Friday, June 30, 1972: Return of the Vampire (1943) / The Invisible Killer (1939)

Synopsis: October 1918 -- a werewolf named Andreas skulks through a British cemetery at dusk.  He enters a crypt, where he awakens vampire Armand Tesla. Andreas tells Tesla that his latest victim is "still alive", and that despite the attentions of Dr. Jane Ainsley and an Oxford professor named Saunders, no progress is being made toward curing her.  Andreas laughs at the notion that the scientists will find anything wrong with the girl that can be explained by science.

Meanwhile, Lady Jane Ainsley is working in the private sanatorium that adjoins her family estate.  She has been examining a blood sample from the very same woman Andreas spoke of, a woman who was brought in suffering from shock.  Ainsley notes that the woman's blood isn't anemic, as she had expected; it is in fact quite normal.  Rather, it appears that the woman's blood had been drained from her body, which seems impossible.  Aside from two tiny pinpricks on her throat, she has no wounds of any kind.  Both she and Professor Saunders are baffled.

The patient becomes agitated, shouting fearfully to an unseen person in the room that she is loyal and hasn't told anyone about what happened.  Moments later, she dies.

That night, Professor Saunders begins reading a strange treatise on vampirism, written a century ago by Dr. Armand Tesla.  By morning, Saunders is convinced that their unfortunate patient's blood had been drained by a vampire.  Dr. Ainsley is reluctant to believe such a wild theory, but when Saunders' granddaughter Nicki is revealed to have been bitten as well, Ainsley is convinced.

Ainsley and Saunders deduce that a vampire operating in the vicinity must have its coffin nearby, somewhere where it can be easily concealed.  Searching the crypt at a nearby cemetery, they discover the vampire sleeping.  They drive a railroad spike through its heart, killing it.  At that moment, Andreas enters the crypt, and he falls to the ground, transforming from a werewolf to a man -- Tesla's power over him has been broken.  They bury Tesla's body in an unmarked grave.

Twenty-three years later, we find Andreas working as a trusted assistant to Dr. Ainsley, and Nicki has grown up to become a beautiful young woman, engaged to Dr. Ainsley's son John.  But Britain is again at war, and one night a stray German bomb falls inside the cemetery.  Surveying the damage, a pair of workers find a man's body with a railroad spike driven through it.  They remove the spike and re-inter the body.

Later, Dr. Ainsley sends Andreas on an important errand: a scientist named Dr. Hugo Bruckner has been spirited out of Nazi Germany and is arriving at the British coast.  Andreas is to meet him and escort him to a temporary residence.  But on the way, Andreas meets Armand Tesla.  Tesla once again gains control of Andreas, and forces him to kill Bruckner.  Taking the place of Dr. Bruckner, Tesla begins to plan his revenge on Dr. Ainsley and her family.....


Comments: We've seen this movie a couple of times before on Horror Incorporated, and I've written about my admiration for it -- it stands out especially since Columbia wasn't exactly your go-to studio for horror fare and Lew Landers was anything but a genius auteur. As we've seen, the follow up to this picture, Cry of the Werewolf, was eminently forgettable, so we might consider this movie a fluke or a happy accident.  But I wanted to take this opportunity to call attention to Return of the Vampire's unusual opening.

We start, as you might expect, with Columbia standing on her pedestal, torch aloft, streams of light radiating out and illuminating the words behind her and the clouds above and below. I love Universal and would give anything to travel back to the 1930s and visit the studio during its so-called Golden Age of Horror -- but I will admit that Columbia has my favorite major studio logo. It's beautiful.

From the logo, we get a very quick dissolve to a tight close-up -- the face of a terrified woman.

From the moment the dissolve begins the camera is pulling away from her, and it never stops moving for the remainder of the shot. Once the dissolve finishes we get a better look at her. She is tastefully dressed in dark clothing and a hat that appears to place her in the late Victorian era.

We quickly discern that it's nighttime, and we are outside -- a wisp of fog is visible over the woman's right shoulder. She is wearing a coat; it's chilly. Even though the camera keeps pulling backward, she backs away, not from us, but from an unseen someone.

As we continue to pull back, it becomes clear that we are in a narrow space, perhaps an alley -- the wall behind the woman is made of brick, and there is what appears to be a trash can behind her, in the lower right of the screen ( I am not sure if metal trash cans were a thing in Victorian England, but we'll go with it). 

As the woman steps back, light falls over the right side of her face -- from a streetlight? an open doorway? it isn't clear; but unexpectedly some text fades in, rendered in elegant script.  It starts, oddly enough, with quotation marks (no one in particular is being quoted; we must assume the quotation marks are being used here to denote a certain measure of authority or gravitas), and reads: "The imagination of man at times sires the fantastic and the grotesque. That the imagination of man can soar into the stratosphere of fantasy is attested by ---

We continue to pull back as the words brighten, and at the same time we see a man - -whom we will not be surprised to discover is Bela Lugosi in a cape -- advance toward her out of the shadows.

The man raises the cape, obscuring the woman's face as fog swirls around them. As he does so she screams, and we cut to a title card....

...and the words THE RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE zoom toward us. The credits play over the same title card. which appears to be a still image of gnarled trees in a foggy forest.

Now, there's nothing unusual about the opening credits playing over a still image; it was commonly done in this era. I could give you a thousand examples but will settle for just one:  The Mummy's Ghost (1944) ran its opening credits over a static image of a wall covered with ancient Egyptian symbols: 

So Return of the Vampire's  title card looks perfectly normal, except that at the end of the credits we find that what we're actually seeing is a freeze-frame: we now see a black bird perched in a tree over the priory cemetery. 

The camera pans left over the cemetery until it finds the werewolf Andreas, who is picking his way through the background, moving toward us. 

