Pre-War Thrills: Dark Eyes of London (Walter Summers, 1939)

Until recently, I’d tended to accept the received wisdom that the few, scattered, horror films made in the UK during the 1930s were pretty creaky and timid affairs, their ambition stymied both by the era’s censorious climate and by the British film industry’s steadfast refusal to treat the nascent genre with anything approaching acknowledgement or respect.

Like viral infection or rock n’ roll though, horror will always find a way, and as such, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, rather than the mere historical curiosity I was expecting, ‘Dark Eyes of London’, shot in the less than palatial surroundings of Welwyn Garden City over eleven days in April 1939, is actually pretty damned great.

Headlined by imported star Bela Lugosi - who seemingly undertook a journey across the Atlantic by ship solely to appear in the film - this adaptation of Edgar Wallace’s 1924 novel is in fact fairly strong stuff for its era, conveying a morbid, decidedly unsavoury atmosphere and including some moments of sadism grim enough to provoke comment even in the more open-minded United States (where the film played in 1940 as ‘The Human Monster’, having been picked up for distribution by Lugosi’s regular employers at Monogram).

Whilst the film’s violence never reaches a level which viewers alive today would deem ‘graphic’, there is a certain, base level nastiness to the depredations of Lugosi’s villainous Dr Orloff which remain disturbing. From the steel water tank in which it is implied the good doctor drowns his victims before dumping them, pre-deceased, into the Thames, to the scene in which he uses an electrical current to deafen a bed-ridden, blind-mute beggar, there is some nasty business going on here and no mistake.

In view of all this, it difficult to believe the film was produced at all, given that the UK’s censors had effectively banned all horror films just four years earlier, having thrown their toys out of the proverbial pram when confronted with the comic book excesses of Universal’s ‘The Raven’ (Lew Landers, 1935). I’d certainly be interested to learn how ‘Dark Eyes..’s domestic release played out under such circumstances, although it was, I note, the first film to be awarded the short-lived “H” (for “horror”) classification by the BBFC, meaning that persons under sixteen would theoretically be refused admittance.

It is telling that, between 1939 and 1950, when the ‘H’ certificate was more or less phased out in favour of the more iconic ‘X’, only one other domestic production achieved the dubious distinction of being “rated H” (Ivan Barnett’s little seen 1950 take on ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’). Instead, the dreaded ‘H’ was reserved exclusively for imported American horror pictures, leading me to surmise that its introduction in 1939 must have reflected the censor caving in to pressure from representatives of the American studios, particularly Universal, who had of course returned to making horror films in earnest at around the same time, and presumably needed a way to get their product onto UK screens. Beyond noting the unique position in which this leaves ‘Dark Eyes of London’ though, perhaps that’s a subject best left for another day.

It is possible, I suppose, that ‘Dark Eyes..’ journey to the screen may have been further aided by the fact that it sprung from the pen of a phenomenally popular, household name author, celebrated (if not exactly respected) for his mystery and crime - as opposed to horror - fiction.

Indeed, for all its unpleasantness, the movie is framed as a police procedural rather than a gothic horror, with the approach taken by director/co-screenwriter Walter Summers reminding me, not so much of the Universal-derived horror you might have expected from a production which went to trouble of luring Bela Lugosi across an ocean, but of Alfred Hitchcock’s then-recent series of ground-breaking contemporary thrillers.

In particular, 1934’s ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’ shares this film’s down-at-heel East London setting, its diabolical Hungarian-accented villain, and even the idea of a charitable/religious institute being used as a front for criminal activity. More importantly though, ‘Dark Eyes..’, like Hitchcock’s British films, has the decency to remain fast-paced, modernistic and ingeniously plotted, imbuing its convoluted storyline with a strong, character-driven through-line to keep us hooked.

Along the way, Summers (along with co-writers Patrick Kirwen and producer John Argyle) give us plenty of interesting diversions, good-natured banter and running gags to break the tension / ghoulishness, and, whilst it’s probably fair to say that Summers lacks the touch of mastery we’d routinely assign to Hitch, the film is nonetheless very nicely done, with solid performances across the board and some impressively detailed production design, making for a rather charming, neatly turned out entertainment whose incongruously breezy tone must have further eased the censor’s worries.

For those who are neither keen readers of Edgar Wallace nor familiar with Alfred Vohrer’s excellent early ‘60s German quasi-remake of this film (of which more below), the plot of ‘Dark Eyes..’ concerns a number of suspicious corpses fished out of the Thames, all of whom turn out to have been customers of the Greenwich Insurance Company - a small-time outfit operated by one Dr Orloff, a seemingly kindly and well-meaning fellow with - AHEM - a murky past as a disgraced medical researcher, who also maintains close connections to The Dearborn Institute, a Limehouse-based home for the blind operated by his - AHEM - close personal friend, the sightless Rev John Dearborn.

As well he might, dashing young Inspector Holt of the Yard (a brisk and likeable Hugh Williams) smells a rat, and, given that Dr Orloff is clearly guilty as sin from the outset, the film’s subsequent ‘mystery’ largely consists of mapping out the precise size and shape of that rat. Less of a ‘whodunnit’ then, and more of a ‘what in god’s name is he doing!?’, if you will.

Of course, further complications arise across the film’s 76 minutes of densely-packed plottin’ and chattin’, not least the introduction of Norwegian actress Greta Gynt, providing a surprisingly strong and self-sufficient heroine as the daughter of one of Orloff’s earlier victims.

In this telling of the tale, Inspector Holt is also accompanied - presumably for reasons of transatlantic sales potential - by a hard-boiled, gun-toting Chicago cop - played for laughs by Edmun Brian - who is sticking around after delivering an extradited convict in order to learn something of Scotland Yard’s rather more genteel methods. It’s a testament to the film’s overall quality however that, rather than functioning as an insufferable comic relief goon, Brian is actually quite an appealing presence. Providing an effective foil for Holt, he even manages to achieve a few unforced laughs here and there, allowing the film to pioneer the ‘chills n’ chuckles’ formula which would later be repeatedly taken to the bank by Rialto Film’s post-war Wallace adaptations in West Germany. [Please consult the Krimi Casebook for further details.]

Jess Franco fans in the audience will no doubt be gesturing frantically and jumping up and down by this point, so yes, let’s briefly pause to acknowledge the fact that, given that the name ‘Orloff’ does not appear in Wallace’s source novel, Uncle Jess clearly must have been very fond of this movie, given the many and varied Dr Orloffs who abound throughout his mammoth filmography, beginning, of course, with Howard Vernon’s memorable portrayal in 1962’s The Awful Dr Orlof [sic].

Technically I suppose, this makes ‘Dark Eyes of London’ the inaugural entry in the Orloff saga, a loose accumulation of cinematic oddities which went on to include not only Franco’s numerous reiterations of the character, but also such mind-boggling spin-offs as Pierre Chevalier’s ‘Orloff Against The Invisible Man’ (1970) and Santos Alcocer’s ‘El Enigma del Ataúd’ aka ‘Les Orgies du Docteur Orloff’ (1967). (1)

As such, Euro-horror fans may wish to pause to consider the fact that the screen’s very first Dr Orloff was in fact embodied by no less a personage than Bela Lugosi - and a pretty bang up job he does of it too, I must say. Gifted with a more ambiguous and multi-faceted role than he was generally called upon to play in Hollywood, and with his confidence presumably buoyed by both his top-billed status and (we must assume) a level of respect and financial recompense commensurate with his talents, Lugosi actually delivers what I’m inclined to consider one of the very best performances of his career here.

