And we finally finish those hitherto unwatched Karloff films from Eureka that have been sitting around for a while… like the last film, this is period gothic melodrama (apparently the last of a number of such films Universal made at that time) in which Karloff is second-billed for advertising purposes but actually only has a rather small role in which he is underused (though he’s not as wasted as Lon Chaney Jr, in his last Universal film, is as the mute heavy). Once again, it’s the other two male leads who get the stronger stuff, with Richard Greene as a British gentleman travelling incognito to the Black Forest in search of two missing friends, and Stephen McNally as the villainous Austrian count who has, you may not be surprised to learn, murdered the aforementioned missing men as revenge for an attack on him in an African expedition. Whew. Karloff’s a doctor again in this one, physician in service to one of the count’s associates, and to give him credit, he plays this small part like it were a lot bigger and makes the doctor kind of ambiguous for much of the film. This was supposed to be directed by Joseph Pevney like the last film was, but he huffed off when Universal wouldn’t let hin make script changes… accordingly, art director Nathan Juran got promoted to proper director two weeks before shooting began, and I think did a pretty fair job of disguising what appears to have been a slightly complicated production; the end result is a pretty good example of this sort of thing, and I’ve got a few more Juran films in the watchlist so we’ll see them eventually too. In the meantime, I shall rather miss uncle Boris, cos I’ve only been watching films with him for the whole month. Let’s see what comes next…
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