Saturday, August 7, 1971: The Man With Nine Lives (1940) / When The Devil Commands (1941)

Synopsis: Dr. Tim Mason (Roger Pryor) is conducting ground-breaking research in cryogenics. In a public demonstration, he lowers the body temperature of a patient until she is in a coma-like state. Five days later he brings her out of it, and after the procedure her chronic pain has diminished considerably.

After the demonstration, Dr. Mason tells his fiancee, nurse Judith Blair (Jo Ann Sayers) that his results are encouraging, but not what he had hoped. He reveals that most of his experiments are derived from the work of a mysterious Dr. Leon Kravaal (Boris Karloff), whose book on the subject of cryogenics hinted that he was in possession of a mysterious process that allowed the body to be completely frozen. Laboratory animals exposed to this process would completely recover from the freezing. Moreover, cancer cells in test animals disappeared after prolonged treatment, because the body's immune system was still working while the cancer cells were suspended. Mason is fascinated by these revelations, and would love to get more of the details of the procedures from Kravaal; but the scientist vanished ten years earlier.




The hospital administration disapproves of all the meddlesome publicity Mason is generating and they force him to take a leave of absence. Seeing an opportunity to track Kravaal down, Mason and Blair drive up north to Kravaal's last known address. This turns out to be a spooky old house on a small island. The place had been abandoned since the disappearance of Kravaal, the county sheriff, county prosecutor, town doctor and two other townspeople.


Exploring the house, Dr. Mason and Judith discover a passage from the basement that leads to an abandoned laboratory, and beyond that, an icy underground cavern. In this cavern Dr. Kravaal is discovered. Using the specialized techniques he's developed to revive hypothermic patients (i.e., warming them with blankets and pouring hot coffee down their throats) Dr. Mason eventually revives Kravaal. He's astonished to find that he has been in suspended animation for ten years. Then he reveals that in a second chamber, behind the first, there are four bodies.


In a flashback sequence, Kravaal explains that the elderly Jasper Adams had come to him in hopes that frozen therapy might cure his cancer. Adams' nephew became suspicious, and the county prosecutor brought Kravaal in. In the prosecutor's office the town doctor avers that he had previously examined Adams, and it was clear the man's cancer was terminal. Kravaal scoffs at the doctor's hidebound pronouncements, but under duress he agrees to take the men to see Jasper Adams during his treatment.


Kravaal takes them, along with the county sheriff, to the island and the underground cavern. Seeing Adams' frozen body, the doctor declares him dead, and the sheriff places him under arrest. Kravaal uses a beaker of chemicals to render his captors unconscious, but in the process places everyone -- including himself -- in a state of suspended animation.


After relating this amazing story, Mason and Judith help Kravaal revive the others, all of whom are astonished that ten years have passed and that they have all probably been declared dead.
When Jasper Adams' loud-mouthed nephew destroys the formula used to put them in suspended animation, Kravaal kills him. He then tells the others that he must now reconstruct the formula, and he must use them all as his guinea pigs....

Comments: Sometimes movies are defined by their openings, and it's almost impossible to keep from barking your shins against the opening of this one.  As The Man With Nine Lives starts we are treated to a screen crawl that is supposed to familiarize us with an exciting new medical procedure called "frozen therapy":

Added to the many miracles performed by modern science that have accounted for the saving of thousands and thousands of human beings, comes its newest and most modern discovery -- frozen therapy.

Estimates of how long frozen therapy can produce a state of suspended animation range from days to years. But on the fact that diseases can be arrested -- that life can be prolonged, by freezing human beings in ice, the medical world agrees.
In research hospitals today, men and women are alive and breathing -- their bodies encased in ice.

Of course, no reputable member of "the medical world" in 1940 would have been able to "agree" with any of this. 

Even in 1940 it was well understood that you cannot place someone in suspended animation simply by lowering their body temperature, no matter how carefully you do it. This is because living cells, when frozen, form ice crystals which cause enormous damage to the organism. 

Most likely the screenwriter misunderstood some of the theoretical uses of what is today known as "cryotherapy".  It doesn't involve piling ice cubes on top of a patient, or placing them in suspended animation; rather it uses liquid nitrogen to selectively kill cells (for example, cancer cells within the prostate gland, a common enough procedure today).

Interestingly, in the decades since this film was made, scientists have learned a great deal about preserving cells and tissue in low-temperature environments. Cells that are suffused with cryoprotectants (a sort of antifreeze for the blood) can be saved for a very long time indeed; in fact contemporary legal battles over frozen embryos couldn't have happened when "The Man With Nine Lives" was made.  The internal organs of animals can now be preserved indefinitely, and it's possible that in the future human organs will be able to be cryopreserved until needed. 

Of course organ transplants weren't even possible when this film was made.  Even the idea of saving a person's life with parts taken from another person was long seen as a radical and distasteful idea; in fact, even as late as the mid-1960s science fiction films such as The Wild Wild Planet took the view that organ transplants were so morally problematic the practice could only lead to bad outcomes.


When the Devil Commands



Synopsis: It is a dark and stormy night at Midland University, and Dr. Julian Blair (Boris Karloff) is demonstrating a breakthrough discovery to his colleagues. He has found that human brains emit electromagnetic wave-patterns, each as unique to an individual as fingerprints. Blair has found a way to measure and record these waves. Furthermore, he has learned the wave-pattern of women is much stronger than that of men. To demonstrate this last point he wires his wife Helen up to his electroencephalogram, which features a big diving-helmet type contraption that goes over the head.