Though Lugosi clearly makes little effort to try to convince the audience of the innocence his scripted character pleads during the film’s early scenes, he instead builds Orloff into an exquisitely loathsome, duplicitous, scene-stealing villain, the like of which old Bela was born to play, but so rarely actually did. The way he can switch from acting the soft-spoken philanthropist one moment to turning on his EVIL STARE and revealing himself as a diabolical mesmerist the next is truly remarkable.

Rivalling Lugosi’s hold over the imagination of the movie’s original viewers meanwhile is the more literally monstrous figure of ‘Jake’ (played here by Wilfrid Walter), the hulking, blind stooge whom Orloff uses to carry out his dirty work (somewhat pre-empting the character of Morpho in Franco’s Dr Orloff films).

Monogram’s publicity materials and re-titling certainly made Jake the star of the show upon the film’s American release, and, although the character was portrayed in more naturalistic, and more terrifying, fashion as ‘Blind Jack’ (Addy Berber) in Alfred Vohrer’s Die Toten Augen von London (‘The Dead Eyes of London’, 1961), Walter makes an impression here nonetheless; if not for his acting, then at least for the absolutely extraordinary make up job achieved by the film’s technicians.

Framing this unfortunate brute as a full-on monster, complete with pointed ears, protruding jaw and bulbous, orc-like fangs, Jake’s utterly fantastical visage provides another wonderfully diversion from the stultifying rules of ‘good taste’ which confined the ambition of so much British cinema in this era.

Speaking of Vohrer’s film meanwhile, that’s certainly another matter we’ve got to discuss here. Going into ‘Dark Eyes..’, I was worried that that it might pale in comparison to the more stylish, more sensational quasi-remake which hit screens over two decades later. And indeed, there is a lot of crossover between the two films, with at least some scenes and visual motifs in ‘Dead Eyes..’ appearing to directly recreate material first seen here. But, there are also enough differences between the two in terms of character and storytelling for them to avoid treading on each other’s toes too much, allowing them to co-exist as equally enjoyable alternate versions of the same tale.

As is extensively discussed by Kim Newman and Stephen Jones on the special features accompanying Network’s new blu-ray edition of the movie, ‘Dark Eyes of London’ feels in many ways like a bit of a cursed film; if not exactly an unheralded classic, then certainly a solid and historically significant effort which has never really gotten its due.

Being released in the UK six weeks after Britain’s declaration of war with Germany probably didn’t exactly help ‘Dark Eyes..’ prospects at the domestic box office - and, sadly, this same historical circumstance made the prospect of Lugosi returning to the country to promote the film, or to work again with the its producers, an impossibility. (2)

Slipped out with little fanfare by Monogram in the U.S. a year later amid a glut of creatively and financially impoverished Lugosi vehicles, it was all too easy for ‘The Human Monster’ to fall through the cracks, filed away between the likes of ‘The Devil Bat’ and ‘Spooks Run Wild’ in the memory of young audiences ill-equipped to appreciate the movie’s rather different cultural context.

With the majority of extant prints comprising blurry, severely degraded copies of this U.S. release version, the film has subsequently languished in Public Domain hell (see this version for a representative example). As a result, it has failed to gain much traction even amongst die-hard classic horror buffs, whilst Vohrer’s 1961 version has meanwhile been (justifiably) enshrined as something of a cult classic.

It is only really with this year’s pristine restoration (see link above) in fact that ‘Dark Eyes of London’ has finally, over eighty years later, been given another chance to find its audience. If you’re still reading this far down the screen, I’d bet that you’re a potential member of that audience, and as such, I’d urge you to take the plunge.

Ok, so the sight of Bela Lugosi lurching around claustrophobic faux-London sets menacing blind people whilst some bantering cops close in on his tail probably won't exactly change your life, but for fans of pulp mystery fiction or classic horror cinema alike, it will at least prove an absolute hoot, if not something of a minor revelation. It seems strange to retrospectively crown such a marginal and unbeloved production as probably THE best British horror film of the pre-war era, but, such is the dearth of competition that I’m damned if I can think of a better one.

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(1)In the commentary track included on Network’s blu-ray, Kim Newman puts forward the theory that ‘The Dark Eyes of London’ influence on Jess Franco’s work goes far beyond merely repurposing the villain’s name for his own purposes. Newman suggests in fact that Franco scattered references and homages to the film throughout his filmography - an idea that, as a Franco fan, I find fascinating, but can’t immediately dredge up much evidence for. Certainly, there are similarities here to Franco’s script for ‘The Awful Dr Orloff’ (1962) - particularly re: cross-cutting between the villain’s crimes and the police investigation thereof - and Franco did indeed obsessively return to the same narrative framework across his subsequent career. But beyond that..? I’m not so sure. In an ideal world, I’d love to discuss this idea at length with the esteemed Mr Newman, perhaps over a few drinks and a slap-up supper, but I’d imagine he probably has more pressing matters to attend to (not least his new novel, which sounds great).

(2) As also observed by Newman & Jones, it is notable that ‘Dark Eyes..’ producer/co-writer John Argyle’s next project was another Wallace adaptation, ‘The Door With Seven Locks’ (aka ‘Chamber of Horrors’), which debuted in October 1940 with Leslie Banks, who had of course beautifully cribbed Lugosi’s style in ‘The Most Dangerous Game’ (1932), in the leading role. We may surmise therefore that that pesky war may perhaps have deprived us of the pleasures of an entire series of Lugosi-starring, UK-produced Wallace pictures.

Dennis’s Library (#40): The Curse of the Wise Woman by Lord Dunsany (Sphere, 1976)

 By this point, it seems that the Dennis Wheatley Library Of The Occult had abandoned their distinctive circular, zodiac sign cover designs; which is a blessing in this particular case, because the full cover painting (for which I cannot find a credit online) is absolutely superb.

This book has been in my possession for many years, but I confess, I’ve never got around to reading it. Though Lord Dunsany remains noteworthy to weird fiction fans as a primary influence on the early work of H.P. Lovecraft, His Lordship's brand of oneiric high fantasy has never really been my cup of tea, and though this rare departure into real world-set supernatural fiction might conceivably be worth a punt, Wheatley’s description of it as appealing primarily to “..those who love shooting, hunting and magnificent descriptions of the beauties of nature” hasn't exactly stoked my enthusiasm for giving it a try, even though the Irish political angle sounds quite interesting.

Top marks for use of the word ‘profanation’. One of my favourites.

As this is the highest number I currently own within Dennis Wheatley’s Library Of The Occult, here is a run-down of what was included within it up to this point. A pretty varied selection to say the least.

Pre-War Thrills: The Mask of Fu Manchu (Charles Brabin, 1932)

So, to get this out of the way right from the outset: if you’re going to take an interest in the pulp fiction or popular literature of the early 20th Century, you’re going to encounter a lot of racism.

H.P. Lovecraft may have taken most of the flak for this in recent years (largely due to the fact that he is one of the only pulp magazine writers still liable to be read by the kind of young/educated readers most liable to take offence at his repellent views), but, as fascinating as it may be to ponder the psychological underpinnings of Lovecraft’s errant fears and prejudices, the digger one digs into the work of his contemporaries, the clearer it becomes that these prejudices were far from uncommon.

