Saturday, September 11, 1971: Behind the Mask (1932) / The Man With Nine Lives (1940)

Synopsis: A Sing Sing inmate named Quinn (Jack Holt) is plotting an escape. His cellmate Henderson (Boris Karloff) advises against it, claiming that powerful friends will spring both of them soon if they are patient. But seeing that Quinn will not be deterred, Henderson tells him how to get in touch with his associate on the outside, a man named Arnold (Claude King).

Quinn’s escape is successful and he travels to Arnold’s mansion in the country. Arnold seems afraid to assist Quinn, but is too frightened of his employer, the mysterious drug kingpin Mr. X, to refuse. He employs Quinn as his chauffer, and Quinn becomes enamored of Arnold’s beautiful daughter Julie (Constance Cummings).


Soon enough Henderson is released and makes contact with Dr. August Steiner (Edward Van Sloan), who runs the Eastland Hospital. We learn that Steiner is also an agent of Mr. X , and he tells Henderson that Mr. X arranged for him to be incarcerated so long because he was displeased with him.

Henderson suggests Quinn as the perfect man to deliver the next drug shipment for the organization. But as soon as Steiner sees Quinn he knows the man is an undercover federal agent. Henderson is shocked and angered by this revelation.

But the plan to have Quinn to pick up the shipment via seaplane goes forward. After Quinn delivers the drugs to a ship at sea, Henderson instructs Quinn to take off and then bail out – the boat, he says, will come to his location and pick him up. Quinn, sensing that this is an attempt to dupe him, quickly “rigs a dummy”, attaches it to the parachute and tosses it overboard so that Henderson will think it’s him.

But before long Steiner captures Quinn himself. He plans on disposing of the federal agent in his usual manner – by getting him admitted to his hospital and subjecting him to an unnecessary – and fatal – operation….


Comments: Life before the internet: nasty, brutish and short.

At least, that's what future generations will say. Our grandchildren will marvel that we were ever able to find information without an oracular Google to tell us what we needed to know.

And no doubt newspapers will come in for the greatest amount of puzzlement. Folded sheets of printed material, updated twice daily from a central office in the city, sold in every store and from machines at every busy intersection - the idea is laughable, when you think about it.

Yet for all their technological limitations, newspapers were astonishingly versatile -- kind of a primitive, self-contained internet. They served as news aggregators, they contained a variety of blogs, a version of Craigslist, a movie-listings app, a sports site that gave heavy emphasis to local teams.  They contained all the news you needed to know - everything from world news, to national news, down to state and local coverage, even what was going on in your local city council.

And in the days before televisions came with their own on-screen program guides, newspapers offered those too.  In fact, newspapers were our only guide to what was on television at any given time - unless you subscribed to TV Guide,  but of course only rich eccentrics did that.

So let's open the Minneapolis Tribune and find out what's being offered on Horror Incorporated for the evening of Saturday, September 11, 1971.

Midnight- Behind the Mask (1932) A US secret service agent risks life and limb to capture "Mr. X", a notorious and cruel head of a dope ring. Boris Karloff, Constance Cummings and Jack Holt. Channel 5.

Based on this description, you might think that Behind the Mask is a standard crime drama from the 1930s, its only claim to being a horror film being the presence of Boris Karloff (who isn't the star, as the description implies, but a supporting player).

And while it's really not much of a horror film, it does have its moments -- all of which center around the mysterious Eastland Hospital, run by the Keyser Soze-esque Mr. X.

Hospitals are fertile ground for horror films, delving into the primal fear that the ones we choose to trust (or are forced to trust) when we're sick or injured, when we're at our most vulnerable, are plotting to do us harm.  In an almost child-like fashion, Agent Burke is led away by Dr. Steiner, not knowing that he's soon to be the victim of unnecessary surgery sans anesthetic.  Surrounded by all the trappings of a modern hospital, Burke isn't able to perceive the danger that's all around him.

