FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN (1943)

Having been forced by diminishing returns to demote their once-lucrative horror icons to B-movie status, beginning with The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), Universal now resorted to squeezing the remaining value from them while they could. An unsubtle hint of their increasing desperation could be found in their next sequel Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943). Here the studio began the fateful combining of franchises that they hoped would translate into an attractive two-for-one offer at the box-office – come and see two of their great monsters battling it out on screen. Ironically it had the opposite effect, draining credibility in the same way that such bargains can devalue any product’s former prestige.

George Waggner, the producer-director behind the newest gallery addition, The Wolf Man, allegedly bought into a half-joking pitch by its esteemed genre writer Curt Siodmak consisting of just the title. The project was fired up from this glib high-concept alone. Rather than helm it himself, Waggner assigned director Roy William Neill, a cut above the usual hack, whose skill at creating artful film noir visuals was serving him well across several of Universal’s Sherlock Holmes series.

To be fair, there is a unique dramatic thread running through this sequel, carried by the return of Lon Chaney’s lupine loser Lawrence Talbot. Whereas Universal’s other marauding creatures hungrily grasp for ongoing life once revived, sometimes turbo-boosted by seething vengeance, his tragedy is a tormented, introspective desire to die quietly away. Although Chaney wasn’t as strong an actor as his namesake father, his most potent quality was a downbeat soulfulness that is perfect for Talbot and gives Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man what substance it has. The dialogue is surprisingly clunky and prosaic for Siodmak’s writing, lacking the wit of his 1933 The Invisible Man or the supernatural resonance of The Wolf Man – but Chaney’s haunted, expressive face compensates.

The story begins in the family vault at Talbot’s homeland of Lanwelly, Wales, the setting for The Wolf Man, which is broken into by two graverobbers looking to filch his corpse of personal valuables years after burial. Upon opening the coffin, they find him perfectly preserved (an ominous sign), and after removing the protective wolfsbane from him, unwittingly also allow the light of the dreaded full moon to invade his rest. As Freddy Jolly (Cyril Deleventi) goes for his ring, Talbot’s risen hand grabs his, causing the vagrant to shriek and his friend to scarper. So much for eternal sleep.

We then move to a bobby on the streets of Cardiff who discovers Talbot’s prostrate body, and has him shipped to Queen’s Hospital where Patric Knowles’ Dr Mannering operates on his fractured skull and is amazed by his fast recovery. Knowles had previously tangled with Chaney in the original film as fiancé to his love interest; here he gets a meatier role gradually drawn into the heart of the plot. His performance has a serene blandness to be sure, yet it contrasts well with Chaney’s aching gloom and the hot-headed vigilantism that will encircle them later.

Added variety of viewpoint is provided nicely by benevolent sceptic Inspector Owen, (Dennis Hoey, who Neill directed as the similar Lestrade in six Sherlock Holmes sequels). A call to Lanwelly makes Talbot’s stated identity suspicious as the station sergeant saw him buried four years ago. Mannering is too sympathetic to agree with Owen that this “poor devil of unsound mind” is an impostor.

Sadly, Larry Talbot does not have the luxury of disbelief. The full moon’s influence pins him to the bed, transforming him under its supernatural glow into the Wolf Man. Dissolve photography layers in Jack Pierce’s celebrated facial prosthetics while Chaney’s eyes dart around in helpless fear. Cut to later that night and an athletic, bestial Talbot bounds through the streets to savage the poor samaritan of a constable who had found his alter ego.

The scenes where Chaney’s character pleads to be held accountable for his uncontrollable monstrosity are largely where Siodmak’s script is at its weakest. The next morning, he vainly tries to convince Mannering and Owen that “There’s a curse upon me. I change into a wolf!” From then on, he reiterates the point with only slight variations across the movie to skirt dangerously close to achieving bad dialogue immortality. There is power though in Talbot’s dawning realisation that no-one normal will believe him, and no-one of normal ability can cure him - “I can’t die” – a turning point that sets him on a death wish quest to find everlasting piece.

Mannering and Owen join forces and head to the Lanwelly vault where they and the local force find the severed-jugular body of Jolly, and hear of the wolf creature that old Sir John Talbot killed. A photo of his son strengthens the evidence that their Mr Talbot may be telling the truth after all. Meanwhile, the intrepid duo learn by ‘phone that their patient wasn’t waiting for vindication, having fled the hospital after biting through his strait-jacket. “With ‘is teeth?” gasps Owen.

Sometimes it takes a little old lady to get the job done. The only person who can help Talbot is elderly gypsy Maleva, (a soothing role reprise by the iconic Maria Ouspenskaya), whose authentic Hungarian gravitas is inevitably beholden to him ever since he was infected by her son Bela (a tiny Bela Lugosi cameo in The Wolf Man). How can she turn down his plaintive “Won’t you show me the way?” They journey by cart-horse, in a sense back in time, to the quaint Ruritanian Vesaria of The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), where Maleva hopes the unearthly experiments of Dr Ludwig Frankenstein can be cruel to be kind. However, as one door opens for Talbot, another one is roughly shown to him by Rex Evans’ towering bully of a tavern owner, Vazec. He damns the scientist’s name: “He harboured a monster in his house – a thing created by black magic” – the very qualifications Talbot needs. Alas, the doctor burned to death in the last sequel. Talbot absorbs the bad news into his doomed perspective: “Now I must go on living. There’s no hope for me to die”. Even Maleva is unable to pacify him from running away to cry wolf a second time in the woods.

The awful result of Talbot’s disappearance soon manifests itself when Vazec bears his dead little girl through the town, collecting hordes of frightened folk in his wake. The most vocal of the followers turns spokesman and is a chance to see the last decent screen part for Dwight Frye. He could still pick up cameos in Universal horror films as his career waned, and as Rudi he at least managed to shake off the wild-eyed, hunchbacked (or both) henchmen that had made his name since the 1931 brace of Dracula and Frankenstein. He would sadly die young shortly after one more of those typecast vile serviles in the aforementioned regrettable Dead Men Walk (1943). Here though, his fierce energy was channelled into a slighty saner, high-voltage vigilantism, prefaced by the immortal line when the villagers realise a monster has torn out the child’s throat: “What animals are there around here that can kill people?” - Cue far-off howl.

The mob now storm off in an unusually early man/wolf hunt that traditionally takes place at the climax. The purpose is to enable Talbot to link up with Frankenstein’s own Monster ‘offspring’, entombed in ice beneath the doctor’s mansion. Unfortunately this leads to the most ill-advised casting possible for the imposing, cadaverous hulk: the well-fed, fragile, sixty year-old Bela Lugosi. It was bad enough that he was a wildly inappropriate choice and ‘too old for this shit’ in terms of the physical indignities of any action or the long hours needed in the make-up chair. Worse still was that he had turned down the original director Robert Florey’s conception of the part when the franchise began in 1931 as being a crude mute unbefitting his dignified self-image and rising star trajectory following Dracula. He then had to watch as Boris Karloff’s poetic interpretation shot the unknown Englishman to a fame that (helped by wiser choices) subsequently eclipsed ‘poor Bela’, as he called his friend, for good. 