Put into context alongside the unabashed imperialism and hysterical miscegenation fears of writers like Seabury Quinn and Dennis Wheatley, the deeply offensive caricatures of non-white characters that litter the work of Edgar Wallace or the dozens of other, more obscure, examples that blogger Samuel Wilson has chronicled over the past few years via his True Pulp Fiction project, Lovecraft’s more notorious passages are noteworthy only for the unusually strident manner in which he expressed his views, rather than for the views themselves (and, as fans and detractors alike will appreciate, HPL was writer who liked to express just about everything in pretty strident terms).

More than any other writer of course, it is Fu Manchu’s creator Sax Rohmer who must, through the very nature of his most famous creation, be singled out as the poster boy for all this Pulp Racism. I confess I’ve not read enough Rohmer to really make a call on the extent to which this assumption is justified, but…. well really this is all just a long-winded way of saying that I probably shouldn’t have been too surprised to discover that a Fu Manchu movie from 1932 is pretty damned racist.

Perhaps I’d been lured into a false sense of security here by my familiarity with the 1960s series of Harry Alan Towers/Christopher Lee Fu Manchu movies [see my reviews of ‘Brides of…’ and ‘Blood of…’ here and here]. Though still a far cry from what anyone would be liable to deem ‘politically correct’, these films are essentially pretty good-natured affairs that tend to treat their antagonist’s ethnicity as a mere incidental detail – a bit of exotic colour to liven up his Bond villain-esque schemes for world domination.

Charles Brabin’s film, by contrast, is definitely pulling no punches. “You hideous yellow monster,” heroine Karen Morley spits at Boris Karloff’s Fu Manchu at one point, shortly after he in turn promises to “..destroy your whole accursed white race”. Clearly sensitivity of any kind was not on the cards here.

Adapted by a veritable raft of screenwriters from the simultaneously published Rohmer novel of the same name, ‘The Mask of Fu Manchu’ indeed presents us with a villain whose motivations are somewhat different from those of the unilateral, ego-driven super-villain proposed by most other screen adaptations. Instead, Fu Manchu’s attempts to swipe the face-mask and sword of Genghis Khan from under the noses of the British archaeologists who have just excavated them is motivated by his plan to use the ceremonial power of these artefacts to inspire the people of Asia (yes, all of Asia) to unite and overthrow their Western oppressors.

Leaving aside the fact that, given the geo-political shit that had gone down in the century or so prior to 1932, people in many parts of Asia had pretty legitimate cause to want to overthrow their Western oppressors, the notion that the sight of a Chinese man carrying some paraphernalia belonging to a Mongol folk hero would somehow cause everyone from Istanbul to Yokohama to rise up in revolt is just so utterly bizarre that I don’t even know where to start with it really. It just left me speechless to be honest, but… such is the level of wilful cultural ignorance we’re dealing with here, apparently.

When, late in the film, we see Fu Manchu strutting his stuff on the stage of what looks like a disused theatre, rousing a crowd of guys who largely resemble moth-eaten Afghan warlords of some kind to a mild display of scimitar-rattling enthusiasm (“conquer and breed – kill the white man and take his women”, he memorably exhorts them), we have to wonder how the hell anyone was *ever* supposed to buy this idea, even in the further reaches of fanciful pulp delirium.

Needless to say, the film’s steadfast defenders of the British Empire spend a great deal of time asserting the seriousness of Dr Fu’s rather whimsical scheme, but it doesn’t help that those defenders aren’t really a very persuasive bunch, by and large.

For reasons best known to themselves, the scriptwriters on ‘Mask of Fu Manchu’ seem to have nixed the idea of including Rohmer’s likeable Holmes/Watson surrogates Nayland Smith and Dr Petrie, who usually provide the bulk of the heroic daring-do in these stories, instead entrusting our attentions to bunch of fairly grumpy, interchangeable middle-aged men who never really succeed in making much of an impression.

As our nominal protagonist, Morley does what heroines do in these kind of things – being alternately headstrong and hysterical, wearing a pith helmet and fretting about her missing-presumed kidnapped archaeologist father and/or archaeologist husband - whilst the assorted interchangeable chaps offer little in the way of reassurance once she’s out on-site in the Gobi Desert.

To be fair, Nayland Smith is actually present (in the shape of Lewis Stone, who also appeared in The Lost World), but he spends the first half of the movie directing operations remotely from back in London, and when he does finally get in on the action he proves only marginally more formidable than the other fellows, with his name warranting scarcely so much as a shrug from his supposed arch-nemesis.

Oh well. At least Boris Karloff’s take on Fu Manchu has got to be worth the price of admission, right? Well, perhaps, but, with all due respect to Karloff, I’m not sure he comes over all that well here to be honest.

Whereas Christopher Lee in the ‘60s movies presented an appropriately towering, saturnine presence (much as you’d expect I suppose), Karloff’s Fu Manchu feels like a physically smaller figure, with a loquacious, conniving sort of vibe about him.

Much is made in the script of Fu’s doctorates from Cambridge, Edinburgh, Harvard etc, and in light of this, Karloff speaks in his own delightfully melodious tones, without attempting any hint of an accent. As lovely as it must have been for him to give his voice a good work-out after non-speaking roles in ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘The Old Dark House’ however, the cliché-riddled diatribes the script equips him with are scarcely very edifying, and, well… perhaps it’s just me, but the idea of a Fu Manchu who is ceaselessly nattering away rather distracts from the taciturn, Confusion menace I prefer to associate with the character.

On plus side, Karloff does muster some splendidly diabolical expressions, and makes good use of his long, claw-like fingernails, but his performance can scarcely have been helped by a somewhat excessive make-up job – complete with pointed ears – that makes the “Devil Doctor” look more like a fire-damaged elf than a Chinese man. (Attempting to cash-in on Karloff’s recent breakthrough as a horror star, this explicitly monstrous/non-human Fu Manchu was rather optimistically billed as “The Frankenstein of the Orient” on some of the movie’s posters.)

Likewise, the casting of the great Myrna Loy as Fu Manchu’s lascivious daughter Fah Lo See bodes well, but production anecdotes suggest that Loy (who had often been cast in ‘oriental’ roles during the silent era, in spite of her entirely European heritage) made no secret of her distaste for the material, and her resentment at essentially being forced to appear in the film by MGM is reflected in a performance pointedly lacking in any kind of enthusiasm. (1)

Other gossip meanwhile relates that, when Karloff requested a script prior to shooting, he received nothing but gales of laughter in response, and subsequently had to deal with having his dialogue passed to him from day to day on single-spaced, typo-ridden pages. It also seems worth noting at this juncture that an initial attempt at principal photography on the film collapsed in chaos after three days, with initial director Charles Vidor subsequently finding himself sacked by the studio, and Brabin drafted in at short notice to replace him.

Under such circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that, in purely narrative terms, the completed ‘Mask of Fu Manchu’ is alternately boring and nonsensical, essentially boiling down to lot of stodgy, indifferently shot dialogue scenes interspersed – seemingly at random – with flourishes of morbid, horror movie atmospherics and grand, opulently transgressive set-pieces.

Thankfully though, the latter sequences survive as fairly jaw-dropping examples of deranged, pre-code decadence, and indeed, even as the film embodies the most regrettable aspects of its era’s pulp fiction, it also manages to bring the very best of the pre-war “Shudder Pulp” aesthetic to the screen, going all out to justify Fu Manchu’s reputation as “The Lord of Strange Deaths” with a series of hair-raising, grand guignol spectacles, rendered with such lavish enthusiasm that they feel like ‘Weird Tales’ cover illustrations come to life.

