DR X (1932)
In the early years of sound film, it wasn’t always a
monochrome world on screen. Warner Brothers had been experimenting with
two-strip technicolour for their releases, including horror films. In 1931 they
produced The Runaround as part of an
abortive attempt to make colour a viable attraction, restricting costly colour
prints to major cities whilst striking monochrome prints for lesser markets. Dr X was
released a year later and although the technique failed to catch on, it allows
us to enjoy an early horror big studio talkie with an added lustre and modern
look.
Dr X was based on the play Terror by Howard W. Comstock and Allen
C. Miller in 1928. Upon mounting it in New York in 1931 they had to change the
name to avoid it being confused with The
Terror by Edgar Wallace. The play thus became Dr X and retained the name when Warner’s decided to film it,
bringing in Hungarian émigré Michael Curtiz as director, who would become famed
for such classics as Casablanca and Yankee Doodle Dandy.
Aside from the brightness accorded by colouring, Dr X benefits from the black humour and the
exuberant fast-talking, wise-cracking of Lee Tracy as Lee Taylor, intrepid reporter
on the trail of New York’s ‘Moon Killer’, who rips out the deltoid muscle from the
base of the brain of each of six victims and subjects them to cannibalism,
murdering them on successive full moons. Tracy supplies the same wise-guy energy
as later movie screwball comedies, offsetting the grislier meat elsewhere on
display courtesy of Lionel Atwill and his Academy of Surgical Research.
British-born Atwill was already a star on Broadway and parlayed
this into notable horror film roles as cultured professionals in the 30s and
40s for Warner’s, Fox and Universal - such as Mystery of the Wax Museum, Mark of the Vampire and Son of Frankenstein.
Atwill’s Dr Xavier finds himself under the spotlight from
local detectives since each slaying occurs close to his academy. Dr X takes the
men on a quick lab tour, introducing them to each of his eccentric and vaguely
sinister colleagues, all of whom are presented with equally suspicious clues
and backgrounds. There is the voyeuristic Haines (John Wray), the secretive and
wheelchair-using Duke, Harry Beresford, and the facially-scarred Rowitz (Arthur
Edmund Carewe). Upon hearing that Professor Wells (Preston Foster) has been to
Africa to study cannibalism, one of the cops practically falls over himself to
clamp Wells into an electric chair before even meeting him: “Why didn’t you tell us this before? It’s as
good as a conviction”. Fortunately, he’s not a presiding judge. His
premature shutting of the case is hampered when they discover Wells has no left
hand, instead making do with a prosthetic glove.
Taylor meets the doctor’s daughter in the captivating form of
Fay Wray, who began a fruitful run in horror cinema here culminating in
becoming an indelible scream with 1993’s legendary King Kong. As Joan Xavier, she uses her charms to persuade the
lovestruck Taylor to hold off his story while her father tries to clear his institute’s
name.
Dr X offers the police a test at his Long Island estate that
may prove the innocence of his team or find the killer. Echoing Prince Hamlet
and John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing,
he plans to subject each team member to images and a re-enactment of the committed
murders while they are strapped to their chairs. Bamboozling the cops and the audience
with some expository flimflam about using *cough*radio waves as well as a
heart-rate monitor, X is sure that any guilty party will incriminate himself by
causing their assigned ‘thermal tube’ to overflow. Dr X recruits his maid and
butler to perform the re-enactment, but pandemonium ensues – Taylor hides in a
closet but is gassed by an unattributed skeletal hand; Wells, whose handicap
allows him to run the experiment free of blame, suffers his own tubal
overheating by suddenly falling through a glass door; meanwhile, after a disorienting
blackout the suspected Rowitz is found dead, a scalpel having been applied to
the base of his brain. He is later cannibalised for good measure.
It turns out that the ruled-out Wells was in fact the killer
all along. His Africa flesh-finding mission was just that, a red alert not a
red herring. (Maybe the hasty cop shouldn’t have been held back by that pesky ‘innocent
till proven guilty’ red tape). He’d been secretly studying a way to create ‘Synthetic fleshhhhh’, famously rumbling
the line as he liberally coats his face and hands with a porridge-like paste that
reconstitutes his skin, covering the dummy hand and disguising his face into Rondo
Hatton-esque heavy features. It’s not explained what, if any, are the supernatural
properties of the human flesh he went all that way to harvest. (If there were
none inherent, why go so far for immaterial material since he’s not above
killing folk on his home turf for it?). No matter, for as he threatens to add
Joan to his digestive tract, Taylor overcomes a cowardly streak to grapple with
the mad doctor, hurling a lamp at him which causes Wells to turn into a human
fireball, smashing through the window to plummet down on to the rocks below.
Taylor is now free to put an ad in his newspaper’s society column concerning
his heroic self and the lovely Joan.
Dr X is fun and deftly mixes comedy with
the horror in a blending of laughs, cannibalism, murder and implied prostitution
which definitely would have struggled to get past the censor board when the draconian
Hays Code soon came into force. There’s also an all-too-brief sassy cameo by
Mae Busch, who varied her marvellous battle-axe turns as fearsome wives or
girlfriends for Laurel and Hardy with other genres: e.g. Rosie O’Grady opposite
Lon Chaney in the 1925 silent version of The
Unholy Three and here a cathouse madam whose telephone Taylor borrows to
call in his story.
Curtiz, Atwill and Wray would be reunited in Technicolor the
following year in Mystery of the Wax
Museum as part of an incredible production output by Curtiz. According to
IMDB he directed 13 films just between 1932-33, a furious pace that at one
point on a Saturday during Dr X had
him shooting for 24 hours solid, lensing eight minutes of the finished film in
that one day. This explains why at times you can hear slightly garbled or
hesitant delivery of lines, particularly by Atwill. Though Curtiz wasn’t in the
same league as the notorious William ‘one-shot’ Beaudine, he could perhaps have
allowed re-takes of the more obvious fluffs to the trained ear…
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