Secret doors, captive beasts, pulsating heads: Universal Horror Classic Movie Archive

Universal Horror Classic Movie Archive collects five of the studio’s genre pieces spanning the years 1941-43. It’s an interesting transitional period if you consider that Universal’s golden years of monster movies climaxed a decade earlier—Dracula, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and Bride of Frankenstein all debuted between 1931 and 1935—while what would arguably be the most distinctive horror films of the new decade were emerging from a B-unit at RKO helmed by producer Val Lewton, whose approach to the genre—subtle, neurotic, contemporary, rife with ambiguity, akin to noir—was essentially a complete reversal of the Universal model. The title of this box set is as misleading as it is awkward. There are no classics here, but most are at least pretty fun, while some are genuinely interesting, inventive and pleasingly strange.

The Black Cat (1941) and Horror Island (41) are both pretty slight whodunits in which characters assemble in a single location housing an unidentified killer motivated by some looming treasure. Both are big on broad comedy, the former enlisting an aging Lou Costello type, the latter a lusty sailor with a wooden leg who resembles a rather discreet drag queen. Concerning a family eagerly awaiting the death of its ancient, very wealthy matriarch, The Black Cat claims to be “suggested by” Edgar Allen Poe, though I can only imagine he would have suggested aborting production. However, the film’s atmosphere, with its smoky moonlight outlining a dense garden of trees, benefits tremendously from the work of cinematographer Stanley Cortez, who would go on to shoot The Magnificent Ambersons (42), The Night of the Hunter (55) and The Naked Kiss (64).


Man Made Monster (41), directed by George Waggner, who would also direct The Wolf Man that same year, is more interesting. Like The Wolf Man, it features Lon Chaney Jr. as a protagonist who’s at once victim and monster. You could say the film is secretly about the curse of survival, and traces of its premise can be found in Unbreakable (2000). A bus is hurled into a high power line. Everyone dies—save Chaney’s Dan McCormick, a sideshow performer who does tricks with electricity. Rather than feel wracked with guilt, Dan walks away from the accident cheerful as ever. A sadistic genius electro-biologist lures Dan into his laboratory, intrigued by Dan’s apparent immunity to electricity. He starts pumping Dan with larger and larger doses of electricity until Dan develops a dependency—there’s a pretty chilling addiction subtext here—and finally transforms into an automaton whose flesh pulsates with white heat. Supporting characters tend toward the bland, but there are beguiling montages involving note-taking and lab work, a curious current of mistrust toward psychiatry, and above all a tragic, soulful yet totally weird performance from Chaney. We feel bad for him, but do we ever really know what’s going on inside this guy?

On the surface Night Monster (42) seems of the same lineage as The Black Cat and Horror Island, replete with an old dark house, abundant secret passages and Bela Lugosi as a servant. Yet this is a creepier, more sinister, more absorbing, set in some swampy Southern town where the nights are draped in fog and local authorities don’t sweat much over the series of strangulation killings occurring near the mansion of a reclusive, quadriplegic millionaire who surrounds himself with his mentally ill sister, Lugosi’s butler, some mystic in a turban, and a chauffer who doubles as a salivating rapist. A trio of doctors converge at the millionaire’s house with their hands out for donations but instead find they’re treated to demonstrations of how matter can be altered by telekinetically adjusting its vibrations. They’re also here to pay penance for their collective failure to save the millionaire from his present condition. I loved the expressionistic fog excess, there’s a really good-looking lady shrink, a haunting night walk sequence where a spunky young woman is sadly killed, and Lugosi is forced to act normal in certain scenes, reminding you what an interesting actor he could be when not always hamming it up.

A sort of girly cousin to Fox’s Dr. Renault’s Secret (42), the puzzlingly titled Captive Wild Woman (43) was directed by Edward Dmytryk, who’d soon be helming some essential noirs, such as Murder My Sweet (44) and Crossfire (47). It features two prominent male figures, one ostensibly heroic, the other the obvious villain, aligned by their compulsion to throw wild animals into unnatural situations and tame these animals until they do their bidding. The first man is a circus performer, the second a mad scientist obsessed with “racial improvement” who inserts human glands into a gorilla, the result being the beautiful and bizarre Acquanetta, “the Venezuelan Volcano.” (The actress was actually from Wyoming.) Sounds like a successful experiment in forcing the evolution of beasts into hot babes, but of course confusion and disaster await. The wildly improbably story is quite fascinating, the mise en scène an elegant mélange of slow-motion, creeping traveling shots and sudden close-ups, and the scenes in which the circus guy tangles with real tigers and lions are more genuinely nerve-wracking than anything else in the entire box set. See it. And be nice to animals.

2008: the year in DVD

It’s one of my favourite parts of my job, discovering some treasure long forgotten, previously hard-to-find or crying out for reassessment. Looking over the past year’s standout DVDs I see two interesting trends: a steady stream of compelling westerns and fresh opportunities to appreciate the astonishing presence and emotional dexterity of the great actresses of Hollywood’s studio era—sometimes both in the same title.