This aura of creepiness is augmented by the Eastland Hospital sets, which lack the verisimilitude even of the sterile institutional corridors of the era, but still manage to be marginally interesting. Seemingly generic details such as the elevator banks seem stylized, as though the sets were designed and built by people who had never actually seen elevators work in real life.  The operating theater in which Steiner gloats over Quinn's helpless body has a strangely art-deco feel to it.

By contrast the lobby is cramped and uninteresting, and we end up with a hospital that gradually becomes more surreal as we delve farther into it.

I can't guarantee that the production designer spent a moment thinking about such things, of course -- in fact, I'd be willing to bet he didn't.  But it's these little touches - whether intentional or not - that make repeat viewings of such films worthwhile.
 

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 that 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: Hey, as long as we're looking at TV listings for this particular Saturday in 1971, let's check out the newspaper description of Horror Incorporated's second feature:

2:30 am - The Man With Nine Lives (1940) A doctor has perfected "frozen sleep". Boris Karloff and Roger Pryor. Channel 5.

This one is a bit perfunctory, isn't it?  It might as well read, "Blah, blah, blah, Boris Karloff".

And that's only appropriate.  Because if ever a movie lived up to the description "Blah, blah, blah, Boris Karloff", it would be  The Man With Nine Lives.  It starts with a reasonably intriguing premise, but squanders it on a never-ending parade of contrivances, the first of which is Dr. Mason's forced leave of absence.  We are told that the hospital is fed up with all the publicity that Mason's Nobel Prize-worthy research is generating. And as we all know, there's nothing hospitals resent more than being associated with newspaper headlines like "CURE FOR CANCER FOUND". 

How Dr. Kravaal stumbles upon his magical formula for frozen sleep is a humdinger: he mixes random chemicals  together in order to fool his would-be captors into thinking he's creating a magical formula.  And jeepers, whaddya know! It works!

  And don't even get me started on how Dr. Mason and his fiancee / nurse stumble upon Dr. Kravaal and his reluctant entourage, even though numerous searches by the authorities over the years have turned up nothing.

There's very little in this picture that's memorable, beyond the loony image of Roger Pryor piling ice cubes on top of his patients early on.  Pryor himself is too bland an actor to make an impression, and the other characters are too thinly-drawn to attract attention. 

Jo Ann Sayers might be a good actress, but it's difficult to tell - she is entirely surplus to requirements here, and her career as a Columbia contract player was relatively brief.  For someone presumably placed on the road to stardom her look is unusual, though not unpleasantly so.  She is thinner than most actresses of her era, with a very pointed nose and pronounced chin. She also seems to be fairly tall, an attribute that has ruined quite a few actress' careers.

The other supporting players are utterly generic, both in the script and on the screen. The only actor who stands out, really, is Karloff himself, but he struggles against a bland screenplay.  His Leon Kravaal is just a stock mad scientist, surprisingly unsympathetic without the tragic Jekyll-and-Hyde-ism that befell Dr. John Garth in Before I Hang, or the misfortunes endured by Dr. Julian Blair in The Devil Commands.

Of course, what Dr. Kravaal does have going for him is a pointed goatee and a pair of owlish-looking glasses, an apparent attempt to give him a cool and remote demeanor.  Other than that, we have little reason to suspect he's a scientist, aside from the fact that he's extremely antisocial.   If Horror Incorporated has taught us anything, it's that most scientists are.

Saturday, September 4, 1971: Cry of the Werewolf (1944) / The Boogie Man Will Get You (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: In their indispensable reference work Universal Horrors, Brunas and Weaver make the interesting claim that Cry of the Werewolf was originally conceived as a sequel to the Bela Lugosi vehicle Return of the Vampire, which we saw just last week.  They maintain that early drafts of the script were entitled Bride of the Vampire, but that at some point the decision was make to rework the material into a werewolf picture.*

I'm tempted to say they make this assertion  while discussing 1943's Son of Dracula.  However, it's more accurate to say they make this assertion while conducting a drive-by on poor old Bela Lugosi.  

