The Raven (1935)

Dr Richard Vollin (Bela Lugosi) is an interesting guy: a surgeon of genius, he has now retired to his mansion to do probably nasty experiments in a hidden lab. A great admirer of Poe, he also spends his free time quoting the man and spouting some highly dubious ideas about Great Men and the Torture of Love (caps most certainly his). It’ll come as no surprise to anyone that Vollin has also tricked out his house as a death trap with various mechanical torture devices – some of them inspired by Poe, of course.

When Judge Thatcher (Samuel S. Hinds) convinces Vollin to return to the operating room to save his daughter, professional dancer Jean (Irene Ware), Vollin falls madly (well, he does everything madly) in love with the much younger woman. She seems to develop something of a crush on the man too, so much so she’s even including an interpretative dance number of Poe’s “The Raven” in her program. Too bad she’s already engaged to be married to the intensely boring Dr Holden (Lester Matthews). Seeing the situation before anybody else involved, the Judge tries to warn Vollin off Jean, but only causes the man to lose it completely.

Now officially tortured by love™, Vollin presses the criminal Edmond Bateman (Boris Karloff) into his services by first doing some very evil work on his facial nerves and promising to make it all better if he behaves. It’s all part of Vollin’ genius plan to take his vengeance on the Judge, Holden and Jean. Finally, his death trap mansion can get a real workout.

This is clearly an attempt by Universal to repeat some of the magic of Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat, again putting Lugosi and Karloff into a tale full of torture and cruelty (some of it of course only implied) and quite a bit of perversity.

That it isn’t the classic the Ulmer film turned out to be is at least in part caused by the decision to let go of most visual tropes of expressionism, and instead aim for a visually naturalistic approach that’s much more Warner than Universal, and so results in a film that never looks and feels like anything coming out of Universal. Lew Landers (then still working as Louis Friedlander) is a great choice for this approach, though, and provides the material with quite a bit of pulpy energy, presenting the tale with a snappiness very atypical of Universal’s approach to horror, and lighting starkly was is usually hidden by shadows.

The script is, as was usual with Universal, a bit of a mess that leaves many a question open: why, for example, is Vollin taking so much effort with getting Bateman on board supposedly to have him do what he cannot do when he wants to get off freely after his “revenge”, when all he then does with Bateman is use him as his in-house murder assistant?

Logic is of course beside the point here: in truth, the point of the movie is to try and get away with implying as much gruesomeness as it can get away with (which is rather a lot), and to provide Lugosi and Karloff with proper horror movie star roles. That, it does very well indeed.

Karloff does get the more sympathetic role here, starting out as your typical working class murderer (with some bad phrenological nonsense thrown in), getting a pretty Frankenstein’s creature-like make-over (because that’s what sells tickets), and eventually sacrificing himself to save the day. Karloff makes this work rather well, giving a genuine likeability and sadness to a guy who really only wanted to be left alone somewhere.

Lugosi, on the other hand, is allowed to go all kinds of crazy, spouting line after line of impressive portentous nonsense, including all sorts of Great Men as the Übermensch business. His performance of all this is gleefully sadistic, with some of the best moments of evil gloating in his career when he shows Bateman his new, “improved” face in a room completely surrounded by mirrors. Vollin, as he plays him, is the kind of man who builds his own tower of bad theories so he can justify all of his sadistic impulses to himself (while blaming love). It’s pretty fantastic, really, as is the film, at least when you don’t go into it expecting The Raven II.

In short: Mark of the Vampire (1935)

Backlot Europe - though this time, this is meant to be close to Prague, so the proceedings do nominally not quite occur in the dream-like places this suggests.

Sir Borotyn (Holmes Herbert) is found dead in his house, probably murdered. However, the only wounds on his body are two little wounds on his neck through which his body seems to have been drained of blood. For most of the men around, like Borotyn’s close buddy Baron Otto von Zinden (Jean Hersholt) and the family doctor, this naturally means he has been killed by a vampire. That’s a particularly good bet in this particular case since Borotyn’s house is supposedly cursed by and with a vampire, one Count Mora (Bela Lugosi). And since we the audience will soon enough see dear old Bela hanging around doing his vampire thing, accompanied by his vampire daughter, Luna (Caroll Borland), it seems like a good bet, even though the investigating copper (Lionel Atwill), freshly arrived from Prague, poo-poos the theory as mere superstition.

He doesn’t even change his tone when Borotyn’s daughter Irena (Elizabeth Allan) is threatened by the terrible twosome. Fortunately, one Professor Zelen (Lionel Barrymore), an expert on the occult and particularly vampires is called in to help solve the little bloodsucking problem.

Which is all fine and good until the film reveals the whole vampire thing as a ridiculously contrived method to get at Borotyn’s true killer, turning Tod Browning’s Mark of the Vampire into one of the pioneers of idiot plot twists in movies that make the supernatural solutions to the plot seem downright plausible.

Not that the film has been all fun and gothic games beforehand, for while there are a handful of genuinely atmospheric and interesting scenes, mostly concerning Luna or the Count hovering dreamlike in gardens or corners (the photography by James Wong Howe is lovely), there’s rather a lot of painful comedy to get through for such a short film. This situation is not improved by the broadness with which particularly Atwell, Barrymore and Hersholt approach their roles. Given the combined pedigrees of these gentlemen, it’s highly likely this is done on purpose, lending rather a lot of credence to interpreting the film as a satire like quite a few later critics like Kim Newman do.


Of course, there’s little point to a satire that doesn’t comment intelligently on the genre it sends up – particularly if its jokes are of the painful 1930s type – and I can’t see much of an actual comment on the genre as it was in 1935 here, so even believing that’s what Browning meant Mark of the Vampire to be, I still can’t find much to appreciate in it except for Howe’s photography and about ten minutes Browning magic.

The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942)

The people of the village of Frankenstein finally have their fill of what they identify as The Frankenstein Curse™. Consequently, they build a mob armed with torches and explosives to raze Castle Frankenstein - you know, the building last movie’s Frankenstein gifted to them at the end of Son of Frankenstein. During the course of their demolition project, they free the Creature (now played by Lon Chaney Jr.) from the sulphur pit that wasn’t located below the castle in the last movie but now seems to have teleported there. Ygor (still Bela Lugosi) – despite having been shot dead in the last film, a fact the film adorably shrugs away with a “well, he already survived a hanging” – is rather chipper too, blowing his horn merrily and cackling with evil. So off he goes with his best bud the Creature to find the brother of last film’s Frankenstein, one Ludwig Frankenstein (Cedric Hardwicke), whom he plans to blackmail into improving the Creature. The poor thing, you see, is rather poorly and in dire need of some electric stimulation after the whole sulphur pit affair.