After minor bits of ghoulishness early on (one character gets a knife in the back, a severed hand falls from a tree at another’s feet etc), things really get underway in this regard when we see Fu Manchu subject the first of his English captives to “the torture of the bell” – a somewhat Poe-like conception that sees the poor chap spread-eagled across a slab whilst a gigantic bell bongs away immediately above him.

Not the most gruesome of on-screen torments perhaps, but it’s at least agreeably bizarre, and Fu Manchu’s attempts to entice information from his victim by dangling grapes from his claw-like finger nails and fooling him with salt water carry an icky charge of sadism that serves to set us up nicely for the depredations to follow.

Subsequent highlights include the extraordinary sight of captured leading man Charles Starrett stripped to a loin cloth and strapped to a table with metal brace around his neck as Fah Lo See covetously surveys his naked flesh, a phalanx of Nubian slaves arranged on pedestals behind her like human statues. When Dr Fu himself makes the scene – ominously clad in a surgical gown - the exceptionally icky action that follows involves the fresh blood of lizards and tarantulas being drawn into a syringe and mixed with snake venom pulled directly from the wound of a dying sacrificial victim(!), all to aid the creation of a mind control serum that we then see injected straight into Starrett’s neck.

One of the earliest horror scenes I’m aware of that dares to go straight for a gross-out / gag reaction, this alarming juxtaposition of bodily fluids and creepy-crawlies almost seems to prefigure the post-‘Black Magic’ excesses of ‘70s/’80s Hong Kong horror, and as such proves pretty hard to top in terms of nastiness.

Even more extraordinary in some ways however is a subsequent scene in which poor old Nayland Smith finds himself strapped to a kind of gigantic see-saw, balanced mere feet above a pit fill of – apparently genuine – alligators. Single shots appear to confirm that Lewis Stone himself was hanging mere inches away from the jaws of these surly looking beasts (no stuntmen here!), whilst, elsewhere, another captured good guy (who presumably won the on-set coin toss prior to shooting) merely has to contend with the none-more classic device of having horizontal spiked walls slowly closing in upon him.

Marvellously, all this madness is rendered in lavish, no-expense-spared fashion by MGM, who at the time were riding high as Hollywood’s top-grossing studio, meaning that, like Doctor X before it, ‘The Mask of Fu Manchu’ is able to take full advantage of the brief, magic window that followed in the wake of ‘Dracula’ & ‘Frankenstein’s box office returns, when horror and pulp adventure subjects could temporarily command something approaching A-picture production values.

Both the opening scenes, set in a shadow-haunted British Museum, and the later explorations of Fu Manchu's suitably extravagant subterranean lair employ a series of genuinely vast sets, elaborately dressed with a wildly imaginative mixture of scientific apparatus and faux-Chinese artistry, incorporating throne rooms, amphitheatre-like torture chambers and – my personal favourite – a curtained-off circular alcove carved from a dividing wall within Fah Lo See’s bed-chamber, wherein, we suppose, Fu’s daughter likes to recline with her “victims” (more on which below).

Tony Gaudio’s photography intermittently catches some fine, shadowy vistas on all this high camp weirdness, and, despite the chaos that apparently characterised the production, the film intermittently displays some great bits of visual imagination – most notably the introductory shot of Fu Manchu himself, in which we see Karloff’s fiendish visage reflected in distorting mirror, inexplicably raising a glass of dark, foaming liquid to his lips as electricity crackles dangerously from some off screen device, casting jagged shadow across his face.

It is in moments like this I think that the film’s conception of Fu Manchu really comes alive, portraying him as a man so completely immersed in his hermetic world of rare poisons, venomous concoctions and scientifically-derived terror machines that they have practically (or literally, in this case) become his food and drink, placing him beyond the threshold of mere humanity – a theme that is taken up later in the film, when we see him almost dancing with the sparking, unearthed electricity current that fly from his machinery.

‘The Mask of Fu Manchu’ also echoes ‘Doctor X’ in providing another fine exemplar of early horror’s post-‘Frankenstein’ fascination with the sinister properties of electricity. Indeed, Fu Manchu’s impressive array of spark-spewing equipment – including an actual death ray, no less - were built by Kenneth Strickfaden, the legendary architect of the laboratory sets in Universal’s Frankenstein series, and his creations definitely get a good work out here.

Perhaps we could read a touch of metaphorical significance into all these electricity bolts flying around the place too, given that, as has often been observed, there is something weirdly sexual about Karloff’s portrayal of Fu Manchu, with his sinuous movements and his propensity to unleash sighs of pleasure furthering the impression that the scenes within his lair were purposely designed to convey a particular kind of frisson to the thrill-hungry audience MGM were hoping to attract to the picture. (Heck, even the carved figures on doors of Genghis Khan’s tomb look a bit saucy.)

In this respect, the film is particularly keen to push the envelope in regard to Loy’s character, making the nature of the sexual interplay between Fah Lo See and her father’s captives abundantly clear whenever the opportunity arises. When Fu Manchu initially interviews his captured archaeologist, he basically offers to let the man sleep with his daughter in exchange for information about the location of Genghis Khan’s swag (“even this, my daughter, I offer to you”), but the boot is very much on the other foot later in the picture, when, prior to his ordeal with all the snake venom and tarantula blood, Charles Starrett finds himself chained to a dungeon ceiling, stripped to the waist and whipped (with what look like leather straps) by Fah Lo’s musclebound Nubian slaves… all whilst the lady herself looks up, working herself up into a bit of a sweat as she insists they hit him harder, and faster.

After this, we see Starrett’s exhausted body deposited – where else – in Fah Lo See’s bed chamber, where she lasciviously caresses his bloodied torso until the scene is interrupted by the entrance of her father. Essentially, the filmmakers outline her activities as a sadistic sexual predator about as unambiguously as they possibly could without moving into full on stag movie territory, and, though the power of these scenes is somewhat undermined by Myrna Loy looking as if she was being forced to emote at gun point, modern viewers can still thrill as they contemplate the long decades that would pass before American audiences would next be allowed to enjoy the sight of a woman experiencing orgiastic pleasure as she oversees a man-on-man bondage session.

To be honest, given the puritanical edicts that would begin to be imposed upon Hollywood productions just a few years after this film’s release, it’s surprising that the early proponents of the Hays Code didn’t suffer a collective coronary when they learned of the kind of depravity depicted in ‘The Mask of Fu Manchu’. In fact, having apparently failed to learn the lessons of the disastrous reception that greeted their release of Tod Browning’s notorious ‘Freaks’ a year earlier, it seems in retrospect as if MGM were hell-bent here on crafting a horror movie calculated to offend absolutely everyone on some level.

I mean, even if you were a 1930s citizen with liberal enough sensibilities to roll with all the sadistic torture and sexual perversity, chances are you might have drawn a line at the film’s blunt racial prejudice and dumb-headed colonialism (or failing that, at least been a bit grossed out by all the lingering close-ups of snakes and spiders).

As a result of this triple threat to public morals (and stomachs), it’s scarcely surprising to learn that ‘The Mask of Fu Manchu’ seems to have become one of the most widely censored films in history. It was banned outright in some territories (including many European countries and, unsurprisingly, in Japan), whilst other local jurisdictions proceeded to arbitrarily cut the film as they saw fit. Some excised bits of the more extreme content, whilst others snipped the inflammatory dialogue, and some even imposed cuts on the grounds of blasphemy, before moral guardians presumably did the same in the next state/county/town, until surviving release prints must have been sliced and diced beyond the worst nightmares of a Lucio Fulci/Jess Franco archivist.