Look, don't get me wrong.  Universal Horrors is a delightful book.  It's both informative and entertaining.  But it's not perfect.  One of its quirks is an almost pathological hostility toward Lugosi.  No opportunity to ridicule Universal's first Dracula is ever missed.   In this case, the authors hint that Columbia, panic-stricken at the thought of having Lugosi star in the sequel to the (ahem, inexplicably money-making) Return of the Vampire, completely overhauled the project rather than risk allowing the hammy Hungarian to stink up another of their pictures. 

Such a notion might be tempting to those who find Lugosi's screen presence overbearing, but it's unfair. As I've asserted previously, Lugosi was a flawed actor of limited appeal, but he certainly wasn't without talent. His career was hobbled less by his acting than by a combination of short-sighted business decisions and bad luck.  After Dracula made him a star he tended to accept the highest-paying roles on offer, regardless of their merit**.  These were often relatively small "red-herring" roles that did little to keep him in the public eye, and convinced the studios that he was an overvalued commodity. Eventually  he was left scrambling for whatever kind of screen work he could get.  

But we're not here to discuss Bela Lugosi anyway, are we?  We're here to discuss Cry of the Werewolf, one of the few examples of an honest-to-peaches, straight-up-no-chaser horror film offered by Columbia in the mid 1940s.

While not up to the standards of Return of the Vampire, this picture aspires to the same sort of low-budget atmospherics as its predecessor and, obviously, the popular Universal thrillers of the time.

But the big difference between Columbia and Universal horror films is quite evident here.  Columbia didn't have a large staff dreaming up special effects and make-up for its horror pictures.  What would have been elaborate set pieces in Universal films are almost thrown away at Columbia. 

Let me show you what I mean.  Here's a crucial sequence featuring Marie LaTour, werewolf queen:

 Jan Spavero is told by Marie that he's going to sleep with the fishes...or the Gypsy equivalent thereof.

What?!? Marie wouldn't cast me aside like that after so many years of loyal service.   Would she?

 Frightened, he stumbles out of Marie's trailer and attempts to flee the Gypsy camp.

We go back to Marie LaTour, and the camera makes a very quick pan left to the shadow on the wall behind her...

....which immediately begins to change shape.....

...it begins to shrink....

...collapsing into the shape of an animal...

...a wolf!  Awooooooooooooooo!

We see Spavero's feet stumbling through the woods....

Intercut with the werewolf's feet, inexorably pursuing....

The Gypsies in the camp sit impassively....

Looking up only momentarily when they hear Jan's screams come from the woods.

This sequence is interesting for how little we actually see.  No yak hair, no special make-up effects, no time-lapse photography.  Instead, the trickiest effects shots prove to be a moving shadow on the wall and a shot of a dog's feet running through the woods.  That points to a pretty meager effects budget, even by Columbia's standards.

The cast isn't particularly notable: Nina Foch was certainly the biggest name, having played a number of similarly aristocratic roles. Fritz Lieber was a fairly successful character actor who is perhaps best known today as the father of science fiction writer Fritz Lieber, Jr.  Osa Massen played a lot of evil Nazi temptresses during the war, and went on to star in Kurt Neumann's Rocketship X-M (1950).  John Abbot brought his dignified Shakespearean cadence to dozens of movies and countless TV shows throughout the 1950s and 1960s. 

Without question the weakest link in the cast is Stephen Crane, completely in over his head as good-natured doofus Bob.  The girls apparently go for Bob, in spite of the fact that he's as dull as library paste.  Crane wasn't exactly cast against type in that department, yet he still couldn't pull off the role.  Go figure.

The Boogie Man Will Get You

Synopsis: Nathanial Billings (Boris Karloff) is a wigged-out professor who owns a dilapidated colonial inn. Billings carries out unorthodox experiments in the basement of the house, much to the consternation of the town mayor / sheriff / banker / justice of the peace Dr. Lorencz (Peter Lorre). Billings is paying a usurious interest rate on the mortgage and for this reason is eager to sell. The only hitch is that nobody would want the place -- it is in desperate need of maintenance and is quite off the beaten track.