Soon enough, things get a little out of control. How out of control? We very quickly progress from “Make the poor Creature healthy again!” to brain transplants and the dire question whose new brain the creature is supposed to get: Frankenstein opts for the brain of an assistant the Creature has killed, the Creature wants the brain of a little girl (seriously) and Ygor wants his brain in the Creature’s body to rule the country with the power of a hundred men, immortality and his wonderful, wonderful brain! And Ygor might just get what he wants, for Frankenstein’s mentor, partner and secret hater Dr. Bohmer (Lionel Atwill) is rather interested in a job as YgorCreature’s new sidekick.

Given the stage of affairs at Universal at this point in time, it is easy to be positively surprised by Erle C. Kenton’s The Ghost of Frankenstein, a film which seems to take its relegation to the minor leagues of minor budgets in stride. At the very least, unlike a lot of horror films Universal had already started to crap out at around this time, this film does clearly try to entertain its audience, so it lacks the offensive tendency of many a Universal horror film from this era to drag a non-plot from one moment of nothing of interest happening to another, and instead hits a mix of Frankenstein’s Greatest Hits while adding a few weird ideas all of its own, without getting bogged down in decidedly boring romance, comic relief, or simple feet-dragging.

After the mix of craziness and artfulness of Son of Frankenstein, Ghost is of course still quite a let-down, but at least it is an entertaining one. Kenton’s direction certainly isn’t on par with old style Universal at all, but he keeps the pacing vigorous, the film nice to look at and never does anything to embarrass himself. Why, from time to time, he even has a good idea or two. Junior obviously isn’t Karloff, and he certainly does overplay the stiff arms bit terribly, but he really does good work with the minimum of facial expression the – still excellent – make-up allows him; he particularly seems to enjoy his short time as the YgorCreature. In fact I would certainly have preferred the further adventures of this power couple to the business with the Wolfman coming up in the next film. Bela is still pretty damn great as Ygor, hitting a nice mix of cackling evil and a more sensitive side. I don’t believe I’ll ever understand people who say Lugosi couldn’t act – how else would you play a guy who wants his brain in the Creature’s body than as a complete yet somehow charming and pathetic weirdo?

Speaking of weird – and goofy – I’m very happy with the film’s brain fixation that after all finds various people having very peculiar ideas concerning what sort of brain belongs in a monster body. Frankly, I’m rather dubious about the idea Frankenstein’s assistant would thank the good doctor for getting this particular body – “oh hey, I’m not only a hideous creature every torch-wielding mob in Backlot Europe (that’s at least one mob per square kilometre) wants to burn, I’m also in the body who murdered me. Happy days!”. The Creature’s own candidate being a little girl is interesting to say the least, and Ygor’s preference is an awesome mixture of the megalomaniacal and the pathetic, so very much Ygor.

Ghost of Frankenstein is so entertaining, I didn’t even need to mention the – absolutely shoehorned in – titular ghost of Frankenstein (senior), a scene utterly useless yet still one that would probably still have been the highpoint in most of the Universal horrors in their express-decaying era. And if that’s not high praise, I don’t know what is.

Past Misdeeds: The Return of the Vampire (1944)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Armand Tesla, (Bela Lugosi) vampire has a grand old time sucking the blood of the British and ordering his mind-controlled, talking werewolf slave Andreas (Matt Willis) around, until the fearless vampire hunting duo of scientist(!) Lady Jane Ainsley (Frieda Inescort) and her mentor, Professor Walter Saunders (Gilbert Emery) put a stake through his heart.

About twenty years later, during World War II, Saunders dies, leaving behind a manuscript describing his and Lady Jane's legally dubious adventures in staking a man in his sleep. It could really get the good Lady in trouble with her copper friend Sir Frederick Fleet (Miles Mander), who quickly arranges the exhumation of Tesla's body after reading the manuscript and having a little talk with the scientist. Before that wonderful event can take place, the combined unhappy circumstances of an especially unluckily falling bomb and a gravedigger who likes to pull stakes out of corpses revive Tesla.

Not surprisingly, the vampire has revenge on his mind. Quickly he has brought Andreas - who is now working as Lady Jane's servant - under his control again and uses the hypnotized wolfman to acquire a new identity from an unlucky scientist Andreas was supposed to help smuggle into the country. Tesla uses his new name to get close to Saunders' granddaughter Nicki (Nina Foch) and Lady Jane. It doesn't take the good lady too long to figure out that the so-called Dr. Bruckner isn't exactly what he seems, but it will take all her determination to save Nicki and the young woman's fiancée John (Roland Varno), who just happens to be her own nephew, from Tesla's revenge.

After wading through half of the terrible movies which make up the Universal Cult Horror Collection I had nearly given up hope for so-called classic horror beyond the obvious films. Fortunately, The Return of the Vampire has come along to restore my faith. It's just too bad that it's a Columbia production and not part of Universal's crappy horror set, so there's still nothing in that one worth the money I paid for it.

Be that as it may, this film is of a whole different calibre than my last expeditions into 30s and 40s filmmaking. While it's obviously done on the cheap, Return's director Lew Landers (not usually praised for being all that competent) uses much of what could have been learned from the first and second generation of Universal's horror films. There's the shadow play that harkens back to expressionist silent movies, the gothic sets, the (after my last experiences surprising) gliding camera work, the fog - in short all the visual elements one can hope for in a film of this vintage, brought together with not inspired but expert hand.

Return is also quite pioneering in its use of a very contemporary wartime London as backdrop for its gothic trappings in a time when many horror movies - and especially vampire movies - still tended to take place in the past, as far away from the daily experience of their audience as possible.

We don't see that much of the Blitz or of ruined London, but Landers puts in enough of it that the viewer can hardly ignore the subtext of a modern horror taking its part in reawakening an older horror.

What the contemporary audience of 1944 made of this aspect of the film is anybody's guess.

The script doesn't always fare as well as Landers' direction. Some of the film's ideas, especially Andreas the talking wolfman are a bit too silly for their own good and would fit much better into a monster mash than into this comparatively serious film. I also found it hard to swallow that Lady Jane doesn't recognize Tesla at once. You'd think she has staked so many people in her career that she just forgot this particular one.

Fortunately, the script also has its good sides, first and foremost casting Lady Jane as a competent and determined chief vampire hunter, as far as I know the first time we witness a middle-aged woman put into that place. Even in this post-Buffy age this kind of female lead is not exactly a matter of course, so it is all the more surprising how normal this much older film treats her and her position. Of course and alas, the film doesn't keep its surprising brand of feminism up all the time, and Lady Jane and her policeman assistant are relegated to waiting in the sidelines when it comes to actively dispatching the vampire.

The finale is not worth all that much. There's too much hand of fate and too little planned action in it. Worse, the actual mechanics of Tesla's demise are based on a character arc of Andreas the film doesn't build up believably enough.