Now we hear narration from Sir Frederick Fleet, played by Miles Mander, who doesn't even appear in the first part of the movie:

The case of Armand Tesla, vampire....as compiled from the personal notes of Professor Walter Saunders, King's College, Oxford. 

We haven't met the unfortunate young woman either; but she will have one brief scene as the patient in Lady Ainsley's sanitarium.  She's barely ascribed a name (Miss Norcutt) before she dies. She was played, by the way, by an uncredited Jeanne Bates, who had a very long career as a character actor, and who would play Ann Winson the following year in Soul of a Monster.

Andreas keeps moving toward us. So much dry ice is being used that the ground is barely visible, and you can see how carefully Matt Willis is choosing his steps.

 The narrations continues: 

The following events took place in the outskirts of London, towards the close of the year 1918.

 Now Andreas is moving toward the foreground and turns deliberately to his left.  He is definitely going somewhere in particular.  He pauses just outside the crypt.

They began on the night of October the 15th, a particularly gloomy, foggy night that was well-suited for a visit from the supernatural.

Now Andreas enters the crypt and wakes Armand Tesla. These opening moments don't add all that much from the standpoint of plot. But they are unusual for the time, and the movie has gotten off to a spooky, enigmatic start....well suited, one might say, for a visit from the supernatural.



The Invisible Killer

Synopsis: Fast-talking newspaper reporter Sue Walker (Grace Bradley) always seems to be just one step ahead of her boyfriend, homicide detective Jerry Brown (Roland Drew). Every time he shows up at a crime scene he finds that she's there ahead of him. This time she beats him to the scene of a gangland killing, an illicit gambling den where a mobbed-up high roller named Jimmy Clark has been murdered, shot while on the telephone. But it is soon revealed that the gunshot wounds didn't cause his death.

Meanwhile, Sue discovers that Gloria Cunningham, daughter of a prominent anti-gambling crusader, was there at Lefty Ross' gambling club at the time of Clark's murder. This is problematic not only because of who she's related to but who she's engaged to: no-nonsense D.A. Richard Sutton, who is just embarking on a new effort to crush the underground casino racket in the city. Sutton rounds up the men he knows are operating illicit casinos in the city and instructs them to stop paying protection to the mob and close up shop.

After the conclave Lefty phones Sutton to tell him that he's ready to spill his guts in exchange for protection. When Sutton replies that he can't offer immunity from prosecution, Lefty says he'll take his chances with a jury -- what he wants is to live long enough to testify.

Sutton agrees and arranges for Lefty to be brought to his house; Sue bribes the butler into letting her inside. A phone call comes for Lefty.  As soon as Lefty begins talking on the phone he keels over and dies.

Brown disassembles the telephone and discovers that the phone has been tampered with: a capsule of poison gas is hidden in the mouthpiece and can be triggered remotely. But who is the arranging the death of the mobsters?

 

 Comments: Fans of the horror genre might find The Invisible Killer's title a promising one, but if you're expecting a killer who turns out to be...you know...invisible, forget it. This isn't that kind of movie.

Some web sites (including IMDB) describe the titular killer as murdering through the use of sound waves, which sounds mildly interesting. But....no.  That is not the killer's m.o.  In fact, the murderer plants capsules of poison gas in the mouthpieces of telephones, then triggers the gas to be released just as the victim starts chatting away on the old dog and bone.

Between you and me, sound waves would seem a less fool-proof form of execution.

The Invisible Killer's gimmick notwithstanding (a gimmick that isn't even established until a good half-hour into the picture), this is a standard-issue crime drama from PRC. Of particular interest is Grace Bradley's performance as Sue Walker, the brash lady reporter type that turned up in any number of films of this era and was parodied by Jennifer Jason Leigh in the Coen brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy. 

 At the end of the film Sue agrees to marry Jerry and tells her boss she is quitting her job. While it seems rather unlikely today, successful career women ca. 1940 actually were expected to give up their jobs for the (allegedly) more respectable life of cooking, cleaning and general housewifery. Interestingly, that is exactly what happened in Grace Bradley's case: she cheerfully abandoned a promising movie career in order to be housewife and number-one fan to one William Boyd, a.k.a. Hopalong Cassidy.

Roland Drew's career was more durable, as he was one of those lucky actors who was able to transition from silent films to sound productions without a hitch. Though he worked steadily through the 1930s this was a rare turn as a leading man. He is best remembered as Prince Barin in Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940).

Saturday, June 24, 1972: Bluebeard (1944) / Island of Doomed Men (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 movie that plays better than it sounds, and credit for its success should go to director Edgar G. Ulmer, who does two things that really help the production: he keeps events moving at a fast clip, and makes it look more sumptuous than its budget allowed through smart use of stock footage.

Ulmer also manages to keep a leash on the hammy John Carradine, who plays Morel as a laconic murderer who is ultimately undone by his own obsessions.

One curious thing about Morel is his decision to set aside his career as a well-regarded (and well-compensated) painter in order to launch a puppet theater that puts on (apparently free) performances in the park.  This strikes me as something of a step down, career-wise. I think we're supposed to read something profound in this; Morel's paintings are all of his various victims and perhaps this is an indication that he wants to put that behind him.  But the Bluebeard murders occur even after Morel is operating the puppet theater.  The puppet theater subplot seems to be a means for Morel to hook Lucille (he recruits her to design puppet costumes) and also makes it possible to trap Morel by getting his manager to  convince the painter to do one more job.  

Carradine carries the movie pretty much on his own; no one else really stands out. Jean Parker has a brittle sort of look that I don't find at all appealing;' as you may recall she was  the hatchet-faced fiance to Lon Chaney, Jr. in Dead Man's Eyes.  She's not quite as abrasive here as she was in that Inner Sanctum opus, but I fail to see what Morel sees in her. 

