Saturday, October 30, 1971 (Midnight): Chamber of Horrors aka Die Tur Mit Den 7 Schlossern (1962) / Doctor X (1932)

Synopsis: In London, a priest is poisoned while drinking a soda at a concession stand.  That same day, another man in the city is murdered, also under mysterious circumstances.  Each of the men carried an unusual looking key on a long gold chain. Later, police inspector Richard Martin (Heinz Drache) is visited by talkative safecracker Pheeny (Klaus Kinski) who tells him that someone tried to hire him to open a mysterious door with seven locks.  Pheeny, sensing that this is the sort of job that doesn't end with a paycheck but with a bullet in the back of the head, backs out of the deal and tells the whole story, asking for Martin's protection.  Pheeny, however, soon ends up dead.

Martin's only clue comes in the form of a piece of paper that bears a coat of arms.  He visits a library; the librarian frostily informs him that it might take months or years to track down a particular coat of arms.  However, when the woman sees it, she instantly knows to whose family the coat of arms belongs. By an astounding coincidence it is the coat of arms of the librarian's own family, the Selfords; and in fact the young woman, Sybil (Sabina Sesselmann), is herself one of the heirs of the Selford estate.  This turns out to be quite useful, as it soon becomes clear that each of the Selford heirs is being systematically targeted for murder.

It happens that the dispostion of the Selford estate is a hot topic at this particular moment.  The primary heir to the Selford fortune is soon to reach the age of majority, and all other heirs to the estate will receive their share of the fortune at the same time.  No one seems to have seen the heir lately, but the family's attorney Mr. Haveloc (Hans Nielsen) says that he is abroad and that he himself has had to send frequent letters of credit to cover the heir's gambling debts and hotel-trashing bills.

Martin, assisted by the comical police detective Holms, proceeds to the Selford mansion, where he must contend with the mysterious Dr. Antonio Stiletti (Pinkas Braun), a scientist in the Bela Lugosi vein, who keeps an ape in a cage down in the basement, and whose sinister experiments have yielded a monstrous assistant named Jacko, who is ready to kill at Dr. Selford's command....

Comments: For our first feature tonight we get a rare treat: a krimi film from the early 1960s.  Krimis were West German crime films produced by the Danish studio Rialto, and based on the novels of Edgar Wallace.  Rialto made an impressive number of these films through the 1960s. They tended to have the same actors pop up again and again (Klaus Kinski played low-life criminals in many of them, including this one) They are mostly forgotten now, though they do enjoy something of a cult following. They sport their own unique look and sensibility; and The Door With Seven Locks (released stateside as Chamber of Horrors) is a good introduction to this subgenre.

Krimi films are fast-paced and pleasant enough to watch, but you shouldn't spend a lot of time trying to make sense of them; it just spoils the fun (it might occur to you, for example, that a door with seven locks can be defeated by any punk with a set of lock picks; it would just take him seven times as long -- but never mind that).

 The novel's already overloaded plot is burdened with even more improbable twists and turns and red herrings. These films have an odd sense of humor, too --  as though you're watching The Usual Suspects as directed by Richard Lester. Inspector Martin is an engaging, light-hearted fellow who is constantly doing magic tricks.  His assistant, detective Holms, is always providing unnecessary information (one murder victim's name is Livingstone; Holms feels duty-bound to report that it isn't the famous African explorer).  And Dr. Stiletti is a Bela Lugosi-esque nut who is interested in building a race of supermen; his first attempt yields a Tor Johnson-esque brute who lumbers around, carrying out his sinister instructions. Stiletti's plan to place the head of a man on an ape's body speaks to the same eclectic portfolio of a Lugosi villain, as well.

There is an agreeable wackiness to the proceedings, and as a mystery-horror hybrid this ones works pretty well.  Chamber of Horrors is also, at nine years old, the "newest" film we've seen on the show thus far.

Doctor X

Synopsis: A vicious serial killer is on the loose in New York, a cannibal who only strikes when the Moon is full. The police realize that all of the murders are centered around the medical academy run by Dr. Xavier (Lionel Atwill), and the cops recruit Dr. Xavier to help find which of the four eccentric surgeons in his employ might be the murderer.

As it turns out, all four of the doctors make pretty good suspects.  We have the sour Dr. Wells, who has studied the practices of cannibals; Dr Duke, whom we may or may not rule out because he is in a wheelchair but who is kind of a jerk anyway; Dr. Rowitz, a researcher of a more lyrical bent (he writes poetry); and Dr. Haines, who seems to be hiding a number of secrets, including a penchant for lad magazines.  Oh, and he might have taken a nibble or two of human flesh in his day.

Meanwhile, newspaper reporter Lee Taylor  (Lee Tracy) is trying to scoop the competition in getting the facts of the case, and he isn't above posing as a corpse in the city morgue to get access.  Along the way he falls for Dr. Xavier's daughter Joanne (Fay Wray).  But as Dr. Xavier hatches a plan to catch the man dubbed the "Moon Killer" by the papers, Lee also has to face the possibility that the killer may be none other than Dr. Xavier himself...

Comments: This Michael Curtiz thriller was shot not long after Universal hit box office gold with "Dracula" and "Frankenstein".  As popular as these two films were with the public, they were regarded with great suspicion by the various self-appointed guardians of public morals, which saw them both -- particularly the latter  -- as unnecessarily ghoulish (Hollywood would soon create its own guardian of public morals in the form of the Hayes Office). Perhaps because of this, Doctor X  is surprisingly light-hearted in tone, considering the subject matter; and the male lead is even more of a goofball than the reporter Wallace Ford played in Night of Terror.