Adding to the confusion, it seems that, when MGM staff returned to the film with a view to striking a new print in the 1970s, they were so shocked by the racially insensitive content that they sliced many offending lines of dialogue straight out of the negative, creating a bowdlerised version that became the only way to watch the movie for decades to come, until the nigh on miraculous discovery of a clean, uncut lab print returned it to circulation in all its unsavoury glory in the 21st century.

For all the multitudinous outrage that ‘The Mask of Fu Manchu’ provoked however, the moment modern viewers might be liable to find most unsettling is one that largely escaped to attention of censors at the time – namely, the scene during the film’s conclusion in which Nayland Smith and his comrades take control of Fu Manchu’s death ray and turn it upon the arch-fiend and his followers, who are gathered in the hall below.

What I found noteworthy here is that, rather than alarming the villains and prompting them to scatter (as would normally be the case with this sort of thing), our heroes actually mow down every single one of the quote-unquote “Asian” ne’erdowells, even leaving the weapon running to mop up the survivors as they head off in triumph.

Distantly recalling the same dark questions raised by the old College Debating Society chestnut about whether or not the USA would ever have dared to drop an atomic bomb on a European city, there is something genuinely chilling about the sight of the good guys in an action-adventure story casually massacring several hundred defenceless people in a locked room, without their heroism being at all called into question as a result.

Immediately after this meanwhile, the film reaches the nadir of its unapologetic racism in a deeply regrettable closing scene that finds Nayland Smith and his friends aboard ship on their way home to England. They are in the process of consigning Genghis Khan’s sword and mask to the bottom of the ocean (because, y’know, fuck that shit), when they freeze upon hearing the sinister crash of an oriental gong.

Their surprise turns to laughter however when a short, pot-bellied, gap-toothed Chinese man enters stage right to declare that dinner is served. Do you have a doctorate from Harvard, or from Christ’s College, Nayland Smith jokingly asks the man, who shakes his head in mute incomprehension, giggling along with his relieved interrogators as they shuffle past him and head off to get their grub. Cue triumphant musical flourish and ‘The End’ card.

The comparison between this pitiable ship steward and the defeated Fu Manchu is thus made explicit, and the message that the film leaves us with is clear: as long as we keep these people away from our institutions of learning and make sure they don't get any funny ideas, they’ll remain where they belong - illiterate, buck-toothed and banging the dinner gong – and all will be right with the world.

Taking the film far beyond a mere “this is the way they did things in 1932” level of background racism, it’s hardly surprising that these ugly sentiments proved controversial even at the time (apparently the Chinese Ambassador to the USA lodged a complaint about the film following its release), and perhaps, like ‘Freaks’ before it, ‘The Mask of Fu Manchu’ can best be seen as another example of MGM disastrously misjudging public tastes in their rush to try to cash in on the contemporary vogue for horror.

Certainly, no sequels to were forthcoming, despite the obvious potential for turning Fu Manchu into a series character. Karloff quietly returned to work at Universal after filming was completed, and, as we’ve discussed above, the film was withdrawn from circulation in its uncut form for pretty much the entirety of the 20th century.

But, eighty plus years down the line, we can hopefully at least strive toward some semblance of 20-20 hindsight and acknowledge that, for all of the deplorable attitudes it embodies, ‘The Mask of Fu Manchu’s errant combination of hare-brained colonialism and grotesque, sexualised sadism still proves fascinatingly unsettling and alluring, carrying with it an intoxicating whiff of the forbidden that edges it toward the same “dark camp” category within which ‘Freaks’ eventually found its niche as a celebrated cult film.

With its baroque excesses and general air of taboo-trampling derangement, ‘Mask..’ certainly stands up as just as much of an unforgettable viewing experience as the other (ostensibly far superior) films I’ve covered elsewhere in this review thread, irrespective of the hateful attitudes expressed within it.

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(1) Confusingly, Fah Lo See inexplicably became Lin Tang (played by Tsai Chin) in the ‘60s movies, and she had already been renamed Ling Moy (played by the beautiful Eurasian star Anna May Wong) in an earlier Fu Manchu adaptation with Warner Oland, 1931’s ‘Daughter of the Dragon’. In Rohmer’s novels, she was Fah lo Suee, so ‘Mask of..’ gets it closest.

Pre-War Thrills: Doctor X (Michael Curtiz, 1932)

“It’s peculiar that the left deltoid muscle should be missing. […] Gentlemen, it wasn’t torn out - this is cannibalism!”

Well, that sure put the cat among the pigeons. The speaker is Dr Jerry Xavier (Lionel Atwill), and he has has just thrown back the sheet covering a murder victim in old New York’s delightfully shabby Mott Street Morgue. We’re less than five minutes into ‘Doctor X’, Warner Bros’ first stab at a full-blooded horror movie, and one of the first out of the gates from any of the major studios following Universal’s runaway success with ‘Dracula’ and ‘Frankenstein’ in 1931. (1)

Quite why the doctor is so confident of his assertion that cannibalism has taken place is never really made clear (I mean, were there teeth marks or something..?), but regardless - this is certainly a hair-raising way to begin a movie in 1932. Could it be an indication that the hard-boiled, straight-talking approach that had recently proved so successful in Warners’ game-changing gangster pictures was about to cross over into their nascent horror efforts..? Well, kind of, but we’ll get onto that later.

For now though - apparently the cops who have called Dr. Xavier out in the dead of night to examine the body are equally as suspicious of his diagnosis as we are. When Atwill says his good nights and turns to leave (“I have a very important experiment in progress, which demands my attention..”), they spring a bit of a surprise on him, blocking the doorway and informing him that they are aware of a few other matters that demand an equal claim to his attentions.

You see, the stiff on the slab is the sixth victim of a fiend the press have dubbed “The Moon Killer” as a result of his penchant for committing his crimes by the light of the full moon. And, the police have determined that all six murders were committed with the aid of a specific kind of European scalpel – an implement so high-end that the only place in the USA known to have imported any is, uh, Doctor Xavier’s medical academy - an institution which furthermore happens to be a mere stone’s throw from the locale in which all of the bodies have been discovered.

“Well… shit,” the doctor may have thrown in for a cheap laugh at this point had ‘Doctor X’ been made half a century later, but as it is, Atwill maintains his cool, and Dr. X instead denies all knowledge of the crimes, demonstrating his desire to cooperate by inviting the two detectives back for a late night tour of his laboratory complex.

What follows is a delightful sequence that is probably my favourite part of ‘Doctor X’, as the detectives are introduced one by one to Dr Xavier’s “research associates”, each of whom has them exchanging glances that say “ok, we’ve found our man”, only for them to then be ushered into the next room to meet somebody EVEN MORE eminently suspicious.

It’s as if, in the wake of ‘Frankenstein’, Warner Bros were telling their audience, “So you like mad scientists, huh? Well boy have we ever got some mad scientists for you!” Frankly, I’m surprised The National Academy of Sciences didn’t attempt to sue the studio for bringing their members into disrepute.

Professor Wells (Preston Foster, looking somewhat like Dean Stockwell in The Dunwich Horror) is “a student of cannibalism” (ya don’t say), who can barely hold back his cackles as he ogles the jar of crimson fluid in which he keeps a human heart he claims he has kept alive for three years using electrolysis. (He also has a pair of mud-caked boots drying on the radiator in his lab, and claims he was out on the waterfront “for a breath of fresh air” at around the time the latest murder was committed – but, wait, he’s also missing a hand, which would seem to rule him out, given the murderer’s penchant for strangulation – OR WOULD IT?)

