Month: October 2025

Finishing off the Karloff at Columbia set, therefore, with the satyr play after the serious business, to use a thoroughly overblown analogy… having made a string of straight SF/horrors, Karloff’s next film nearly two years later (during which time he was treading the boards in the original Arsenic and Old Lace) was a kind of parody of those films; with it being wartime by now, Karloff’s working on a race of supermen with which to fight the Nazis, and doing it from the basement of an 18th century tavern in the process of being sold and restored. Peter Lorre is the town sheriff (and everything else) investigating Karloff’s activities, but soon decides to get involved himself. But is murder afoot? Well, the ghost of a fictional character seems to be… This is thoroughly delightful stuff, possibly the most purely fun thing in this whole set, and probably a lot better than it had any right to be. The real star of the show, of course, is Lorre’s crime-detecting kitten, though obviously both Karloff and Lorre are having the time of their lives; notably, this film has probably the best nice young romantic couple of the series (the others mostly having been comparatively minor), being (Miss) Jeff Donnell and Larry Parks (speaking yet again of blacklist victims), the former as the new owner of the old inn and the latter as her ex-husband who gets suckered into assisting with her perhaps mad scheme to make the old tavern new and viable again. And former boxer Max Rosenbloom plays the sort of charming thickhead I gather he specialised in playing after boxing ended for him, as the powder puff salesman who gets involved with Karloff and Lorre for the apparent hell of it. The reminders that the US had finally deigned to join in a certain war are laid on a bit thick, and you can definitely accuse the plotting of being a bit loose, but there’s just something winning about the whole thing. Enjoyed this greatly.

This one immediately feels different to the three others we’ve seen so far; for one thing, it’s directed not by Nick Grinde but by Edward Dmytryk, for whom this was an early directorial effort before the Hollywood Ten unpleasantness and his subsequent ratting to HUAC… Also there’s a scene-setting narration that you don’t get in the others, and this one’s adapted from a novel by William Sloane, The Edge of Running Water; this is a book for which I actually have some fondness, and it has, perhaps inevitably, been somewhat bastardised for Hollywood B-movie purposes. And the other difference is that Karloff may not be entirely in charge of the mad science going on here… Dr. Blair is working on gear that will not only record people’s brainwaves, but it turns out it might just be able to communicate with the dead. He attracts the interest and cooperation of a fake spiritualist, played by Anne Revere (talking of the blacklist), who’s kind of the titular devil cos she gets even more interested in the power possibilities of this equipment and really drives Blair to work on it. The problem is, well, talking to the dead somehow requires actually dead people to drive the equipment, and that eventually draws outside attention… I don’t think this is quite as good as Everson says in his book (nor quite as visually threadbare as his pissing and moaning about Dmytryk overusing darkness and shadows might make you think), but it certainly is a good one; great basic idea, amazing pseudoscience (the scene where the housekeeper breaks into the lab and inadvertently sets the equipment off is a damned good one), Karloff is obviously fine and Revere is probably the best secondary performer in this whole series. Plus I think it’s quite bold to actually leave the end a little obscure, rather than explicitly rationalise what happens to Blair at the end; I think trying to actually show whatever he summons forth and what it perhaps does to him would’ve been unwise (and probably beyond Harry Cohn’s famous budgetary tight-fistedness), and suggesting something bleak for the viewer to imagine was a better idea.

Continuing with the Karloff at Columbia series, Karloff’s been working on a “cure” for old age, but in the course of doing so he’s managed to kill someone (much like in the first film). This time, however, he manages to dodge the death sentence, and he perfects his age-reversing serum… but, in a Hands of Orlac-esque twist (or “blood of Orlac” at any rate?), the serum uses the blood of an executed murderer, which provides an obvious complication. This one’s my least favourite so far of Karloff’s “mad doctor” films (the doctor being not especially mad in this one); apparently the original title was The Wizard of Death which I think I like more cos it makes more sense, really. Think the main problem is that I just didn’t buy the film’s basic situation, i.e. that the doctor gets to actually continue his work in jail, first while on death row and then after he commuted to life before being pardoned (this latter part struck me as a particularly unlikely detail). Director Nick Grinde dresses it up again in some nice, effective shadows, but generally I felt it lacking a bit of overall energy. Still, obviously good to have Karloff leading things, and nice also to have Edward Van Sloan on board too.