Doctor X was one of a number of early sound-era films shot in two-strip Technicolor, which theoretically makes this the first color film to be shown on Horror Incorporated. However, I am dead certain that the print shown on Channel 5 the night of October 30, 1971 would have been black-and-white.  To my knowledge no color 16mm prints were ever struck for this feature; in fact, most of the 35mm prints made after the original release of Doctor X were in black-and-white.  Luckily, the current DVD version is taken from UCLA's restored archival print, so we can see what audiences in 1932 saw.

Color does wonders for this film. It brings life to the lavish art-deco sets and seems to deepen the overall depth of field. The two-strip process also lends an unusual, desaturated color palate to the film, with very strong greens and browns but the vibrant "hot"  colors we associate with the later Technicolor -- reds, oranges and yellows -- quite muted by comparison.

It's great to see Lionel Atwill working on a good film while his career was still on the upswing.  Doctor X was released about a year before Secret of the Blue Room, another of his good early roles. But he's better served in this film because his daughter is not played by the simpering Gloria Stuart, but the radiant Fay Wray, one of the greatest film talents of the early 1930s. It's unfortunate that Wray's career faded so quickly -- but she gives a luminous and memorable performance here.

Saturday (Noon), October 30, 1971: The Black Sleep (1956)

Synopsis: Dr. Gordon Angus Ramsey (Herbert Rusley) has been convicted of murder. On the eve of his hanging, he is visited by one of his old medical school professors, Sir Joel Cadman.  Ramsey swears to Cadman that he didn't commit the crime, and Cadman seems sympathetic. He gives Ramsey a vial of powder and instructs him to mix the powder with water and drink before dawn on the morning of his hanging.  This, Cadman promises, will put him in a such a state of torpor that he will not be aware of the hanging at all. He also assures Ramsey that his body won't be turned over to the medical college for dissection, as is normally done with convicts' bodies; instead, the body will be turned over to Dr. Cadman himself.

When the guards come for Ramsey the next morning they find his dead body lying in the cell.  The body is transferred to Dr. Cadman, who once back at his lab gives it an injection.  At once the body goes into convulsions; minutes later, Dr. Ramsey has come back to life.

This, Dr. Cadman tells an astonished Ramsey, is the work of an ancient drug known as the Black Sleep; it perfectly simulates death; and as long as the antidote is given within 24 hours, the patient can be revived. A grateful Ramsey agrees to assist Dr. Cadman with his brain research.

While at the Cadman estate, Ramsey witnesses young Laurie (Patricia Blair) being attacked by a wild-eyed patient, Mungo (Lon Chaney, Jr). Mungo seems deranged and is apparently carries a visceral hatred for Laurie.  Ramsey tells Cadman that Mungo reminds him of someone he once knew, Professor Monroe, who was one of his instructors in college.  Cadman tells him that Mungo is indeed Professor Monroe; moreover, Laurie is his daughter.

Dr. Ramsey assists in experimenting with the brain of a cadaver when he notices cerebral fluid running down the surface of the brain.  How can this happen on a cadaver? he asks Cadman.  It isn't a cadaver, Dr. Cadman replies.  The man they are experimenting on is alive, kept in a state of suspended animation by the Black Sleep.

When Dr Ramsey protests, Cadman tells him that this is the only way to conduct the research that will benefit all mankind.  He reminds him that Dr. Monroe will benefit when he is able to unlock the mysteries of the human brain; so will Dr. Cadman's wife, who has been in a trance-like state since a brain injury.

But little does Dr. Ramsey know that Cadman was the one who arranged for him to be tried and convicted of murder, in order to recruit him as an assistant in his ghoulish experiments....

Comments: The Black Sleep is often called a throwback to an earlier era of horror, for two reasons.  First, it is the sort of gothic mad scientist picture that was popular in the 1930s, but decidedly unfashonable when it premiered in 1956; and second, it boasts an impressive number of washed-up horror stars in its cast, giving the strong impression of an homage to the glory days of Universal horror.

Unfortunately, while the actor's names might have been useful in generating box office, the actors themselves don't fare well. Bela Lugosi walks through his mute servant role with a pained expression and a palpable sense of physical frailty; the good humor that he displayed in such unfortunate productions as Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire has utterly evaporated here. He's reached the end of the line and seems to know it -- and in fact, this would prove to be the last time he worked on a movie set. (Plan 9 From Outer Space is technically his final screen credit, but that hardly counts -- Lugosi died after shooting less than a minute's worth of home-movie-quality footage).

Lon Chaney, Jr's drinking problem had more than caught up with him by this time and he looks sallow and unhealthy, no longer able to memorize dialogue and therefore appearing here - as he did in most of his late film roles -- as a rampaging brute. John Carradine, who always seemed quite comfortable in the most dismal settings, seems no less comfortable here; and Tor Johnson, the new kid on the block, upstages the old guys somewhat with his trademark blank-eyes-and-gaping-mouth performance.

While he wasn't a horror star per se, Basil Rathbone had played the title role in Universal's Son of Frankenstein nearly 20 years earlier.  He had moved on to bigger and better things in the meantime, and appearing in this film must have felt like a big step down for him.

But throwback that this is, The Black Sleep is also something of a missing link.  While aping Universal's golden age of horror, the  movie anticipates the Hammer cycle of horror films that defined the genre for the following decade.  The old Universal films almost entirely implied their ghoulishness and anything grotesque occured offscreen*.  In this film, we see a patient laid upon an operating table, a flap of skin folded back and his brain exposed, and we're treated to a close-up of cerebral fluid dribbling down the brain's convoluted surface. 