Island of Doomed Men

Synopsis: Federal agent Mark Sheldon (Robert Wilcox) is on his first day on the job as an undercover operative.  He is told that once sent on his assignment, the agency will be unable to assist him if he gets into trouble.  He's given the code number 64, and sent to a meeting with his counterpart, agent 46. 

46 tells him that a man named Stephen Danel is running a slavery operation on the appropriately-named Dead Man's Island.  The island is owned by Danel but it falls within U.S. jurisdiction.  Up until now Danel's activities have attracted little notice from the government, because no one who goes there ever returns.  Neverthless, 46 says that Danel is running a slave-labor operation on the island. "Lincoln freed the slaves," 46 says. "Mr. Danel is back in the trade and doing very well at it."

It's clear that 46 wants Sheldon to do something about all this, but before we find out the details, 46's briefing is cut short by a bullet fired through the window by an unseen assailant.  46 is mortally wounded.  Knowing he will be blamed for the crime, Sheldon runs for it, but he's caught by the police.  He stoically refuses to answer any questions about the shooting, merely stating that he didn't commit the crime.  He also gives the obviously phony name of "John Smith" to his interrogators.

Meanwhile, we learn that Stephen Danel (Peter Lorre) was very near the scene of the crime, and it was he who dispatched the gunman that killed 46.

"Smith" is convicted of murder, and the judge -- sensing that there is more to the story -- expresses sympathy to his plight.  Nevertheless he has no choice but to sentence Smith to life in prison.

There follows a montage of prison life.  Smith spends a year breakin' up rocks in the hot sun, yet he is still determined to complete his task and find out the secrets of the mysterious Dead Man's Island.

Help comes to Smith from an unexpected source.  It turns out that Danel gets his slave labor from the ranks of prison parolees; and because he is uncertain as to how much Smith knows, he convinces the parole board to remand Smith to his own custody.  His island, he tells the board, is the perfect place to rehabilitate ex-convicts, what with all the fresh air and honest work.

Soon Smith and a half-dozen other prisoners are being transported to Dead Man's Island.  The men quickly learn that conditions here are far worse than the prison they just left.  They are forced to work long, grueling days in the open-pit mine, and are chained to their bunks at night.  Men are whipped mercilessly for the slightest offenses, and shot if they should attempt to get through the electrified fences that surround the mining camp.

The men are miserable, but just as unhappy is Danel's long-suffering wife Lorraine.  It seems that she had been dazzled by Danel's money and promises of the good life, but has since discovered that she's now living in a gilded cage - Danel won't allow her to visit the mainland, and she is just as much a prisoner as the parolees working in the mines.

When Lorraine learns that Sheldon might be a federal agent, she is determined to meet with him -- even though a meeting may come at the cost of her own life ....

Comments: Agent Mark Sheldon is ostensibly the protagonist of this modest Columbia thriller, but everyone knows this movie really belongs to Peter Lorre.  He's so deliciously evil in this picture that the only other actor you could imagine playing the part would be Vincent Price, who in 1940 would still have been too callow for the role.  The script would have to be tailored to fit Price's oily, ironic charm anyway - and could Price have so effectively strolled around a tropical island in a pith helmet and a white linen suit, gently ordering 20 lashes for insubordination?  It's hard to imagine. What we have in Island of Doomed Men is the laconic Danel behaving like a coiled snake, seeing everything and striking quickly when the moment is right, taking everyone around him off guard.

That's the sort of thing Lorre excelled at, and it's delightful to watch him work.  Lorre's Danel is tightly wound, quiet and controlled right up until the moment his volcanic temper gets the better of him.  It works for the most part, though Lorre's bulgy-eyed outbursts sometimes veer toward self-parody ("Keep that monkey away from me!" he shrieks at one point) and he is not physically large enough to be imposing -- he seems quite small even in comparison with his wife Lorraine, a thinly-written part thinly played by Rochelle Hudson.

In spite of  Lorre's brilliant performance, Island of Doomed Men is another example of Columbia's squeamishness as a studio.  The exploitative intent of the material is clear (WOMEN SHUDDERING AT HIS CRUEL CARESS! the one-sheet screams. MEN DYING UNDER HIS TORTURING LASH!) yet there isn't a lot of exploitation to be found; the camera doesn't linger on the scenes of torture or on Danel's psychological domination of Lorraine.  It all seems quite tame and perfunctory, even by the standards of 1940. One can only imagine how eagerly Universal would have seized the more lurid aspects of this material, as they did with Tower of London. 

Director Charles Barton soft-pedals the privations -- both physical and psychological -- that men in such a place suffer, and he seems reluctant to demonstrate the sadism that is ascribed to Danel himself.   Sadism, after all, is what we're led to believe motivates him - but his actions don't really suggest a sadist.  In fact he doesn't even stick around for the punishments he orders his subordinates to carry out.  By the end of the picture it seems more like a control freak with an eye toward enhanced productivity from his staff.  He just wants more of what he's already got, hardly a novel motivation for any villain. "Everything on this island belongs to me," he mutters during his (inevitable) death scene

It wasn't until the end of World War II that Americans first saw the films brought back from  liberated death camps, and perhaps for the first time in history civilians got a good hard look at the drepavity that had been heretofore witnessed only by soldiers at the front lines. If Island of Doomed Men seems timid, perhaps it's only because Barton wouldn't -- or couldn't -- imagine the true potential of human cruelty.  He wouldn't be  the first to have failed in that department.

Friday, June 23, 1972: My Son the Vampire aka Mother Riley Meets the Vampire aka Vampire Over London (1952)

Synopsis: Scotland Yard is searching frantically for a man known as "The Vampire", a scientist by the name of Van Housen (Bela Lugosi), who is descended from Transylvanian nobility and who is believed to drink the blood of young women in order to extend his lifespan.