As the scientists watch, they see the needle on the device recording a steady pattern of peaks and valleys, interspersed with small jigs and jags in the needle. These small variations, Blair says, are individual thoughts, and in time he will be able to decode them.


Blair's colleagues shower him with congratulations on his discovery. Helen reminds him that they must pick up the cake for their daughter's homecoming, and Blair, ever the doting husband, hurries to close out his demonstration -- forgetting to shut off the inputs for the machine.


Blair and his wife drive to the bakery to pick up the cake, and we get a strong impression that the two are happy and very much in love. Unfortunately, in the movies this can only mean one thing, and sure enough, Helen is killed minutes later in a car crash.


Despondent, Blair gets through the funeral, then returns to the lab, hoping to find solace in his work.
To his astonishment, he finds that Helen's unique brain-wave pattern records for a few moments on the machine, which had been left on.


Blair tells his colleagues of this incident, and that he might have stumbled on a means of communicating with the dead. But the colleagues are not only skeptical, but embarrassed that he would entertain such a notion. Blair is angry at their willful stupidity. The building's maintenance man, Karl, overhears their exchange, and he later tells Dr. Blair that he knows a psychic who can communicate with the dead -- she is, in fact, helping Karl communicate with his dead mother.
Blair is doubtful, but he accompanies Karl to a seance.


The psychic, Blanche Walters (Anne Revere), once again helps Karl receive a message from his dead mother, but after the seance Blair exposes her as a fraud. Nevertheless she agrees to assist him his experiments when he offers to compensate her.


Blair's idea is to use Mrs. Walters' naturally stronger wave-pattern to establish a link with Helen. When this fails, he decides to add Karl to the circuit, like the amplifying grid in a vacuum tube.
Alas, poor Karl! An electric charge fries his brain, making him like a shuffling zombie.
Knowing that medical treatment for Karl would lead to questions, and the end to the experiments, Mrs. Walters convinces Blair that they need to immediately decamp to a new location. Soon enough, they have set up shop in a spooky house outside the small town of Barsham Harbor.




But even here they are not allowed to work unmolested. In the two years since Dr. Blair, Walters and Karl arrived, a number of bodies have disappeared from morgues and crypts, and the townspeople are beginning to suspect. The soft-spoken local sheriff (Kenneth MacDonald) tries to question Blair about his experiments, but gets nowhere. He convinces Blair's housekeeper, Mrs. Marcy (Dorothy Adams) to find out what's in Blair's secret laboratory. But when she unlocks the door and looks inside, she gets a terrible shock -- a half-dozen corpses sitting around a table, each with diving helmet-type contraptions over their heads....


Comments: In sharp contrast to the clunky exposition that opens The Man With Nine Lives,  The Devil Commands begins with a portentous shot of a house on the rugged New England coast and an earnest, almost plaintive voiceover from Julian Blair's daughter Anne:

My name is Anne Blair. My father was Dr. Julian Blair. This was my father's house. In Barsham Harbor, on nights like this, when lightning rips the sky apart, why do people close the shutters that face toward my father's house, and lock their doors, and whisper?  Why are they afraid? No one goes near my father's house....no one dares. 

I don't know where my father is. I only know that for one brief, terrible moment, he tore open the door to whatever lives beyond the grave...

Anne's narration pops up from time to time during the film, even though Anne herself has little bearing on the plot.  She is perpetually an outsider, at every turn kept away from the action by Dr. Blair (at one point he physically blocks her from entering his lab; later he sends her to a faraway city, mailing a check to her each month but refusing to communicate with her in any way). It's unusual for a film to have a narrator so far removed from the action, and unusual too for a film to have a narrator as thoroughly unreliable as Anne. She claims not to know why the people of Barsham Harbor lock their doors and whisper about her father -- but that is clearly not true. She insists on pleading Dr. Blair's case to us, trying to convince us of his goodness even when we can see the evidence to the contrary:

People in Barsham Harbor didn't understand my father. They began to talk about him. Slowly they began to fear him...and then to hate him. No one would even speak to him, though he had never hurt any of them -- remember that.  My father never hurt a living person in Barsham Harbor. Never.

Her choice of words is telling: "My father never hurt a living person in Barsham Harbor" is a carefully-constructed sentence if there ever was one. We know Blair had hurt Karl, a "living person" --  but because Karl isn't from Barsham Harbor Anne exempts him.   And Barsham Harbor's non-living persons are carefully exempted from Anne's statement as well.  And there is no acknowledgement, either, to the harm done to the relatives of the dead whose corpses were dug up and used for unauthorized and unethical scientific experiments.

And what about Mrs. Marcy? Surely Dr. Blair is at least partially responsible for her death; and yet he tries to cover it up, just as he had done with Carl's accident, compounding his crime by throwing her body off a cliff.

Nevertheless Anne's narration is intriguing because it forces us to question not only her motives in defending her father but her access to events to begin with.  It adds another layer to what is by far the best of Columbia's cycle of mad-scientist pictures.