Interestingly, if Lugosi had been offered the seemingly snug fit of Baron Wolf von Frankenstein in Son of Frankenstein (1939) instead of Basil Rathbone, we would never have been treated to what I feel remains his most affecting performance. Whereas Lugosi tended towards an imperious auto-pilot many times as his mad scientists, he shows a heart-rending, unexpected vulnerability within Ygor’s crippled soul.

In Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Lugosi is simply an embarrassment, only marginally better than in The Ape Man - released the same day - because at least as this creature he is barely recognisable under prosthetics, and recurring illness afforded him liberal coverage at times by stunt doubles Eddie Parker and Gil Perkins. It is said to be Perkins playing the Monster’s first close-up when excavated - (it certainly isn’t Lugosi). The most glaring liability in the Monster portrayal is his absurd, straight-armed walk, which may not really be Lugosi’s fault. Apparently this splayed-hand, comedic strut was down to a late decision to remove all suggestion of the Monster’s residual blindness after Ghost, and the inconsistent use of stuntmen would also have jeopardised performance continuity. Post—production also excised filmed sequences of him speaking, which explains Lugosi’s occasional wordless mouthing.

On the lighter side, the second half of the movie introduces the radiant Ilona Massey as Dr Ludwig’s daughter Elsa. A soprano operetta star in real-life, she is the third genuine Hungarian in the cast and will become a vital conscience for the heroes. Talbot seeks her out posing as a land buyer to beg her help in finding her father’s work diary. Another positive influence is a warm change of pace for Lionel Atwill playing the Mayor of Vesaria rather than his standard frosty, maniacal medics. He genially zips around, sporting a curved pipe and bushy moustache attempting to douse the civic fires that will soon break out. As a good host, he invites Elsa and Talbot to stay for the Festival of New Wine - with unforeseen consequences. What should be a pleasant distraction instead only reinforces Talbot’s plight when beaming bass-baritone Adia Kuznetzoff belts out the hearty ‘Song of the New Wine’. The acquired taste of operetta is a busman’s holiday to Massey, but the relentless life-affirmation of the lyrics is excruciating for Talbot (and some horror fans) when they are serenaded with: “And may they live eternally / For life is short and death is long”.

This rare touch of artistry in the script taunts and intensifies the Wolfman’s frustrated drive to find assisted suicide. (Watch Chaney’s startled reaction).  “Eternally? I don’t want to live eternally! Why did you say that to me?” he explodes at Kuznetzoff.

From here on, the other strong theme introduced is the conflict between the traditional and the perceived threat of the modern. Mannering arrives, (having tracked Talbot down easily from the trail of carnage across Europe), and is convinced to help his patient by harnessing the technology of Elsa’s father’s diary. Resistance is strongest from the eavesdropping Vasec; not only is he mistrustful of strangers causing havoc in Vesaria again, but he’s a confirmed Luddite in general: “Machines day after day. What does man really need machines for?” The reappearance of the rampaging Monster in the market-place reinforces the old-world fears of the perilous new, and it takes the combined persuasiveness of the Mayor - “Let’s use our brains for once” - and the newcomers to be allowed to re-activate Dr Ludwig’s equipment to drain the energies of both creatures. Suspicious Vazec secretly plots to dynamite the nearby dam and drown the interlopers.

We then relocate to the underground laboratory of Ludwig’s damaged mansion where Ludwig’s playbook convinces Mannering to treat the creatures as walking batteries whose energy polarities can be reversed into extinction. Although he is not a descendant of the Frankenstein blood-line, (making the title cheekily misleading), that old black magic of scientific curiosity corrupts him just the same. Despite Elsa’s better judgement, an internal switch is thrown that sends Mannering’s mind and his subjects’ bodies into berserk megalomania. It could be Henry himself back in 1931’s Frankenstein saying of the Monster: “I’ve got to see it at its full power”!”

The build-up to the promised titanic battle between two Universal icons is nicely paced. The surging electrodes smoke at Lugosi’s neck while the machinery’s rising pitch howls menacingly. Horror fans will enjoy Lugosi’s subtle, malevolent grin as he looks to his new master in evil expectancy. Disappointingly, the release of Monster and Wolfman into paw-to- boot combat happens merely three minutes from the end. There is just time for a few mouth-watering attacks before Vazec’s explosives destroy the castle above them in a well-realised water torrent – a dam shame.

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man marked the sad spiral of Universal’s former potent properties of horror into the crash-landings of House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945). And yet the ‘king-of-the-ring’ silliness of these entries was not the end of the story. The studio sifted through the wreckage and found enough glowing embers to retool their gallery of ghouls for a Third Wave - as comedy antagonists opposite Abbott and Costello. It soon became an undignified revival, but a half-life is better than no life at all…

THE APE MAN (1943)

By the time Bela Lugosi reported for work on his sixth contracted Monogram film, The Ape Man, it was clear that his career was in serious trouble. It wasn’t the title so much – after all, over at RKO Val Lewton’s films emerged with enormous kudos despite being saddled with tacky names like Cat People. No, it was the inescapable quicksand of poverty on Poverty Row that kept dragging him down, even though Universal had just used him (more on this to follow) in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Lugosi didn’t have the support of Lewton’s admirable and wide talent pool. Instead, he had to endure increasingly poor scripts with ludicrous premises and dialogue, directors whose only virtue was a speedy turnaround, and the unenviable position of often being surrounded by the walking dead of fellow actors. To be the big fish in the smallest and most undesirable of ponds is no source of pride, and offers nothing in the way of artistic growth if one cares about the work as he did. Lugosi was still trumpeted as a star, but never paid a commensurate fee by producers who ever since his break-through in Universal’s Dracula (1931) had mercilessly used their unequal bargaining power to exploit him. Lugosi’s situation must have been immensely dispiriting for him, which makes his efforts in The Ape Man all the more poignant. Unfortunately, our sympathy for his sincere professionalism is constantly scuppered by the guilty pleasure appeal of this stinker in which he is the one of the most laughably conceived of movie monsters.

Under the optimistic production logo of Favorite Films Corporation, The Ape Man is directed by the infamous William ‘one-take’ Beaudine, perversely beloved by bad film buffs for his life-time quota of over 350 credits jet-propelled by blithely moving onto the next set-up without noticing the dire footage he was allowing through; IMDb clocks him at directing 11 films in 1942 alone.

We are plunged, in every sense, into the main plot from the dockside opening, where a gaggle of reporters await a steam-ship carrying Agatha Brewster, sister of the esteemed, vanished scientist Dr James Brewster. Regular readers of my articles will know that I’ve become a fan of horror movie newspaper headlines, and here we get the helpfully succinct ‘Famous gland expert goes missing’ with a distinguished photo of Lugosi posing in spectacles. Alas, this is the only time in the film that Bela will look either human or dignified.

(By the way, If Barney the photographer looks familiar, that’s because he is Charlie Hall, Laurel and Hardy’s sourpuss enemy in such classics as 1935’s Tit for Tat.)

