fun Fact: The Ox-Bow Incident featured George Meeker and Mary Beth Hughes (Charlie Blake and Kitty Reed in I Accuse My Parents) portraying a husband and wife.

6 Likes

Maybe in another one it’s like The Brute Man where he gets arrested at the end.

1 Like

House of Horrors was on Svengoolie a couple of months ago, that was a much better movie than The Brute Man.

2 Likes

Bah! Creeper, Creeper Creeper! You give ME the Creeps!

2 Likes

Drew and Josh Alan Friedman’s Warts and All has a great short comic book biography of Rondo Hatton. A great book for any MST3K fan anyway.

image

4 Likes

For those in the overlapping part of the fandom Venn diagram, a pretty well known Zappa bootleg from 1974 was called The Rondo Hatton Band. He was big fan of B movies and for a time in the '70s would introduce himself as Rondo Hatton from stage.

1 Like

Zappa was a MSTie. Joel and Kevin are Zappa fans. There were even tentative plans for them to work together, along with Terry Gilliam. Here’s a transcript of Kevin talking about, and to, Frank here: Mystery Science Theater 3000 - Zappa Wiki Jawaka
Well worth a read.

3 Likes

I was always a little surprised that there weren’t more references to his B-movie related material on the show. There were several mentions of “Dog Breath,” Ruth Underwood, Suzy Creamcheese and others, but never a peep about “Cheepnis” or “The Radio is Broken,” etc.

2 Likes