The ending could probably have been saved if only Matt Willis' acting as Andreas would have been a bit more subtle and/or his wolfman make-up less cuddly and cute. The latter is very much a problem not just of this particular movie, but of the whole cycle of early wolfman films. As it stands, Willis is also the most whiny wolfman around. In his way, he fits perfectly to Nina Foch, who does look very nice indeed but really should have piped down the melodramatics.

Both Willis and Foch are further hampered by having to play most of their scenes alongside the two dominant actors in the film in form of Lugosi and Inescort.

Dear Bela must have had a very good week while filming this. Lugosi's remarkable screen presence is always a given, even in the late phase of his career, but the subtlety he was capable of was often drowned out by his love for grand gestures (and really, the shabbiness of most of the productions he worked in). Somehow, the great man managed to find a very fine middle path between grand theatricality and subtlety for this film, and his performance is all the better for it.

Frieda Inescort is Lugosi's perfect adversary here. Where Lugosi is all menace and slimy charm, her Lady Jane radiates the perfect mixture of calmness and steely determination while never overplaying it to become the insufferable blowhard the elder vampire hunter before Peter Cushing so often became.

In short: Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)

Boy, do Universal horror films from the monster mash era make me cranky. I’m not even going to get into my usual synopsis here, seeing as the film’s plot is a pretty strained exercise in pointlessness despite the script being written by Curt Siodmak, who really could do better. Not only are character motives utterly incoherent, they’re illogical actions are not even setting up anything that’s all that interesting to watch. It’s one thing to use “It’s in the script!” as a motivation when it at least gets a film somewhere interesting or exciting, but you don’t really need to go into any contortions of this sort when your film isn’t planning on going anywhere of note anyhow.

I suspect it’s that legendary disinterest of the Universal higher ups in using their horror franchises as anything more than an unloved money making machine that’s responsible for how little of interest or dramatic impact is actually happening in Roy William Neill’s – who also could do so much better - film. This certainly is not a film made by people giving much of a crap about making a good movie; to my annoyance, though not to my surprise, it’s not even one terribly interested in at least giving its audience what its title promises. Sure, Frankenstein’s monster (Frankenstein himself being dead and all, and his daughter Elsa alas isn’t a mad scientist because that might have been entertaining) and the Wolf Man do meet, and even have a thirty second fight without any reason the script actually bothers to set up for it in the end, but that leaves us with a film mostly dragging its feet for seventy minutes, particularly once Lon Chaney Jr.’s Larry Talbot leaves beautiful Wales and goes on an odyssey of very little interest.

To add insult to injury, Bela Lugosi’s (whom I love dearly) performance as the Monster that somehow – for a reason the film of course doesn’t bother to explain but just treats as a given – has lost much of its strength is absolutely dreadful, lacking the physical presence as well as the pathos Karloff gave the role. He’s a good aggressive grunter, though.

And you know what? That’s really the kindest thing I have to say about this thing.

In short: The Saint’s Double Trouble (1940)

Gentleman thief and adventurer Simon Templar (George Sanders), aka “The Saint”, comes to beautiful Philadelphia to visit his old teacher, Professor Bitts (Thomas W. Ross) and his old flame, Bitts’s daughter (Helene Whitney).

However, there’s another man walking around with the Saint’s face, leaving Templar’s typical calling card on dead bodies. Murder is not a thing Templar approves of, so he jumps right into a rather convoluted and even more silly plot of doubles, peculiar traps, and cops and robbers with a decided lack in gray matter. Frightening stupidity (is it a virus!?) rules everyone except The Saint himself and Templar’s old friend and theoretical nemesis Inspector Fernack (Jonathan Hale), who just happens to be on vacation in Philadelphia too. Fernack, however, does really rather like Templar and his tendency for needlessly complicated shenanigans.

I can’t pretend to know much of or about the various incarnations of Leslie Charteris’s The Saint beyond vague memories of the Moore show and one or two books I must have read ages ago. Consequently, placing The Saint’s Double Trouble into the context of its series would consist of me repeating stuff anyone can read up on on Wikipedia, so I might just as well not pretend.

What I do know a bit about by now is the kind of programmer Jack Hively’s film is, a light concoction of convoluted plotting, a charming rogue protagonist doing charming rogue things, some action, and some moments of the film just playing around to fill out the running time. So I am quite able to identify The Saint’s Double Trouble as an entertaining example of its kind, pleasantly paced, shot straightforwardly but not without care, and acted by an ensemble that knows what its doing, and, particularly in the cases of Sanders and Hale, seems to have fun with it.

The film does of course need an audience tolerant of the contrived plot, Templar’s even more contrived manoeuvring to thwart it, the general silly stupidity of everyone involved, and the crimes’ basic improbability but then, it is charming enough to deserve this tolerance, and at least from me, had no trouble acquiring it.

The only thing I found rather disappointing was the waste of a perfectly fine Bela Lugosi in a forgettable role as The Partner (caps mandatory) of Templar’s evil double, but at least he isn’t playing a sinister butler.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,mystery,jack hively,george sanders,helene whitney,jonathan hale,bela lugosi

The Black Camel (1931)

Hollywood star Shelah Fane (Dorothy Revier) has come to beautiful Honolulu to shoot a movie as well as to romance one Alan Jaynes (William Post Jr.), wealthy globe trotter. There’s even marriage under discussion but because Shelah carries around a dark secret connected with the murder of actor Danny Mayo three years earlier, the actress has to fly in her favourite psychic, Tarneverro (Bela Lugosi) before she knows what she’ll do.

The evening after a rather dramatic session with Tarneverro, Shelah is murdered. Honolulu’s master investigator, Inspector Charlie Chan (Warner Oland) has his work quite cut out for him, for there are more suspects than you could shake the proverbial stick at (something Chan surely has an enlightening proverb or two about), and there are various other mysteries surrounding the death of the actress.

From today’s oh so enlightened perspective, the biggest problem of the long-running series of Charlie Chan films is of course their habit of having their Chinese detective played by white people in yellowface. On the other hand, it seems rather unfair to blame the movies too much for being products of the times they were made in; I’m much less tolerant of the later revival films made in times when people really should have known better, and of the actively racist humour in some of the Charlie Chan films, particular once the franchise got into the hands of Monogram. That is fortunately not really a problem of the film at hand, unless you want to argue Otto Yamaoka’s Kashimo is a racist stereotype more than just an odious comic relief character. Of course, odious comic relief characters always feel a bit like racist stereotypes to me, quite independently of their race – just look at my nemeses Johnny Walker and Jagdeep.