Van Housen sleeps in a coffin and affects the dress and manner of a vampire, but what he really wants to do is to build an army of robots that will take over the world.  So far, he has built only one prototype, which he calls Mark 1.

Van Housen orders Mark 1 delivered to his laboratory (apparently through a conventional shipping company)  but by accident the crate containing it is mixed up with another crate meant for an Irish washerwoman known as Old Mother Riley (Arthur Lucan).  Soon Van Housen discovers the mix-up and orders Mark 1 to come to the lab and bring Riley along as well.  Seeing an opportunity for fresh blood, the scientist gives Riley a light housekeeping job, but insists on fattening her up with fresh steak and liver.

 In order to build his army, Van Housen needs large quantities of uranium, and in order to get that, he needs a map in the possession of Julia Loretti (Maria Mercedes), who has recently returned from an expedition to South America.  Even though he has Loretti in his laboratory and in a trance, Van Housen has been unable to discover where the map is hidden.

Discovering that not only Loretti but all the missing women are being held captive by Van Housen, Riley escapes from the mansion and runs to the nearest police station to report the crime.  However,  because a clumsy drunkard at the police station has accidentally doused her with gin, the hysterical Riley reeks of alcohol, and the police decide to arrest her for disorderly conduct....

Comments: This cinematic dumpster fire is so odd and so disjointed that I've come to believe that screenwriter Val Valentine was asked to make radical changes between drafts -- assuming, of course, that there was more than one. Dr. Van Housen's dream of taking over the world with a robot army is just so far afield from vampire lore that I have to assume that the original plan was for Lugosi (or someone) to play Van Housen as a straight-up mad scientist. The vampire stuff, which seems like an afterthought, was presumably just that (Dr. Van Housen is often referred to as "The Vampire", but his vampirism seems to be an affectation -- he sleeps in a coffin, and we hear him snoring inside it when his assistant comes in to wake him). The whole vampire bit certainly seems tacked on, and doesn't mesh with anything we know about Van Housen. On the other hand, this movie is so slipshod that Valentine might well have written the whole thing in a couple of days, not knowing or caring how the individual pieces went together.

As I mentioned the last time this film aired, Lugosi seems to be having fun with the Van Housen role, and easily outshines titular star Lucan. 

This was the last in the Old Mother Riley series of films, and the only one without Kitty McShane, Lucan's then-estranged wife and long-time stage partner (in the Old Mother Riley films she played daughter Kitty).

The lowbrow antics of Old Mother Riley were popular on stage and screen, and playing her was pretty much Lucan's whole career (he would die in 1954, backstage while preparing to go on as Mother Riley yet again).  A big reason the movies were so profitable was that they were made for very little money; and that's reflected in Lugosi's paycheck for this picture. He got $5,000 for his efforts and was glad to get it, as spoofing his Dracula persona was about all that he would be offered at this point in his career, with the dubious exceptions of The Black Sleep and Ed Wood's contributions to cinematic history, which offered far greater humiliations for far less money.

The film was released in England as Mother Riley Meets the Vampire and as Vampire Over London in the U.S. It was re-released in 1963 as My Son the Vampire,  a dubious tie-in to a (terrible) Alan Sherman novelty song, which played incongruously over the credits.

Here is Lugosi's television interview upon returning from England in 1951. It's touching, really, to see how grateful he is for the attention. 

Saturday, June 17, 1972: The Human Monster (1939) / Mysterious Doctor (1943)

 

Synopsis: At Scotland Yard, a group of Detectives Inspector are being chewed out by their superior.  Five bodies have been pulled from the Thames in recent months, and while they are clearly meant to look like suicides, no one doubts they are murders.  The Yard is no closer to an arrest than it was at the beginning, and the press is having a field day playing up the ineptitude of the police.  Detective Inspector Larry Holt (Hugh Williams) is told to redouble his efforts to solve the crimes - or else.  He is instructed to take charge of a prisoner who being returned to London from the United States, a career criminal named Fred Grogan (Alexander Field). Grogan is being accompanied by a Chicago police detective named O'Reilly (Edmon Ryan).   Holt's captain tells him that the Americans want O'Reilly to shadow a British detective in order to learn the methods of the Yard.  "I'll attach him to you," the captain tells Holt contemptuously.  "That way he won't learn anything."

Meanwhile, insurance agent and London philanthropist Dr. Feodor Orloff (Bela Lugosi) makes a loan to Henry Stuart (Gerald Pring), a formerly well-to-do man who has had a run of bad luck. Orloff suggests that Stuart sign over his life insurance policy to him as collateral, and Stuart agrees. Orloff talks about his charity work at a house for the blind, and he tells Stuart to visit the house the following evening. As he talks to Stuart, he types out a short note on a Braille typewriter, wraps the note around a coin, and throws it out onto the street, where a blind street violinist picks it up and carries it away.

 Later, Holt meets O'Reilly and his prisoner at the railway station, and they head back to Scotland Yard.  Once Grogan is taken away to a holding cell, O'Reilly pulls out a rubber hose and recommends the Chicago way of getting information from a suspect: a good old-fashioned beat down.  But Holt has other plans. A drunk is put in to the cell with Grogan, and Grogan takes a great interest in the newspaper the drunk has in his coat pocket.  Later we learn that the drunk was an undercover policeman placed by Holt.  Grogan found a classified ad in the newspaper that had been meant for him alone -- an ad written in a simple code that directed him to Orloff.

The next evening, Stuart turns up at the home for the blind. As he enters, a furtive resident pushes a Braille note into his hand.  Confused, Stuart puts the note into his pocket.   He is greeted by Orloff, who seems shocked when Stuart mentions he has a daughter --  Orloff thought he had no living relations. Stuart's tour ends abruptly when Orloff leads him to a room where Jake, a Rondo Hatton-esque grotesque, is waiting for him.

