Noir Diary # 13 / Thoughts on… Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945)

I.

Ever since I decided to start writing up my viewings of ‘40s/’50s Film Noir a couple of years ago, I’ve found myself bedevilled by the question of where, precisely, the boundaries of ‘noir’ lie. It’s an issue I’ve wrestled with to some extent in pretty much every one of these Noir Diary posts to date, and, with every critic, fan, reference book and blu-ray label on earth drawing their preferred demarcation line somewhere entirely different from all the others, it is not a debate which seems liable to be happily resolved any time soon.

In trying to find a workable way to define ‘noir’ therefore, my current thinking is that, though we may treat it as such for the sake of convenience, noir is not a genre, in the conventional sense of the term. In some ways, this is a pretty obvious point to make - after all, no one in the USA prior to about 1975 ever sat down and said “I’m gonna make a film noir” - but I think it bears repeating.

Instead, I believe noir can probably be best understood as an ineffable essence - a kind of aesthetic virus, if you will - which infects a wide swathe of cinema and literature to a greater or lesser degree. As irreducibly ‘noir’ as the canonical classics of the form may seem, it’s worth remembering that they all simultaneously belong to other genres as well. To the people who wrote and directed them, the 40s/50s films we now categorise as noir were gangster movies, police procedurals, psychological thrillers, murder mysteries, or, in this case, even a quote-unquote ‘women’s picture’.

The germ of what we now call ‘noir’ is something which crept into them from outside, changing and perverting the material it infected; eating away moral clarity, tilting camera set ups and dimming the lights like some celluloid Dutch elm disease. And, like everyone’s favourite virus here in the second decade of the 21st century, the effects of this bug were varied and unpredictable in the extreme.

Some films emerged so slathered in the thematics and visuals of noir than their root genre almost shrivels up and dies; for others, noir simply hangs in the background, barely perceptible, like some eerie seed of doubt. Then, there are movies in which the noir is spread unevenly - confined to certain scenes or sub-plots, or hitting full strength in some reels whilst completely disappearing from others. In spite of its storied position in the noir canon, ‘Mildred Pierce’ fits perfectly into this latter category.

II. 

Considered as a standalone short film, opening fifteen minutes of ‘Mildred Pierce’ are as vivid and intoxicating an invocation of the 1940s So-Cal noir aesthetic as has ever been conjured before the cameras.

Straight out of the opening credits, the sound of six gunshots is foleyed over an exterior shot of a luxurious yet lonely Malibu beach house with a shiny black sedan parked outside. Cut to the interior, where a man in formal dress spins to face the camera, clutching his chest. He just has time to gasp the name of the movie’s titular heroine(?) before he hits the floor, as inert as the remains of the chic standing lamp he pulled down with him.

Cut to a breath-taking crane-shot of (a studio recreation of) a rain-sodden Santa Monica seafront, water gleaming on the wooden boardwalk in the light of neon hoardings for bars and seafood restaurants as the unmistakable figure of Joan Crawford - looking like a Cossack officer in her wide-shouldered fur coat and hat - strides away from us toward the pier. 

As she stares at the black waves below, her contemplation is broken by the sound of a beat cop’s baton tapping on the iron railings. The first words spoken in the film if we discount the murder victim’s final utterance, the cop’s ensuing lines (“if you take a swim, I’ve gotta take a swim. Is that fair? Because you feel like killing yourself, I gotta get pneumonia?”) give us a brilliant example of the approach to dialogue which will remain consistent throughout the film. Most readily attributable to sole credited screenwriter Ranald MacDougall, these lines are simple and to the point, lacking the literary self-consciousness of many post-war noirs, but are nonetheless attention-grabbing, memorable and devoid of cliché. (1)

(It is only on repeat viewings that we might note that, a few years prior to this in the film’s chronology, Mildred’s beloved younger daughter did indeed die from pneumonia after “taking a swim”, instigating a fatal shift in her mother’s psychological make-up.)

Anyway, the cop’s well-chosen words seem to do the trick, turning Mildred (for of course it is she) away from her watery grave and pointing her in the direction of a loud, claustrophobic seafront bar, where she immediately falls in with the lecherous, fast-talking Wally Fay (Jack Carson), an old friend who seemingly owns the joint. Clearly an inveterate hustler, Wally is suspicious when Mildred - who, we are given to understand, has routinely rejected his crude advances since time immemorial - invites him back to her pad for a quiet drink.

