Two of my favorite old time "B" movie badmen
Rondo Hatton and Martin Kosleck. Each played the bad guy in separate 1940s Sherlock Holmes features with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. In The Pearl Of Death, Hatten played the role of "The Creeper", a hulking monster who killed his victims by breaking their spines with his bare hands. In Pursuit To Algiers, Kosleck played the sadistic knifer called Mirko. Both men teamed up together in Universal pictures' House Of Horrors. A cult following has evolved around both actors.
Rondo Hatton was his high school class valedictorian and voted the most handsome boy. He married and entered the profession of journalism. Shortly thereafter in his young adulthood he developed the disease of acromegaly, where the pituitary gland produces out-of-control amounts of growth hormone, causing excessive height, thickness, and bone. His head became monstrously misshapen. Hatten's extraordinary appearance won him roles in several films as a monstrous character known as "The Creeper". Universal Pictures was very high on his prospects for becoming a major star along the lines of Karloff and Lugosi. Unfortunately, before his final two films were even released to the public, he died of a sudden heart attack caused by his acromegaly, right on the cusp of true stardom.
Here's a photo of Hatton before the onset of acromegaly:
Martin Kosleck was a German actor who was an outspoken opponent of Nazism during the rise of Adolph Hitler and was forced to flee to the United States. Kosleck appeared in more than 80 films and often played villainous Nazis including Joseph Goebbels, stormtroopers, and even concentration camp officers. With his oily, slimy smirk and demeanor, he was a bargain basement version of Peter Lorre. He was wonderful as the knifer Mirko in Sherlock Holmes and the Pearl Of Death and as an artist seeking revenge on his critics through murder in the 1946 film House Of Horrors.
Here's the synopsis of House Of Horrors from the imdb website, starring both Kosleck and Hatton:
"...Marcel De Lange is a struggling sculptor whose work and sanity are derided by the New York art critics. After waspishly officious critic F. Holmes Harmon ruins a sale for De Lange by dismissing his expressionistic cubist work as "tripe" and later gloating about it in his column, the distraught artist goes to the river to drown himself. There he discovers the half-drowned body of the notorious serial killer, the Creeper, and takes him back to his studio to recover. Feeling empowered by the friendship of the acromegalic sociopath, De Lange tasks him with murdering the critics who have pilloried him in print. When successful commercial artist Steve Morrow is wrongly suspected of the crimes, his art critic girlfriend Joan Medford decides to follow her instinct about a mysterious bust De Lange has suspiciously covered in his studio and she decides to snoop around. ..."
Here's a link to the full length feature film:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x16njo3_house-of-horrors-1946_shortfilms
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who was a major film star in Germany, starring in the 1920 silent film The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari. He and his wife fled Germany to Britain during the rise of Hitler before coming to the U.S. where he played a number of roles including that of Major Heinrich Strasser in Casablanca.