Before long Stuart's body is fished out of the river. On a hunch Holt has the water in the man's lungs tested; it turns out that Stuart was drowned in tap water, not the muddy water of the Thames. And the Braille note in Stuart's pocket reads simply "MURDER".  Based on this, Holt begins to suspect that Dr. Orloff and the home for the blind are involved, somehow, with the crimes....

 
Comments: The Human Monster is the clunky American title for British thriller The Dark Eyes of London, and while it's quite harrowing by 1939 standards it's also a lot of fun, as these Edgar Wallace mysteries tend to be. Bela Lugosi gets a very juicy bad-guy role as Dr. Orloff, a doctor / insurance agent who runs a home for the destitute blind on the side.

Lugosi usually enjoyed top billing at this point in his career, and he was well-paid for his efforts,  but all the same he was often relegated to relatively small or red-herring roles. I've always felt this worked against him, making him seem an overvalued commodity by the studios. But 1939 was unquestionably a good year for him.  He not only appeared in this thriller, but got to show off his versatility in Son of Frankenstein, and also had a nice non-genre cameo in Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka, playing a stern Soviet official. Had Lugosi sought out more character parts like the one in Ninotchka his career might have played out somewhat better than it did; but for whatever reason -- Lugosi's preferences, his agent's lack of foresight, or just bad luck -- it wasn't meant to be.

Lugosi's Dr. Orloff, of course, is running a racket. He sells life insurance policies to people he knows have no living relatives, arranges for himself to be named the indirect beneficiary of their policies, and then has them killed by his goon Jake at the home for the blind, their bodies dumped out the back of the building into the Thames. This obviously leads to a substantial body count which even Scotland Yard can't ignore. But as luck would have it the stolid Detective Inspector Holt is on the case, with the American Lt. O'Reilly as his sidekick. 

I can't say I'm overly impressed by Dr. Orloff's scheme. Since all the people fished out of the Thames had purchased insurance policies from his own office, it isn't difficult to follow the money back to him. It might be that Orloff always expected that the police would eventually catch on to his plan (after all, he has a yacht anchored on the river and a change of identity all ready to go) but it nevertheless seems to be pretty sloppy work.

In my partial synopsis above I didn't even get to Diana Stuart, the daughter of unfortunate policyholder Henry Stuart, who is played by Greta Gynt. Gynt is a bit of sunshine in this otherwise morbid tale, and she is both a talented actress and a winning screen presence. Unfortunately for Gynt she never quite hit the big time; when she finally moved to Hollywood in the late 1940s the spark that had set her apart had faded a bit and she wasn't able to make the kind of impression she makes here.

Mysterious Doctor

Synopsis: In England during World War II, a man calling himself Dr. Holmes walks into a small Cornish village.  He is surprised to find that the innkeeper wears a black hood, supposedly to hide terrible scars he sustained in a mining accident.   

Dr. Holmes rents a room, buying a round for everyone in the inn and telling those gathered that he is taking a walking tour of Cornwall; but this only raises the suspicion of Sir John Leland and some of the other natives of the village.  There's a war on, Leland says.  What are you doing going on walking tours?  Holmes replies a little sheepishly that he tried to enlist, but the army wouldn't take him.  Leland is suspicious of Holmes, but the villagers eventually accept his story.  

The natives tell Holmes of a terrible curse that has befallen the town: the local tin mine is haunted by a headless ghost.  The ghost is known to have killed a number of people in the mine, and now none of the local miners will set foot within it.  Late that evening Dr. Holmes goes to visit the mine; his decapitated body is later found.

Lt. Christopher "Kit" Hilton (Bruce Lester) soon arrives in town.  He tells the townspeople that tin is desperately needed for the war effort.   Hilton implores the miners to disregard their superstitions and return to work.  But to a man they refuse.  This earns the contempt of Letty Carstairs (Eleanor Parker), the local kind-hearted beauty, who calls them a bunch of frightened old women and volunteers to go to the mine herself to prove it is safe.  The miners squirm under her blistering gaze but don't budge.

The town simpleton Bart Redmond (Matt Willis) is accused of murdering Dr. Holmes, and knowing an angry mob is preparing to storm the town jail where he is held and exact an American-style lynching, Letty arranges Bart's escape, and she tells him to hide in the mine.  He does so, but soon returns to town secretly.  He tells Letty that he has discovered a secret passage inside the mine -- that leads to a room which contains the costume worn by the headless ghost....

Comments:  This enjoyable programmer from Warner doesn't offer much in the way of suspense, as the Scooby Doo ending is telegraphed so early that it doesn't even feel like a cheat. It's pounded into our heads repeatedly that tin is desperately needed for the war effort, and -- in case that was too subtle for you -- no one is going to set foot in the tin mine as long as there's a headless ghost running around. The real mystery -- such as it is -- is who is behind this hoax.  We get several suspects and it's possible to choose the wrong person as the real Headless Ghost. Possible, but not likely. Nevertheless, the movie sports an able cast and the Cornish village sets have an agreeably spooky atmosphere reminiscent of umpteen Universal efforts.  

 

This is one of those movies where thinking too much spoils the fun.  Don't bother asking why gruff Cornish miners would be scared off by rumors of a ghost, when they already work in a job where being buried alive is a real and constant possibility; and don't bother asking what miners who don't work are supposed to do for money.  It's pretty obvious that the headless ghost is a costume because the arms are clearly too low on the body, and wisely the ghost isn't kept on the screen for very long. 

I really liked the cast in this one. Lester Matthews (Werewolf of London) makes a great Dr. Holmes, the stranger who is clearly up to something; Jon Loder (The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Brighton Strangler)  is a welcome presence as the suave Sir John Leland, and Matt Willis, whom you may remember as Andreas from The Return of the Vampire, plays the same sort of character here.