Saturday, July 31, 1971: The Soul of a Monster (1942) / Night of Terror (1933)

Synopsis: George Winson (George Macready) is a famous surgeon and humanitarian who is dying in a city hospital.   An accidental tear in his surgical glove exposed him to an infection, and now he only has hours to live.  It seems everyone in the city has some memory of his kindness and selflessness, and it seems that everyone has joined together in mourning him.

George has come to accept his fate, but his wife Ann (Jeanne Bates) is another story. She is angry that a man who has contributed so much to the world is being taken out of it before his time, while others who do evil and contribute nothing live on.  George's devout friend Fred (Erik Rolf) tries to console her, telling her it is God's will, but Ann will have none of it.  What God, she asks Fred, would allow such an unjust thing to happen? Either God doesn't exist or he has abandoned George; either way, she wants nothing to do with him.  She then says that if any other force in the world -- the Devil, for example -- would intervene and save George, then she would owe that force her allegiance.  And to prove the point, she calls out to the Devil, asking for George to be saved.

At that very moment a woman in black walks along the darkened streets of the city.  She never breaks stride for a moment, and walks right into the path of an oncoming car.  The couple driving the car slam on the brakes, and leap out, thinking they struck her - but no one is there.  The woman in black continues walking, unconcerned at a downed powerline that is sparking only a few feet away from her.  She walks into a building up to the very room where George is dying.


The woman tells those assembled that her name is Lilyan Gregg and that she heard Ann's offer.  Does it still stand?  Ann says it does, and at the woman's word, George begins to recover. 


The next day the newspapers are filled with the amazing news: George Winson has made a seemingly miraculous recovery.  But Fred is deeply disturbed by George's behavior.  He is now distant and cold, no longer the kind and compassionate man he once was.  He snarls at his faithful dog, throwing a pair of hedge clippers at it in a fit of rage.  Fred later discovers that the dog has been killed, and its blood is on George's work gloves.   Ann is having second thoughts too, as George displays an increasingly rude and dismissive attitude toward her.


And there are other strange things: when George holds a flower in his hands, it immediately shrivels and dies.  He seems to have no pulse.  And when Ann accidentally cuts him, he does not bleed....

Comments:  By the mid-1940s, Universal's vaunted Golden Age of horror films was pretty much over.  The vibrant, sumptuous productions of the 1930s  had given way to perfunctory franchise entries (House of Dracula), humdrum mysteries with only meager horror trappings (She-Wolf of London) and low-budget programmers with a distinctly non-supernatural pedigree (House of Horrors).  Meanwhile, interesting things were cooking over at Columbia.  We've already seen Return of the Vampire and its follow-up Cry of the Werewolf; and tonight we're treated to the studio's most Val Lewton-flavored effort, The Soul of a Monster.

This dreamlike film starts out with a surprisingly frank crisis of faith, for a picture of this era: Fred tries to comfort Ann with pious words about God's will, but she throws them back in his face.  What sort of God, she asks, would allow a man who gave selflessly of himself to die, while tyrants are allowed to kill millions and cause untold suffering with impunity?  An insane God, she decides, or a cruel God - or perhaps a God who doesn't exist at all.  Ann tells Fred she will pray to the Devil if that will save George's life, and she does, reasoning that perhaps the Devil "has been done an injustice".  And in response, right on cue, the enigmatic Lilyan Gregg steps - literally - out of the shadows to snatch George Winson from the jaws of death.

Ann's blasphemy is very unusual for a film of this era, as is the character of Lilyan Gregg herself. Hollywood in those days treated religion much the way it treated sex - as something that was important, but too embarrassing to talk about openly.  Thus we can marvel at the frank talk about religious faith as well as the depiction of Lilyan, who might be seen as a minion of Satan, though it seems more likely that she herself is the Devil incarnate.  The Devil is usually depicted in movies as a character who has no power at all, save for that which people choose to give to him of their own free will.  But here, she has the power to overrule what God has decreed if a human wills it to be so, and that makes for an unusual, almost radical, interpretation of Hollywood theology.

Obviously, the Hayes Office would never allow evil to triumph over good in this fashion, so in order to steer clear of the censors, the film must resort to a cop-out ending, but up until that point it's an interesting little what-if picture that manages to convey an agreeably spooky tone.  Val Lewton it ain't, but we nevertheless have some lovely images - Lilyan's walk down the darkened streets in her black dress, for example, is beautifully done, and the gathering around the piano, listening to a performance of the Mephisto Waltz during a raging thunderstorm, is equally atmospheric.

None of the characters are drawn especially well, particularly George Winson.  The problem is that we never see that George was a good man (he is dying as the film opens); we only have various people telling us how good he was.  Thus the advent of a cruel, unfeeling George can't come as too much of a shock -- we've never seen him act in any other way.  As for the other characters -- well, it feels cruel to call them "stock".  The screenwriters seemed to be aiming for "archetypal".  I can't say they succeeded  -- this movie doesn't have quite the intellectual wattage for a fancy term like that.

Night of Terror

Synopsis: A knife-wielding serial killer known as the Maniac is terrorizing the countryside, and the police, led by the clueless Detective Bailey (Matt McHugh) are unable to catch him. Each of the Maniac’s victims is found with a newspaper headline pinned to the body (as befits a Columbia picture, these headlines are in 42-point font, saying things like MANIAC STILL ON THE LOOSE!).