Professor Haynes (John Wray) meanwhile was shipwrecked off Tahiti several years past, and when he and a companion were rescued after an arduous time adrift, the third occupant of their lifeboat had mysteriously vanished, if you get my drift. When he is first introduced in silhouette, his tufty beard and unruly forelock make him look like a pantomime devil. In the medical world, his speciality is “brain grafting”, apparently. He gets jittery in the presence of the police and also keeps saucy French magazines hidden around his lab.



Next up, Dr Rowitz (played by the wonderful Arthur Edmund Carewe) was Professor Haynes’ companion in that lifeboat, believe it or not. A cadaverous fellow with a smoked glass monocle covering his empty left eye socket, he speaks with an Germanic accent faintly reminiscent of Peter Sellers’ Dr Strangelove and takes “..an interest in the light qualities of the moon”. “If you suffer sunstroke, might you not suffer some similar EVIL from the rays of the moon?” he asks pointedly, before throwing in a flippant comment about a murdered ‘scrub woman’ (that being the agreed upon description of the killer’s most recent victim). Strangely, given that his private research seems to primarily consist of observing the heavens, Dr Rowitz also has some grisly looking gore splattered all over his lab coat. Dr Rowitz is a sensitive soul, and the author of several volumes of poetry, Dr Xavier points out when leaping to his colleague’s defence.

Professor Duke (Harry Beresford) is a cankerous old bugger in a wheelchair, who, it must be said, is somewhat less suspicious than his fellows (not that that’s saying much), but he makes up the numbers, as indeed does Dr Xavier’s genre mandated leering, cadaverous man-servant Otto (George Rosener).

Now, clearly if Detective O'Halloran and Police Commissioner Stevens (thanks, IMDB) really were the hard-boiled Warner Bros cops they appear to be, they’d slap the cuffs on this whole crew of nuts and sort out what’s what once they were safely behind bars down at the station. But, as you may have gathered by this point, gritty realism is not really the priority of Robert Tasker & Earl Baldwin’s screenplay, despite their studio’s trademark aesthetic. (2)

Instead then, the cops prove surprisingly receptive to Dr Xavier’s pleadings against negative publicity, and to his claim that he can use state-of-the-art scientific methodology to identify the killer in his midst. As such, they promise to leave him and his associates unmolested for forty eight hours. Which is nice of them.

Whilst all this has been going on meanwhile, we have – to the chagrin of every horror fan who has ever written about this film since being a “horror fan” first became a thing – spent an equal amount of time in the company of wise-cracking newspaper reporter Lee Taylor (Lee Tracy). He has one of those joke hand buzzer thingys, an exploding cigar in his pocket, and a habit of saying “wayda minute, WAYDA MINUTE” whilst waving his arms around. Oh boy.

In truth, Tracy isn’t all that bad as far as comic relief goes. Basically doing a Bush League Bob Hope impersonation, he’s likeable enough and good for a few chuckles. The problem is rather that he is on the screen all the damn time, filling up a fairly hefty chunk of ‘Doctor X’s seventy five minute run time with his antics, when we would far rather be learning more about the film’s world-beating retinue of mad scientists (none of whose quirks are ever really explored in much detail, unfortunately), or indeed checking in on the depredations of The Moon Killer. (3)

This whole ‘comic reporter’ angle was reportedly absent from the film’s source play, and is said to have been largely mandated by Warners' Head of Production Darryl F Zanuck, whose fears of potential censorship led him to try to steer the picture away from all-out horror and more toward the ‘comedy chiller’ template established by the countless ‘mystery play’ adaptations that followed in the wake of 1927’s ‘The Cat & The Canary’.

Bolstered by the fact that Warners had recently been enjoying big success with a handful of other "wise-cracking newspaperman" type movies, Zanuck thus determined to exercise the long-standing prerogative of studio bosses to fuck up perfectly good pictures whenever they feel like it, and ‘Doctor X’s potential future status as a stone-cold classic of taboo-busting weirdo horror cinema duly found itself badly compromised.

In addition to comedy, Zanuck also prescribed a heavy dose of romance to try to widen the film’s appeal, and as such, Tracy’s presence becomes particularly irksome during the scenes he shares with the film’s obligatory leading lady, Fay Wray (no relation to John, as far as I know).

Appearing here as Dr. Xavier’s daughter, about a year before she was achieved immortality via ‘King Kong’, Wray herself is great in ‘Doctor X’. She has a brassy, no-bullshit attitude, she looks amazing, and her very presence adds a great deal to the film. Unfortunately however, she is given absolutely nothing to work with in a role that basically amounts to little more than a token pretty girl parachuted into a cast that otherwise consists almost entirely of middle-aged male weirdoes.

Despite Zanuck’s edict that Tracy and Wray’s characters should take centre stage as much as possible, screenwriters Tasker & Baldwin clearly had no idea what to do with them, and thus we find them running through an unedifying “big-mouthed goon charms the lady” rom-com routine that must have seemed hackneyed even in 1932. This basically involves Tracy winning Wray’s heart by the tried-and-tested means of bothering and harassing her until she eventually succumbs to his unctuous advances, and as a result is liable to strike modern viewers as more ghoulish and unconvincing than anything in the film’s horror storyline.

Had those horror elements been rendered in less convincing fashion, Zanuck’s meddling might well have torpedoed ‘Doctor X’ entirely, but thankfully, there was enough talent both in front of and behind the camera to ensure the film’s “good bits” remain so remarkable that we can excuse any amount of clowning around in the interim.

For a start, the resources allotted to ‘Doctor X’ seem to have been surprisingly elaborate for a ‘horror subject’, and the filmmakers make excellent use of them. Sets were created (or redressed from earlier productions) by splendidly named production designer Anton Grot (a much celebrated figure whose impressive resumé can be perused here), and without exception they look absolutely wonderful, from the shabby, dockside street scene that opens the film to the shadow-haunted, bubbling test-tube filled interiors of Dr X’s academy. (Even the academy’s vast hall of records – used solely for a fairly mundane dialogue scene in which Wray is introduced as Atwill’s daughter – is a knock-out.)

Grot and his collaborators further up their game when the action switches to Dr Xavier’s cliff top gothic mansion (of course he has a cliff top gothic mansion), supposedly located in Long Island. Introduced via a wonderfully foreboding painted establishing shot that pre-empts the ones used decades later in AIP and Hammer gothic horrors, this decidedly unreal location highlights the uniquely uneasy relationship between hard-boiled realism and utter fantasy that runs throughout ‘Doctor X’… with the latter very much predominating at the mansion, as you might well imagine.

At one point, we even see Tracy’s character arriving at the house in a horse-drawn carriage, complete with a coachman in a top hat and inverness cape. Perhaps intended as a nudge-wink reference to the opening of Browning’s ‘Dracula’, this shot looks as if it could have been pulled directly from an early ‘60s period gothic, and seems a bizarre addition to a film supposedly set in 1930s New York, joining the howling winds on the soundtrack and the house’s faux-medieval exteriors in signalling that, as modern parlance would have it, we’re now off on some other shit entirely.

Suffice to say, Dr. X has called everyone to the mansion so as to isolate his ‘suspects’ whilst he uses allegedly fool-proof scientific methods to try to establish which of them is the unhinged cannibal killer. In short, this goes about as well as you’d imagine it might in a dark, old house full of suspicious characters, hidden stairwells, closets inexplicably filled with skeletons and prominently displayed fuse boxes operated by big levers.