His prayers are answered when young divorcee Winnie Slade (Miss Jeff Donnell) shows up at the inn with the determination to buy it and restore it to its former approximation of glory. Billings gets her to agree to let him stay on for a time and work on his experiments in the basement.

The nature of his experiments quickly becomes clear to us. Billings is a patriotic fellow, and he wants to do his part for the war effort. He believes he is closing in on a method of making ordinary men into super-soldiers. Alas, none of the door-to-door salesmen he's used as guinea pigs have become super-soldiers. In fact, none of them have survived the treatment. So there is a growing stack of dead salesmen in the basement, which he is desperately trying to hide.

Soon Winnie's ex-husband (Larry Park) shows up and immediately becomes suspicious of the goings-on around the house, Dr. Lorencz becomes an unlikely backer in Dr. Billing's experiments, and a new dopey door-to-door salesman ( "Slapsie" Maxie Rosenbloom) becomes the latest chump hoping to be converted to a superman.

Comments: Hey, did tonight's werewolf movie put you on edge?  Would you like to unwind with a screwball comedy?  You've come to the right place.

Frankly, there isn't much to say about this little Arsenic and Old Lace knock-off that I haven't said before.  Karloff and Lorre seem to enjoy doing a bit of light-hearted comedy for a change; Miss Jeff Donnell seems to be every bit as solid and reliable as Winnie Slade, the character she plays; "Slapsie" Maxie Rosenbloom seems at least plausible as a down-on-his luck salesman; and the story -- well, let's just forget about the story, shall we?

Truth is, the more you focus on the story, the less likely you are to enjoy yourself.  The screenwriters are painfully aware of this, and try to keep things moving quickly enough that the seams won't show.  It doesn't always work, but my advice would be to give them all the assistance you can.  

For example, when Frank Puglia shows up as a demented Italian P.O.W., take a moment to appreciate the man's career.  He was a bread-and-butter character actor who appeared in hundreds of movies and television shows, usually as a kindly priest or doctor, always as what the industry called "ethnic" characters -- Latino / Italian / Greek / etc.   Watching this movie, you can take him at face value: he's a hard-working actor earning a living. And that's a pretty good thing.

__________________ 

*Brunas, Michael, et al: Universal Horrors: The Studio's Classic Films, 1931 - 1946. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co. 1990, pp 380-381.  I don't think bloggers ever cite book sources on the Internet, but I'm an old-fashioned sort of fellow and I'm doing it anyway.

**Exhibit A: The role of Professor Strang in the 12-chapter serial Whispering Shadows (1933)

Saturday, August 28, 1971: Return of the Vampire (1944) / The Black Room (1935)

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: Tonight we have the most delicious sort of pairing one can hope for from a late-night creature feature: a top-notch Bela Lugosi picture followed by a top-notch Boris Karloff picture.  Even better, they are both fairly obscure titles.  We start things off with Lew Landers' Return of the Vampire from 1944.

  In my previous write-up of this picture, I noted the strong revenge subplot that runs through it.  In fact, as far as I can tell this is the earliest Dracula movie where vengeance is the Count's primary motivation.  In the original Dracula, of course, Mina was the object of the vampire's obsession.  In Son of Dracula, it was possession of the Caldwell plantation.  In House of Frankenstein, Dracula was simply an unwilling pawn in Dr. Neimann's revenge plot. 

I know what you're thinking  -- dude, put down the crack pipe, this isn't a Dracula picture.   But we mustn't  kid ourselves. This vampire calls himself Armand Tesla, but even without Lugosi's presence and the vampire's silk-lined cape  (and the fact that Columbia tried to secure the rights to the Dracula name from Universal for this occasion) there is little doubt as to who we're dealing with here.  


