Month: February 2025

By this point in Universal’s history, Carl Laemmle and his faemmle had lost control of the studio and the new owners (including the legendary J. Arthur Rank, who was trying to expand his own business into the US) were slashing budgets. But, after the post-Production Code horror slump of the mid-30s, horror had come back onto the menu; for Man-Made Monster, the studio dusted off an old script originally intended for Lugosi and Karloff but which was deemed too similar to The Invisible Ray, and so it was handed over to one up and coming player of mostly lesser roles in lesser films (Creighton Chaney, better known as Lon Chaney Jr.) and one who was more experienced in horror and whose career was about to hit the legal skids (Lionel Atwill). What we have is a man who survives a fatal accident involving a bus colliding with an electrical pylon; Dan McCormick is a carnival performer who has somehow developed an “immunity” to electricity. This obviously attracts the interest of many people, particularly somewhat mad scientist Dr. Rigas, who suddenly has a test subject for his experiments with electricity and life. The end result is an almost ruthlessly efficient B film, costing less than $90,000 and running just a few seconds under an hour, but it generally feels pretty well-proportioned and paced; quite handsomely filmed and generally made with care, and Lionel Atwill makes the most of his part (particularly the climactic lab scene). The real beneficiaries of the film, though, were Chaney and director George Waggner; though the film wasn’t a mega hit, Universal brass were happy enough with the film to team them up again on The Wolf Man in 1941 (and give Waggner twice as much money to make it with). As the film’s Wiki page notes, though, perhaps the most fascinating outcome of the whole project was that it eventually helped lead to the formation of American International Pictures…

Tiffany Productions is usually considered part of the “Poverty Row” mob, turning out B films and programmers, but if so it was one that had at least some pretensions to move into the bigger leagues; they had their first part-talkie out in 1928 before almost any other non-major Hollywood studio, and then they made this, not only an all-talkie but a colour one at that. Astonishingly, they also apparently planned to make it in 3D as well, though that ultimately proved a step too far for Tiffany, which would go through quite remarkable hell on Mamba, with the budget blowing out to half a million dollars (about five times their usual) and a certain stock market crash occurring right in the middle of production. Still, once it was all over, Tiffany had the world’s first all talking and all-colour dramatic film (its handful of predecessors had all been musicals).

That seems to be the main reason Mamba is still remembered now, and all things being equal its continued existence and rediscovery—here in Australia, remarkably enough—is probably down to that too. In and of itself, the film offers some kind of creaky melodrama, set in a town on the border of German East Africa and the British East Africa Protectorate just before the outbreak of a certain world war in the last third of the film. The titular character is a scuzzy but rich German landowner, August Bolte, loathed by the natives and the German military stationed at Neu Posen; money can’t buy him respect though it does buy him marriage into German aristocracy, but when war breaks out his money’s not going to get him out of that. All of this culminates in a pretty remarkable climax when the natives use the outbreak of the war, and the distraction this causes the German and British soldiers, to rise up and try to wipe them out.

So yeah, very much of its time (especially when it comes to racial attitudes) and inescapably an early talkie albeit not quite as stiff as some (and some surprising violence; the Production Code would soon put an end to such overt bloodshed); a lot of the film is actually shot outdoors which you didn’t often get with early Technicolor productions, and apparently some of the outdoor sets built at Universal are still in use nearly 100 years later. I don’t think Mamba is exactly a rediscovered masterpiece but I’m still happy that it’s back among the living after decades of absence. Plus the blu ray offers a nice commentary by Brian Trenchard-Smith, of all people, which among other things handily points out the film’s numerous Code violations (like the miscegenation subplot) that give it extra flavour…