Mildred is clearly in an unsettled state of mind, but, like every noir fall guy, Wally prides himself on keeping his eye on the prize, never looking a gift horse in the mouth, etc etc. So, before we know it, he’s propping up the sleek, chromium bar back at that accursed beach house, boastfully bantering to himself, as Mildred slips out, ostensibly to change, and locks the door behind her.

By the time he finds the corpse, it’s too late. Careening around the increasingly labyrinthine beach house, Wally ascends winding, disorientating flights of stairs, dense lattices of shadow thrown by the house’s baroque / art deco accoutrements hemming him in from all sides, as he too cries Mildred’s name.

Photography by Ernest Haller, whose CV includes ‘Gone With The Wind’, ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ and 183 other top-flight flicks, and art direction from Curtiz’s regular collaborator Anton Grot (also see: Doctor X), are, of course, fiendishly superb here, briefly bringing a touch of Orwellian nightmare sci-fi to proceedings.

Eventually making his exit by crashing through the French windows, Wally briefly staggers across the sand - inevitably reminding us of the unforgettable finale to Robert Aldrich’s ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ a decade later - before he is frozen in the beam of a searchlight, trained on him from the road above by the cops Mildred presumably called.

Soon regaining his wise-cracking composure once he’s back amongst other men, he tells them, “you know, this is a pretty big night for you guys; yeah, lots of excitement - there’s a stiff in there”. “Izzat so? And I suppose you were running right down to the station to report it?” retorts the younger cop, who’s clearly got Wally’s number.

Amazing. Just amazing. Really, if you’re in search of the condensed essence of ‘noir’, it doesn’t get much better than that my friends.

The subsequent scenes, in which Mildred is picked up from the opulent mansion she apparently shares with her adult daughter and informed that her husband(!) has been murdered, are equally great. The limbo-like inertia of the police squad-room - where thick-necked cops sit around, smoking, eating sandwiches or desultorily typing up their nightly reports as Mildred is forced to sit amongst them in her Cossack finery, awaiting the attention of the investigating officer, is brilliantly conveyed. (“Would you like a paper, lady?” some toad-like brute asks her, as if the wife of a murder victim might want to catch up on the sports pages or something.)

As she is eventually ushered into the strangely inviting environs of the interrogation room (incongruously low-lit, as if by firelight) and disconcerted by the smooth, logical and ingratiating tone taken by the detective within (“even his more courteous, somewhat friendlier types gave one pause for concern,” begins the IMDB bio of actor Moroni Elson), we know we’re sliding headlong toward extended flashback territory, as Mildred is coerced into recounting her sorry tale.

Even as we cross that one off our “Film Noir signifiers” bingo card however, first-time viewers expecting to file this one alongside Double Indemnity and ‘The Big Sleep’ are liable to be taken aback by the extent to which the film takes a stylistic handbrake turn as soon as the fairy-dust of noir glamour disappears in the flash of a back-in-time dissolve, leaving us adrift in the flat, sit-com greyscale of the (then novel) surroundings of pre-fab suburbia, where a somewhat fresher-faced Mildred Pierce exchanges her furs for apron and oven gloves, thoroughly immersed in the drudgery of domestic routine.

III. 

When I first watched ‘Mildred Pierce’, around twenty years ago(!) at this point, I didn’t get it. I was in the process of discovering Film Noir for the first time via a Film Studies module I was taking in college, and as such, my expectations of the “genre” chiefly revolved around gun-toting gangsters, scummy tenement apartments, crumpled fedoras and weary P.I.s striking matches on their unshaven jaws.

By failing to deliver on these hallowed signifiers of the hard-boiled idiom, ‘Mildred..’ fell flat for my younger, dumber self. I mean, not only does it feature only a single murder, which we see in the opening minute, but it then has the audacity to follow the day-to-day travails of somebody’s freakin’ mother - and like, who’s got time for that, right?!