My tolerance for the yellowface nonsense does exist for the Chan movies as well as the Mister Moto films because they at least have the not-quite-Chinese characters as their heroes, characters who are generally much cleverer than the white people around them, who use some of their pseudo-folksy rambling just as much as a distraction from their actual talents as detectives like Columbo would later do with less stereotypical methods.

With The Black Camel’s – and many of the other Charlie Chan’s with him I’ve seen – there’s also the simple fact that Warner Oland is a pretty fantastic Chan, projecting a cleverness that can’t quite hide behind his – often rather wise-cracking – proverbs, as well as a degree of warmth and human compassion you don’t always find in movie detectives, particularly not in ones whose habits and verbal tics can so easily become annoying when played wrong (don’t get me started on Hercule Poirot).

The Black Camel is a pretty special Chan film, even, not just showing Oland at his best but also graced with a generally fine supporting cast (like Sally Eilers, a very young Robert Young, the always wonderful Bela, and even – playing a crazy butler – an uncredited Dwight Fry), and a script that works wonderfully in the contrived ways of its genre, and never gets bogged down in distractions other than red herrings. Thanks to it being a pre-code movie, the film is also a bit more frank about the way actual human relations work, and is allowed to actually speak some things later film could only hint at, which helps keep character motivations more believable than in years hence, before the film noir showed everyone how to speak about the things you’re not allowed to speak about in an effective manner again. The film is – of course, we are in Hollywood, after all – still quite melodramatic in its later stages but it is the kind of melodrama that seems organic and earned instead of forced and random, and just enhances the film’s copious charms.

There’s also something pleasantly tight and pacy about the film with director Hamilton MacFadden often managing to avoid the staginess that was in the genes (and the technical possibilities) of this era of sound film. There are, for example in the psychic session between Bela and Dorothy Revier, even some choice and highly atmospheric uses of post-expressionist shadow play as brought to Hollywood by my ancestors, which I am consequently quite the sucker for.

As is obvious by now, The Black Camel is one of the early highpoints of the Charlie Chan films, probably the first film I’d recommend to anyone even slightly interested in the character and his representations on screen to watch first, before encountering the horrors (and pleasures) of the Monogram films in particular.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,mystery,reviews,hamilton macfadden,warner oland,sally eilers,bela lugosi,robert young,dwight frye

Son of Frankenstein (1939)

Wolf von Frankenstein (Basil Rathbone), the son of the original monster-creating genius, returns with his wife Elsa (Josephine Hutchinson) and his incredibly annoying little son Peter (Donnie Dunagan), to his father’s old haunts – Castle Frankenstein in the village of Frankenstein. The Frankensteinians are not at all happy with their new neighbours and are only a small step from turning into a torch-wielding mob already. Fortunately, Krogh (Lionel Atwill), the one-armed chief of police of the village (and this place must have quite the crime rate, given that he’s the chief of police instead of the lone village cop), is a rather reasonable man, so things still might turn out well for everyone involved.

Of course, Wolf seems a bit too fascinated by his father’s experiments right from the start; that state of mind doesn’t improve when he meets Dad’s old assistant Ygor (Bela Lugosi) who has no trouble walking around with neck broken when he was hanged for his work for Frankenstein senior. Ygor shows Wolf the body of his father’s Creature (Boris Karloff) who has been lying in a coma for some weeks now, after it was hit by lightning, and easily convinces the scientist to revive it again. Curiously, Ygor fails to explain that he has some sort of mental hold on the Creature (implied to be connected to some fine woodwind playing), and that he has used it to kill the people involved in his hanging. Nor does Ygor mention he’s planning to continue the killing spree.

Soon, the son of Frankenstein is in a bit of trouble, and the never very peaceful village of Frankenstein is riled up again.

The usual narrative among us horror fans is that the Frankenstein films lost their lustre as quickly as the other Universal horror series, too soon descending in self-parody and the kind of films seemingly made by people who loathed the horror genre as much as they did their audience. This narrative’s not completely wrong, but too easily, a film as wonderful as Rowland V. Lee’s Son of Frankenstein gets put down on the side of the increasingly bad films Universal made during its second wave of horror films, though I suggest Universal horror lost its enthusiasm a few years after the start of that wave, shortly after The Wolfman. Still Son carries a bit of a stigma with it in some circles, despite it being just as good as its two predecessors, if very different from them.

For most of its running time, Son feels a lot like an effort to outdo the two James Whale movies that came before in as many ways as possible. To some, this might sound sacrilegious, yet I think In some ways, the film is even quite successful with this project. Sure, Son doesn’t quite have the poetry of the best moments of Whale’s films, nor is it as thematically resonant as they are but it does probably win out when it comes to plotting and characterization by eschewing the slightly episodic feel of the first two Frankenstein films in favour of a surprisingly tight plot full of comparatively complex characters with actual motivations for their behaviour. Not that the behaviour itself makes much sense in the ways of reason and logic, mind you, but then, Frankenstein isn’t the place where these things would actually have a proper place.

One of the film’s many joys is the interplay between Rathbone’s increasingly crazed and frightened Wolf and Atwill’s stiff and distrustful but basically kind Krogh, culminating in a game of darts of all things.

I also just adore Lugosi’s performance here that sees the great man doing much of what he does best – the curious and threatening pronunciation of certain WORDS nobody around HIM seems to NOTICE, the grand overacting, the joyfully glittering eyes whenever the macabre or the grotesque rear their heads. And in this particular Frankenstein movie, the grotesque and the macabre are nearly always present. Even the comic relief tonally fits into the movie this time around, not really working as a relief but strengthening the audience’s conviction that Universal’s Backlot Europe is a place where nothing ever isn’t macabre and/or grotesque, not even the funny people.

This is after all a place where no angle ever is just a right one, where no stair step is shaped like the one next to it, and where people dine in nearly empty, starkly shadowed rooms dominated by giant somewhat cubist looking boar heads. In fact, where the visual style in the earlier Universal horrors seemed inspired by German expressionism, many of the (brilliant) sets here are expressionism pure, completely ignoring any idea of naturalism, and turning every place the characters dwell in into a part of a dream world, or, if you’re so inclined, places where the subconscious is right on the surface of things, and where it seems perfectly natural that men with broken necks walk, life can be created out of death, people pretend Bela Lugosi’s Ygor seems harmless, and the very same people are only very mildly concerned when six of the eight men responsible for a hanging wind up dead by exploding heart.

It’s all a pure joy to watch and witness, the sort of movie that makes a lot of weird decisions but then follows them through so well and so (un-)naturally, they make up a perfectly fitting whole.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,horror,gothic,rowland v. lee,basil rathbone,boris karloff,bela lugosi,lionel atwill,josephine hutchinson,reviews

On Rewatching Dracula (1931)

I'm changing up my usual format a bit today because nobody needs to hear a plot synopsis of the first classic Universal horror movie.