Hammer studios clearly borrowed the revenge subplot for its bloodier and sexier forays into Dracula lore in the 1950s.  And even Universal did some cribbing from this picture.

Before Return of the Vampire was made, Dracula movie lore was pretty well established. One of the rules was: if a vampire has a stake driven through his heart, it's game over.  The vampire is utterly destroyed, and it can't come back. 

Return of the Vampire altered that rule.  In this film, a stake merely immobilizes a vampire.  Remove the stake, and the vampire is back and badder than ever.

Just under a year after Return of the Vampire premiered, Universal released House of Frankenstein, which featured the skeleton of Count Dracula, complete with a stake jammed through its ribs.  When the stake was removed, presto!  The vampire reconstituted itself, like
powdered milk in a glass of water.  This sort of tinkering was inevitable as screenwriters began to look for new wrinkles to exploit; but Universal, which had essentially created the vampire movie genre was surprisingly timid about branching out into new territory.  By contrast Hammer wasn't shy at all, eventually making up all kinds of vampire lore on its own.

The Black Room

Synopsis: In a Tyrolean fiefdom, a baron anxiously awaits the birth of an heir. But he is greatly distressed to learn that his wife has given birth to twins. An old family prophecy holds that one day twins will be born to the family, and that the younger twin will murder the older in the onyx-lined "black room" of the castle. Fearful of the prophecy, the baron orders that the entrance to the room be bricked up.

Some forty years later, we find the older twin Gregor ruling as baron. He is a cruel and dissolute tyrant, hated by his subjects, and he is suspected in the disappearances of several young women. But the local authorities turn a blind eye to his activities.


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


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


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


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


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

As Anton dies, Gregor taunts him. He reminds him that, according to the prophecy, Gregor was the one supposed to die at Anton's hand. "The prophesy will be fulfilled!" Anton insists. "From the grave?" Gregor asks sarcastically. "Yes," Anton says as he dies. "From the grave!"

Emerging from the Black Room, Gregor now assumes the identity of Anton, able to rule again while being absolved of all his past crimes. Yet Anton's dying words keep coming back to him...

Comments: At first blush this Columbia thriller seems to aspire to be the sort of  middle-brow costume drama that the Korda brothers made so successfully in the 1930s.  But The Black Room's  production values are too modest for that, the cast too far off the A-list, and the screenplay a bit too lurid.  Karloff gets one very actorly scene where he compares women with pears, and finds them roughly equivalent in terms of utility and shelf life. 

Aside from that, however, his must rely on his canny physical presence to portray the sinister Gregor, and in this department he's quite good.  But in spite of the screenwriter's ham-fisted attempts at Shakespearean gravitas, in the end both his Anton and his Gregor are distinctly lacking in dramatic heft.

There are fancy costumes and ambitious speeches, but at its heart this is an unassuming thriller.  Soon enough we get down to business, which in this case means people being thrown into pits and pretty young women being placed in danger.  The designated woman in danger here is the forgettable Marian Marsh, whose Thea runs the risk of being married to Gregor pretending to be Anton.  Marsh doesn't do much with her role, and we have to conclude that the only reason Thea is regarded as so desireable is simply because there are no other women hanging around the castle.

But we should pause and praise the work of Katherine DeMille, a far more luminous a presence as Mashka, the serving girl unlucky enough to engage in an affair with Gregor.  She gets just what you might expect from such an arrangement, but in the meantime she brings more life to the proceedings than anyone save Karloff himself.

 Most of the picture is taken up with evil twin Gregor's attempt to pass himself off as good twin Anton. This is not the sort of plot that's driven by lust for power, lust for revenge, or just plain old lust.  Nope, tonight we have a kind of early 19th-century Patrick Bateman on a fairly predictable  trajectory toward his own comeuppance.