The Furies, Day of the Outlaw
Barbara Stanwyck’s magnificent performance in Anthony Mann’s fascinatingly perverse 1950 western, a web of incest, gender reversal and land ownership, is alternately terrifying—keep your eye on those scissors—and moving. Equally scary and nearly as affecting is Robert Ryan, heartsick, vengeful and rivetingly repressed, in Andre De Toth’s wintry 1959 western, in which grotesque outlaws, led by Burl Ives, take over a farming community. 

Kid Galahad, Daisy Kenyon
The long road of high stakes and good times shared by the no-longer-young Bette Davis and Edward G. Robinson reaches its terminus in this superb 1937 boxing flick. She falls for a naïve fighter but only winds up steering him toward another woman with a fraction of her easy-going charm. Joan Crawford however can’t decide between crazy WWII vet Henry Fonda and adulterous lawyer Dana Andrews in Otto Preminger’s 1947 women’s picture—yet watching her try makes for something of profound emotional textures.

Blast of Silence
Writer/director/star Allen Baron’s ultra-low budget 1961 noir is a stark portrait of a neurotic, lonesome hitman, as well as one of the movies’ most striking portraits of New York City. Criterion's supplements heighten the film's unique position as both an inspired one-off from an unusual and little known talent in American movies, as well as supplying a sense of how the city has changed.

Dr. Renault’s Secret, Dragonwyck
Gene Tierney’s the innocent country girl swept off to Vincent Price’s lordly lair of aristocratic rot in Joseph Mankiewicz’s excellent 1946 gothic melodrama. Yet Tierney’s not as fundamentally innocent as the amazing J. Carroll Naish, who plays both the brute, inarticulate hero and monster in Harry Lachman’s 1942 post-Darwinian horror film, which was truly my B-movie discovery of the year, brimming with strangeness and fascinating supporting performances, including one from the inimitable Mike Mazurki.

Moontide, Road House
Ida Lupino is the suicidal waif who pierces the heart of Jean Gabin’s wandering longshoreman amidst murder, booze and plumes of fog in this atmospheric, creepily homoerotic 1942 proto-noir half directed and then abandoned by Fritz Lang. Lupino then manages to turn just about everybody on, including Richard Widmark and Cornell Wilde, as the traveling take-no-shit singer and pianist in this sexy, very adult 1948 noir. Both came from Fox as part of their continuing series of noir releases, a series that hopefully keep up its annual yield in 2009.

Death of a Cyclist
Juan Antonio Bardem exposes the lower depths of classism in Franco’s Spain in this 1955 noir. A secret affair is threatened with exposure after an accidental killing on a bleak country road.

Mon Oncle Antoine
There’s something ridiculous in labeling what’s been deemed the greatest Canadian film of all time a discovery, but, sadly enough, there you have it. I confess, I never saw it until Criterion, and American company, put it out. But I don't think I'm alone in undervaluing the classics of my own country. Claude Jutra’s richly evocative 1971 masterpiece captures a moment of transition in rural Quebec and a child’s developing awareness of sex, death and the trail of hidden compromises that lead to adulthood.

Larisa Shepitko, Aki Kaurismäki’s Proletariat Trilogy, The Films of Budd Boetticher
Three multi-title director showcase boxes of tremendous value. Shepitko’s films were poetic explorations of troubled Soviet memories; Kaurismäki’s are marked by a highly distinctive, minimalist comic deadpan and affection for crime stories about losers; Boetticher helmed some of the best westerns of the 50s, five of which are included here.


The Small Back Room, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1949 wartime drama features an alcoholic demolitions expert who has to both diffuse a bomb and keep alive an old flame. Martin Ritt’s 1964 spy story plunges us headfirst into the Cold War and the chilling lengths governments traverse for the sake of secrecy. It features a terrifically brooding turn from Richard Burton that seems like it must have been study material for Daniel Craig. Two brilliant British films about the toll of war on ordinary lives.

The Ballad of Narayama, Mishima
With the death of Ken Ogata last October, Japan lost one of its great film actors. In Shohei Imamura’s 1983 epic Palme d’Or-winner, set in a backward rural community, Ogata played the son of an old woman who must be taken up a mountain to die. In Paul Schrader’s 1985 biopic, Ogata embodied legendary writer Yukio Mishima, who suicided in 1970 after a failed military coup, and remains a controversial figure to this day... Okay, so Mishima was anything but a discovery for me, but it deserves extra recognition here as some sort of milestone in the biopic, as a beautifully put together DVD package with commentary from the always articulate Schrader and as an extraordinary showcase for Ogata.  

