Month: April 2025

So, the logical next step after last night’s film, which as I said screenwriter Curt Siodmak kind of extended into his novel Donovan’s Brain, would be to watch an actual film version of said novel, wouldn’t it? Therefore I did precisely that tonight… for reasons best known to themselves, Republic decided to conceal it under this frankly kind of shit title that represents it poorly (albeit less so than the poster); fortunately the film itself was a lot better than the title might suggest. I first heard of it via Bill Everson‘s book on horror classics, where he’s very positive about this one, but ungallant at best towards its female lead, Vera Ralston… little Vera had originally been a figure skater in Czechslovakia who Republic chief Herbert Yates was kind of obsessed by and determined to make into a star; he did eventually make her Mrs Yates, but stardom never exactly happened. Ultimately she would be his undoing when the company’s stockholders booted Yates out of the business after making 20 films with her, of which supposedly only two were successes. Per IMDB, John Wayne refused to work with her because he didn’t want her poor strike rate to damage his own career, and this film’s director, George Sherman, supposedly quit Republic entirely rather than suffer through another production with her ever again. I’m going to make the bold statement that I didn’t think she was actually that bad; the accent was far less thick than I’d expected and she does OK for someone who had so little English she had to learn her lines phonetically. She is, still, outshone by Erich von Stroheim and Richard Arlen in the male lead roles, the former as the doctor who saves Donovan’s brain, the latter as the man the brain tries to take over. The plot is more complicated than it initially looks—ultimately Donovan tries to posthumously atone for framing his son for a murder he committed—and allowing the film a nearly 90-minute runtime rather than the hour and change most horror films of the time got allows it to breathe. I’ve said elsewhere that I’ve never thought the 1940s was exactly a great age for horror cinema, but this one shows how good the genre could be even then. Liked this a lot. Just… that title.

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…