Meanwhile, at the Rinehart mansion, Dr. Arthur Hornsby (George Meeker) is working late on a chemical formula that will place a person in a state of suspended animation. To demonstrate that his formula works, he plans to inject himself with the serum, then have his body placed in a coffin, buried in the backyard, then dug up eight hours later and revived. A number of skeptical scientists will be on hand to witness the experiment.

Hornsby’s experiment is worrisome to his fiancée, Mary Rinehart (Sally Blane), and she is frustrated that he pays more attention to his experiments than to her. In spite of the fact that she and Hornsby are engaged, Mary is being aggressively courted by brash newspaper reporter Tom Hartley (Wallace Ford) , who is covering the Maniac killings. While Mary chides Hartley about his advances, it’s clear that she is flattered by the attention – attention she isn’t getting from Hornsby.

The servants at the Rinehart estate are as quirky as its other inhabitants. Ethnically indeterminate butler Degar (Bela Lugosi) seems to be carefully guarding a secret or two, and mystical maid Sika (Mary Frey) believes that various omens from the spirit world are pointing toward ghastly fates for all in the Rinehart household.

When family patriarch Richard dies under mysterious circumstances, the will reveals that everyone in the household -- including the servants -- shares in the inheritance. What's more, should any of the inheritors die, that portion of the estate will devolve to the others. So when members of the Rinehart family start to turn up dead, the question is obvious: are they victims of the Maniac, or each other?


Comments: This quirky variant of the Old Dark House plot clearly doesn't want to get too deep into the ghoulish stuff, and so it assiduously soft-pedals its scares. In an attempt to compensate for the low-octane thrills, it presents us with an overly busy plot, hoping to keep the audience off balance.  The result is a horror film you can bring your flapper-girl date to.  She won't have to play close attention in order to get the plot points: they aren't subtle.  There are secret passages and seances and a good old-fashioned murder now and then. Nothing that happens really connects with anything else; and if by chance she misses something, don't worry: someone will rush into the room carrying a newspaper with a blaring headline and it will all get explained again.  In fact, the Maniac pins headlines of his own exploits on the bodies of his victims, priving that self-promotion pays.

If there is any protagonist in this picture it must be Wallace Ford's Tom Hartley, who as a newspaperman serves as a proxy for the audience.  He does not belong to the class-conscious world of the Rinehart estate, with its Downton Abbey-style divisions.  He can poke fun at the pretensions of the Rinehart stuffed shirts, just as he mocks the peculiarities of the oddball servants.  Yet at the same time he is able to court Mary Rinehart with his lower middle-class charm.  Tom's social mobility makes him the only active agent in the movie -- even the Maniac is trapped, doomed to keep stabbing people without a motivation.

Watching this film again makes it plain just how insubstantial the character of Degar is, and I found myself wondering how Bela Lugosi's career might have been different if he had turned down roles like this one and The Whispering Shadow's Dr. Strang.  He was offered big money for both these movies, but he was really doing glorified cameos that seemed to diminish him as an actor.  In the end Lugosi wound up like Karl Dane, who was also in The Whispering Shadow: hobbled by a poor command of the English language, unable to find work, and haunted by the loss of a fame that had once seemed permanant.

Saturday, July 24, 1971: Cry of the Werewolf (1944) / The Man Who Returned To Life (1942)

Synopsis: Dr. Charles Morris (Fritz Leiber) operates a museum of the occult, located in the former mansion of a famous Gypsy queen named Marie LaTour.  Dr. Morris tells assistant Elsa Chauvet (Osa Massen) that he is about to publish a ground-breaking work on Marie LaTour, which will reveal important new information about her life.  Elsa leaves to pick up Dr. Morris' son Bob (Stephen Crane) at the train station, but when the two of them return to the LaTour mansion they find Dr. Morris has been killed by an animal - apparently a wolf.  Moreover, the notes he has compiled for his manuscript have been tossed into the fireplace and are mostly burned, and a tour guide who was present at the museum is now babbling incoherently, his mind apparently broken by what he witnessed.


Bob and Elsa devise a way to reconstruct some of the information from the burned notes, and this leads them to investigate the mythology and practices of the Gypsies.  Marie LaTour had purportedly been a werewolf, and as the Gypsies are a matriarchal society, her daughter -- also named Marie LaTour -- has inherited her lycanthropy.


Meanwhile, Lt. Barry Lane (Barton McLane) doggedly tries to solve the murder without resorting to occult explanations.  This is surprisingly difficult, since Elsa, his first prime suspect, is cleared because her fingerprints don't match those found at the scene of the crime, and museum janitor Jan Spavero, his second prime suspect, ends up getting mauled by a wolf. ...

Comments: Like Columbia's Return of the Vampire, which arrived in theaters just eight months earlier, Cry of the Werewolf is a curious film in that jumbles together a number of horror film tropes with uneven results.  We have Gypsies (always a convenient access point to the occult); lycanthropy (which Universal had mined profitably for years but which Columbia had heretofore avoided); an old spooky house (in this case, a mansion formerly owned by a Gypsy -- don't stop and think about that one too long); and most importantly,  a curse carried only by the female members of the family: a hereditary tendency to change into a vicious animal. 