Returning to the film as a respectable, wage-earning adult however, greater life experience and (I would like to think) more mature tastes have allowed me to engage far more deeply with the tale being told during the - entirely noir-free - central hour of their movie’s run-time.

Admittedly, I’ve not been through a painful divorce, raised a hateful harridan of a daughter or gone into the restaurant business during the interim, but what can I say? I suppose I can now at least relate to such quintessentially ‘grown-up’ concerns, meaning that, when Mildred’s extended confession begins, I no longer tune out.

At 114 minutes, ‘Mildred Pierce’ is a long film for its era, and it packs a hell of a lot into that run-time. Full of ostensibly repetitious character encounters, melodramatic contrivances and mountains of detail concerning the titular heroine’s property deals, legal transactions and business plans, this material could, in clumsier hands, have become a colossal bore. Indeed, one suspects that it is only the prestige Curtiz was still enjoying a few years downstream from the success of ‘Casablanca’ that prevented Warner Bros from scything through the screenplay in no uncertain terms.

But, thank god, they didn’t. And at the risk of stating the obvious here, ‘Mildred Pierce’s final cut is a fast-moving, thoroughly engrossing, friction-free joy to sit through - an example of ‘40s Hollywood artistry raised to its absolute zenith.

Always a gifted director, Curtiz brings both a steady hand and an unparalleled mastery of visual storytelling to proceedings, whilst MacDougall’s writing is, as mentioned, exceptional. Haller, Grot, editor David Weisbart and composer Max Steiner are also all at the top of their game, and in front of the camera, Crawford is - of course - magnificent, whilst the rest of cast is packed out with carefully chosen, lesser-known players who inhabit their roles just perfectly.

Basically - this crew could have made a film about the history of Battenberg cake and it would have been worth watching, so seeing them take on an inspired adaptation of a second tier James M. Cain novel is just dandy, thank you very much.

IV. 

The nebulous concept of the ‘women’s picture’ represents a distinct category within studio era Hollywood filmmaking - one which, predictably enough, been largely overlooked by the male-dominated critical / Film Studies establishment.

Being just as in thrall to the whims of said establishment as anyone else, I’m not really sufficiently familiar with the form to judge how indicative ‘Mildred Pierce’ is of its overall conventions, but certainly one suspects that many (now largely forgotten) movies aimed at female audiences must surely have followed the same basic trajectory seen in the film’s central hour; a steadfast, hard working wife/mother overcomes the obstacles life throws at her, negotiates her relationships with men, fights her corner in assorted melodramatic conflicts and misunderstandings, and so forth.

The big difference of course is that, in the regular run of things, one supposes that these stories would most likely have ended with their heroine finding true (legally sanctioned) love, securing a bright future for herself and her children, etc etc…. which is where the shadow of our old friend ‘noir’ begins to creep in once again.

One of the masterstrokes of ‘Mildred Pierce’ is the complex characterisation of the three men who play a role in its heroine’s life. Though all of them are eventually found severely wanting on the scales of the film’s moral schema, they are all somewhat fascinating characters in their own right, and, crucially, none of them are portrayed as entirely irredeemable. This adds a note of moral ambiguity to proceedings which takes us beyond the realm of boilerplate melodrama, even as Mildred is weeping into her oven gloves in her suburban kitchen as first husband Bert (Bruce Bennett) walks out on her.

Openly conducting an affair with the oft-mentioned “Mrs Beiderhoff”, Bert Pierce is initially depicted as a cruel and gloomy sad-sack who refuses to acknowledge his own culpability for the failure of the couple’s marriage. But as the film goes on, and the machinations of the plotting become more complex, he emerges as something of a paragon of plain-spoken honesty, offering Mildred his heartfelt apologies and best wishes when she proves him wrong by achieving success on her own terms, and attempting - in a characteristically vague sort of way - to protect her from the sharks who are circling.

Significantly, Bert is also the only character in the movie who is not entirely fixated on making money. Unemployed when the flashback segment of the movie begins, he remains glum, dishevelled and content with with relatively lowly position in the economic hierarchy. Even after a brief bit of exposition informs us that he has eventually found work in (where else) the aerospace industry, he remains uninterested, it seems, in signing up to the crazed pursuit of the dollar which motivates the rest of the cast.