This icky detail must have been quite lurid for its time, and it is treated with the solemnity of acolytes wishing to impress the master.  Hammer, by contrast, used blood and gore with the barely-concealed glee of prankish schoolboys. The Black Sleep was made in a time when Universal's golden age was remembered fondly, even though its characteristic restraint was seen as a bit old-fashioned. By the time Hammer studios got into the business, Universal's horror films seemed much creakier, and movies like The Black Sleep, which wanted to be seen as  daring and innovative, were quickly forgotten.

____________________________________
* In fact, James P. Hogan's The Mad Ghoul we never see a single drop of blood -- even though it's a movie about a man turned into a zombie, who can only return to normal by digging up freshly-buried bodies and eating their hearts.

Saturday (Midnight), October 23, 1971: The Mask of Diijon (1946) / The Man Who Lived Twice (1936)

Synopsis: A successful stage magician named Diijon (Erich Von Stroheim) has retired his lucrative act in order to study the mysterious art of hypnotism.  He feels he is on to something big, but his obsessive devotion to his studies is troubling to his wife Vicki and their friends.  His lack of income is putting a strain on their marriage, but all attempts by Vicki's friends to help are rebuffed by the proud and arrogant Diijon.

About this time, Tom Holliday arrives in town.  He is an old flame of Vicki's and he too is concerned that she is being neglected.  In an attempt to help her, he offers Diijon a gig at the club where he works as a bandleader.  After much convincing, Diijon finally agrees;  but because he is long out of practice he botches the act and is fired.  Diijon is furious, and accuses Tom of trying to humiliate him in front of his wife.

On his way home, Diijon stops at a diner for a cup of coffee.  A shady character enters and tries to hold the place up – but Diijon manages to hypnotize the man, forcing him to give up his gun and return the money to the owner.  Intrigued by his success, Diijon hypnotizes the man selling papers at a newsstand  -- getting him to shout for all to hear that he is selling the evening edition, when he is in fact selling the morning edition.
It becomes clear to him that he can hypnotize anyone, and his subjects will do whatever he orders them to do.  But how far does his control go?  As something of an experiment, he hypnotizes family friend Danton, forcing him to write a suicide note and then throw himself off a bridge.  

Now that he has established a means to kill through hypnotism, Diijon decides to take revenge on Tom and Vicki – by hypnotizing his now-estranged wife, and forcing her to kill Tom at the club, in front of hundreds of witnesses….

Comments: What a difference twelve hours makes.  On the noon show we had to witness that Monogram train wreck Return of the Ape Man.  Now, at midnight, we have another poverty-row production.  But this PRC thriller is as lively and clever as Return of the Ape Man was witless and lazy.

The Mask of Diijon has an intriguing premise and an extraordinary lead performance by Eric Von Stroheim.  On the surface Diijon might seem to be a pretty straightforward role, but in fact it is quite difficult to pull off.  Diijon is not a conventional antihero -- he is proud and haughty, often taciturn, but when he speaks his words drip with acid. Von Stroheim excels at this, providing a strong undercurrent of menace whenever he is onscreen.  He never once raises his voice.  Quite the opposite -- some of his most chilling lines are delivered in almost a murmur.

The reason this little thriller has been largely forgotten is probably due to its extremely contrived ending. The movie stands up very well until the last ten minutes or so; then the wheels simply come off.  The ending doesn't match the quality of the rest of the screenplay, and I suspect it was written very quickly. But whether it was meant to replace a different ending that was deemed unacceptable, or if the screenwriters simply didn't know how to close it out, no one knows (well, okay  - I don't know) .  It's too bad --  The Mask of Diijon might have been regarded as a minor classic.  But movies are a bit like marathons -- it doesn't matter how well you do along the course if you can't make it to the finish line.  

The Man Who Lived Twice

Synopsis: Hard-boiled criminal Slick Rawley (Ralph Bellamy) has been in some tough jams before, but he's really done it this time. During a botched bank job he killed a cop, and now every badge in America is looking for him. He leaves his girlfriend Peggy Russell (Isabel Jewell) in the care of his pal Gloves (Ward Bond) and runs for it.

Hiding out in a lecture hall at a medical college, he hears Dr. Clifford Schuyler (Thurston Hall) expound on his theory of crime: career criminals, he says, are the victims of a medical defect -- namely, small tumors in a certain region of the brain. Remove the tumors, Schuyler says, and the criminal can be permanently cured.

He has tested his theory on vicious dogs and apes, and in all cases the animals become gentle and docile after the brain surgery.

But as much as Schuyler wishes to test this surgery on a human, the criminal justice system won't allow it.

Rawley follows Schuyler home and offers himself as a test subject. He convinces Schuyler that this might be his only chance to verify his theory, and he asks for only one thing in return: plastic surgery so that he can forever evade detection.

After the surgeries, Rawley (literally) looks like a new man, and he remembers nothing about his past. Dr. Schuyler tells him that his name is James Blake, that he lost his memory in a car accident, and that he has no living relatives.

Blake proves to be an honest, caring and hard-working man -- the very opposite of Slick Rawley. Seeing that Blake is inquisitive and fascinated by medical books, Schuyler enrolls the young man in college, and then medical school. Soon Dr. James Blake is a renowned physician and philanthropist, a man of sterling character, dedicated to improving the lot of America's prison population.

But when Peggy happens to meet Dr. Blake, she begins to suspect that he is her former boyfriend. A dogged police detective begins to think so too. But is Slick Rawley really dead? And if he is, how can Dr. Blake be held responsible for his crimes?