Agatha is played by Minerva Urcal whom we last saw as Lugosi’s hatched-faced retainer Fagah in Monogram’s The Corpse Vanishes (see review dated 7/3/2017). Here, she would have been better staying on the boat as she is all at sea under Beaudine’s unwatchful eye. What doesn’t help her is acting opposite Henry Hall as Brewster’s associate Dr Randall, who throughout the film has the expressive range of a gallery portrait. Enjoy his astoundingly wooden revelations to Agatha where he reveals James is actually hiding out in his laboratory due to the adverse effects of his latest experiment. “Unfortunately it was a great success”. His meaning will soon become hilariously clear. Meanwhile, Agatha’s shocked reply - “George, what does he….?” – is a cue left awkwardly hanging for so long that Hall’s eventual pick-up makes her look am-dram as well. A little gem of stewardship by Beaudine.

At least Randall wastes no time in taking Agatha to see James – and what a wretchedly funny sight he is. Sharing a cage with gorilla-suited Emil Van Horn (whose career was almost entirely ape-costume parts) is the pitifully even less convincing Lugosi cowering in self-pity. His face is framed in yak hair and a thick wig that presumably aims for chimpanzee-like veracity, but instead accentuates his heavy features to somehow resemble a hybrid of Sid James and Abraham Lincoln. We don’t get any explanation for exactly what break-through Brewster was aiming to achieve. What it has done other than monkey with his face is to devolve his entire body. Lugosi gamely channels his inner chimp by hunching over and swinging his hands pendulum-style in front of himself as he walks. Bless him for committing above his pay-grade to this role. He wisely plays Brewster exclusively for pathos since there is zero credibility or intimidation available when you look this unintentionally comedic. We see him shamble tragically across the screen and then sink into a chair before mumbling the classic understatement: “What a mess I made of things”. With lines like this, it is hard amid our pity not to draw parallels between the character’s plight and the actor. He breaks down in tears before his heartbroken sister.

Over at the city news-desk, they think Brewster is a still-missing link. Editor William Ruhl orders his ace reporter Jeff Carter to get an interview with Agatha about him, informing him there’ll be a new photographer taking shots because “Barney’s smell”. Whilst this shoddy line suggests that it’s the developing chemicals at fault, we have the welcome sight of Wallace Ford as newshound Carter. We last saw his quick-fire wit and polished timing as Babe Jensen enlivening The Mummy’s Hand (1940) and all-too briefly in The Mummy’s Tomb (1942). This time around he makes light-hearted work of the heavy-lifting as third lead, with an established persona self-directed enough to be Beaudine-proof. His energy bounces well off the less-assured, Republic serial stalwart Louise Currie as replacement shutterbug Billie Mason. Together, their constant sparring of modern feminism against traditional male chauvinism is the closest The Ape Man comes to basic adequacy. “Cocky little wench, aren’t you?” grins Carter after Mason presumes him to be a non-serving ‘4-F’ (failing the forces call-up medical). Structurally, Barney Sarecky’s script is pitched somewhere between The Front Page’s screwball newspaper comedy and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, landing instead as a dismal foul ball.

Back in the secret lab, Brewster pleads with his agent – sorry, Randall - to help him regain his 

humanity. “I must have human spinal fluid injected into me!” he begs. Far be it from me to launch mean-spirited gags about backbone deficiency, this is an ethical minefield for Randall the Embalmed. He refuses, knowing that to have any potency, the fluid must come from a living person: “And that means instant death”. Carter and Mason interview him at home later, whilst Brewster breaks in and commands the gorilla to vengefully throttle his butler Townsend (George Kirby) who goes down with some amusing gargling. Brewster has opted for a hat and coat disguise, but rather than Mr Hyde he now appears to be a demented Rabbi.  Examining a clump of residual ape hair at the murder scene, one of the beat cops observes: “Whoever did it sure needed a haircut”. The latest newspaper cuts to the essential with the headline: ‘DOCTOR FINDS BUTLER STRANGLED’.

Since Brewster’s whining won’t work on Randall’s granite demeanour, it takes Agatha to force him at gunpoint into injecting her brother with serum. This leads to a mirthsome sequence where an impatient Lugosi pantomimes repeatedly hoisting himself up from the waist - until at last he has become homo erectus again. Sadly, the effect is only temporary and must be continually topped up with a fresh supply, prompting a montage showing Brewster and his gorilla bumping off a selection of innocent victims.

As this cinematic clown car parps its rickety way to a climax, Randall suddenly develops a new spine of his own, smashing a beaker of fluid rather than facilitate his simian associate any more. No good neck goes unbroken as his reward. Meanwhile, Carter the snooping scoop is conked with a vase by Mason, and opportunistic Brewster carries her off to be his next source. His plan is foiled though by the gorilla strangling him before the police shoot the latter dead.

The Ape Man is probably the best argument so far for the longevity of Lugosi’s ‘Monogram Nine’ run amongst horror lovers. Whether he’d played it admirably straight (as he tried), or camped it up, the cards were against him from pre-production and his embarrassment is immortally preserved. It might qualify under the Law of Unintended Consequences as being far more entertaining for inept execution than it could ever have been if made well. I’ll let the last line of dialogue sum it up best, from an epilogue that illustrates another (lost) showbiz maxim - ‘Always leave them perplexed’. As Mason and Carter leave Brewster’s house, he spies a strange, skinny fellow (Ralph Littlefield), a peripheral pop-up throughout the film, crying in his jalopy. When asked why, the oddball identifies himself to the camera (untruthfully) as the screenwriter, closing with “Screwy wasn’t it?”

DEAD MEN WALK (1943)

Whilst the very lowest of low-rent studios were not slow to jump on the horror bandwagon, they never had the budgets or the rights to compete with the likes of Universal and its roster of creature features; which is why it’s remarkable, as Tom Weaver points out, that “in the 1940’s Poverty Row, oddly, avoided vampires almost scrupulously.” After all, a sober suit, optional opera cloak and fangs, plus a hopefully hypnotic rather than laughable stare costs very little.

The first one to prise open the coffin of the urbane undead was PRC with Dead Men Walk (1942). Unfortunately this is the product of the feverish work ethic of speedster director Sam Newfield, whom we last saw churning out their rip-off of Universal’s The Wolf Man in The Mad Monster (1942) in his one-man celluloid sausage factory of 250-300 credits uninhibited by quality control. The script was also written by his partner-in-crime on that turkey, Fred Myton. It was likewise no problem to draught in George Zucco to topline this, since he seemingly accepted anything typed that was placed 

in front of him.

The result is sixty-four minutes of tedium that belies its brevity in making you feel it’s three times as long, an almost impressive feat when you consider that it was filmed in a scorching five days. Not one calorie of that kinetic energy however seems to have translated onto the screen. Instead, the film crawls along at a deadening pace.

The prologue initially raises hope, consisting of a book of vampire history being tossed onto a fire, followed by a spectral head (Forrest Taylor) accusing the audience of having the “puny conceit” to doubt the power of the supernatural. He suggest we are to encounter “witch and warlock, werewolf, and all the spawn of Hell, borne on the sable wings of night through the holy communion of the witches’ Sabbath.” What a mouth-watering invitation. If only we could believe one wing-flap of it would be on offer here.

