The Mel Welles Centennial

For a goodly stretch there, when I was about 20 years old, my very favorite movie in all the world was Roger Corman’s original 1960 Little Shop of Horrors (which is one of the many reasons I’ve never had any use for the 1982 musical adaptation). And my favorite actor in the original Little Shop was Mel Welles (Ira W. Meltcher, 1924-2005), who created the role of Gravis Mushnik.

This was also my Lenny Bruce phase, and it’s easy to see what the two had in common from this distance, a quality you might call beatnik yiddishkeit. It’s the place where cool and comedy meet, all made possible by the lingua franca of the Jewish people, which is simultaneously the funniest and hippest of all languages. The second adjective refers not to fashion, but to its magical ability to transmit code to those tuned in. And most are not tuned in. Welles is a most fascinating creature in this regard, for he was brilliant. He had a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia, and was a practicing clinical psychologist for awhile. And he spoke a half dozen languages. But the Bronx native obviously loved show business. He began acting in off-Broadway plays, and he wrote material for Lord Buckley.

Welles was acting in films by the early ’50s. As is common, he was a bit player in major movies, and played larger roles in B pictures. Naturally, he specialized in foreign characters. One of his first roles was in Jacques Tourneur’sAppointment in Honduras (1953). He’s also in such things as The Silver Chalice (1954), William Castle’sJesse James vs. the Daltons (1954), Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955), the Bowery Boys’ Hold That Hypnotist (1957), and the 1958 screen adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov (1958), the latter very well suited to his enormous, Russian Bear-like physiognomy.

Part of his legend is that he wrote a beat poem called “Dragsville” that gets recited in Jack Arnold’s amazing all-star High School Confidential (1958), and that makes a nice pivot to his B movie work. For Roger Corman and AIP he was in Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), The Undead (1957), and Rock All Night (1957), in which he played one “Sir Bop”.

Throughout the ’60s and ’70s he worked in Europe, as an actor, dubbing specialist, and occasional uncredited director. He was in Panic Button (1964) with Jayne Mansfield, and The She-Beast (1966), and directed such things as Maneater of Hydra (1967) with Cameron Mitchell and Lady Frankenstein (1971) with Joseph Cotten and Mickey Hargitay.

By the ’80s, Welles was back in Hollywood picking up where he’d left off with Little Shop‘s Charles B. Griffith in Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype (1980) and Smokey Bites the Dust (1981). You can hear him in Faeries (1981) and Wolfen (1981). He’s also in Chopping Mall (1986), Commando Squad (1987, which concerns a group of Las Vegas showgirls who rescue their friend with machine guns), and Invasion Earth: The Aliens Are Here (1988). Especially intriguing (on account of their casts) are the comedies Medium Rare (1987) with Burt Young, Lainie Kazan,Brad Dourif,Timothy Leary, Larry Storch, and Frances Bay; and Robert Downey’sRented Lips (1988) with son Robert Downey Jr,Martin Mull, Jennifer Tilly, and Dick Shawn (it was Shawn’s last film). During his last years he worked mostly as a teacher and vocal coach.