Comments: Just the other day I read about a scientist who  is zeroing in on the causes of violent behavior. Apparently the brains of psychopaths and murderers often have the same peculiarity: a region of the brain called the orbital cortex is much less active in these patients than in normal people.  The orbital cortex serves as a kind of braking mechanism, governing the activities of the primitive amygdala, which houses fear and rage and aggression --  the whole Incredible Hulk portfolio. Without that brake in place, aggressive behavior spins out of control and mayhem ensues.

That got me thinking about The Man Who Lived Twice. Even though that film was made some 75 years ago, its premise still holds up today: what if violent criminals were potentially decent people who just happened to have malfunctioning brains? And what if those brains could be repaired?

And the movie as a whole still holds up well. Ralph Bellamy really shines here, making weaselly, beady-eyed Slick Rawley seem a completely different character from the calm, good-natured Dr. Blake. And the rest of the cast is just as strong, with Ward Bond turning in a very convincing performance as Gloves.  

The Man Who Lived Twice isn't particularly well-directed, which should surprise absolutely no one; it was the work of Harry Lachman, an old hand at low-budget programmers.  His movies were always shot in the most straightforward way possible -- no frills and nothing fancy. The Man Who Lived Twice is probably Lachman's best film, with the possible exception of some of the Charlie Chan pictures he did for Fox during the Warner Oland era.  There is still a good deal of affection out there for those movies.  And I'll admit they're a lot of fun.

Saturday (Noon), October 23, 1971: Return of the Ape Man (1944) / The Face Behind the Mask (1941)

Synopsis: Professors Dexter (Bela Lugosi) and Gilmore (John Carradine) are conducting an experiment in suspended animation.  They bring a drunken vagrant (Ernie Adams) back to their laboratory, inject him with a serum, then freeze him solid for four months.  When they thaw him out, he's as good as new.  He happily takes the five-dollar bill Professor Gilmore gives him, unaware that any time has passed at all.

Professor Gilmore states that this is a triumph for Dexter's theories.  A man in this state of preservation, he says, could survive for a thousand years.  But Dexter is more circumspect.  There is only one way to prove that a man frozen for thousands of years could be revived, he says.  And that's to find someone who's been frozen for thousands of years and revive him!

Nine months later the two scientists are in the arctic, searching fruitlessly for a human body that's been preserved in a glacier.  Gilmore urges Dexter to give up: they've been searching without success for nearly a year.  Gilmore adds that he is a married man, and that his family needs him. Dexter mocks Gilmore's lack of resolve.

At that moment, the men see the outer edge of a glacier shear off from the rest.  They find the body of a man frozen in the ice, and they carve out the block and bring it back to their laboratory.

Using the techniques they've developed, the two scientists thaw out the caveman and restore it to life.  This, Gilmore says, is truly an amazing achievement!  Not yet, Dexter replies.  It will not be a truly amazing achievement until they are able to fully control the caveman.  And the only way to fully control the caveman is to take part of the brain of a modern man and add it to the caveman's brain!

Gilmore scoffs, noting that it would be impossible to find a volunteer for such an experiment.  But Dexter seems unconcerned by this.  Later, at a homecoming celebration for the two scientists, Gilmore notices that his brainy brother Steve isn't around.  Steve, we learn, has left with Dexter.  Gilmore rushes to Dexter's lab, afraid of what he will find....

Comments: Oh lord. We've seen a few clunkers on Horror Incorporated since its premiere in November 1969.  But this feature -- the very first of Horror Incorporated's matinee shows -- is the first movie we've seen that actually made me angry.  Each of Return of the Ape Man's idiotic plot points aggravated me as though it was a personal insult, until by the end I was pacing around my living room, furious at everyone involved in the production. But my most profound rage was reserved for screenwriter Robert Charles.  I wanted to drive to L.A. and punch him in the face. But he's dead, or at least I have to assume he is (his IMDB entry lists no year of birth or death, and exactly two credits: this film and Voodoo Man, which also came out in 1944.  Presumably all the good screenwriters had been drafted -- but I digress.)

This isn't an auspicious beginning for the noontime edition of Horror Incorporated. As a calling card it's more of an insult than anything else. Return of the Ape Man is a perfect example of everything that's wrong with Monogram's output: the grimy-looking sets, the excessive use of stock footage, the weak-as-water dialogue.

But what really outs this movie as a Monogram production is its air of complete indifference. No one involved with the production seems to have exerted a moment's effort more than was necessary to pick up a paycheck.  That goes for the lead actors as well; and it is somewhat surprising in the case of that old pro  Lugosi, who always seemed to give his all no matter how big the turkey he was asked to play in.

But to be fair, no amount of effort could have salvaged this train wreck.  From stem to stern, the screenplay is dreadful.  The absurdities start right out of the gate and never really stop coming.  The very first shot in the movie is a blaring newspaper headline, "NOTED TRAMP MISSING". The "noted tramp" is, of course, the same vagrant that Dexter and Gilmore have abducted in order to use in their experiments.  We're asked to believe that the two scientists picked up the homeless man and experimented on him, presumably because he wouldn't be missed. But the JAPS-BOMB-PEARL-HARBOR- sized headline indicates that the vagrant was, improbably enough, missed after all.  Yet after the four-month experiment, Gilmore gives the man a five-dollar bill and the noted tramp goes his merry way.  There's no indication that the man's reappearance triggers any questions or spurs any investigation that would lead back to Dexter and Gilroy.

In fact, the ethics of using a homeless alcoholic as a guinea pig (or a caveman as a guinea pig, for that matter) is never even brought up; we are apparently supposed to think there's nothing wrong with it.  Gilmore is presented to us as the scientist with a conscience, reacting in horror when Dexter proposes taking part of a modern humans' brain and implanting it in the caveman. But Gilmore's horror seems to be caused more by the prospect of Dexter harvesting his brother Steve's brain than it is the immorality of Dexter's plans.