This matriarchal curse is an obvious pilfering from Val Lewton's Cat People -- and while Osa Massen's Elsa isn't the lycanthrope in question, her Eastern European accent, wide face and distinctive hairstyle clearly suggest Simone Simon. Nina Foche, who is the bad girl to Elsa's good girl, isn't very convincing as a Gypsy, but she is always an arresting screen presence and is believably seductive here.

It is the battle of wills between the two women that is the most interesting part of the film.  While Elsa isn't as strong and independent as she might be (she seems to be fighting to retain Bob's affections more than anything else) she still has her moments.  And we can't help but root for Nina Foche's sly lycanthrope, willing to break the crockery to get what she wants, even if what she wants is a dull fellow like Bob.


While Return of the Vampire was relatively florid in its presentation, things are more prosaic in this feature.  The human-in-hairy-makeup approach is dispensed with.  Instead, we suddenly cut from footage of a woman to footage of a wolf. Occasionally the effect is sweetened through a simple dissolve from one to the other. 


This was a somewhat less exploitative -- and certainly a more economical  -- way to convey lycanthropy, though for audiences used to on-screen yak-hair-infused transformations, the results must have seemed a little dull.  As for the wolf itself, we get a good look at it during the opening credits, and it doesn't look very wolflike to me  (it is too long in the body to be a Siberian husky but I still suspect it's at least half dog) and it's obvious that a thick rubber band has been placed around the poor thing's muzzle in order to make it snap its jaws fitfully. 


Barton McLane plays the same no-nonsense flatfoot he played in The Maltese Falcon and countless other crime dramas, so we are not surprised that he's doggedly avoiding a supernatural explanation for the string of murders he is investigating.  Nevertheless he is teamed up with the most dull-witted bunch of cops this side of an Ed Wood movie.  The persistent use of the uniformed cops as comic relief does a lot to undercut the tension in the middle of the film, which relies heavily on some (ultimately pointless) police procedural work.


Osa Masson is probably best-known as the rocket scientist Lisa from Rocketship X-M and she is perfectly acceptable in this picture, though her Elsa doesn't get a great deal to do but look wounded and jealous.  The object of her affection, unfortunately, is Bob, played by Stephen Crane, who is by far the weakest link in this movie. 


Bob would be a lackluster character in the hands of any actor.  But a talented actor might at least have made him forgettable.  Alas, Crane's level of talent is on a par with a middling community theater player and as a result he stands out like a kangaroo in a dinner jacket.  How he ended up starring in a Hollywood production would be a mystery, had he not recently married a certain Lana Turner.  Fortunately for the moviegoing public their marriage quickly dissolved, and with it Crane's career.  He went on to become a successful restauranteur, and I can only hope his veal piccata was better than his performance in this movie.

The Man Who Returned To Life

Synopsis: It's October of 1941, and George Bishop (John Howard) has a great life.  He has a beautiful wife and a delightful five-year-old daughter and a loyal dog.   He just got a big promotion at work.  He owns a nice-looking house with a white picket fence in sunny Ridgewood, California.  Everything in George's life is just swell -- and in the movies, that can mean only one thing.

Sure enough, as George leafs through the morning paper, he finds a news item that shocks him to his core: a jury in Blissville, Maryland has convicted a man named Clyde Beebe of the murder of David Jameson eight years earlier, and Beebe has been sentenced to hang for the crime.

"Clyde Beebe to hang!" George gasps. "For murdering me?"

Bishop hastily makes plans to leave town, mumbling to his wife that there is "something I need to take care of". 

Flashback to 1933.  Bishop is living in Blissville, Maryland under the name of David Jameson.  He's been in the community for five years, but because this is a small town, he's still a newcomer in their eyes.  He works at the local bank and has nearly paid off the loan on a farmhouse he's bought in the area. 

Jameson is sweet on pretty Daphne Turner (Marcella Martin), but she is being pursued aggresively by local troublemaker Clyde Beebe (Paul Guilfoyle). Meanwhile, Jameson himself is being ruthlessly pursued by Clyde's sister Beth Beebe (Ruth Ford).  Some friendly locals advise Jameson to steer clear of the ne'er-do-well Beebes, and Jameson agrees, but in a town this size it's easier said than done.

Beth has been telling everyone in town that she and Jameson are an item, and she goes so far as to invite herself to social events with him.  One night she brings up the M-word, and Jameson is shocked and appalled, and his rejection sends Beth running away in tears.  Clyde Beebe, hearing about the insult to his sister, confronts Jameson and attacks him with a knife.  Jameson isn't badly wounded, but it's clear that the Beebes will be trouble for the foreseeable future.

Jameson and Daphne Turner begin to grow closer.  Daphne has been helping sketch designs for improving the farmhouse, and as they talk excitedly about what the house needs they realize they are making future plans together.  Jameson proposes to her, and she accepts.  When Beth hears the news she is devastated, unable to leave her room for days. 

One afternoon Jameson is walking down Blissville's main street when Beth Beebe pulls up in a car.  She seems very calm and even cheerful, congratulating Jameson on his wedding plans and offering him a lift.  Jameson, relieved that Beth is taking it so well, accepts -- but once they are underway he discovers that she has a sinister plan.  She has already told everyone she knows that the two of them have eloped, and she has arranged for a witness and a justice of the peace to marry them at the Beebe place.  Jameson makes clear he wants no part of it, but Beth will not be deterred -- she is clearly off her rocker.  The car is now hurtling along the highway at 70 miles an hour, so Jameson can't jump out.  Fighting Beth for the wheel, the car goes off the road and Beth is killed in the resulting crash. 