Friday, June 16, 1972: The Woman Who Came Back (1945)

Synopsis: Lorna Webster (Nancy Kelly)  is returning to her New England hometown of Eben Rock, Massachusetts after spending several years away.  The bus she is riding on stops along the road to pick up an elderly woman (Elspeth Dudgeon) who has flagged the driver down.  It is late at night and the driver is reluctant to take the woman on, and refuses outright to take the woman's dog.  The old woman agrees to leave the dog on the side of the road and boards the bus.

The woman sits by Lorna, and seems to know her by name.  She says that Lorna is the descendent of Elijah Webster, a judge who 300 years ago sentenced a number of witches in the town to be burned at the stake.  She tells Lorna that she herself is Jezebel Trister, a 300 year old witch who had been condemned by Judge Webster, which greatly startles and alarms Lorna. Almost immediately, the bus plunges off a steep embankment into a lake.

In  the town, Lorna stumbles into the local tavern, and it's clear that no one in the place had expected her to arrive, including her ex-fiancee, local doctor Matt Adams (John Loder).  When Lorna tells of the bus accident, the authorities go out to the lake.  They pull a number of bodies from the water; but Lorna is the only survivor.  Moreover, none of the bodies matches the description of the old woman Lorna describes.

As the local physician, Matt nurses Lorna back to health.  He is pleased to see her, even though she had stood him up at the altar years before.  The other townspeople are not so forgiving, particularly Ruth Gibson (Ruth Ford).  Ruth resents what she had done to Matt, and remembers that bad luck always seemed to follow Lorna, that everything she touched seemed cursed.  The bus accident is only the latest proof of this: how is it possible that she walked away without a scratch, when everyone else was killed?  

Matt gives Lorna a black shawl that she'd had with her after the accident.  Lorna is alarmed -- she knows it isn't hers, but Jezebel Trister's.  Matt says that can't be possible.  Lorna, he says, must have imagined meeting Jezebel Trister, since no old woman was found among the bus accident casualties.  Uncertain, Lorna tries on the shawl after Matt leaves, but when she looks in the mirror, she sees the face of Jezebel Trister appear over her own.

Lorna tries to resume a normal life, but she finds it difficult.  She is staying at Ruth's tavern, and Ruth reveals to her that she herself has been carrying a torch for Matt, and this seems to be fueling at least some of Ruth's resentment.  When Lorna feeds the fish belonging to Ruth's daughter, the fish almost immediately die.  She learns that she fed them rat poison by mistake.  And she finds herself being followed by a sinister-looking dog, the same dog that had accompanied Jezebel Trister....

Comments: Tonight we have the second broadcast of The Woman Who Came Back, a Republic feature with an interesting cast and a spooky atmosphere that's marred somewhat by a clunky, explained-away ending.  This modest programmer seems to have come and gone pretty quickly from theaters on its initial release in December of 1945, but it turned up regularly on TV schedules through the 1960s and there's little question that viewers of Horror Incorporated would have been familiar with it.

The Woman Who Came Back was made at a time when explained-away endings were enjoying something of a renaissance in horror films, maybe because Val Lewton was dominating the genre at the time. Lewton made atmospheric horror fare with a strong psychological undercurrent; Cat People, his best-known film, pitted ancient tribal fears against the modern science of psychiatry in order to make us question just what we believe, and in fact the question of whether the Cat People's curse itself is real or just a sexually repressed woman's delusion isn't revealed until the final minutes.  While Lewton wouldn't have gone for something as crass as an explained-away ending, his imitators often did, and films like this one, The Beast With 5 Fingers, The Soul of a Monster and She-Wolf of London all went the same route. This was an especially tempting cheat for filmmakers who were uncomfortable making genre movies; they could reassure themselves -- and the audience -- that their film was grounded in safe, respectable reality.

A number of scenes strive for a spooky Lewtonesque vibe, as when Ruth (Ruth Ford) walks from the church, along the streets of Eben Rock at night, slowly realizing that the mysterious dog is following her. Such attempts always lack Lewton's indefinable spark, but they do indicate the filmmakers were paying attention.

The Woman Who Came Back has a strong and eerie opening sequence which ends with Lorna being the sole survivor of a bus crash. And the movie has an ominous atmosphere that's aided by some decent day-for-night shooting. But the film is rather talky and drags in places where it should be building suspense. And the explained-away ending leaves some gaping plot holes behind it; if Lorna isn't cursed, how did the fresh flowers Matt brought wither and die by the time he gave them to her?  How did the woman on the bus (whom we learn wasn't Jezebel Trister) find Lorna, and how did she know her name?

Director Walter Colmes only directed a handful of films, and this was probably the best-known of them. His work is straightforward and unimaginative. But he has at his disposal some very good actors: John Loder, whom we just saw last week in The Brighton Strangler, Otto Kruger from Dracula' s Daughter and Ruth Ford, who lost her marbles in The Man Who Returned To Life.  This is the only film I've seen Nancy Kelly in, but does quite well as the tormented Lorna.

Saturday, June 9, 1972: The Brighton Strangler (1945) / The Walking Dead (1935)

Synopsis: Celebrated actor Reginald Parker (John Loder) has just completed a successful run on the London stage with the hit play The Brighton Strangler.  The theater manager ruefully notes that he could easily run the show for another year, and he's sorry that Parker has decided to hang up the role.  So arresting is Parker's performance that there's no thought of bringing in another actor to play author-turned-murderer Edward Grey.  For audiences Parker is the Strangler.

It is December 23rd, and after wishing the cast and crew a happy Christmas, Parker prepares to leave the theater and rejoin his fiancee, who is also the author of the play.  But German bombers are making a nighttime raid on London.  Numerous bombs hit the neighborhood and the theater is destroyed.  Parker staggers away from the ruined building.  He's gotten a nasty knock on the head and he is in a daze.  Has he forgotten who he is?  Not exactly; he remembers that he's Edward Grey, and he heads to Victoria Station and buys a ticket to Brighton.