Oh, and while we're on the subject, what exactly are Dexter's plans?  Even a mad scientist has to have some goal in mind.  As a scientist, Dexter seems to be quite a dabbler: he first perfects suspended animation, then goes on an expedition to find someone frozen in an ancient glacier, then suddenly he's talking about brain transplants.  What is Dexter's area of expertise, anyway?  Is he a cryogenicist?  An anthropologist? A neurologist? Where does his funding come from?  In what journals, if any, does he publish?

I know, we're not supposed to ask these sorts of questions. But mad scientists are consistent if nothing else. Even Dr. Niemann, crazy as a bedbug, had sense enough to be a specialist.

This opus enjoys a 4.6 rating on IMDB, which is baffling to me.  I can only chalk it up to people who can't tell good movies from bad ones, or those who think of themselves as connoisseurs of rotten movies, the way some people are connoisseurs of rotten cheese.

This movie doesn't deserve to be lauded, or even watched ironically.  I suspect it isn't a movie at all, but a fraudulent imitation of one.  If the Consumer Product Safety Commission regulated movies, they would have taken this one off the market a long time ago.  It's a cheat from start to finish.

By the way, here are two more cheats in the film.  The title Return of the Ape Man is meant to mislead audiences.  It is not a sequel to Monogram's previous Bela Lugosi outing The Ape Man.  Moreover, the Ape Man, who does not return from anywhere, is not played by George Zucco

The Face Behind the Mask

Synopsis: Immigrant Janos Szabo (Peter Lorre) is fresh off the boat from Hungary. He's a nice guy, and on his first day in America he befriends a police detective named Jim O'Hara (Don Beddoe). O'Hara recommends a cold-water flat nearby that he can stay at. Before the day is out, he lands a job as a dishwasher, and he is sure that before long he will be able to find work as a watchmaker. Janos is thrilled at all America has to offer, but that night tragedy strikes: his apartment building catches fire and his face is hideously disfigured.

Even though he is a skilled watchmaker and machinist, Janos now finds he can't get a job anywhere because of his grotesque appearance. Soon he falls in with a friendly thief named Dinky (George E. Stone). Janos is reluctant to pursue a life of crime, but when Dinky becomes ill, Janos takes a safecracking job in his stead.
 
It turns out that Janos excels at crime, and when he discovers that he can get a detailed rubber mask made of his old face, he is determined to get the money it takes to have it made. When the mask is completed it gives Janos a waxy, heavy-lidded appearance, but women no longer scream when they see him. Soon Janos is the leader of Dinky's gang, but when he becomes involved with Helen Williams (Evelyn Keyes), a beautiful and good-hearted blind woman, he is determined to quit the gang and lead an honest life. The only problem is, his new friends would rather see him dead than let him go....

Comments: This rags-to-riches crime melodrama only qualifies as horror because its luckless protagonist has been disfigured in a fire, and must wear a mask to conceal his hideous mug. Director Robert Florey might have given Peter Lorre an actual mask to wear, like the one sported by Jack Huston's maimed war vet in the HBO series Boardwalk Empire. Instead, he decided to simply have Lorre hold his (heavily made-up) face rigid in order to simulate a life-like rubber mask. This may seem a questionable idea, and as a special effect it isn't all that convincing. But it hardly matters because the mask is really just a metaphor.

 Like a lot of masks in the movies, this one points to a false inner life. Janos Szoba finds he is really good at being an underworld kingpin, but his heart isn't in it.  No matter what he pretends to be on the outside, he will never stop being a goofy Hungarian watchmaker, with a hopeless crush on the American Dream. This isn't completely obvious at first, and it isn't until he meets the sweet and conveniently blind Helen  that he decides he wants to chuck the life of crime that he'd only taken up out of dire necessity.

It all has the potential to become arty and pretentious but never does, thanks to Florey's direction,  some deft screenwriting and a winning performance by Peter Lorre.

Saturday, October 16, 1971: Kronos (1957) / The Black Room (1935)

Synopsis:  Late one night in the California desert, a man drives his pickup truck along a lonely stretch of highway.  Suddenly, his radio is filled with static and his truck stalls.  He gets out and lifts the hood, then notices a strange white sphere racing toward him. When the sphere hits him it vanishes, and he calmly lowers the hood of his vehicle, gets into the truck, and heads back the way he came.

Soon the driver arrives at a scientific research facility called LabCentral.  There he knocks out the security guard and barges into the office of the lab's director, Dr. Hubbell Elliot (John Emery). In an instant, the white sphere transfers from the truck driver to Dr. Elliot.  The driver collapses, dead; now Dr. Elliot seems not to be himself.  He immediately goes to a locked cabinet and peruses a file that lists the locations and yields of all the world's atomic power plants.

Elsewhere in the building, three other LabCentral employees are working late: Dr. Leslie Gaskell (Jeff Morrow) is tracking the path of an asteroid, with the help of his beautiful assistant / #1 squeeze Vera Hunter (Barbara Lawrence); Dr. Arnold Culver (George O'Hanlon) is using a mammoth computer nicknamed "Susie" to compute the asteroid's orbit.  But something hinkey is going on: Gaskell is certain the asteroid's course is changing for no apparent reason.  And before long Susie bears this out: the asteroid is now heading directly for Earth.