If you're just joining us, young grasshopper, be advised that Tod Browning's Dracula isn't based directly on Bram Stoker's novel but on a stage play by Hamilton Deane that was later rewritten by John L. Balderston and makes some sensible and some very curious changes to the novel. Some of the latter may make more sense on the stage than on screen, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Browning would have preferred Dracula to be played by his old partner in crime Lon Chaney (senior) but Universal insisted on very successful stage Dracula Bela Lugosi. Consequently, Browning had one or more hissy fits and did not bring his full creative power to the proceedings because he found his ego more important than his movie. As far as can be said today, parts of the film were really directed by supreme cinematographer Karl Freund. This part of the film's backstory has made an easy in for a lot of critics to take the film down a peg. It's difficult to completely disagree with the brunt of their arguments, for the film is often rather more stagy than necessary with too many scenes of characters telling us important plot developments instead of the film showing them (though I don't think it's all the play's fault - some of the scenes that are only told, especially Dracula feeding his blood to Mina, would just have not gone over on screen in 1931, pre-code era or not), and Browning is visually far less imaginative than in those of his films he deigned to care about. Having said this, to me there's so much about Dracula that is a remarkable achievement I can't help but have the impression these critics are so in love with mourning a film that never was they don't look at the film that actually exists with an open mind.

It's true, Browning is not at all at the top of his game here, and especially the dialogue scenes that make up most of the film's middle are filmed with little élan or interest, but all of the film's big horror set pieces are moody and brilliant and staged with a care many filmmakers don't bring to the table when they are at their best. Then there's Freund's beautiful cinematography, Charles D. Hall's impressive art direction that sets up rules of the visual treatment of gothic horror by way of German expressionism generations would go on to follow. Freund's and Hall's contributions to the film really give the joyful impression - in a fog-shrouded doom and dread kind of way - of something happening on screen for the first time.

And then there's Bela, of course. One could make fun of the curious stiffness and theatricality of the great man's performance, but then one would rather miss out on the fact how nuanced what he's doing here actually is. Lugosi doesn't play the Count as a romantic, several hundred years old noble with a lust for blood, but as a creature that may once have been human and vaguely remembers some of the surface aspects of acting like a human being. There's a reason that Lugosi's accent is thicker whenever Dracula lets his mask drop completely, and it's the same reason why he's moving less corpse-stiff in those scenes where he's trying to fit into society, even though each of his gestures then is still slightly off. This Dracula is not a dead man walking, but something deeply inhuman pretending to be a man, and for my taste, Lugosi realizes that aspect of the role brilliantly.

I also think most of the rest of the cast does their job rather well. Helen Chandler's Mina is quite a bit more convincing than one would expect going by the generally pale performances of female romantic leads of the era. Dwight Frye does an important step to be forever type-cast as the bug-eyed madman, and while this interpretation of mental illness is of course as dubious as that of Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter, his performance has a strong, melodramatic (in all the best senses of the word) power that perfectly fits Lugosi's performance as well as Edward van Sloan's Dutch accent by way of Hollywood-Hindustan and Hollywood-China. No, we're not in method acting land here, but in a film where intelligently melodramatic and artificial acting come together with ideas and methods of German cinematic expressionism and Hollywood commercialism to create more than just the first horror house style in cinematic history but a foggy, shadowy, weirdly accented world of its own.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,horror,tod browning,bela lugosi,dwight frye,helen chandler,edward van sloan

Three Films Make A Post: in her eyes...DESIRE! in her veins...the blood of a MONSTER!

Gantz - Perfect Answer (2011): In the second Gantz movie (that in truth is the second half of one very long movie) Director Shinsuke Sato still ignores the fanservice part of the manga he is adapting, and concentrates on the characters and a lot of melodrama that's from time to time broken up by pretty fantastic fight scenes, as well as by a handful of pleasantly weird flourishes. The general tenor in reviews of the film seems to be that there just aren't enough of the fight scenes, but I really prefer the two tour-de-force set-pieces the film does have to the "more blood, more tits" approach; you know, there's nothing wrong with trying to stay classy. The problem the film has in my eyes is one of pacing - it takes a bit too much time to get going (and a bit too much time to actually end once the plot is over and done with), and then hasn't quite enough time left to develop the huge swathes of manga it has decided to adapt. I still enjoy the two Gantz films quite a bit more than most films of the blockbuster league, though.

The Black Sleep (1956): In theory, it must have sounded like a good idea to make a Gothic horror movie about the usual mad science stuff featuring Basil Rathbone, Lon Chaney Jr, John Carradine and a heartbreakingly ill looking Bela Lugosi. In practice, it's one of those films where most of the old stars are just carted out for a few minutes to remind the audience of better films, and the only one of them with a substantial role - Rathbone as the mad scientist - has the difficult job to not upstage Herbert Rudley too much while still acting like the prototype of Cushing's Baron Frankenstein.

The film's main problem is that there really isn't anything remarkable about it except for Rathbone's performance - the script is tame and lacking in imagination, Reginald Le Borg's direction is characteristically bland, and little happens that could not have happened in a film twenty years earlier in exactly the same way. "Pure retro" was an approach to art with as little power in 1956 as it has today.

Investigation Into The Invisible World (2002): I know, it's an incongruous position for someone like me, who always praises Werner Herzog's documentaries for their respect for even the strangest people and ideas, to take, but I find the same approach taken by Jean-Michel Roux talking to a bunch of eso crackpots and schizophrenics in Iceland pretty offensive. It might have something to do with Roux's visual style too, or rather the way he tries to turn Iceland into the cover of an Enya record (though at least the film's score by Biosphere and Hector Zazou is much above the Enya-level) using post-production effects so aggressively manipulative I was at first thinking something was wrong with my DVD player. To me, the whole project feels like kitsch with pretentions to be art, which is always the worst kind of kitsch as well as the worst kind of art.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,japanese movies,french movies,in short,sf,action,horror,gothic,documentary,shinsuke sato,reginald le borg,jean-michel roux,bela lugosi,lon chaney jr,basil rathbone,john carradine

Three Films Make A Post: Revenge Has Never Been So Brutal

The Mysterious Mr. Wong (1935): A film from Bela Lugosi's Poverty Row phase in which the great man is enthusiastically playing the most Hungarian evil Chinese mastermind ever to grace the screen. Alas, Bela is basically the only good thing on screen. Except for the grotesque and uncomfortable fun of Lugosi in yellowface, there's not too much else to recommend the film. Expect lots of casual racism, a "funny" arsehole-reporter (Wallace Ford) as our hero, and of course not much of interest to happen on screen. It doesn't look too impoverished for a Monogram film, but there's still neither the will nor the money for anything even vaguely exciting on display.