Framed more-or-less as Bert’s polar opposite meanwhile, the aforementioned Wally Fay is a ruthless opportunist, a loud-mouthed braggart and a shameless lecher who, as he repeatedly demonstrates, is willing to throw his business partners under a bus at a moment’s notice in pursuit of his own interests. But, despite all this, his fondness for Mildred seems genuine, he works hard to help make her business a success, and despite his boorish conduct, he never forces himself upon the female characters in the movie after they’ve rejected his overtly cartoonish advances.

Armoured against ethical doubts by the same spiel employed by carpet-baggers and capitalist ultras to this day (hey, it’s just good business, nothin’ personal, etc), against all the odds, we kind of end up liking the guy. There are even moments here when, fleetingly, Mildred and Wally seem to be operating as a pretty tight team - a kind of proto-power couple almost - until his roving eye for some amoral side deals inevitably gets the better of him.

Which just leaves the most fascinating gentleman of all, Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott). Gifted with a name worthy of an Iberian dragon-slayer, this fellow has sometimes been likened by critics to a gender-reversed femme fatale (homme fatale?), but personally I’m not sure that glove really fits.

In stark contrast to the raw sexual magnetism generally assigned to yr average ‘femme fatale’ in fact, the root of Monte’s seductive charms remains rather elusive. With his receding hairline, cleft chin and skinny build, Scott leaves us with the impression that Joan Crawford could probably break him over her knee and send his remains wafting away on the ocean breeze, leaving him a far weaker, more compromised, figure than the ‘black widows’ who routinely preyed upon the protagonists of male-orientated noir.

Given that Beragon is also stony broke - and everyone in the movie seems to know it - it is presumably only his intangible aura of old world, aristocratic glamour which keeps a steady stream of debutantes and wealthy widows heading back to his heavily-mortgaged beach house. (Though the script is reluctant to address Beragon’s promiscuity directly, references to his notoriety in the ‘society pages’ and a running gag about the multiple bathing costumes he keeps on hand for his many ‘sisters’ make the point clearly enough.)

And, in good time, we get a first-hand taste of his talents too, as, thanks to Curtiz’s proven talent for handling romantic material, the scene in which Monte eventually gets Mildred alone in his ‘lair’ zings with more of a sense of inter-personal chemistry and genuine human warmth than the rest of the movie put together… even as bad news and piled up IOUs combine to douse their passion more or less immediately.

Between them, these three fatally-flawed suitors then add up to far more than mere shooting gallery ducks for Crawford’s world-beating super-woman to knock down, allowing the film to chart a surprisingly complex (if resolutely cynical) cross-section of the relationships between the sexes in the competitive, hot-house environment of post-war America. (2)

As Mildred’s loyal right-hand-woman Ida (brilliantly played by a scene-stealing Eve Arden) remarks at one point as the pair raise a lunch-time glass of bourbon, effectively cutting the crap and compressing a fair share of the complex machinations of the film’s plotting into a single sentence: “to the men we’ve loved… the stinkers”.

V. 

Though the relentless fixation on acquiring wealth which triggers the bulk of the conflict within the script could lead some to label ‘Mildred Pierce’ an ‘anti-capitalist’ film, several factors - not least the movie’s refusal to elevate Bert Pierce to a higher plain for his prioritising of emotional honesty over material gain - suggest that a slightly different moral dynamic is actually at work here.

If anything, the film functions primarily as a kind of unabashed celebration of the Protestant Work Ethic, promoting hard graft as the engine through which the put-upon proletariat can improve themselves and take revenge upon their social ‘betters’; a theme which I assume must go all the way back to Cain’s source novel, as such messages were often close to the writer’s heart, in spite of the nihilistic air which defines his best-known material.

Thus Mildred becomes an almost Christ-like figure for those who strive to better themselves and their families through hard work - an avatar perhaps for the overlooked female labour force brought to the fore during WWII - whilst the scenes demonstrating the success of her restaurant chain convey the sheer exhilaration of post-war American prosperity better than anything else in the era’s movies; a seething world of polished chromium, gleaming glass, imitation leather and bubbling grease, every inch of space filled by voluminous, big-spending customers whose gigantic automobiles idle outside, ready to send them roaring off to the next fashionable destination, amid the not-yet-polluted air of the Pacific Coast Highway.