When told of this, Dr. Elliot shrugs, suggesting that Susie might have made a mistake; in any case, there is nothing anyone can do about it.  Gaskell finds Elliot's attitude perplexing.  He implores Elliot to contact the government immediately -- missiles loaded with nuclear warheads must be fired at the asteroid while it's still in space.  If the object isn't destroyed, Gaskell says, its impact could cause enormous damage.



Reluctantly, Elliot agrees.  Soon a trio of missiles are launched at the asteroid.  All three strike their target.  At the same moment Dr. Elliot collapses to the floor, unconscious.  But to Gaskell's astonishment, the asteroid is left completely intact and its course is unchanged.  The object splashes into the sea,  a few miles off the west coast of Mexico.  On a hunch, Gaskell and Culver travel to Mexico to see if they can determine the asteroid's makeup.  Gaskell is surprised but eventually delighted when Vera shows up as well.

Back in the States, Dr. Elliot, moving in and out of a trance-like state, is being treated by a psychiatrist.  In his lucid moments, he tells the shrink that an alien intelligence has gained control of him, and is forcing him to betray the human race.  The alien race is trying to absorb all the Earth's energy, and will succeed if given time. 

The following morning, the scientists in Mexico awake to discover that in the same place in the ocean where the object landed, a 300-foot robot now stands....

 Comments: While it certainly isn't the best science fiction movie of the 1950s, Kronos has a lot going for it. The word "underrated" is almost always applied to it, perhaps because it's somewhat smarter than many of its contemporaries and because it has remained fairly elusive over the years. In fact, a lot of people who know their 50s sci-fi films backwards and forwards have never seen it.

Structurally Kronos resembles Japanese science fiction of the era  -- it's shot in widescreen; the heroes are scientists rather than military men; the threat is a giant robot, not an alien armada; and destruction is on an epic scale.

But in other respects it stands as an almost generic example of midcentury American science fiction: it's shot in black and white, there is a standard-issue alien possession subplot, the hero has a curvaceous assistant who doubles as his girlfriend; and the method used to finally cripple the energy-hungry Kronos is a fairly predictable let's-reverse-the-polarity-and-overload-its-circuits gimmick.

The movie was directed by Kurt Neumann, who famously beat George Pal's Destination Moon to theaters in 1950 with his own low-budget imitator, which had been announced to the trades as Expedition Moon.  Under threat of a lawsuit, Neumann changed the title to Rocketship X-M (the "X-M", however,  standing for "eXpedition Moon") and changed the rocket's final destination ( it was supposed to land on the Moon, we're told, but through a wacky mishap ended up on Mars instead).

 


Rocketship X-M is better remembered today than Kronos, perhaps because of its tenuous association with Destination Moon, and because it starred a young Lloyd Bridges.  But Kronos is unquestionably the better movie.  It builds an air of suspense and mystery with admirable speed, and while the characters sling around a lot of technobabble, it's there to establish verisimilitude, and it doesn't get in the way.  The audience can pretty easily follow what's happening.

The concept of LabCentral is interesting, even if it is a little hard to swallow: it seems to be a robustly-funded R&D lab without any particular portfolio or specialty.  It has an observatory that tracks asteroids, a supercomputer that appears to be up for any task, and the facility squirrels away all manner of classified information.  We don't know much about LabCentral -- whether it is privately-funded or government-run, or some combination of the two. 

Some of the plot elements suggest that Kronos takes place in the near future; for instance, Gaskell impatiently tells Elliot to call the government and order a missile strike against the incoming asteroid, as though everyone knows this is standard procedure. In fact, no rocket was capable of leaving the Earth's atmosphere when Kronos was made, let alone one bearing a nuclear warhead (the rockets we see being launched at the asteroid are German V-2s, the only rockets at the time for which stock footage was available).

Neumann has a talented cast to work with here.  John Emery, one of the better players in Rocketship X-M, is memorable as the doomed Dr. Elliot. As is typical with movies of the time, Barbara Lawrence's Vera doesn't get a lot to do, but she is in many ways the character who is meant to connect most directly to the audience, always trying to get the stuffy scientists to ground themselves in the real world. This is one of Jeff Morrow's better performances -- he plays the absent-minded but determined Dr. Gaskell with a nice touch of humor.    George O'Hanlon (best known as the voice of George Jetson) also provides some humor, though his anthropomorphizing of the computer mainframe ("Susie, speak to me!") gets a bit tiresome after a while.  We also have Morris Ankrum on hand, always a welcome presence.  For once, he doesn't play a general, but a psychiatrist who believes - mistakenly - that his patient's nutty story is a delusion.

The Black Room

Synopsis: In a Tyrolean fiefdom, a baron anxiously awaits the birth of an heir. But he is greatly distressed to learn that his wife has given birth to twins. An old family prophecy holds that one day twins will be born to the family, and that the younger twin will murder the older in the onyx-lined "black room" of the castle. Fearful of the prophecy, the baron orders that the entrance to the room be bricked up.
Some forty years later, we find the older twin Gregor ruling as baron. He is a cruel and dissolute tyrant, hated by his subjects, and he is suspected in the disappearances of several young women. But the local authorities turn a blind eye to his activities.

The younger twin Anton (Boris Karloff) is a nice but somewhat ineffectual fellow, and has been away since his brother's rule began. At Gregor's invitation, Anton returns home.

At first Anton refuses to believe the rumors about Gregor, but it soon becomes clear to him that his older brother is every bit as cruel and despotic as the locals allege.



When Gregor is implicated in the disappearance of Mashka, a gypsy serving girl, the townspeople rise up. They storm the castle and demand Gregor be handed over to them.

To everyone's surprise, Gregor tells the townspeople that he will relinquish his authority immediately and turn it over to his younger brother Anton. This mollifies the crowd and Anton becomes the new baron.