We switch to the funeral of one of two twin brothers (both played by Zucco). The deceased Dr Elwyn Clayton was originally a good man whose soul was corrupted by the dark arts of witchcraft after returning from India. His surviving sibling, Dr Lloyd, offed him in secret to save the town from his hideous occultry. We understand this when grieving local Kate (Ferm Emmett) bursts in to lambast his coffined body at the altar. He had murdered her grand-daughter, this “Servant of the Devil”. Lloyd takes Kate’s pained outburst in his stride. Indeed Zucco more or less handles the entire film as though it’s a leisurely round of golf through which he mutters his lines on auto-pilot. 

Away from the public show, Dr Lloyd meets his niece Gayle and her fiancé Dr David Bentley. The former is played by the able and beautiful Mary Carlisle, who had risen to become a musical comedy co-star of Bing Crosby three times before marriage persuaded her to make this film her last. As Dr David we have Nedrick Young, who thankfully was a strong writer - weathering the McCarthy blacklist to co-write Elvis Presley’s Jailhouse Rock (1957) and earn an Oscar as the pseudonymous Nathan E. Douglas for 1958’s The Defiant Ones - because his performance here in front of the camera is dreadfully wooden throughout.

Once the lovebirds have left, having passed judgement on the “black and evil thing” they’ve just buried, in private, Dr Lloyd is burning his brother’s unsavoury notes when he is assailed by the crazed appearance of the latter’s hunchbacked henchman, Zolarr. It is good to see Dwight Frye again, even though the years’ mileage had clearly not been kind to him since his promising one-two of Dracula and Frankenstein roles in 1931. By now, he was largely reduced to trying to balance his time between unremarkable stage roles and war effort factory work for Lockheed Aircraft, hence his haggard, prematurely-aged appearance. Tragically, he died that November before reporting for work on Fox film Wilson (1944). In his last role, at least his engine still summons up the red-lining revs of frenetic servitude that made and limited his name. “You’ll pay for death long before you die!” he gibbers at the sight of Lloyd’s dishonouring of his dead master’s work.

No matter, for just like his high priest Andoheb in the previous year’s The Mummy’s Tomb, you can never count on an evil Zucco staying dead. Zolarr opens Elwyn’s coffin to reveal the satanic sibling can cheat death here as well. To differentiate between each Clayton’s (bored) demeanour, Dr Lloyd is the one with glasses and a hat whereas Elwyyn is without either. One interesting feature, possibly accidental, is Zucco’s facial resemblance to Aleister Crowley, the real-life occultist who also sported a bald head and sinister glower. It turns out that Elwyn is actually a madcap hybrid of both Andoheb and Dracula, in sinister service to evil gods whilst literally moonlighting as a vampire in need of constant fresh blood. His resurrected self confronts the not-noticeably shocked Lloyd, vowing that to replenish his blood bank, he intends opening an account using his brother’s loved ones, starting with Gayle, before suddenly vanishing.( The effects work of showing both brothers together by necessity is simply achieved using separate right and left shots of Zucco merged together where the scene cannot get away with a double)

True to his word, Elwyn sneaks into Gayle’s room for a swift pint one night. This causes our heroes to go into crisis mode, which for Dr David means behaving as though he’s been ex-sanguinated himself, such is his bloodless acting. He’ll need every drop though as he steps up to offer his own matched blood type to give his fiancé a rejuvenating transfusion. To be fair, Dr Dave is at least a less erratic physician than his prospective father-in-law. He noticed the tell-tale puncture marks on Gayle’s neck immediately. Lloyd, perplexed over Gayle’s sudden anaemia, missed them completely in his presumably full examination, - even though he spotted them on a previous victim. It just shows the value of getting a second opinion.

It takes Kate to fully understand the demonic forces at work here. She warns Lloyd and Gayle that they are up against a vampire who can only be deflected by a crucifix she gives to Gayle. And sure enough she is proved right when a glowing-eyed Elwyn pays her a return visit but is foiled. You would think these plot developments would create some interest, yet I hate to say it but Zucco is one of the main culprits in the slowness of the piece. As Dr Lloyd he prefaces each exchange with ponderous thought as though attempting to diagnose his own boredom. This would be understandable if the dialogue was worth savouring, but Myton’s script is likewise cripplingly dull. When Gayle asks what he thinks of Kate’s utterly fantastic story, he replies drearily: “I don’t know, dear. It seems utterly impossible and yet it’s the only answer to an impossible condition”. Not for Zolarr it isn’t, who offs Kate for being wise enough to supplying that the answer.

We must not forget the townsfolk, who cannot be expected to tolerate a resurgence of unexplained deaths without over-heatedly reaching for the torches and marching on what passes for Castle Dracula. This motley mob are however no-one’s idea of an urban vigilante threat; they look and sound like a rabble of Wild West hillbillies. Robert Strange as the gummy comic relief posse member appears to be a prototype of ‘authentic frontier gibberish’ wild man Gabby Johnson in Blazing Saddles (1974)

Before the villagers can head off evil at the pass, Elwyn and Zolarr battle with Lloyd in his home. “You don’t wait for death. You come to meet him” hisses Elwyn. No wonder he’s boiling with pent-up fervour – Lloyd has just administered his slave one of the most ignominious lingering demises possible, pinning Zolarr fatally under a pedestal supporting a stuffed ostrich. Cain and not-very Abel grapple with each other as a fallen lamp sets fire to the curtains, a clichéd resolution already in horror movies. One striking point is the element of jeopardy of seeing Zucco and his stand-in finally duking it out within a ring of staged flames encircling them in the house set. “Good heavens. There’s two of them!” declares one of the cowboy panhandlers in oddly polite exclamation compared to their earlier blue-collar roughness. Unusually, both brothers die in the blaze, so at least we have the boldness of a downbeat ending

Dead Men Walk is a tepid Dracula rip-off that never stands a chance by being hamstrung from the start due to its tortuously slow rhythm, dull acting and slapdash, quickie execution.

CAT PEOPLE (1942)

Cat People is a hugely impressive achievement on many levels. It was Val Lewton’s first release as a producer for RKO and made under studio restrictions that many creatives would have found demoralising. Each film of his tenure had to be brought in for no more than a tightly-budgeted $150,000, their running times could not exceed 75 minutes (they were, after all, B-picture supporting features), and most chafing for Lewton, he was forced to accept the lurid, audience-tested titles his bosses forced upon him. He, however, learned to manoeuvre within these limitations and what they gifted him in largely being left alone to interpret them through his artistic vision. Arguably, the assumed freedom of a much greater budgeted A-picture would also have an accompanying greater scrutiny by the studio heads.

In his cabal of talent, Lewton chose wisely. His director Jacques Tourneur shared not only his meticulous eye and craft, but also Lawton’s unceasing desire to go beyond the mundane mainstream. Speaking of his loathing for television many years later, Tourneur revealed what drove him aesthetically as a film-maker: “If you don't bring some of your individuality and some of your experience and sensitivity to bear on a subject, you don't get more than a mechanical result.” His interpretive genius as a director has such flair that when viewing Cat People one continually has to remember that it is a B-movie; indeed, the care and sensitivity shown by all departments lifts it far above what other studios were producing in quality. Instead of the routine schlocky horror that the title would usually signal, audiences were getting something that played to, yet subverted, their own expectations. Lewton was careful to supply the horror jump-shocks that the format required, and it features cats who are supernaturally bound to human beings in macabre ways. And yet the producer-director partnership layered in subtexts of meaning, clues and character story-telling so deep that if all the horror elements were cut out, Cat People could still stand as an engrossing drama of a failing marriage doomed by dark secrets. Like everything else in the film, this was a deliberate result of rare and painstaking artistry.