Meanwhile, true evil within the film’s moral schema is reserved for those refined, Luciferian layabouts - as represented by the tag team of Monte Beragon and Mildred’s spoiled elder daughter Veda (Ann Blyth) - who scrounge their living off the hard work of others whilst mocking the honest toil which underpins their wasteful, dissolute lifestyles.

Stretching right back across the Atlantic and down through the annals of antiquity, this particular class-based dynamic can be traced through the whole deathless lineage of Europe’s debauched aristocracy, from the fall of Rome to the French and Russian revolutions, to the gout-addled, rotten borough squires of British popular fiction (an archetype splendidly lampooned by Charles Laughton in ‘Jamaica Inn’ (1939)), and, more pertinently, the related lineage of ‘Jane Eyre’-derived gothic heartthrobs who were busy menacing and abusing their pure, proletarian maidens in vast swathes of the celluloid which followed in the wake of that rather more celebrated Hitchcock/Du Maurier joint, 1940’s ‘Rebecca’. (3)

It is in in imitation of this legion of sub-Byronic cads - along with a touch perhaps of the aristocratic affectations of the silent era Hollywood elite - that Monte Beragon was presumably moulded, and in this sense, ‘Mildred Pierce’ becomes less of an anti-capitalist parable and more of an all-American class war diatribe, in which evil and corruption ultimately derive, not from capital itself, but from snobbery and laziness, from refined manners, bohemian self-indulgence and any remaining hint of old world entitlement.

A very different prospect from the kind of native-born, inherently American, corruption routinely unpacked in the literary noir of Chandler and Hammett… but, having said that, the rot lurking at the heart of the American dream can certainly be seen elsewhere in the film - if not in the figure of the foreign-coded Monte, then certainly in that of his protégé, and the movie’s ultimate villain, Veda.

VI. 

If I suggested above that man trouble accounts for a fair share of Mildred’s woes, it is the remainder which ends up being both far more significant and far more uncomfortable, ultimately swinging the picture firmly in the direction of Film Noir - and for better or for worse, it’s a very female pile o’ trouble indeed.

In general, I try not to make a habit of hurling misogynist insults at the screen whilst watching films, but if you can get through the first half of ‘Mildred Pierce’ without yelling “you BITCH” in the general direction of Ann Blyth’s Veda, well, your olde world manners must be more refined than my own, let’s put it that way.

Arguably the most memorable character in a film packed full of memorable characters, Veda functions as a magnet for audience hatred right from the outset. A full-on, ‘Bad Seed’-level monster whilst playing younger in her earlier scenes, the toxic snobbery and insincerity which seems to have taken possession of her - traits not obviously inherited from either of her parents - seems so inexplicable, it almost pushes the movie in the direction of horror. (Certainly, it’s difficult to imagine that the producers of the aforementioned 1956 film didn’t have Veda in mind to some extent.)

Beyond mere vindictive, bad-kid nastiness though, there is something so perversely vile, so cruelly idiotic, about the idea of a child attacking her own mother for her perceived low class breeding (“..you never talk about your people, or where you came from, do you mother?”), that Crawford’s inchoate reaction to her daughter’s behaviour can’t help but mirror our own.

In a more conventional, more sentimental story, it would be easy to imagine Veda learning the error of her ways as she grows up, redeeming herself as time goes by and becoming less of a conceited, duplicitous cow as a result. But - thankfully - that’s not the film we’re watching here. The essence of ‘noir’ has sunk deep into the bones of ‘Mildred Pierce’.

And so, under the questionable tutelage of Monte Beragon and Wally Fay, the teenage Veda is soon a fully signed up apprentice femme fatale - a Phyllis Dietrichson or Cora Smith on training wheels, complete with a side-gig as a night club bawler (clearly the money mummy spent on all those music lessons didn’t go to waste) and the future of at least one promising young man already crushed beneath her wheels.

There is a sense here that we’re supposed to see Mildred’s parenting - spoiling her daughter with gifts and luxuries whilst failing to put the time aside to actually build a relationship with her - as being somehow responsible for Veda’s beastly conduct, but to be honest, this intended bromide on child-raising is one element of the screenplay which never quite lands, which is perhaps for the best.