Worse, Bela (who also disguises himself as a kindly old herb seller), just doesn't have a lot of screen time. Instead, the film prefers to torture its viewers with Wallace Ford being "funny". That's one of those "things worse than death" deals.

 

Chaya (2003)?: Very cheaply done Thai cross of reincarnation soap opera (and wow, does reincarnation work wonders for melodrama) and vengeance horror film. Everyone's quite pretty and quite melodramatic, but the plot is not too interesting, the direction pedestrian and there are so many better Thai films to see.

If you're a Westerner like me, you'll probably at least get some moments of delight out of how matter of factly the film treats reincarnation and all that comes with the concept; I imagine Thai viewers to have comparable feelings about films including the Catholic confessional secret.

 

(The) Record (2000): Last in today's trilogy of cheap but not very good movies is this South Korean attempt at ripping off I Saw What You Did Last Summer, which itself wasn't exactly a film bursting with originality. Turns out that the two directors needed to make this film hate even the thought of originality with the burning passion of twelve exploding huts and so continue to pillage every post-Scream slasher they can get their hands on for "ideas" that were already long dead when those films stole them.

This frankensteinian way of filmmaking could of course still lead to an exciting (or at least interesting) outcome, but for that to happen at least one of the directors would have needed talent, or a bit of madness, or vision, or the ability not to bore me to tears.

As it stands, I even preferred watching Wallace Ford.

 

Technorati-Tags: in short,american movies,thai movies,south korean movies,mystery,comedy,horror,bela lugosi

The Dark Eyes of London (1940)

aka The Human Monster

DI Larry Holt (Hugh Williams) of Scotland Yard has a difficult case to crack. A surprising number of drowned gentlemen has drifted onto the banks of the Thames in the last few months. His boss - who does not seem to like him too much -  wants the Inspector to prove that there's nothing untowards about these deaths, but Holt is soon convinced that the drownings are in fact murders. Together with an American guest copper from Chicago (Edmon Ryan; mostly there to demonstrate the superiority of the British over the inhabitants of the US), the Inspector goes to work. It turns out that quite a few of the victims were insured through the company of kindly and helpful Doctor Orloff (kindly Bela Lugosi), and that said Doctor Orloff himself was wont to lend money to them, with the proceedings from their life insurances as securities.

While Holt now has his suspect, he still can't prove anything. There's also a mysterious connection between the deaths and a home for the blind Orloff kindly finances. Fortunately for the policeman, extra-kindly Doctor Orloff invites the daughter of one of his victims, Diana Stuart (Greta Gynt), to work for the home as a secretary. The spunky Diana is just too willing to do some snooping for Holt. Of course, this is more dangerous for her than anyone could have expected.

Who knew that one of the three films Bela Lugosi made in England is in fact one of his good ones?

The Dark Eyes of London is based on a novel by Edgar Wallace, and as such a mystery with horror elements instead of a full-grown Bela-thon, but it truly is quite a good film, even good enough to make up for Lugosi's final British film, the intensely painful Mother Riley Meets the Vampire that is the nadir of the great man's career (don't try to sell me on his work with Ed Wood as Lugosi's worst, those films at the very least aren't good reasons for self-mutilation, unlike Mother Riley).

Dark Eyes shows its strengths especially when compared to Lugosi's Poverty Row work. Although I'm quite sure that the budget and production circumstances of this film weren't much better than those of its US counterparts, it has the strong smell of a film made by people trying to make the most of their means. I wouldn't exactly call the film fast-paced or clever, but it never gets bogged down in unnecessarily long dialogue sequences, and has only one or two plot points that don't make much sense.

A lot of the film is not impressive to look at, but from time to time its director Walter Summers (a UK B-picture work horse, it seems) rises to creating atmospheric and even somewhat creepy scenes. If you squint (and I'm always willing to do that for a director who is making an effort), you can see an expressionist influence especially in the scenes taking place in and around the home of the blind, which incidentally is also a very Gothic looking set (even with the mandatory verticality of such a place).

The film is also surprisingly ruthless and cruel in the misdeeds it insinuates more than shows, with some ideas that would have fit nicely with the most production code skirting efforts from the US.

Bela is in fine form here, giving one of his better performances. He presents his mad scientist persona with his usual relish, but (something he was always particularly good at) also gives Orloff a certain degree of pathos that hints at the fact that he has not always been a monster without ever explaining what happened to make him one.

For once, I don't even feel the need to complain about Lugosi's counterparts in a film. I wouldn't call Hugh Williams exciting or all that charismatic, but he's convincing enough as a comparatively competent police officer. He certainly beats the pieces of wood Lugosi usually fought.

Greta Gynt also sells herself well enough by avoiding too much of the melodramatics her role could have descended into.

The less said about the odious comic relief the better, so suffice it to say there's relatively little of it on display, and what is there is neither too painful nor too misplaced.

All in all, I'd call The Dark Eyes of London a minor, well-hidden classic in Lugosi's body of work, as solid and entertaining a little thriller as one could hope for, and certainly still worth seeing.

 

Technorati-Tags: british movies,horror,mystery,thriller,reviews,bela lugosi

On WTF: The Return of the Vampire (1944)

1944 isn't exactly what I'd call a good year in the career of Bela Lugosi, so I entered into this one with some trepidation. Surprisingly enough, this film was very much worthy of my time.

More about the The Return of the Vampire, and some words about a World War II female vampire slayer, can be found in my review on WT-Film.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,bela lugosi,lew landers,reviews,frieda inescort,other places

In short: Chandu On The Magic Island (1935)

Not much has changed since The Return of Chandu. The Lemurian cult of Ubasti still wants to abduct Princess Nadji (Maria Alba) to use either her body or her soul (the film isn't so sure about which) to revive their old high priestess, which will somehow also let Lemuria rule the world again, while very white mystic Chandu (Bela Lugosi) protects her - at least he says that he does.

Of course, being Chandu, he starts the film off with going away for unexplained reasons, leaving Nadji in the care of his annoying relatives, obviously leading to a near instant kidnapping. This time around, though, Chandu's rescuing work will be quite a bit more difficult, for the cultists at once have teleported Nadji to Lemuria itself. If they'd only used this trick before.

Our hero has only seven days to reach Lemuria, where he will witness even more abductions, kidnappings and re-abductions, all the while hindered in his heroic work by the "Black Curtain of Ubasti" that shrouds the island and (sometimes, sometimes not) nullifies Chandu's magical power of the Yogi phone. What luck that the bad guys are even more incompetent than he is!

Chandu On The Magic Island is a re-cut film version of the same serial The Return of Chandu was based on, and everything I said about that film still applies. The only thing that's different is that the editing and reassembling seems a little less slapdash here and that the whole kidnapping business reaches even more ridiculous heights, letting Chandu not look all that heroic anymore.