In Dewitt Bodeen’s carefully-structured screenplay, the story’s protagonists, Irena Dubrovna and Oliver Reed, (Simone Simon and Kent Smith) meet cute at the zoo where we discover much of their essential natures immediately. She is a sketching artist of talent whose playful surface hides a passionate temperament for high standards as she carelessly tosses each drawing away of the panther who fascinates her. He in turn is transfixed by her beauty, and her littering brings out his innate decency and almost paternal care. The casting of the two leads is a master-stroke. Feline French actress Simon was already a well-known star from her homeland,, and since arriving in Hollywood had already given a literally bewitching cameo in The Daniel and Daniel Webster (see my review of 16/2/2017 ). In looking for his Irena, Lewton actually sought “A little kitten face like Simone Simon”. She is charming and as endlessly watchable as a cat, being both cute and with hidden dark depths that can turn from playful to the self-servingly demonic with great subtlety. Beware, those who underestimate the physical winsomeness of her petite size. Her scarlet fingernails are claws and there is something poised to pounce within her.

What lies beneath Irena’s kittenish charm is unknown as yet to the man she will entrance. Kent Smith’s seemingly bland marine engineer Oliver is a disarming and necessary counterpoint to Irena’s exoticism. He describes himself aptly as a “good plain Americano”, a tall, handsome, solid man of integrity and conscience embodied by an actor who exuded those qualities in a long career of nearly five decades, never quite achieving stardom.

Irena lives alone in an apartment (at the top of the staircase recycled from Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and begins to gradually draw Oliver into her lair. Her Serbian background is drenched in tragedy and dark menace. Both her parents had died by the time she was a teenager. Her village history is steeped in suspicion of practised devil worship resulting in Irena’s seemingly irrational fear that she must never make love to or even kiss a man for fear that she will transform into a cat or panther and kill them. She possesses a statue (or maybe it possesses her) of her country’s saviour, King John, spearing a cat-like symbol of the fabled 13^th-century Muslim Mamaluk warrior enemies of their land. This is a contradictory image for such a fetishist of the feline and adds to her complexity, possibly suggesting an inner duality and conflict. She is also curiously fond of the unlikeliest elements: “I like the dark. It’s friendly”.

This enigmatic and elusive woman with her macabre fantasies beguiles Oliver so much that he endures, even welcomes the enticing mystery of Irena, knowing she is destined to always be ultimately unknowable to him. He buys her a kitten as part of his gentlemanly courtship of her; the moggy’s hackles rise in her presence, causing them to exchange it for a canary at the pet shop, whose menagerie are similarly freaked out by her. “Cats just don’t like me”, Irena explains, further confusing us and Oliver. Irena’s secret smile of delight at the preferred present is almost predatory, although when she teases the bird, its sudden demise on the cage floor fills her with genuine regret.

To complicate the central relationship, there is Oliver’s co-worker friend Alice (Jane Randolph) who appears to be his gal pal shoulder to cry on, but is expertly driven as a inciting wedge between the couple as the story unfolds. The original gifted cat takes to her all right, and she seems the soul of guileless understanding for her colleague when he increasingly confides the frustration he is too nice to admit in front of Irena.

Another striking female haunts Irena during the couple’s wedding night meal, a brief albeit crucial cameo by the equally feline Elizabeth Russell, who would feature much more substantially in the 1944 sequel, Curse of the Cat People. “She looks like a cat”, says workmate Doc Carver indifferently, played by Alan Napier, biding his time till his 6ft 5-inch frame elegantly shot him to fame in the Sixties TV Batman as butler Alfred. The lady comes over and punctures the festivities with her innocently blunt enquiry to Irena: “Moya sestra?” (‘My sister?’). Russell’s voice was dubbed by Simon to subtly accentuate her link with her fellow Serbian. Irena’s reaction though is a hasty crossing of herself in fear at this bad-luck supernatural reminder of home crossing her path. Some critics saw a seam of lesbianism implied by this encounter and Irena’s cock-blocking of her husband; Dewitt Bodeen dismissed this as an intention in his writing.

Whilst Cat People’s varied symbolism is rich enough to support even the most fanciful of arguments, it is infused with more than the ideas of Bodeen and Tourneur. Val Lewton’s personality and preoccupations imprint themselves on the shaping of the film’s heroine. In real life, he shared Irena’s life-long fascination with death, and had a fear of being touched that must have placed him at a comparable slight remove from those around him. Most bizarre of all, considering the material, was his intense fear of cats. One might argue a parallel between his and Irena’s complex embracing of the very thing that also horrifies them.

A less welcome influence on the screenplay was Joseph Breen’s all-powerful censorship office who were troubled by Irena’s original account of being illegitimate (tweaked), any suggestion of sexual consummation (a key plot element in the end), and the horror angle which Lewton and his team treated with an emerging signature style of restraint.

The gloves are delicately taken off where Alice is concerned though. She takes devious advantage of Oliver’s confided struggle to her, about Irena’s physical distance, to confess her own hitherto-concealed love for him. This self-serving will be a catalyst for Irena’s darker territorial side to flex its claws with fatal consequences in the film’s most memorable scenes later.

As if hubby’s sly colleague on the make and a second cat person isn’t enough, the course of Irena’s embattled true love is hampered further by unprofessional advances from the psychiatrist Alice recommended for her. Dr Judd (The Falcon series lead Tom Conway) listens to her recount her past in a stunningly isolated circle of light by cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca. She reveals that her mother was labelled a witch by villagers who branded her a shape-changing cat person. Judd then crosses ethical boundaries with honey-toned smoothness, challenging her fear of inherited panther prowess with the offer of kissing her. Conway’s languid, top-drawer toned Britishness was intriguingly an assumed shape in itself. He and his more famous brother, actor George Sanders, were actually both from an aristocratic Russian family forced to flee after the revolution. Sanders in particular harboured a life-long resentment of being cheated over his rightful inheritance, and although he achieved great fame, with an Oscar for All About Eve (1950) and 1957’s The Jungle Book showcasing his own remarkably English vocal grandeur, he took his own life in 1972. Conway was plagued by alcoholism like him and his death preceded his younger brother by five years after being found in a seedy flop-house.

As a result of Alice’s seemingly benign interference, doom is set to stalk her. When Irena learns that the shrink was her idea, she coldly tells her husband: “There are some things a woman doesn’t want other women to understand”. Like an alley-cat backed up against a wall, the invasion of her privacy will turn her from a pussy into a hell-cat. “A cat just walked over my grave” remarks Alice as she says good-night to Oliver. This deliciously prefigures her solo walk home through Central Park in a brilliant sequence of threatened danger and suggestive power. Roy Webb’s music score is suddenly silent; we are left with the creepy echo of Alice’s heels clicking along the pavement, intercut with those of the pursuing Irena. The air is thick with unseen menace, Alice continually looks behind her to the left of frame until – hiss! – not a feline attack, but the air brakes of a bus bursting in from the right hand side. Cinema audiences received a classic jump-shock, skilfully played on them by Tourneur’s sleight-of-screen distraction and superb sound design by John L. Cass. (Homages to this scene would crop up in many later films, such as the oppressive tracking through the dark streets felt by a paranoid Robert Redford in 1976’s All the President’s Men).