Before all the fun gets underway however, we at least have enough time to appreciate the magnificence of the mansion’s central laboratory set, which comprises a cornucopia of vertiginous art deco glass tubing fronds, fog-spewing beakers and bell-jars, spinning hypno-wheels, giant, gleaming steel valves, massive halcyon lighting rigs and assorted Frankensteinian electronic equipment of unimaginable purpose.

Enhanced by the extraordinary morass of techno-babble that Lionel Atwill gamely intones as he straps his assembled suspects into barbers chairs to test their physiological reactions to re-enactments of The Moon Killer’s crimes (“..the rotor of the electro-static machine is connected in multiple series with a bank of glass plate condensers and the discharge causes irradiations to the thermal tubes which in turn indicate your increased pulse rate and nerve reactions..”), Grot’s ingenious creations ensure that, for connoisseurs of vintage mad scientist gear, ‘Doctor X’ is up there with ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ as the gold standard for this sort of thing. It’s amazing.

Mirroring Grot’s achievements meanwhile, Curtiz’s direction proves that, despite his reputation as an unpredictable tyrant on set, he was already an accomplished visual stylist a full decade before his breakthrough with ‘Casablanca’, employing disorientating dutch angles and vertiginous overhead shots wherever possible, and cluttering his foreground with jagged assemblies of weird-looking props.

As you will no doubt have noted from the screen shots posted above, ‘Doctor X’ also enjoys the distinction of being shot using two-strip Technicolor, securing its place in genre history as the first – and for several decades, practically the only – colour horror film. (4)

Though the idea of a colour film from the 1930s may seem novel to us today, the primitive two-strip process employed here had actually been used extensively in Hollywood during 1929-30, with Warner Bros leading the charge. In fact, with a return to black & white mandated both by the legendary intransigence and dictatorial tendencies of Technicolor and an increasing public perception that two-strip colour was little more than an unconvincing gimmick, ‘Doctor X’ was actually one of the *last* entries in this early colour boom, and was reportedly only filmed in colour to help fulfil Warners’ remaining contractual obligations to Technicolor. (5)

Nonetheless though, the limitations of the two strip process (which as I understand it involved layering up two of the three primary colours whilst leaving the third entirely absent) suits the fantastical nature of ‘Doctor X’ extremely well, and Technicolor cameraman Ray Rennahan does an extremely good job of imbuing the film with a uniquely weird look, with whites and blues entirely excised in favour of a murky, almost sepia-tinted palette of brown, beige and cream tones, fuzzy pools of bottomless inky black and sickly blasts of bright green, red and pink used to liven up the mad science scenes.

Though this look was likely more the result of circumstance and technical limitations than anything else, it again seems to pre-empt the expressionistic colour schemes that would eventually be incorporated into the horror genre once directors like Bava, Freda and Corman first got their hands on a bunch of gel filters in the ‘60s.

Yet another thing that helps make ‘Doctor X’ so noteworthy is The Moon killer himself. Though we don't see much of him for most of the film, he already looks pretty striking in his brief appearances, with a melty-looking rubber face-mask, grasping, monster hands and what looks to be some kind of ritualistic robe.

This is small beer though in comparison to the movie’s final ace-in-the-hole for horror fans – an incredible sequence in which we are allowed to witness the villain’s complete transformation into his ‘Moon Killer’ alter-ego, plastering his face in the synthetic flesh (or seeeenthetic flerrsh as he prefers to pronounce it in none-more-creepy fashion) that has apparently been his life’s work – living, breathing tissue that he moulds like putty onto his own features in advance of each crime in order to turn himself – for some reason - into a monstrous, flesh-eating galoot.

Effectively pre-empting the “body horror” pioneered by directors like David Cronenberg by nearly a full half-century, the innovative use of gooey special effects (rubber masks provided by Max Factor, no less) and Grot’s weird, pseudo-scientific set dressing make this sequence feels startlingly modern – more akin to the kind of FX showcase sequences that took centre stage in so many ‘80/’90s horror movies than anything you’d associate with the ‘30s.

Quite how the killer’s ‘synthetic flesh’ angle tallies up with his cannibalism, his full moon fixation, his Jack The Ripper-like surgical excavations and the clearly stated implication that he has raped his victims(!), lord only knows, but as an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink mutated maniac, he is certainly a pretty extraordinary figure to find rampaging through a movie of this vintage.

Enlivened by a pungent whiff of Freudian weirdness, the film’s finale, during which our lingerie-clad heroine, laying on what may as well be a sacrificial slab on a makeshift stage, is menaced by the creature’s hairy hands whilst her father looks on from the ‘audience’, strapped to a chair and unable to help, achieves a truly nightmarish intensity.

As you will have noted if you’ve followed this review up to this point, the logic of just about every aspect of ‘Doctor X’ is just a little bit skewed. In fact, as an early exemplar of the ever-popular “what were they smoking when they came up with this?” approach to horror movie scripting, it’s practically flawless.

I mean, aside from anything else, why is Professor Wells excused from Dr. X’s physiological tests on the basis that his missing hand disqualifies him as a murder suspect, even though Professor Duke – who is confined to a wheelchair – must submit them? And, whilst we’re on the subject, how did the killer apparently manage to incorporate a whole network of secret passages and his own crazy, electricity-draining lab set-up into someone else’s house, to which he’d been invited with less than twenty four hours’ notice? I’d go on, but you get the idea.

Of all the many things that allow us to celebrate ‘Doctor X’ for being ahead of its time, I think that, ironically, these frequent forays into absurdity may actually be the most significant.

Whilst the tradition of sloppy scripting that crept into American horror movies of the ‘40s and ‘50s (and that was inherited by the exploitation and ‘grindhouse’ product of the ‘60s and ‘70s) was primarily rooted in a patronising disdain for the films’ presumed audience (the “why bother getting all the details lined up when yr making pictures for children and imbeciles?” defence), the unhinged plotting of ‘Doctor X’ seems to be coming from somewhere else entirely.

Less the result of mere laziness, it feels more like an errant explosion of crazy ideas piled up with such haphazard enthusiasm that it almost collapses under its own weight – a wonderful, irrational nightmare zone that American audiences and filmmakers have only intermittently been able to access over the years, but that a subsequent generation of European genre directors would soon take to heart in a big way.

Even as the goon-ish comic relief reporter tries in vain to drag ‘Doctor X’ back to a world in which grown-ups were incapable of treating supernatural subjects with anything other than mockery, the film’s demonstration of the fact that a script consisting largely of thrown together, abject nonsense can still be transformed into a feast of visually intoxicating, thematically provocative, jaw-droppingly weird entertainment points the way forward toward all of the maniacal triumphs that the more outré proponents of the horror genre achieved in the latter half of the 20th century.

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(1) Ok, I know that TECHNICALLY, ‘Doctor X’ was a ‘First National Pictures’ production, distributed by Warner Bros, but First National was basically a subsidiary of Warners by this point, having been bought out by the larger studio in 1929, after which they continued to intermittently use First National branding on their pictures before formally dissolving the company in 1936. More info here for anyone who cares.

(2) Credit where it’s due department: ‘Doctor X’ was adapted for the screen from a Broadway play of the same name – authored by Howard W. Comstock & Allen C. Miller - which ran for eighty performances in 1930-31.