Jameson is arrested, and charged with murder.  Everyone in town seems to think he is guilty; and when the charge is reduced to manslaughter,  Clyde Beebe rounds up a posse.  Released on bail, Jameson returns to the farmhouse, but through the darkened front window he can see that someone's rigged a shotgun to kill the first person who walks in through the door....

Comments: 1942 was a busy year for director Lew Landers. He was averaging a picture a month for Columbia in those days, including this little programmer. The Man Who Returned To Life clocks in at just over 60 minutes, but spends so much time setting up its central conflict that it races around in its last few minutes trying to tie up loose ends.

The movie sports a premise that's intriguing, but difficult to execute. Arranging for your protagonist to discover that someone from his past has been convicted of killing him causes significant headaches right out of the box.  From the outset we're treated to hefty plot contrivances and bouts of extremely unlikely behavior from the characters.  For example, why would a newspaper in California report the pending execution of a murderer in Maryland?  If the case were so sensational that it would warrant nationwide press coverage, wouldn't he have heard of it before now?

Why would anyone believe that Jameson murdered Beth?  What was the alleged motive? On what basis would the prosecutor charge him with manslaughter, let alone murder? Why would Jameson, upon discovering Clyde Beebe's plot to kill him, jump on a freight train and travel to California as a hobo, abandoning his property and fiance? 

And really, why should Jameson feel so much guilt about Clyde Beebe being charged for his murder in the first place?  Granted, Beebe didn't succeed in committing the crime.  But he fully intended to succeed, thought he had succeeded, and in fact did kill someone  - the hobo from the railroad camp (amusingly, after Jameson exonerates Beebe for his own murder, one of the swirling headlines in the final moments indicates that Beebe was charged with the murder of the hobo - a crime for which he will presumably hang).

Interestingly, it's never clear to us how much -- if anything -- Jameson's wife Jane knows about his past.  After reading the newspaper headline he tells her that there is "something I need to take care of".  We see stock footage of a commercial airliner flying cross-country (an extremely expensive way to travel in those days, but handy if you're racing to stop an unjust execution).  After Beebe is cleared of the crime, we get a series of swirling headlines, indicating that Jameson has been cleared of the manslaughter charge.  More stock footage of an airplane flight follows, and an image of a telegram, telling his wife he's on his way back.  Then he is reunited with his loving family.  Is he still George Bishop, or has he reverted to David Jameson?  Did he tell his wife who he really is, or did she know all along that he was a fugitive?  We're never told.

John Howard makes Jameson / Bishop a likable and sympathetic fellow, and Lucille Fairbanks makes a fetching Jane, though she is hampered, as many women of the time were, by a paper-thin characterization.  She is a Saintly Wife and that's all we get to see of her.

But by far the most interesting character is the delusional Beth Beebe, played with a convincing aura of nuttiness by Ruth Ford.  Ford conveys slightly off-kilter with tremendous skill.  She never overdoes it, which somehow makes her all the more frightening. The scene where she's about to crash the car is the highlight of the movie; with nothing more than a facial expression we buy completely that Beth has lost her marbles and feels she has absolutely nothing to lose.  It's a splendid and understated performance.

Interlude: It Took Me A While....

....but I've finally gotten around to adding Chilly Billy's Chiller Theater TV Log to the blogroll.  It is a crackerjack site, curated by George "E-Gor" Chastain, who also runs the delightful E-Gor's Chamber of Horror Hosts page, which I've mentioned in the past, and which you will already find in our list of recommended sites.

I've only seen YouTube clips of Bill Cardille's program, but it's pretty clear why this show is one of the most fondly-remembered creature features ever.  To put it simply, it's tremendous fun.  Cardille is a guy who seems to love what he's doing and we can't help but enjoy his company. And the movies, week in and week out, are a blast.  As much as I love Horror Incorporated, I'll admit it's a bit stodgy when compared to Cardille's show: Horror Incorporated  is heavy on Universal horror (exclusively the Shock! package at first, expanding later to include 50's sci-fi and horror offerings) and therefore without a great variation in style and tone. 

But part of Chiller Theater's charm was its zany mishmash of subgenres.  Take the Shock! package, throw in some Hammer titles (The Creeping Unknown, Island of the Burning Doomed), add some Corman cheapies (War of the Satellites, Not of This Earth), a dash of Ed Wood (Bride of the Monster), some indie favorites (I Was a Teenage Werewolf, Invisible Invaders), a couple of made-for-TV oddities (The Questor Tapes, Gargoyles), spice it up with some weird Japanese titles (The H-Man, X From Outer Space), shake it up and see what happens.  There's a gleeful, slightly anarchic sensibility at work here, and little wonder the show has such a following even today.

E-Gor is clearly a smarter guy than I am, because he didn't foolishly decide to write about every freakin' movie that came up on the schedule; nor was he dim-witted enough to do all the research himself.  He crowd-sourced the titles, calling on folks with collections of old TV Guides to suss out what was on for a particular week.  As a result, his site is complete, and he is no doubt sipping mojitos on the beach, watching a Caribbean sunset and congratulating himself on a job well done.  Meanwhile, the Horror Incorporated Project grinds on, year after year, and my only hope is that I complete my work before the icy hand of Death clamps down on my weary shoulder. 