At the station he meets beautiful young April Manby (June Duprez), a WAAF heading home for Christmas.  Seeing that Parker -- or rather, Grey -- is injured, she helps daub a bit of blood off his forehead.  On the trip to Brighton she confides in him that she has secretly married her sweetheart, an American soldier named Bob Carson (Michael St. Angel).  Upon arriving, April is met by her parents, respected physician Dr. Manby (Gilbert Emery) and his wife (Lydia Bilbrook). They invite Grey to come over and celebrate Christmas Eve at their house the following evening.

The next night, Grey leaves his hotel room and walks to the Manby house.  Along the way he encounters the mayor of Brighton, Herman Brand (Ian Wolfe).  Grey accuses the kindly mayor of being the barrister who had betrayed him -- a charge which puzzles Brand but which we know is taken from the play The Brighton Strangler.  Reaching into his pocket, Grey produces a silk cord, which he'd kept in his pocket after the show closed. He uses the silk cord to strangle Brand, and then proceeds to the Christmas party as though nothing has happened.

Late that evening, Chief Inspector Allison (Miles Mander) arrives at the Manby house.  Everyone is shocked to hear of the murder of the mayor. The following day, the police interview all new arrivals in town, including Grey.  Like the character in the play, Grey is outwardly pleasant and charming.  He says that he is staying in town to write a book, and that he is a friend of the Manby family.  Soon he is crossed off the list of suspects.

April is surprised to learn that Bob is able to join her in Brighton for a few days.  But because of the mayor's funeral, she isn't able to meet him at the station, and she asks Grey to meet him for her.  Grey meets Bob, and takes him over to the hotel.  But as Bob checks into his room, Grey goes to his own room and falls asleep.    He dreams that he is confronting Inspector Allison, who is now another of his persecutors from the play. 

As Bob goes over to his new friends's room to knock, he overhears Grey talking angrily in his sleep -- vowing revenge, and threatening to kill an unseen someone.... 


Comments: This enjoyable wartime programmer clocks in at only 67 minutes, and uses its time quite efficiently, but even so we are still able to see the seams and the plot holes. The most obvious one is rooted in the premise. Even people who have only lived for a short time on this planet know that a knock on the head doesn't turn innocent people into murderers, but the conceit here is that Reginald Parker hasn't entirely been himself lately -- for the last year he has also been living the life of Edward Grey on the stage -- and Grey just happens to be a serial killer.

One can only imagine the hijinks that would have ensued if Parker had instead been playing Mortimer Brewster or Algernon Moncrief at the time of his accident; that would, in fact, have made a pretty good Ealing Studios comedy.

 The device of having someone hit in the head and losing their memory is a common one in film and television. It is something that actually can happen (it's called organic retrograde amnesia), but it is rare, and unless there is permanent brain damage the victim regains the lost memories within hours.* Parker, of course, goes on to believe he is someone else entirely, an even rarer condition known as a dissociative fugue, a condition triggered by a psychological breakdown - it can't be caused by a blow to the head. 

Nevertheless the idea of not just losing your memory but assuming an entirely new identity was probably too tempting for the screenwriters to resist. I'm sure there were a number of movies and TV shows that used this device, but I can only think of one off the top of my head -- a TV movie from 1976 called Return of the World's Greatest Detective, in which a Sherlock Holmes-obsessed motorcycle cop (played by Larry Hagman) gets hit on the head and wakes up believing he is Holmes. Oddly enough he is magically endowed with Holmes' legendary ability to solve crimes (as well as his ability to play the violin).  It was clearly the pilot for a TV series that never got picked up, so we didn't find out if someone else wound up getting hit on the head and came to believe he was Professor Moriarty. 

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Of course, Return of the World's Greatest Detective was meant as a little confection, nothing that you should linger over and analyze. Similarly, The Brighton Strangler was designed to be nothing more than an evening's diversion for war-weary moviegoers. And on that level it works very well indeed. So let's not be too hard on it, okay?
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*Interestingly, in movies and TV shows people are routinely knocked unconscious with a single punch to the head, and once out they stay that way for 20 minutes or so. In real life, it's actually fairly difficult to knock someone unconscious, and if they remain out for more than a minute or so they've probably suffered a serious brain injury.



The Walking Dead

Synopsis: Mob attorney Nolan (Ricardo Cortez) is dead certain he's got Judge Shaw (Joe King) scared -- so scared that he's sure to acquit Nolan's underworld client.  But to his surprise, Judge Shaw doesn't knuckle under, and the man is sentenced to ten years at Sing Sing.

For the mob, this is intolerable. Shaw has to be taken care of, or future mob threats won't carry any weight.  The trouble is, any action against Shaw will implicate Nolan and his associates. 

A solution is found in one John Ellman (Boris Karloff) a quiet man who's just finished a stretch in prison, thanks to Judge Shaw. Mob fixer Loder (Barton MacLane)  arranges for Trigger (Joe Sawyer) to bump into Ellman, strike up a conversation, and offer him a job. Posing as a private detective, Trigger tells Ellman that Shaw's wife, suspicious of an affair, has hired him to shadow the judge. He wants Ellman to stake out Shaw's house and take notes on his comings and goings.

This, of course, establishes Ellman's presence outside the judge's house for several successive nights.  And on the last night Ellman returns to his car to find a body lying in the back seat -- that of Judge Shaw.  But as luck would have it, a young couple -- Nancy (Marguerite Churchill) and Jimmy (Warren Hull) are passing by and witness the shady characters planting the body in Ellman's car.

Soon Ellman is on trial for Shaw's murder -- and just to make sure he's convicted, Nolan himself is representing the unlucky ex-con.

