So, a bit more Karloff for the later hours; this time he’s the main attraction and does things, and instead this film underuses Bela Lugosi… oh well. This is quite some mad scientist stuff, with Karloff as the scientist in question; his university professor friend is literally caught in the crossfire of a battle between a criminal and the erstwhile members of his gang (one of these being Lugosi, second billed but nowhere near as prominent in the film as Karloff and third-billed Stanley Ridges). Both men are grievously wounded, and when Karloff discovers the gangster has a half-million dollar fortune hidden somewhere, he finds himself fighting to keep both of them alive… in the one body. It took me longer than it perhaps should’ve done to realise that Ridges actually plays both roles, just with a change of makeup and tone of voice; it’s not quite Jekyll & Hyde, but it’s along similar lines, I suppose. Story’s by Curt Siodmak, with this film being one of his earliest Hollywood jobs, and he expanded on the idea in his book Donovan’s Brain and its various film versions and follow-ups; director Arthur Lubin’s career began on Poverty Row, where he gained a reputation for efficiency that soon took him to Universal, and you can kind of see that in this one… we are pretty much dealing with post-Laemmle faemmle Universal here, when the studio was pulling back on budgets and kind of going for B status, but Lubin uses his fairly limited resources well. It clocks in at just 70 minutes, but it packs quite an amount of Stuff Happening into that time, and there’s some amazing shadows in the scene where Ridges’ crook goes to retrieve his ill-gotten gains; it’s almost unnecessarily atmospheric but it undeniably adds something despite that. So on the whole, yeah, I liked this, it’s an honest B film with some nice central performances. Just wish Lugosi had been given more to do…
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