Few of German actor Horst Frank's films made the crossing to American audiences--and when they did, the English-language dubbing made an assessment of Frank's talents quite difficult. The actor was most familiar to horror fans for his appearance as transplant-happy Dr. Ood in the cheap German horror flick The Head (1959). In the mid '60s, several of Frank's European-filmed westerns gained brief American TV exposure, due to audience demand for any movie filmed in Technicolor. Evidently not one to turn down a role on the basis of aesthetics, Horst Frank was seen in such international co-productions as The Pirates of the Mississippi (1963), The Corpse of Beverly Hills (1964), Vengeance of Fu Manchu (1968), and the immortal South African epic Whispering Death (1971), wherein Frank surpassed his previous cinematic triumphs by playing a black Albino-African rapist.
by Hal Erickson
biography