Nancy and Jimmy debate whether to get involved in the case, knowing that the reach of the mob is quite long.  In the end they decide to come forward with what they know -- but it's too late, and Ellman is executed for the crime.

But the young couple's employer Dr. Beaumont (Edmund Gwenn) himself steps forward with a radical suggestion: with the experimental technique Beaumont has developed, Ellman can be brought back to life....

 
Comments: The Walking Dead is an early attempt to fuse the old genre of horror with the embryonic one of science fiction, and on the whole it works pretty well. Ellman's journey back from the beyond would, in an earlier age, have been accomplished through black magic or voodoo; and in fact the Ellman who comes back from the dead is more like a zombie than a resuscitated human. He also has preternatural abilities that he apparently picked up in the afterworld that allow him to mete out a just punishment to those responsible for his death, making his revival more supernatural than scientific. But it should be noted that, thanks to James Whale's Frankenstein (1931), what scientists did to push the boundaries of knowledge was pretty much limited to reanimating corpses -- at least, it's something we see scientists doing again and again throughout the decade.

The two underlying themes -- "crime doesn't pay" and "there are some things man was not meant to know" were both common ones under the Hayes code in 1936, and probably already a bit shopworn, but they are deployed deftly and perhaps a little sneakily here. Warner was pretty good at showing the glamour and excitement of gangster life even while carefully arranging for the bad guys to get their comeuppance in the last reel. And significantly, the forbidden knowledge that Ellman acquires dies with him, even though the nosy Dr. Belmont works hard to pry it out of him.

Karloff had a pretty good run through the 1930s, and The Walking Dead is one of his better roles in this period. He'd excelled at playing gangsters and crooked ex-cons in his early career, so he slips into the role of the tormented Ellman easily enough; the first third of the movie is really a conventional Warner-ish crime drama. It pivots quite quickly to science fiction in the second act, and then horror at the end.

Ricardo Cortez, always delightful, is quite engaging as the slick mob lawyer Nolan. We get to see Marguerite Churchill, who is a welcome presence just as she was in Dracula's Daughter, even though she doesn't get quite as much to do. We are also lucky to have the avuncular Edmund Gwenn on hand as the unorthodox Dr. Belmont; the kind of character he played never varied much from film to film but his quiet, genial manner serves as a nice counterpoint to the crooks and swindlers we encounter earlier in the movie.

Friday, June 8, 1972: Bury Me Dead (1947)

Synopsis: A funeral is being held for Barbara Carlin (June Lockhart), a woman killed in a stable fire on her family's estate.  But almost as soon as this fact is established, we learn that Barbara isn't dead at all.  She attends the funeral hiding behind a black veil, musing that her husband Rod Carlin (Mark Daniels) doesn't seem very broken up about her death.  When the graveside service has concluded, Barbara approaches the family attorney, Michael Dunn (Hugh Beaumont) and reveals to him that she's still alive.  She tells him that she believes someone started the fire in an attempt to kill her, but got the wrong person; the body recovered from the horse barn was burned beyond recognition and identified only by a diamond necklace that belonged to Barbara.

Barbara is particularly troubled by the question of who was actually killed in the fire, because she thinks it might be her younger sister Rusty (Cathy O'Donnell).  Rusty has a history of mental illness and often disappears for extended lengths of time. But she finds Rusty safe and sound, though still embittered that she was cut out of her father's will because she was adopted. With Rusty eliminated as a possible victim, she goes to confront Rod, who claims to be delighted that Barbara is still alive -- even though he has been carrying on with goodtime girl Helen Lawrence (Sonia Darren), who had previously told Rod that she'd like to be the next Mrs. Carling. 

Barbara had had a dalliance of her own with dim-witted palooka George (Greg McClure), who'd previously been seen around with Helen. Rusty still harbors a grudge against Barbara for stealing the big lug away from her, but it might be that Barbara was trying to save Rusty from a bad situation. 

Barbara finds there are plenty of people who might have wanted her dead. But not only does she not know who committed the murder, she still doesn't know who the victim was....

Comments: I've written about Bury Me Dead once before, and as often happens I felt more charitable toward the film after a second viewing.

Don't get me wrong. The movie has plenty of flaws; it's cheap and a bit dreary, its second act is muddled and a lot of plot points appear to have been thrown in simply to pad its 65-minute running time. 

But it does have a few things going for it. June Lockhart, who seems a good deal older than her 22 years, effectively anchors the film as Barbara, and Hugh Beaumont is convincing as the buttoned-up family attorney Michael Dunn. I've written favorably in the past about Cathy O'Donnell's portrayal of Rusty, and I also liked Sonia Darren, who didn't have a huge role but still managed to stand out as Helen.

The movie also gets off the blocks quickly with the fire that supposedly kills Barbara. It's an exciting way to start a movie and the central mysteries -- who started the fire, and who died in it? -- are raised in the first few minutes, and for a poverty row quickie, that's a definite plus. Don't look too closely at the stock footage used for the fire, though -- it's clear that the structure that's burning is a house, not a barn.

Something that strikes me as a little unusual for a film from this era is its understated but unmistakable sexual politics. Barbara's estranged husband Rod is carrying on with Helen -- not an unusual plot point in a movie from this era -- but what is unusual is that Barbara gives as good as she gets, engaging in a fling with George. The fact that George is Rusty's boyfriend at the time makes her seem all the more wanton by the standards of 1947. Also, Barbara is not only the protagonist but an active agent throughout, which wasn't the case in Lockhart's starring role in She Wolf of London -- a film in which the woman presented to us as the protagonist had almost no influence on the events around her.

A full restoration of this film would be nice, but is probably unlikely to ever happen. John Alton's compositions are intriguing and were no doubt perfectly lit, but you can't tell that from the muddy prints used to strike the DVD copies.