Irena may have stalked Alice invisibly, but she leaves the unmistakable wake of slaughter, satiating her frustration on lambs in the zoo. An indelible mark is left on her too by an effective dream sequence (the visuals designed by Lynwood Dunne), full of haunting symbolism: predatory animated panthers, an equally predatory Judd putting them to the sword in the armour of King John, the key to the panther cage she gave to its zoo-keeper earlier, which may unlock her own tragic destiny.

The most notorious scene of Cat People is to come, whereby the huntress makes her boldest pursuit of her prey in a hotel swimming pool. Alice goes for a swim and in her most physically vulnerable state is tormented by a catlike shadow we see spread across the wall. Once again, without music we are similarly naked and sense-sharpened, listening in suspense to the reverberation of water droplets and the deep, rising growl of a very hungry cat. She dives into the water in vain, yet there is no escape from the animal force closing in on her prissy doggy-paddling. At the peak of tension, a light-switch flicks on, and against the wall leans Irena, a triumphantly-grinning Cheshire Cat having savoured the pawing of her little mouse. Some later horror maestros like Clive Barker had no patience with this technique of teasing the viewer with a solely imagined horror, preferring the in-your-face visceral terror of seeing the monster in full sight. It is hard though to conceive of anything artist-made that could live up to what our minds devise of Irena’s metamorphosised form here. A woman in a cat-suit can be alluringly sexy, but a costume to create fear is more likely to end up inspiring laughs, like the disastrous monkey-suited men of tacky gorilla shockers. Lewton and his team were too refined for such self- sabotage. Tourneur wanted to develop the mind’s-eye only representation of ultimate fear for his monster concept in Night of the Demon (1957) but was over-ruled by Columbia.

Inevitably, Irena must draw human blood. She cannot be satisfied by weak innocent animal victims. She doesn’t know her gallant husband has been torturing himself to do right by her. “It’s too late”, he mournfully tells her. Alice has moved into his lonely heart. Irena slumps into the sofa, her inner homicidal resolve signalled by the marvellous touch of her nails scratching long slashes down the cushion.  “I love loneliness” she intones, as if to convince her fatally divided soul.

At least Irena has one deserving victim to fatally lash out at in the lascivious form of Dr Judd. In a cheeky reference to Universal’s The Wolf Man (1941), he blithely mentions possibly defending himself with silver bullets in a gun. An even more direct ‘tribute’ from it is his sword-cane, which sadly for him is no help after he wilfully kisses Irena. She allows him to do so, the sparkle in her eyes momentarily caught by Musuraca’s artful lens as she transforms again. We still do not see the change, yet receive it reflected in Judd’s terrified reaction before death.

As with her life, Irena’s cat who walks by itself must also decide alone when to end it, and she does so with the awful inexorability of returning to the panther at the zoo where the story began. She releases it from its cage to launch at her, freeing it from captivity and herself from the prison of the human condition. When Oliver and Alice find her body, the ambivalence of Irena’s damaged journey rears up even in death: “She never lied to us”.

Simone Simon never found a lead role again that fit her as well as Irena. In Greg Mank’s marvellously informative DVD commentary, she recalled: “I was Irena when I shot. It was like a weird connection…everything came naturally. I worked on that picture with all of my being”.

Despite the confidence of his vision, Lewton was extremely apprehensive about the reaction in advance of Cat People’s pre-release screening in December 1942. Everything was riding on this first venture of his as producer. The staging of the RKO premiere was no help, consisting of a Disney cartoon beforehand that centred around a cat. By the time the main feature started, audience members were still miaowing facetiously. Lewton’s heart sank. He needn’t have worried. The astonishing latent power of his film slowly weaved its magic upon the restless crowd, converting and subverting them through poetic tenderness and orchestrated blasts of palpable fear into a rousing reception. Lewton and his team were now an overnight smash success…

DOORWAY TO DARKNESS: An introduction to VAL LEWTON

In 1942 RKO studios was in trouble. They were losing money every month, and on the edge of receivership by June their president George J. Schaefer was forced to resign. His replacement, Charles Koerner, would be a saviour who managed a truly remarkable turnaround in the company’s fortunes. His famous mission statement declared: ‘Showmanship in place of genius’, signing the death certificate for worthy, artistic ventures that were not geared directly to commercial success. A drastic swathe was cut through existing staff such as long-serving studio manager Sid Rogell and many producers. Even Orson Welles, the golden boy auteur behind 1941’s Citizen Kane, was dropped. Despite enormous critical praise, Welles’s masterpiece had failed at the box office due to distribution problems caused by the all-powerful media baron it clearly satirised, William Randolph Hearst.  The last straw for his employers was the young writer-director’s follow-up, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), which was deemed so uncommercial that RKO took it away from Welles and re-edited it, not even permitting him to strike a print of his cut for posterity.

Future decades would triumphantly resurrect Citizen Kane and mourn for his lost Ambersons vision, but in 1942 there was no room in the tough new regime for anything that could not translate into profitable mass entertainment. To stave off the studio’s imminent demise, Koerner needed a talented producer who could create no-nonsense packages of sure-fire commercial hits. He was about to get a lot more than he bargained for…

Val Lewton was born Vladimir Ivanovich Leventon in Yalta, Russia on May 7^th 1904. Along with his sister, they emigrated with their mother Nina after her failed marriage firstly to Berlin, and then America in 1909, settling in New York. Vladimir’s name was Americanised to Val Lewton as part of the family’s assimilation into their new homeland. They were fortunate to already have a Hollywood connection. Val’s aunt was silent screen star Alla Nazimova, who found Nina a story reader’s job at major studio M-G-M. Already the young Val was enjoying the powerful influence of strong women in his life. This would be reflected in the female protagonists around which he would base many of his best films.

Val inherited his mother’s literary streak, though as a sixteen-year old he lost his reporter job at the Darien-Stamford Review over a fabricated story involving kosher chickens in the city. This error of judgement didn’t stop his writing ambitions, nor his taste for fantasy which would crucially gain him much more positive attention. After journalism studies at Columbia University, he had eighteen books published, many in the disparagingly-named ‘pulp’ field. The most notable was No Bed of Her Own (1932) which Paramount bought and partly adapted for that year’s Clark Gable and Carole Lombard movie No Man of Her Own.

Lewton was already working in the film business when his novel struck gold. Like his mother, he was employed by M-G-M, in his case to convert their hit films into novelisations intended for newspaper serialisation.  No Bed of Her Own’s success gave him the confidence to quit his job and turn full-time novelist, but his next three books flopped in comparison. Once again though, luck and family connection rescued him when Nina was asked by her boss, renowned producer David O. Selznick, to urgently source writers of genuine Russian extraction to work on the script of his abortive Taras Bulba. Selznick was famous not only for his extreme demands, but for an unbending pursuit of authenticity in any project he undertook. His meeting with Lewton would lead to a hugely inspirational apprenticeship for the young writer, learning much from his mentor aside from a passion for veracity that would be reflected in his later choices as a filmmaker.