But you know, E-Gor had a great idea.  If you're a fan of the old Horror Incorporated show, and if you have anything that would add context to the project - an old advertisement, an autographed photo, a videotaped promotional spot -- send it to me and I'll post it on the site.

Saturday, July 17, 1971: Return of the Vampire (1944) / The Man Who Lived Twice (1936)

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 sanitorium 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:  Back in the 1930s, studios didn't grind out sequels at the rate they do today.  It took four years for Universal to put together a sequel to Frankenstein.  For The Invisible Man the gap was seven years and for The Mummy it was eight.


  And while Dracula's Daughter (1936) is technically a sequel, the character of Count Dracula himself didn't return to cinemas until 1943's Son of Dracula.  Eleven months after that, the count turned up again, this time as something of a bit player in House of Frankenstein. But as much as Lugosi yearned to reprise the role that made him famous, the part was handed off to other actors - first Lon Cheney, Jr. and then John Carradine.


Universal had always been strangely ambivalent about Bela Lugosi, often trading on his name even while relegating him to smaller and smaller roles. In the end he was forced to lobby for whatever parts he could convince screenwriters and producers to throw his way.  His stint at Monogram couldn't have done much to boost his confidence, so it must have been wonderful for him to essentially play the count again in Lew Landers' Return of the Vampire at Columbia.


At this point Universal had pretty much cornered the market on horror films, and Columbia had never tried very hard to compete.  But Return of the Vampire is a strikingly atypical example of Columbia's output, essentially an homage to the entire Universal horror canon.  Not only do we have the caped vampire stalking beautiful young women in streets of London, but a werewolf whose makeup is strikingly similar to Jack Pierce's design for The Wolf Man (though Matt Willis looks a bit more like a terrier than a wolf).  Enough dry ice is used to fog up the graveyards of a dozen Universal pictures; we even have fog indoors in a couple of scenes.


And unlike Columbia's typical approach to horror, Return of the Vampire is quite unflinching in its depiction of the supernatural.  There is no attempt to dress it up in scientific patter or resort to an explained-away ending.  Instead, we have the character of Armand Tesla, a Romanian scientist who once sought to study and quantify the phenomenon of vampirism, only to become seduced by its unearthly power himself.  Thus, when posing as Dr. Bruckner, he is able to mouth the comforting platitudes of science, but this is just cover -- it's clear that he no longer believes it.

Lugosi is in fine form here, and he's aided by a very solid cast. Freida Inescort is marvelous as Lady Jane Ainsley, an initially skeptical scientist who must mortgage her sterling reputation in order to convince her colleagues that the vampire she's talking about is real.  She is ultimately the Van Helsing character: her greatest obstacle is not the vampire himself, but the skepticism of those around her.  The luckless Andreas is Tesla's Renfield, though luckily he gets to do more here than eat flies and bulge his eyes out.  He also gets a nobler death scene than Dwight Frye ever did.

This is one of the better-paced horror films of its era, and despite some glaring plot contrivances (I can accept one plot point caused by a stray German bomb, or even two, but three is pushing it) it's one of Lugosi's best films.  It's too bad Universal didn't give Lugosi permanant ownership of the Dracula mantle and let him play the role to his heart's content.  It would have been their best route, economically  as well as artistically speaking; Return of the Vampire was a big moneymaker for Columbia.

Interestingly, the second half of Return of the Vampire introduces a Dracula-seeking-revenge subplot that anticipates the Hammer Dracula films of the 1950s and 60s. Like those later films, the vampire here doesn't get an enormous amount of screentime (we don't even see his face until 23 minutes in), but Lugosi makes the best of all his scenes; the confrontation between Tesla and Ainsley in the music room is thrillingly staged. 










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: The Man Who Lived Twice raises a number of big issues in the course of its 73-minute running time -- the utility of prison reform, the price of loyalty, the nature of identity, even the existence of good and evil itself.  But to its great credit it never comes across as preachy or heavy-handed.  Rather it's an intriguing little thought experiment that is aided by a smartly-written script and a terrific performance by Ralph Bellamy in the title role.

In my previous write-up of this movie I'd mentioned Anthony Burgess' novel  A Clockwork Orange, which takes up the same theme but from the opposite direction.  To Burgess, preservation of the authentic self is more important than the good of society as a whole.  In The Man Who Lived Twice, the opposite view is championed: the authentic self has little or no value if it is not aligned with the values of society. 

Dr. Schuyler's theory on criminal behavior -- that it's caused by a physical defect and can be easily treated -- has more far-reaching implications than the screenplay itself suggests.  Such a scientific theory, if proven to be true, would turn the whole world upside down, because most of our religious and societal institutions are built upon the premise that people are capable of free will.  Schuyler's theory calls into question how many of our choices are dictated by the minor tumors he has identified.  What happens if criminality isn't the tumors' only effect?

Suppose the tumors cause other traits or impulses to appear in patients?  What if the tumors determine whether or not a person is pleasant or rude, liberal or conservative, straight or gay, religious or non-religious?  And if the tumor link extends to these other preferences or behaviors, could anyone truly said to be free to choose any path in their lives?  What would stop society from "fixing" those "defective" traits by the same basis that they "fixed" Slick Rawley's?