While acquainting Anton with his new duties, Gregor shows him an interesting trick: inside the huge fireplace in the main hall there is a secret passage that leads into the Black Room. Gregor reveals that he has been there many times, and that there is a pit beneath the room. When Anton looks down into the pit, he sees a number of bodies that have been thrown down there -- including the body of the missing girl Mashka. Gregor strikes Anton and tosses him down into the pit as well.

As Anton dies, Gregor taunts him. He reminds him that, according to the prophecy, Anton was supposed to kill Gregor in that room. "The prophesy will be fulfilled!" Anton insists. "From the grave?" Gregor asks sarcastically. "Yes," Anton says as he dies. "From the grave!"Emerging from the Black Room, Gregor now assumes the identity of Anton, able to rule again while being absolved of all his past crimes. Yet Anton's dying words keep coming back to him...

Comments: Kronos made its first appearance on Horror Incorporated 14 years after its theatrical release, the newest movie to date on Horror Incorporated; and you may have already guessed that we're moving into a new phase, where the science fiction films of the 1950s are starting to supplant the old Shock! package standards.  The Shock! pictures won't ever go away completely, of course, but the less famous titles will start to slip to second-feature status.

So back to the boneyard we go, with the 1935 Karloff opus The Black Room.  This one stands up well to repeat viewing, which is fortunate --  because by my count only Dracula has been broadcast more frequently.  I talked about the movie previously here and here; I don't have a lot to add, except that it stands up somewhat better as a thriller than as a horror film.  Gregor's depravities aren't dwelt upon, and most of his cruel deeds happen off screen.  By today's standards horror was a relatively tame genre in the 1930s, but even so, there seems to be an effort to keep things from getting too ghoulish.  Gregor's evil nature is largely an ascribed attribute.  We never see him do away with poor Mashka, for example.  Instead, Anton finds her body in the pit, along with a lot of other bodies; the only one we really see bumped off is Anton himself.

All the same Karloff is deliciously evil as the bad twin, and we can't wait for his comeuppance, which arrives right on schedule, and occurs in the most satisfying way.  Having Karloff play twin brothers is almost a hindrance in this movie -- we focus on the brothers' different characters and forget that Gregor is the only really interesting one.  And Karloff plays him to perfection.

Here's a quick programming note: next week marks the premiere of Horror Incorporated's noontime show, which was broadcast as a supplement to the midnight program. 

Saturday, October 9, 1971: Bluebeard (1944) / Before I Hang (1940)

Synopsis: In 19th-century Paris, the body of a young woman is fished out of the river Seine. She has been strangled, another victim of the notorious serial killer Bluebeard.  Women are urged to stay in at night, and not to take unnecessary risks - but it's difficult to take precautions when no one knows what Bluebeard looks like.

One evening young Babette (Patti McCarty) and her two friends Constance (Carrie Devan) and Lucille (Jean Parker), knowing that women aren't safe on the streets after dark, decide to walk home together.  On the gaslit streets they meet Gaston Morel, whom Babette recognizes -- he is "The Puppeteer", a painter well-known in Paris for the elaborate puppet operas he stages in the park.  Morel seems charmed to meet the young women, but is especially interested in Lucille, who claims to be entirely unafraid of Bluebeard.  He invites them all to see his show the following night, but it is clear that Lucille is the one he hopes will attend.

The following evening, Morel scans the crowd as he and his puppeteers perform "Faust".  He sees Lucille and after the show invites her backstage.  He tells her that he wishes to paint her; will she sit for him?

Flattered, she tells him that she will.  Meanwhile, Morel's assistant Renee angrily watches his flirtation with the new woman.

Later, Morel returns home to find Renee waiting for him.  She is angry that he is flirting with another new girl, and hurt that there have been other women who have posed for his pictures, women who have temporarily replaced her.  But, she says, "You always return to me."

Morel is dismissive, telling her to go home, but she presses him further.  What, she asks, has happened to the  women he's had dalliances with?  Where have they gone?  Angered, Morel removes his cravat and strangles her with it .  Later, he dumps her body in the river.

The next day, he goes to the police station, and reports Renee missing.  When her body is pulled out of the river he is asked to identify the body.  He does so, telling the police that Renee left the park before he did, and he is unable to say if she left alone or in someone's company.

But the next time Morel sees Lucille, he tells her that what he really wants is for her to make new costumes for his puppets.  By this time we've figured out an important part of Bluebeard's m.o. -- he only strangles women who have posed for the pictures he's painted.  Does the fact that he no longer wants to paint Lucille mean he is becoming genuinely fond of her?

Apparently so --  and Lucille is growing fond of him too.  She mends one of his torn cravats (which will, of course, prove to be an important plot point) and the two are spending more and more time together.

Meanwhile, police inspector Lefevre (Nils Asther) discovers that a painting on display in a Paris gallery has as its subject one of Bluebeard's victims.  He looks for other paintings by the same hand, and sure enough, all of the victims of Bluebeard appear to have sat for paintings.  But the identity of the artist is shrouded in mystery.

Lefevre locates the dealer of the paintings, who will not divulge the name of the artist.  Lefevre conducts a sting operation, arranging for a wealthy patron of the arts to offer an outrageous sum to the dealer -- if he can get the mysterious painter to take a last-minute job.  Tempted by the money, the dealer talks Morel into doing it.  But what Morel doesn't know is that his studio is now surrounded by the police -- and that the woman he is painting is Lucille's younger sister Francine....