Still, it's good enough fun.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,adventure,serial,pulp,in short,bela lugosi

The Return of Chandu (1934)

Frank Chandler (Bela Lugosi), master of the mystical arts of "The Orient", and therefore also known as Chandu the Magician, brings his friend, the Egyptian princess Nadji (Maria Alba) into the supposed safety of his Los Angeles home.

Poor Nadji is quite the popular girl, you understand. Especially the Lemurian cult of Ubasti is very interested in acquiring Nadji's body as the vessel to carry the soul of an ancient high priestess of their goddess. This kind of soul transfer is only possible into the bodies of members of the Egyptian royal family, and Nadji, being the last of her line, is the last hope the cultists have to get their high priestess reincarnated. Why they didn't try their luck a few centuries earlier is anybody's guess.

The traveling time between Lemuria and California will certainly not be enough to hinder their plans, and soon Chandu and the cultists are playing a merry game of kidnap/rescue the princess. It is quite possible that Chandu is not the most competent of heroes, what with his permanently letting his charge alone or in the care of his nephew Bob (Dean Benton). The latter amounts to a fate worse than death - being in the same room as Bob, at least until he runs off to do who knows what and leaves Nadji to be kidnapped again.

Chandu, you have changed! While the first Chandu film featured the less than fascinating Edmund Lowe in the title role and (house favorite) Bela Lugosi as his nemesis, the excellently named Roxor, this sequel promotes dear Bela into the unusual role of the hero, an opportunity the great man seems to have relished.

As was so often the case in Lugosi's career, he is also the only one on set who does any acting at all, unless one wants to call Maria Alba's excellent work at cowering in fear and being unconscious acting.

Compared to the first Chandu film, Return of Chandu is a much impoverished outing, with sometimes sloppily arranged, cheap looking sets, the already mentioned non-acting, not too many stunts and an effects budget that doesn't allow for much more in the way of magic than a little invisibility (no moving objects here, obviously), Bela's patented hypnotic gaze and the Yogi phone - Bela calling his mystical master WITH THE POWER OF HIS MIND to get great advice like "keep the faith" combined with a little magical GPS. Which I'd call something of a problem in a film about a magician.

This and other of the film's problems, like the repetitiveness of its plot, or a certain lack of transitions, have their reason in the sad and tragic truth that The Return of Chandu isn't a real feature film at all, but a fix-up of the first six parts of a twelve part serial, and a cheap one at that, quite naturally not leading to the slickest of experiences even in the hands of a genius of editing.

Still, it isn't all bad - the opportunity to see Bela for once as a film's hero is a fine thing, and his charisma and presence definitely is preferable to anything your typical white-bread serial hero actor could bring to a film, the few stunts that are there are fun enough, the plot has a certain pulpy drive, even if it does not make much sense, and the evil rituals are quite charming.

I also found myself absolutely enamored with the main bad guy's - whose name unfortunately gets lost through the terrible sound quality of the print - love for very big hats. I suppose he has other deficiencies that make wearing them necessary. He starts out with the biggest damn turban mankind has ever seen, but obviously levels up in the second half of the film and is then allowed to wear the Tower of Pisa on his head.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,adventure,serial,pulp,bela lugosi,reviews

The Raven (1935)

When Jean Thatcher (Irene Ware) is dangerously hurt in a car accident, her father Judge "I don't need no stinking first name" Thatcher (Samuel S. Hinds) turns to the only man who seems capable to successfully operate on Jean for help. Dr. Richard Vollin (Bela Lugosi) is a retired physician with a Poe obsession and the rather unpleasant self-interpretation of "Nietzschean superman", yet he is also a (self-)certified genius.

Vollin saves Jean's life without breaking a sweat, but one look at his patient also has him falling madly in love with her.

When she is alright again, Vollin and Jean start socializing. The young woman even seems to take a shine to the good Doctor, a fact that highly displeases the Judge. After all, she is already eloped to one of the non-entities one is eloped to in films like this (Lester Matthews).´

Obviously, instead of impressing onto his daughter the importance of thinking about which man she actually wants and letting her do the sorting out herself (or, good Lord!, just letting her be), the Judge has a little talk with Vollin, starting from the assumption that a man like Vollin would of course never be drawn to someone like his daughter (ah, the respect), and even if he did would never act upon it when it displeases her father. Vollin is rather displeased with the Judge's position himself, even more so because all this love business isn't good for his superior brain.

Surprisingly, the good doctor's command to "Send her to me!" doesn't endear him to Judge Thatcher, and the whole civilized talk business  just ends with him growing murderously mad and the judge getting into a (this time understandable) hissy fit.

Obviously, a mad genius like Vollin is not going to take this lying down. But how to avenge himself? Fortunately, soon after this discussion, a solution to Vollin's problem in form of the escaped killer Edmond Bateman (Boris Karloff) stumbles into Vollin's mansion. He wants Vollin to change the appearance of his face, not just to escape the attention of the police, but to become a better person by being prettier. Vollin agrees to operate Bateman.

Alas, instead of the Valentino look Bateman was probably hoping for, Vollin (who has a slight disposition towards sadism, I must say) rather goes for Karloff in Frankenstein. This is not only bound to make Bateman more evil, it is also a nice basis to press the man into helping Vollin get his revenge.

Now it's just a question of inviting everyone Vollin wants to see dead (who knows for what reason in the case of half of them) to a little party over the weekend and acquainting them with the beauty of one's home built torture devices and very special home improvements - after a little (very very dumb) philosophizing about Poe, love and torture.

The Raven is one of the lesser known Universal horror films, a forerunner of the trend of picking the title of a random Poe story or poem to then not follow the plot of one's source in the least. It's a perfectly fine way to go about it, of course, as long as the resulting film is as entertaining as this one.

Films like this and its brethren always rise (or fall) with the enthusiasm of their villains, since nobody in the 30s or 40s ever bothered to make the supposed heroes and heroines of a film even remotely interesting or likeable. So it should come as no surprise that it is rather difficult to have much empathy with the Judge, the fiancee who acts like the heroine's daddy or the additional random annoying people Bela wants to kill. Jean herself is a little more open-minded than your typical heroine (which means that she at least apologizes when she treats the disfigured Karloff shabbily), but the rest of them is of no further interest at all. What exactly does it say about the morals of a culture when its theoretically ideal embodiments press the viewer into adopting a torturing maniac as his hero?