Across eight years Lewton served under Selznick in multiple roles, gaining industry experience as his assistant, studio publicist and story editor. It was while working on A Tale of Two Cities (1935) that Lewton’s other key relationship was forged with second-unit director Jacques Tourneur. Together, from page to screen, they realised the critically-acclaimed revolutionary scenes of the storming of the Bastille. Typically, Selznick had hired Tourneur for his French ancestry to direct these sequences, but it was the Frenchman’s real talent that went on to make his name as a director in partnership with Val Lewton.

Jacques Tourneur was born in the same year as Lewton, and similarly emigrated to America with his father Maurice Tourneur in 1913. They headed straight to what was the original Hollywood in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Maurice was an established film director for the Éclair company of Paris. Keen to expand into the lucrative American market, his bosses sent him to manage their U.S. studio after its original state-of-the-art complex burned down in 1914, taking all their stored film negatives with it. Éclair American struck a deal to distribute their short films and then features with Carl Laemmle’s Universal Film Manufacturing Company. By 1915, Tourneur Senior had allied himself with World Film on the same lot, a move that linked up the family with that of Lewis J. Selznick, father to David, who began his feature-producing dynasty here.

Maurice Tourneur passed on to his son a strong belief that the star system in Hollywood was wrong-headed, and that it limited a story’s focus unrealistically. This expansive view would influence the films that Jacques would make, where often the most interesting characters are to be found as small supporting parts. Before his own employment by David O. Selznick on A Tale of Two Cities, Jacques worked his way up the business for his father through script editing onto short film direction, developing his talents behind the camera.

Before Lewton and Tourneur collaborated again, Lewton was involved in the gargantuan labour of love that became Selznick’s Gone With the Wind (1939). He famously tried to persuade his boss that 

Margaret Mitchell’s book was unfilmable, yet he himself shot the memorable pre-intermission scene, a stupendous single take where the camera gradually pulls back to reveal Scarlett among literally hundreds of wounded soldiers at Atlanta Depot.

As for how Lewton came to RKO, one story told by film historian Steve Haberman in the TCM documentary Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows (2007) dealt with potential carnage of a different kind. Allegedly, newly-installed president Koerner saw him at a party and, enquiring about him, was told that Lewton was the writer of those ‘horrible’ pulp novels. Koerner misinterpreted this as a pipeline to the horror genre he thought could save the studio and immediately suggested recruiting him.

Even if the anecdote is fiction, Koerner was actually gunning for a slice of the money-spinning horror renaissance enjoyed by Universal. The only problem was that, unlike their rival, RKO did not own the copyright on any recognisable creatures for their features. They would have to invent their own, and this is where the studio needed to bring in a unique visionary to create new crowd-pleasing terror for war-time audiences with all the quality of their wealthier competitors, but at a low cost.

Val Lewton signed to RKO to undertake the opportunity of a lifetime in 1942. It was to be his first ever position as a film producer, a powerful, creative role whose pressures might have been daunting enough without the imminent creditors at the door. There was no time for being gently eased in to the new role. Lewton however had spent eight years learning from a master. Selznick not only taught him well, he had the generosity to broker the deal with the studio that had tempted away his young protégé, an act that only increased Lewton’s gratitude to him.

Lewton was far from the stereotypical image we have of a Hollywood producer. He was neither brash nor crude in manner, or loudly overconfident in his opinions. Instead, he was meticulous, tasteful and exuded a quiet power much like his films, concealing his intense ambition behind modesty just as the roaming Irena in Cat People (1942) hid her desires in the shadows. Lewton was also no simple packager of other people’s talent. He was supremely hands-on, overseeing every detail of his department’s scripts and often rewrote them, which is why the nine remarkable horror films he produced between 1942 and 1946 bear the stamp of his personality as much as their own directors.

(L-R) Robert Wise, Mark Robson and Val Lewton

This is not to downplay the achievements of the superb team Lewton assembled around him. There was cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, composer Roy Webb and two editors who gained their first film directing assignments thanks to him. Robert Wise, the Oscar-nominated editor of Citizen Kane, as well as The Magnificent Ambersons, was given 1944’s Curse of the Cat People to direct by him. Secondly, Mark Robson, Wise’s assistant editor on the Welles films, began working for Lewton as his own production assistant and editor before earning his directorial debut on The Seventh Victim (1943) and going on to four others including Lewton’s non-horror teen feature Youth Runs Wild (1944). Robson was Academy Award-nominated himself for Peyton Place in 1958.

In the meantime, Lewton needed a stylish director whose taste was sympatico with his own to take charge of the all-important opening movie of his tenure: the audacious Cat People. Recalling his time on A Tale of Two Cities, he knew the perfect collaborator…

THE HIDDEN HAND (1942)

A few months after Warner Brothers released The Strange Case of Dr Rx, they gave audiences a better murder-mystery programmer with The Hidden Hand (1942), aided by dense Agatha Christie-style plotting and an elaborate game being played by its protagonist that lets the viewer in on the fun from the start. The 1934 stage play source Invitation to a Murder by Rufus King hints at the playful tone intended, and under director Benjamin Stoloff the workmanlike cast facilitate the step-by-step machinations without any distractingly bad performances cluttering its path.

Indeed, the film creates a good showcase for the eerie screen persona of Milton Parsons, a busy character actor of cadaverous build, eccentric manner and a beguilingly soothing voice reminiscent of Boris Karloff. Here, he plays escaped convict John Channing who returns to the family home assisted in his break-out by his sister Lorinda (Cecil Cunningham) who wants him to help her in a ruthless plan to test her avaricious relatives. She knows the unfeeling bunch are circling for her inheritance, so she has John pose as her butler while setting off a chain of events designed to have them cross and double-cross each other under her remote puppetry.

The two greedy couples are Walter and Rita (Roland Drew and Julie Bishop) plus Horace and Estelle (Tom Stevenson and Ruth Ford). Coincidentally, Ford was herself embroiled in a real-life familial inheritance squabble over the estate of her wealthy mother-in-law. By the time of her own death at 98 in 2009, Ford had amassed a personal wealth of ten million dollars and bequeathed the whole estate to her butler, snubbing her daughter and grand-children.

To balance the unapologetic avarice within her family, there is the goodness of Mary Winfield, Lorinda’s secretary, whom she intends to make her beneficiary, owing to her selfless loyalty and being the daughter of a past almost-husband of Lorinda. Mary’s similarly virtuous fiancé is also Lorinda’s attorney Peter Thorne played by Craig Stevens who later achieved TV fame as private eye Peter Gunn. Together they embody almost the only wholesome characters in the film, other than Willie Best’s chauffeur Eustis, another in his dispiriting gallery of cowardly comic relief subservient black employees, last seen in my review of The Strange Case of Dr Rx. Eustis may also be on hand to represent an everyman fear reaction to the murders and menace since the grasping family members are too greedy to ever be scared by the unfolding horror.

