Villain of the Month: Rondo Hatton
No other actor in the history of the Golden Age of Hollywood has sparked more debate and controversy than Universal horror star Rondo Hatton. Was he being ruthlessly exploited by the studio or was he knowingly exploiting his own disfigurement for profit? It is doubtful the truth will ever be known. Even his own disfigurement causes debate. Hatton suffered from Acromegalia, a disease that causes the sufferers head, feet, hands and joints to continually enlarge while their skin becomes thick and course. The official story is that Hatton began to suffer from the disease due to exposure to mustard gas during World War I. Many skoff at this, siting the disease is usually caused by a benign tumor that affects the pituitary gland.
Whatever the real reason, Hatton came to Hollywood in 1930 and played bit parts for over ten years in Hell Harbor (1930), In Old Chicago (1938) and The Princess and the Pirate (1944). His big break came in the mid forties, when cast as the back breaking Hoxton Creeper in the Sherlock Holmes mystery Pearl of Death (1944) and became an immediate sensation. Quickly capitalizing on their new star, Universal shoehorned him into the serial The Roya Mounted Rides Again (1945) as a silent, menacing looking henchman purely for window dressing reasons.
Hatton’s next two films had him playing the assistant to mad scientists in Jungle Captive (1945) and The Spider Woman Strikes Back (1946). His final two films gave Hatton top billing as he returned to playing the homicidal back breaking Creeper in House of Horror (1946) and The Brute Man (1946). The latter film has been the subject of controversy due to it’s plot of showing the Creeper had been a handsome college athlete who suffers a disfiguring accident, which mirrored Hatton’s own life a little too closely.
Unfortunately Hatton died soon after filming The Brute Man and never even saw the release of his only starring roles. Even sadder, Universal was in the midst of their changeover to only doing A pictures and sold The Brute Man to PRC.
And that is where his story would have remained, with Hatton being a minor horror actor whose films occasionally showed up on TV, but then then makeup artist Rick Baker used Hatton as the model for Timothy Dalton’s hulking henchman in The Rocketeer (1991) which sparked a renewed interest in the man and his films.
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