Saturday, August 21, 1971: Before I Hang (1940) / The Face Behind the Mask (1941)

Synopsis: Dr. John Garth (Boris Karloff) did the best he could for the elderly patient in his care, even giving the man injections of his test serum to reverse the effects of aging. But the serum was a failure. Finally, Garth helped his agonized patient achieve a peaceful death.
Now convicted of a mercy killing, the judge sentences Garth to death by hanging -- a sentence to be carried out in one month's time.
At the state penitentiary, prison doctor Ralph Howard (Edward Van Sloan) becomes intrigued with Garth's line of research, and he convinces the warden to allow him to work with Dr. Garth in a makeshift lab on the prison grounds. Working quickly, knowing that Garth's execution date is fast approaching, the two are elated when they are able to create a promising test serum.

But fresh blood is needed for further tests, and Dr. Garth asks Dr. Howard to secure blood from a prisoner due to be executed that night. Howard sees no reason why this shouldn't be allowed, and he takes the prisoner's blood after the execution.
The new batch of serum is finished just minutes before Dr. Garth is taken away to be hanged. Garth injects himself with the new serum, reasoning that the autopsy will allow Howard to examine the effects the serum had on the body.  But moments before the scheduled execution, Garth's sentence is commuted to life in prison.



Within 24 hours, Garth's body has undergone a remarkable change. His heart is stronger, his hair is turning dark -- he seems in every way 20 years younger.
Dr. Howard decides that he will be the next one to try the serum. But as Garth prepares to inject him, he begins to feel strange. Dr. Howard, seeing his face, realizes in an instant what has happened: they used the blood of a three-time murderer to make the serum, and now Garth has absorbed the killer's nature into his bloodstream....


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

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


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


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


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






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: Every movie is a self-contained universe, one that operates according to certain rules established by the screenwriter.  In the case of The Face Behind the Mask, this universe is surprisingly arbitrary, stocked with characters and incidents that tilt wildly between the too good to be true and the too bad to be believed.


Within minutes of arriving at the New York waterfront, Janos happens to meet Detective Jim O'Hara, a cop so kind-hearted that he buys the newly-arrived immigrant an ice cream soda (!) and gets him into a clean, reputable flat on his personal recommendation.  Before he's even seen the room, Janos gets a job as a dishwasher in the diner downstairs.  As Janos settles into bed that night, he shakes his head, unable to believe his incredible luck.


Almost instantly, his luck reverses polarity, and Janos becomes the victim of almost absurd series of misfortunes. The apartment building he is in just happens to burn down the very first night he stays there; his face is horribly disfigured and he cannot find work because of his grotesque appearance.  He runs out of money and he and his only friend, a petty thief named Dinky, are out on the street.  Then Dinky gets pneumonia, and the two huddle miserably in an abandoned car, Dinky coughing miserably and seemingly doomed to death.  An honest man, Janos is reluctant to take the safecracking job that Dinky's too sick to perform; but out of desperation he does it.


Almost overnight, Janos' fortunes shift again.  He not only succeeds in keeping himself and Dinky alive, he quickly climbs the criminal ladder, becoming an underworld kingpin.  He makes more money now than he would ever have done as a watchmaker, and he uses his money to obtain at great expense a custom-made rubber mask, one that is an identical copy of his old face.  


This may seem like a crude or trivial thing for a crook to want, but the human face is the one piece of equipment you absolutely have to have in order to be accepted in human society.  Indeed, the face is necessary even though the woman with whom he falls in love is blind.  In a sense the mask was made not for her benefit, but for his own.  It allows him to reclaim not only membership in the human race, but the human ability to love as well.  And as we reach the movie's conclusion, it allows him to act selflessly, in the best interests of Helen, even at the cost of his own life.


Interestingly, the mask we're presented with in the movie isn't a mask at all - Lorre simply had heavy makeup applied to his face, and a couple of pieces of tape were used to pull the skin taut.  It helps drive home the symbolic function of the mask as the image we project to the world. You could argue that, given a chance to custom-order your face, it should be possible to upgrade from one belonging to Peter Lorre.  On the other hand, perhaps it's better to just be yourself.