Better by far I think to just see Veda as some Satanic anomaly - a force of nature capable of bringing down her indomitable mother the way no mere man ever could. And indeed, it is the warped, rather obsessional nature of this mother / daughter relationship which really steers the movie back toward darkest noir territory during its final act.

As has often been noted, once Veda has flown what’s left of the family coop, Mildred - perhaps still mourning the tragic loss of ‘good’ daughter Kay - dotes on her as if she were a lost lover rather than an errant daughter, going to what we in the audience recognise as absurd, self-destructive extremes to try to win back her tarnished “love”.

Things proceed to become outright queasy, as the sequences depicting the eventual reunion of mother and daughter are shot more like passionate love scenes than parent/child interactions. There is some freaky, co-dependant kind of shit going on between these two we realise, altogether too late, and the result is… pretty weird, to be honest, bringing the sense of intoxicating gothic perversity which has been lurking deep beneath the surface of his story gasping, finally to the surface.

In cultural / symbolic terms, the extent to which Veda dominates the action in ‘Mildred Pierce’s second half causes the film to sometimes plays more like a prequel / precursor to the full-blooded Film Noir tradition than a fully fledged example of it. Through no fault of her own (?), Joan Crawford’s paragon of hard-working American motherhood, pursuing the American dream for all it’s worth, has given birth to a witch the boys back in Salem never dreamed of, ready to scour the underbelly of her mother’s rotten dream, devouring its losers and rejects with a relentless cruelty.

As critics Molly Haskell and Robert Polito joke in the discussion included as an extra on Criterion’s blu-ray and DVD editions of ‘Mildred Pierce’, you just know, when the cops lead Veda away to the cells at the film’s conclusion, that she’ll be running that damn prison in a couple of weeks.

And as soon as she gets out, well… she’s gonna be heading straight for the nearest Robert Mithum or Fred McMurray, and the whole terrible cycle begins a-new; evil slouching toward Malibu to be born.

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(1) Although Ranald MacDougall takes the sole on-screen credit for ‘Mildred Pierce’s script, and I’ve assigned authorship to him in this post just to make everybody’s life a little easier, authorship of the screenplay is, as with most studio era movies, highly contested.

So - deep breath. First off, Warner Bros apparently commissioned no less than eight writers to produce treatments based on Cain’s novel (including an unused draft from William Faulkner), making it unlikely that everything except MacDougall’s effort went straight in the trash. Secondly, quoth IMDB trivia; “writer Catherine Turney [who wrote a number so Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis pictures at around this time] was credited on some release prints, but chose to have her name removed.” Thirdly, producer Jack Wald (who instigated the project) has taken credit for devising the opening sequence and the murder-based flashback structure. And finally, also from an anonymous posting on IMDB: “due to script problems, some of the film was improvised by the actors together with Michael Curtiz”! So in conclusion: who the hell knows who wrote this thing.

(I will at least say though that, if that last claim is to be believed, the cast must really have been improvising at the top of their game, because, as mentioned, the dialogue in ‘Mildred Pierce’ is consistently excellent, and seems (to my mind at least) to suggest the work of a single authorial voice.)

(2) As an aside, it’s interesting to note that, despite it being filmed whilst WWII was still being fought, the script for ‘Mildred Pierce’ does not address the war, or its potential effect on the lives of the characters, in any way whatsoever. Instead, the film seems to take place during the kind of exciting economic ‘boom’ period we’d retrospectively tend to associate with the recovery of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s - a fact apparently not lost on Warner Bros, who seem to have deliberately delayed the film’s release until October 1945, when the war was safely in the rear view mirror.

(3) Seriously, it seems like you couldn’t hurl a brick in ‘40s Hollywood without hitting a few of these ‘Rebecca’-type gothic romance movies. Just off the top of my head, you’ve got ‘Dragonwyck’ (1946), ‘Secret Beyond The Door’ (1947), ‘The Spiral Staircase’ (1946), ‘Jane Eyre’ (1943), ‘My Name is Julia Ross’ (1945), ‘Gone to Earth’ (1951)…. and no doubt many others which I’ve not bothered to watch, as I don’t particularly seek these things out.

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.