(3) Fun Fact: Lee Tracy lost his contract with MGM after the studio had to smuggle him out of Mexico following an incident that saw him urinating on a military parade from a hotel balcony whilst filming ‘Viva Villa!’ in 1934. Given the “you’ll never work in this town again” treatment, he served out most of the rest of his career on stage and TV, much to the delight no doubt of the countless thousands of fans and critics who have given him shit over the years for ruining ‘Doctor X’.

(4) Contrary to Technicolor’s strict demands to the contrary, ‘Doctor X’ was actually shot simultaneously in colour and black & white, with prints from two separate negatives being prepared and distributed simultaneously, leading to no end of confusion. The B&W version, which apparently features many different takes and shot compositions, was the only version of the film in circulation until the chance rediscovery of the colour version – which is generally held to be superior – in the 1980s. Both versions are still widely available however, thus furthering the aforementioned confusion.

(5) The prominence of colour films in the early sound era is often overlooked today as a result of the fact that the cumbersome and fragile nature of the era’s colour prints led to most of the relevant film elements being unceremoniously destroyed in subsequent decades, leaving the films in question either reduced to alternate B&W prints, or lost entirely. In case you were wondering.

October Horrors # 1: Werewolf of London (Stuart Walker, 1935)

During the Second World War, American studio horror films (and Universal’s efforts in particular) managed to boil themselves down into a set of formulaic clichés that have come to broadly define the idea of “cheesy horror films” in the popular imagination ever since.

That much we know, but the shadow cast by eight subsequent decades of monster movie branding makes it easy to forget that, a full decade before Glenn Strange was stomping about in the Frankenstein get-up and some mad scientist was trying to decide which brains to put where whilst the torch-wielding mob knocked on his door, many of the first wave of American horrors from the early/mid 1930s were far more unpredictable and just-plain-weird than this reductive set of clichés would suggest - and not just the designated classics helmed by Whale, Browning, Freund and Ulmer either.

My theory, y’see, goes that, during the pre-war years, studio directors and writers who found themselves assigned to a horror picture were obliged to strike out in all kinds of tentative new directions, faced as they were with a new, commercially popular genre for which no easily replicable template had yet been established. For a few years at least after the runaway success of ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘Dracula’, the thinking seemed to be that a big part of what pulled the punters in to see these movies was the sheer novelty of their subject matter – that oh-so-bankable “nothing-like-this-seen-before-on-the-screen” factor.

Rather than merely seeking to imitate those earlier hits therefore, Universal and the other studios seemed to want their boys to crank out some genuine ‘Shock of the New’… and mad-as-a-barrel-of-bats pictures like ‘Werewolf of London’ were the inevitable result.

As everybody knows, it was Curt Siodmak’s script for 1941’s ‘The Wolf Man’ that basically laid down the law for all future cinematic werewolves, pretty much inventing the werewolf mythology we now take for granted, and, as such, it feels all the more surprising to go back a further six years and discover that Universal’s first – commercially unsuccessful - stab at a werewolf movie completely ignored the monster’s origins in European folklore, instead pulling together elements of “exotic” orientalist adventure fiction, newly minted Frankensteinian mad science, slight echoes of ‘abominable snowman’ mythos and a hefty dose of Jekyll & Hyde to tell a very different tale of lycanthropy.

Written from scratch by John Colton and producer Robert Harris (was this the first Universal horror that didn’t even pretend to follow any literary antecedent?), we’re essentially talking here about a werewolf story that involves excursions to remote Himalayan valleys, rare night-blooming flowers, sinister underground networks of lycanthropy sufferers, electronically-generated artificial moonlight, hints of faux-Buddhist mysticism, octopus-tentacled man-eating plants, Jack The Ripper-style Victorian London skulduggery, and… well, you get the idea.

It’s all great stuff, and, watching for the first time, I went through most of the film with absolutely no idea where it was all going next -- which is a lovely feeling when it comes to a genre movie made over eighty years ago.

On a more prosaic level meanwhile, another thing ‘Werewolf of London’ has going for it in the weirdness stakes is the casting in the lead role of Henry Hull – a prolific character actor who here delivers a very convincing impression of a granite-jawed, hammer-headed lummox entirely devoid of human feeling.

Seriously, Hull’s character – a pioneering botanist and plant-hunting adventurer - is so rude to everyone he encounters during the film, it’s a miracle he has any friends or supporters at all, let alone a beautiful wife (Valerie Hobson from ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ and ‘Kind Hearts & Coronets’) to ignore and belittle, a whole garden party full of wealthy associates to offend, and a luxuriously appointed mansion house/botanical gardens/laboratory set-up in which to receive them.

Though Hull never becomes an out-right villainous character (in the vein of Peter Cushing’s Frankenstein, or the roles Michael Gough played for Herman Cohen in the ‘60s), he nonetheless comes across as a conceited, self-centred asshole, and much of ‘Werewolf of London’s failure to engage with audiences over the years has retrospectively been blamed on the film’s decision to present them with such an entirely unsympathetic protagonist.

Personally however, I’ve never much cared for this “central character must be sympathetic” jive that critics sometimes fall into, and I very much enjoyed the way that Hull’s perpetually enraged presence makes every conversation in the film feel spectacularly awkward. This allows ‘Werewolf of London’s idle chatter-filled dialogue scenes to side-step the usual blandness and expositional drag, instead filling the movie with pregnant non-sequiturs, uncomfortable silences and “well… I suppose I’d better be going then…” type moments, all of which I found most amusing.

(To be honest, Hull seems like such a goddamned weirdo, it’s easy to believe that few of these emphases were actually present in the script – it’s as if the other actors just had no idea how to react to him.)

Speaking of weirdoes meanwhile, the somewhat more likeable Warner Oland is also on hand as the inscrutable Dr Yogami, essentially offering a slight variation on the Charlie Chan character he played in dozens of sixty minute programmers through the 1930s. Though supposedly a more villainous figure than Hull’s character in terms of the storyline – not to mention racially offensive on more levels than can be calculated without the help of a spreadsheet – Oland’s faux-Asian quack doctor is a veritable teddy bear compared to our leading man, which leads once again to some very strange cognitive dissonance in terms of the way business is conducted on-screen.

Though ‘Werewolf of London’ is nothing special in terms of artistry or atmosphere, Stuart Walker’s direction is breezy and fast-moving, most of the film’s performances are lively and Hull’s transformation into an inadvertently rockabilly-styled wolfman is a hoot (sacrilege though it may be to say so, I think I actually prefer the make-up job here to Jack Pierce’s work on the ’41 Wolf Man). It’s all just such a wonderfully imaginative load of cracked, b-movie fun, it is impossible not to enjoy it on some level – so if you’ve previously overlooked it, I’d definitely recommend giving it a shot at the nearest opportunity.

For a perfect case study in what went wrong with horror movies between the mid ‘30s and mid ‘40s meanwhile, just try contrasting ‘Werewolf of London’ with its quasi-sequel, ‘She Wolf of London’ from 1946 - a sixty minute programmer so utterly lacking in interest that I can honestly believe it was concocted as part of some studio in-joke to try to drive audiences home to bed before the main feature came on.

I was going to do a separate review of ‘She Wolf..’, but… there really is nothing to say. I might just as well review the carpet in my living room. If, like me, you’ve got both of these movies on a double feature disc, please do yourself a favour and just skip the second one entirely. Hell, watch ‘Werewolf of London’ again instead – you’ll be happier that way, trust me.