Be that as it may, Lugosi and Karloff are both in excellent form here, carrying the film despite a rather dumb script (that takes itself to be quite clever, I'm afraid), bland direction and wretched co-stars right into the realm of unfairly ignored films.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,reviews,horror,bela lugosi,boris karloff

Voodoo Man (1944)

The area around Too-Lazy-To-Give-It-A-Name, USA is plagued by a series of disappearances. "Girl motorists" (and their cars) just seem to vanish into thin air, or at least, that's what the comic relief sheriff in his wisdom thinks (if he does think). In truth, Doctor Richard Marlowe (Bela Lugosi) and his merry band of malcontents - among them his Igor, the dedicated zombie wrangler, unfunky drummer and hair fondler Toby (John Carradine, doing his worst until it is oh so right) and gas station owner and voodoo priest Nicholas (George Zucco, often dressed in the most ridiculous voodoo priest get-up you'll ever see) - kidnap the women to solve a typical Lugosi problem. You see (and you just might have heard this one before), Bela's wife has been dead now for 22 years, but her loyal husband is still trying to revive her by transferring other women's wills to live (that's the technical term) to her body. Alas, not just any donor will do for a project like this. He has not been too successful until now, leaving the poor man with cellar full of young female voodoo zombies in white gowns (not even especially flimsy gowns!) to be hair-fondled and told about their prettiness by Toby and not much else to show.

I'm quite sure Bela would be able to triumph over death given enough time (let's say a few centuries), but as things like this go, he has finally kidnapped the wrong woman. Turns out that it's not a good idea to abduct the cousin of the fiancee of a Hollywood hack (Tod Andrews when he was still called Michael Ames, giving an absolutely perfect impression of a wooden doll with rubber arms; just too bad he's supposed to be human), unless one wants to be pestered by the incredible skill of the "romantic lead" (and golly, does this position deserve its quotation marks) of a Poverty Row movie at doing nothing at all and still being called a film's hero and triumphing over evil (by lying unconscious on the floor) in the end.

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who hear about a Monogram picture featuring Lugosi and Zucco and Carradine and jump (not fall) into an ecstatic state of mind quite like being hypnotized by Bela himself and those (poor sods) who just look kinda puzzled and shrug while they're slowly backing away from the person who brought them such glorious news.

I don't know what else I can do for the latter group than to pity them; to the former group I can say that the film is very much like one would expect, which is to say, not a good film at all but still very lovely.

Sure, I'll give skeptics that the plot of the film makes no sense, that the comic relief is as painful as always (though at least lacking in racist stereotypes thanks to the total absence of non-white people - for a voodoo movie from the 40s, that's actually positive), that the young lead characters should be shot on sight, that William Beaudine's direction is as pedestrian as always. But what are these minor questions of quality compared to Bela doing his hypnotic shtick, the gloriously low-key and/or impoverished voodoo rituals (so cheap they couldn't even afford Hollywood voodoo drumming and had to go with John Carradine and Pat McKee performing their own drumming, very badly of course) or the mindbogglingly boring "finale"? Not much, as most people with discerning tastes (a much nicer way to say "I", don't you think?) would agree.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,bela lugosi,john carradine,george zucco,reviews

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)

A certain Dr. Mirakle (Bela Lugosi) helps to keep a carnival in Paris classy. He is a scientist, you know, pulling in quite the crowd with his talk of evolution and the relationship between man and ape, even if he's annoying his public more than he's enlightening them. He keeps a gorilla (in fact, a costume that does not look like any monkey or ape I've ever seen but magically transforms into a laughably harmless looking chimp for close-ups) called Eric whom he claims he can talk to through some nonsense babble that seems to predict future ape related losses of dignity soon to come in Lugosi's career.

Secretly, Eric assists Mirakle in experiments to "scientifically" proof evolution by finding a woman with gorilla-compatible blood to - carry Eric's babies, I guess. The film does not make the latter part of the plan all that explicit, but it's not all that subtle about it either.

One day, charming young Camille (Sidney Fox) and her suitor Pierre Dupin (Leon Waycoff, hero and incredibly bad actor) stroll into the good doctor's little show. Mad scientist and murderous ape are both quite taken with Camille's button-like cuteness and there's not a long way from seeing her to abducting her for the good of science and a little bestiality.

 

Murders in the Rue Morgue is one of the less loved and less well known films of Universal's first horror cycle. This time, film history has been relatively fair - Rue Morgue just isn't in the same class as James Whale's Frankenstein films or Karl Freund's The Mummy. Most of the film's flaws can be nicely put on the shoulders of writer/director Robert Florey's script that only has its nicely pulpy crudeness going for it, but does not seem to have much of a clue about what to do with the few elements and scenes it takes from Poe's literary model nor have a lot of experience with the subtleties or basic concepts of plotting. Most of the scenes that are taken from Poe don't make a lot of sense in their new context and - even more problematically - the changes Florey makes are mostly for the worse. This is not as hurtful for the film as Leon Waycoff's puzzling inability to act at all (and imagine my surprise when I learned what a long career that guy had nonetheless), though. While one does not expect much acting or charisma from the romantic lead in a film of this age, Waycoff's oscillating between Shatner-like mugging and wood block imitations still comes as a bad surprise.

Fortunately there are reasons that make Rue Morgue worth the time in spite of its flaws. Bela - as always - does a fine job with the little he's given and gives Dr. Mirakle his standard undertone of wounded pride that somehow became plain homicidal madness. There are a few moments when you can see what kind of a person Mirakle must have been before he became a ranting maniac - those are most certainly not based on anything in the script, but part of a thoughtfulness and subtlety that was always present beneath the stage theatrics of Lugosi's acting, but sadly underused in his films. (I must admit, I always want Bela to be the hero of his films, based on impressions like this).

Karl Freund was working as director of photography here, and, comparing his track record with that of Robert Florey, it seems only fair to see him as responsible for all that goes well on the visual side of this film. He delivers some fine shots that still carry much of the dream-like artificiality of the Expressionist era and also had an ability to keep the camera moving (without being too showy with it) that was not typical for the films of the time, letting the film look much more dynamic than the script deserves.

So, if you are going into this without looking for a masterpiece, but keep your eyes open for the things Lugosi and Freund have to offer, you'll find a lesser Universal horror film that is still lively enough to keep you interested.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,reviews,karl freund,bela lugosi,robert florey

Also seen

The Imp (1981)

Ah Keung has been out of luck for quite some time now. He's always losing his job and his young marriage isn't too happy either. His life isn't getting much better when a malevolent spirit tries to be reincarnated in the body of his unborn son.

The Imp is placed somewhere between the truly outrageous examples of Hong Kong horror and a more psychological approach. It's a pleasant enough watch, but lacks either the transgressiveness and plain lunacy of its more extreme brethren or the moodiness needed for the subtler form.

 

Chandu the Magician (1932)

A fun little piece of serial style entertainment, featuring the silly British Yogi Chandu fighting power-mad Bela Lugosi for possession of a death ray. Bela is in top form, Chandu's magic is silly fun, the rest of the acting is wooden. What more can you want?

 

Technorati-Tags: also seen,american movies,hong kong movies,horror,adventure,pulp