To crank up the greed incentive amongst her clan, Lorinda drops in various clues and temptations. John leaves a paper on the stairs to be found by their Chinese cook Mallo (Kam Tong) describing the combination of the clock hands needed to release the key to a treasure chest Lorinda has secreted in the house. She also enlists her corrupt doctor nephew Lawrence (Frank Wilcox) to drug her with a suspended animation serum and provide a full burial ceremony before reviving her with an antidote, in return for a quarter of her estate. Having wound up the mechanism, Lorinda’s macabre mind relishes the impending feeding frenzy: “You know, it gives me a thrill to know I’m going to die tonight”. The thread of Channing insanity clearly doesn’t just run through the male line.

Along the way to Lorinda’s staged death, she fakes nearly becoming victim to a falling plant-pot and has her beloved raven Mr Poe poisoned (a little name-check for writer Edgar Allen Poe’s titular haunting bird). After she is apparently killed the same way, Lawrence opts to let his aunt stay dead since he benefits anyway, not realising she was testing him as well. The crafty matriarch seems to have considered every eventuality – except for John’s coveting of Mary. “So lovely, so delicate, so dainty” he drools.

A recorded disc of Lorinda reading out her will allocation then causes the relatives to form an uneasy alliance in pursuit of the remaining quarter of her inheritance. The pacing increases and a body count is entertainingly racked up: the nurse is strangled by John and Mallo becomes the first victim of a trap-door activated by the clock combination that sends each one plummeting into the flowing river under the house. The bulldog-faced cops arrive as Lorinda emerges not only as a frighteningly effective planner but also a capable murderess in person, shooting her traitorous nephew in cold blood. She is undone though by the weakness of her genuine care for Mary, which forces her to reveal she is still alive when Mary almost triggers the trap-door to her own doom. It’s hard to argue with her defence to the cops that “…all I did was rid the world of a few abnormals”, even though she is evidently a pretty lethal one herself.

The Hidden Hand is a spirited B-movie of undemanding fun that wears its scheming silliness with confidence.

THE SMILING GHOST (1941)

Haunted house, spook-the-inheritor comedies following the plot of The Cat and the Canary (1927) were ten-a-penny in the Thirties and Forties. Warner Brothers’ B-movie The Smiling Ghost was no exception but is amiable enough within the formula. It was directed by Lewis Sellers, a veteran of the studio’s house style of crime thrillers including Crime School (1938) starring Humphrey Bogart who was billed below his rambunctious co-stars, the Dead End Kids. Bogart was also connected to one of The Smiling Ghost’s writers Vincent Sherman whose screenplay of The Return of Doctor X (1939) gave the actor his only horror genre part. Co-writer Crane Wilbur went on to pen House of Wax (1953) for Vincent Price. Though the storyline doesn’t fully make sense, the duo craft some sassy one-liners.

The plot centres around tall, gauche, chemical engineer ‘Lucky’ Downing, who is offered a much-needed $1000 to pose as the boyfriend of an eligible society heiress for one month, unaware that her eligibility is due to her previous three husbands falling victim to a ghoulish figure nicknamed the Smiling Ghost. To his credit, Downing sticks around even after uncovering the real back-story to try and solve the mystery. 

In the light leading-man role Wayne Morris has a gangly, aw-shucks persona that fits well and convinces when called upon to use his fists. As comic relief back-up to strengthen Morris’s character, Willy Best is drafted in and endures the poison chalice of being Clarence,  the resident ‘negro comic’ of lily-livered buffoonery. We last see him doing the same as the butt of Bob Hope’s gags in 1940’s The Ghost Breakers and here the only benefit is the decent chunk of screen time he gets. This is just as well when for example he is admonished by the butler, Norton for hiding in the coal-cellar: “How do you expect anyone to see you in there?” Actually, Alan Hale’s Norton is one of the few original touches in the film. He plays the butler without any of the supercilious formality normally assumed, instead being a blunt, blue-collar type who could just as easily be a plumber or a street cop. Film buffs may recognise Hale from his memorable Little John in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) among other humorous roles.

Downing is indeed lucky since he is caught between two women subtly cat-fighting over him. There is the aforementioned Elinor Bentley Fairchild (Alexis Smith), a self-possessed blonde siren of means, and the down-to-earth brunette reporter Lil Barstow, an equally beautiful yet honest Brenda Marshall. At one point, Elinor skewers her rival with the delicious: “Every look you give him, you could pour on a waffle”.

The family home also encompasses a gaggle of dinner-suited sybarites such as Elinor’s permanently sozzled cousin Tennant (Richard Ainley) and a vivid crackpot turn by Charles Halton as Great Uncle Ames who has a disconcerting passion for manufacturing shrunken heads out of suitable subjects he meets. Seeking a final piece for his collection - “the perfect negroid type” - Ames takes a special interest in Clarence: “How would you like to stay with us for a looong, looong time?”

Introductions over, Downing’s luck holds long enough to dodge the blade of the killer after Tennant asks to be given back his own room. The inhospitable drunk is unwittingly mistaken for Downing by the titular, fedora-wearing menace baring a toothy grin and mad, staring eyes. Tennant is later found, alive and unconscious as the tenant of a cellar trunk.  For some reason, the Ghost does lack that all-important killer instinct. We learn that although his first victim John Eggleston drowned, and number three died of a snake-bite, the second, Paul Myron (David Bruce) also survived, albeit placed in a permanent iron lung. When Downing and Barstow visit him, he shows them a photo of Eggleston, insisting he is the Ghost – back from the dead to haunt all future suitors.

Downing later finds himself attacked by the grinning ghoul and dumped unharmed in a coffin, making the Ghost’s half-hearted advances even more perplexing. Eventually the family decide to lure the Ghost out by staging a phoney wedding for Lucky and Elinor at midnight. There’s an amusing exchange during the nervy wait when Lucky makes awkward small-talk about the cruel treatment of Mary, Queen of Scots. Lee Patrick’s Aunt Rose fires off the zinger comeback: “Yes, isn’t it? I didn’t think the news had got around”.

For extra harshness, the Ghost appears and abducts Barstow. Lucky grapples with him manfully until the killer is crushed by a disused boat. Barstow remarks that their assailant doesn’t look or sound like Eggleston somehow, a hunch borne out when he is unmasked as assumed iron lung occupant Paul in another of those denouments that Scooby Doo would almost parody later. His vendetta is explained as the insane jealousy of a man rejected by his wife for being a cripple, but not how he can free himself from the confines of his seemingly necessary apparatus – a clanging error by the writers. Even more inexplicably, Downing bursts in too late to save Clarence from Ames reducing him to a presented shrunken head - and yet his valet appears safe and sound as well. (?)

America’s impending entry into World War Two (courtesy of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour that December) gets a sobering look-in at the end after Downing realises that Barstow is the one for him. Pessimist Aunt Rose clouds the rosy prospect with the sour: “Why worry? He’ll probably be drafted right in the middle of the honeymoon”. Ironically, in real life Morris would soon leave Hollywood to enlist. He found that his size initially ruled him out of cockpit flying until an air-force relative pulled strings enabling him to spend the rest of the war becoming a decorated Hellcat fighter pilot.