The hazy frontiers of genre and genetics: the unforgettable faces of Lugosi, Price and J. Carroll Naish illuminate three new Fox classics on DVD

If the movies sometimes closely resemble our dreams, its partly because the actors, who appear and disappear in different guises, are somehow analogous to our own internal catalogue of faces, limited by the sway of memory and the mysterious dictates of unconscious imagination. The result can be a mixture of disorientation, comfortable familiarity and outright rejection when we can’t accept the grafting of a face we associate with one persona onto another, like how our bodies might reject a the introduction of a foreign organ.

An amusing case study can be found in a pair of roles played by Bela Lugosi. In Chandu the Magician (1932) he played Roxor, a villain bent on acquiring a death ray that can destroy the world. In The Return of Chandu (34), Lugosi, who dies at the end of the previous film, played… Chandu, the hero, and Roxor’s nemesis. Were the invisible forces of studio casting deliberately messing with the minds of filmgoers? Were the filmmakers trying to subliminally impart a sense of the Borgesian infinite in which good and evil alternate endlessly? I haven’t seen the latter film, but I suspect that the reasoning behind Lugosi’s audacious role reversal was simply that the first Chandu, Edmond Lowe, was so irredeemably bland next to Lugosi’s deliciously over-the-top villain, that they opted to keep the more appealing box office draw in the franchise by whatever means. Such is the sometimes banal logic of dreams.

Chandu the Magician is newly available in the three-disc Fox Horror Classics Vol. 2 box, a terrific package, if extremely misleading in its generic designation. Chandu isn’t horror at all but an adventure yarn as jam-packed with spectacular sets (one of the film’s directors was master production designer William Cameron Menzies), daring escapes, laughable implausibilities and casual racism as the Indiana Jones series that revived the tradition 50 years later. Chandu, an American who journeys east, acquires “the secrets of the yogi” and accompanying turban, has to stop Roxor’s scheme with his powers of suggestion. There are some terrific set-pieces, especially Chandu’s escape from a watery grave, but I don’t think Lowe’s mascara-lined eyes could persuade anyone to check for stains on their tie much less run in terror believing their rifle’s become a snake. Anyone who thinks this guy could be a master of mentalism is just plain mental.

Dragonwyck (46), an adaptation of Anya Seton’s novel and the directorial debut of Joseph Mankiewicz, arguably isn’t really horror either, despite the many claims of Steve Haberman to the contrary on the disc’s hugely informative audio commentary, but more fittingly labeled a Gothic romance. It’s also a much more deeply satisfying film, telling the story of a bucolic innocent (Gene Tierney) swept off to a forbidding old mansion lorded over by her cousin, a charismatic landowner (Vincent Price). Set in 1844 amidst the Anti-Rent Wars, it’s also a rather scathing indictment of the aristocracy, here characterized as alternately ignorant, gluttonous or sliding into a dementia founded in zealous faith in their own entitlement, implied inbreeding and perhaps a familial curse, which manifests in some of the film’s most haunting moments, highlighted by Alfred Newman’s ghostly music. Tierney’s lovely, of course, but also wonderfully nuanced in her journey from naïveté to bleak wisdom, while Price makes his first steps into the sort of role that would come to define his persona in the dream world of movies: articulate, haunted, elegant and slipping into darkness.

Good as Dragonwyck is however, the movie I really want to tell you about, the only bona-fide horror movie in this collection, is Dr. Renault’s Secret (42), which, at least by the standards of this lover of 40s B-movies, is one well-kept secret indeed. There are reasons for this, such as the absence of stars or acclaimed filmmakers, yet the script is based on a novel by Gaston Leroux, who once wrote a little something you might have heard of called The Phantom of the Opera, and the sensationalistic story circles around such juicy themes as genetic predisposition and Darwinism, which, let’s face it, is as controversial a topic in American discourse these days as it was 65 years ago.

Dr. Larry Forbes (John Sheppard, a likable enough type with a Kevin McCarthy overbite) turns up in rural France on the eve of Bastille Day to wed Madelon (Lynne Roberts), the daughter of the titular scientist (George Zucco). Forbes meets Renault’s chauffer Noel (J. Carroll Naish), a strange, melancholy Javanese who seems deeply attached to Forbes’ kind and fetching fiancée, and Renault’s gardener, the gruff ex-con Rogell (the terrific character actor and former wrestler Mike Mazurki, who marvelously played the brokenhearted brute Moose Malloy in 1944’s Murder, My Sweet). As France celebrates the anniversary of its first claims toward modern nationhood—and a string of murders terrorize the community—this pair will come to represent man at his most primitive, with Noel, who we discover is the recipient of Renault’s most ambitious experiments, struggling to overcome his basest urges, while Rogell’s content to surrender to the aberrant dictates of his gene pool—he comes from a long line of criminals.

Surprisingly beautifully photographed, brilliantly paced, thematically layered and clocking in at just under an hour (!), Dr. Renault’s Secret is a real diamond in the rough, with a truly weird love triangle and the even weirder surprise that the hero of the movie is actually Noel, embodied so sympathetically and with an absolute minimum of make-up by Naish, whose face I’d like to see populate my movie/dream-world a lot more often—even if those dreams are nightmares.