Comments:  Bluebeard is a good example of the kind of movies Edgar G. Ulmer made throughout his career: while it isn't a great film, it is far better than it has any right to be.  Shot in 6 days at PRC, it is as good or better than any of Universal's comparable efforts in the mid 1940s. Ulmer makes good use of stock footage, which allows him to successfully evoke 19th-century Paris on the cramped poverty-row soundstages.  

He  handles his cast well, even coaxing a decent performance out of the incurably hammy John Carradine (in fact, this is probably the best performance of Carradine's career, though that isn't saying much).  The only over-the-top moments come as Carradine garrotes his victims -- we always get an extreme close-up of his bulging  eyes -- but for the most part Carradine is surprisingly low-key.  I have to imagine it was Ulmer who compelled him to dial it down; it's hard to believe that Carradine would deliver a restrained performance of his own volition.

Jean Parker plays Lucille, the ostensible protagonist and the focus of Morel's obsession.  You may remember her from the Inner Sanctum vehicle Dead Man's Eyes, in which she played Heather Hayden.  Parker never seems to stand out as an actress, and her features are too sharp to be attractive; it's a stretch to think that Morel would single her out as his new obsession.  Nevertheless, she turns in a good, workmanlike performance.

Teala Loring is somewhat more interesting as Lucille's kid sister Francine. Some reviews of Bluebeard speculate that Francine is the love interest of Inspector Lefevre; but I like to think their connection is more professional.  Francine is a sometime police operative, willing to serve as the bait in a series of risky stings.  Inevitably it catches up to her, but it's nice to see a woman in this era get more to do than just look pretty and be supportive of the leading man.  

Lefevre himself is played by Nils Asther, who so ably played the mystic Agor Singh in Night Monster. 

Interestingly, the serial killer is publicly referred to as "Bluebeard"  (the term refers to  a serial killer who preys upon his own discarded  paramours) long before Morel becomes a suspect.  That is the sort of continuity gap that would sink a bigger-budgeted picture.  But because it's a PRC title, we just shrug and go with it.

Entirely absent from this production is a plot point common to Bluebeard plots -- the killer telling his new lover to never open this locked door, no matter what.  I will admit I kept waiting for that moment, but it never came.

Before I Hang

Synopsis: Dr. John Garth (Boris Karloff) did the best he could for the elderly patient in his care, even giving the man injections of his test serum to reverse the effects of aging. But the serum was a failure. Finally, Garth helped his agonized patient achieve a peaceful death. 

Now convicted of a mercy killing, the judge sentences Garth to death by hanging -- a sentence to be carried out in one month's time.

At the state penitentiary, prison doctor Ralph Howard (Edward Van Sloan) becomes intrigued with Garth's line of research, and he convinces the warden to allow him to work with Dr. Garth in a makeshift lab on the prison grounds. Working quickly, knowing that Garth's execution date is fast approaching, the two are elated when they are able to create a promising test serum.

But fresh blood is needed for further tests, and Dr. Garth asks Dr. Howard to secure blood from a prisoner due to be executed that night. Howard sees no reason why this shouldn't be allowed, and he takes the prisoner's blood after the execution. 

The new batch of serum is finished just minutes before Dr. Garth is taken away to be hanged. Garth injects himself with the new serum, reasoning that the autopsy will allow Howard to examine the effects the serum had on the body.  But moments before the scheduled execution, Garth's sentence is commuted to life in prison.

Within 24 hours, Garth's body has undergone a remarkable change. His heart is stronger, his hair is turning dark -- he seems in every way 20 years younger.

Dr. Howard decides that he will be the next one to try the serum. But as Garth prepares to inject him, he begins to feel strange. Dr. Howard, seeing his face, realizes in an instant what has happened: they used the blood of a three-time murderer to make the serum, and now Garth has absorbed the killer's nature into his bloodstream....


Comments: There's an interesting moment in Before I Hang that takes place in the prison warden's office.  Dr. Garth is expounding on his theory of old age.  He tells the warden that contrary to popular belief, there's no reason why human beings ought to grow old and die.  Theoretically, the human lifespan should be unlimited. He mentions the work of Dr. Alexis Carrell, who proved that individual cells can reproduce indefinitely.  It's only when those cells are at work in the human body, says Dr. Garth, that the stresses of life build up toxins that cause the body to decay. 

Dr. Garth's name-check is intriguing because Carrel was a real person, a Nobel Prize winner who did groundbreaking work in the areas of vascular and open-heart surgery.


He was also interested in the science of aging. The work Dr. Garth mentions was widely known at the time the screenplay was written.  In 1912, Carrel sealed a culture taken from a chicken's heart inside a flask, giving it regular doses of nutrient.  He reported that the cells continued to divide in the flask for more than twenty years, proving that individual cells can reproduce far beyond the lifespan of the creature from which they were taken. Carrel's findings captured the popular imagination, and for decades the idea that cells can live forever outside the body was commonly believed to be true.


But Carrel's research could never be replicated by other scientists, and his claims eventually lost credibility.  In the end scientists eventually discovered what would be known as the "Hayflick limit" -- a cap on the number of times a cell can divide.  The prevailing view today is that cell division is finite because if it weren't, replication errors would eventually creep into the DNA sequence, and cancer would run wild in the organism.  It turns out that humans aren't meant to live forever - just long enough to transmit their DNA to a new generation.  Then their work is done.


Unfortunately, Carrel's interests extended into some unsavory areas.  He was an outspoken proponent of eugenics, and lavished great praise on the Nazi program of exterminating those whom society believed to be inferior. After the German invasion, Carrel used his connections with the infamous Marshall Petain to secure an important medical post in Vichy France. After the country was liberated, Carrell was arrested and charged with treason, but he died in 1944, before he could stand trial.