If the movie were made today, perhaps it would attempt to tackle all these questions.  That would undoubtedly ruin it.  Part of the pleasure of watching The Man Who Lived Twice is seeing a petty criminal become not just a good man, but a great one.  That's not easy to pull off in any movie, but it works well enough here.  While it's not quite a horror film it carries enough elements of the fantastic -- and asks enough questions -- to keep us interested.

Saturday, July 10, 1971: My Son the Vampire a.k.a. Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (1952) / The Face Behind the Mask (1941)

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.  In order to secure the uranium, 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: The genesis of this bizarre little film has been discussed at length elsewhere; according to El Santo, Bela Lugosi was in England for a stage revival of Arsenic and Old Lace, but the under-financed production collapsed.*   This left Lugosi in dire straits financially, without even enough money to return home.  As luck would have it, he was offered $5,000 to appear in a low-brow comedy to be called Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire.


Old Mother Riley was a drag act cooked up by a music-hall comic named Arthur Lucan.  The character was Irish, which for English audiences signaled that she was lazy, dim-witted and always ready for a drink.  The first Old Mother Riley film was released in 1937.  By 1952 the series had been more than played out,  and the novelty of man in a dress wasn't enough to lure audiences anymore; presumably it was felt that the novelty of a man in a dress interacting with Lugosi in a cape would pack 'em into the theaters.  In the U.S.,  which had been heretofore deprived of Old Mother Riley's antics, it was released as Vampire Over London.  


The version we're seeing tonight was titled My Son the Vampire for a 1963 re-release.  Novelty songster Allen Sherman was at the peak of his (mercifully brief) fame at this point, and his new single "My Son the Vampire" played over the opening credits.  As a promotional gimmick it doesn't seem to have done much good -- the title doesn't really match the movie.  Even worse, Sherman's song is awful, and it never charted.


The good news about the film itself is that it isn't quite as dreadful as I imagined it might be.  I went into it fearful of the humiliations that Bela Lugosi would have to endure in order to get a paycheck.  But the surprise is that Lugosi is the best thing about the movie.  He seems to be enjoying himself a great deal, and displays an unexpected knack for comedy.

I don't think anyone would argue the film is laugh riot (El Santo describes it as "funny as the Khmer Rouge") but there are a few amusing moments, all of them from Lugosi himself, who seems quite at ease and worth every penny the ironically-named Renown Pictures paid him.


I'd been expecting Lugosi to look desperate and humiliated, but that honor actually goes to Arthur Lucan himself.  His Old Mother Riley act is so dreadfully cheap and moth-eaten that it's hard to believe that anyone -- anywhere -- ever found it funny.   Humor is subjective, of course, and the world contains an alarming number of people who think a man wearing a dress is inherently funny. Nevertheless, it seems incredible that the Old Mother Riley films endured as long as they did.


The movie is made so carelessly that a badly-dubbed musical number is thrown in at around the ten-minute mark, presumably to pad the running time (in fact, this might be the only musical in the history of cinema to have just one song).  As it was, I was grateful that I didn't have to hear any more of them.  One was bad enough.


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:  I had noted previously that this Robert Florey-directed thriller is a bit hard to pin down.  It's not quite a horror film, not quite a crime picture and not quite a melodrama.  Nevertheless, it holds our attention and benefits from an exceptional cast, from Peter Lorre himself to George E. Stone as the sympathetic thief Dinky and Evelyn Keyes as good girl Helen.  


In fact its horror credentials are so slight that there's little reason for it to be routinely assigned to that category at all, aside from its inclusion in Screen Gems' Son of Shock! TV package.  Its inclusion in Son of Shock was more desperation than anything else; with the exception of the Karloff mad scientist flicks from 1939 - 1940, Columbia had a notable dearth of horror titles.  A few movies were apparently thrown in just to round out the numbers, and this appears to be one of them.


In July of 2011 The Face Behind the Mask was nominated for entry into the National Film Registry.  Brian Taves' introduction argues that The Face Behind the Mask is a minor masterpiece of Expressionism, a fact partially obscured by its rushed shooting schedule:

THE FACE BEHIND THE MASK was unquestionably a "B" picture, a film shot quickly on a low budget for exhibition on a double bill. Despite these modest origins, THE FACE BEHIND THE MASK is widely acknowledged to be among the greatest "B" films ever made, and one of the few to offer profundity and depth in theme and characterization, as well as artistry in its writing, direction, and acting. While containing elements of several genres--horror, social consciousness, gangster, and romance--the film transcends all of them. THE FACE BEHIND THE MASK won favor from both critics and audiences, and a small following in its time that has grown in the intervening years, an exceptional record of success for a movie made so inexpensively. The film remained in continuous showing for two years after it was released in 1941, and was later theatrically reissued on numerous occasions, as late as 1955, before it began to be shown on television.

The movie seems a bit too scattershot to be regarded as "one of the greatest "B" films ever made" -- that covers a lot of territory, after all -- but it's good to see that The Face Behind the Mask  hasn't been forgotten.  Maybe adding it to the National Film Registry will lead to a decent home video release; this effort certainly deserves it.
_____________
*It should be noted, however, that in a TV interview shortly after his return to America, Lugosi says that he was in England for a stage revival of Dracula.