Three Inner Sanctums Make A Post: Read the fine print: you may have just mortgaged your life

Dead Man’s Eyes (1944): In this Inner Sanctum Mystery, Lon Chaney Jr. feels particularly sorry for himself after his artist character is accidentally blinded (which is the sort of thing that happens when your eyewash stands right next to your acid). That’s bad news for the audience, for the only thing standing between it and a dull yet melodramatic plot full of non-events that mostly aren’t shown by director Reginald Le Borg anyway is an extra helping of Chaney whimpering “I’m blind! I’m blind”, followed by Chaney shouting “I’m blind! I’m blind”, and other assertions of blindness. If you’re like me and find Chaney’s general tendency to regard whininess as the supreme thespian expression aggravating more often than not, Dead Man’s Eyes might just cause you paroxysms (“My brains! My brains!”) of annoyance.

Strange Confession (1945): Despite some – surprisingly – stylish direction by John Hoffman and an extra sleazy performance of J. Carrol Naish as the world’s sleaziest capitalist, this outing of Lon Chaney Jr., unluckiest man alive, isn’t very interesting. It fluctuates wildly between pretty tame melodrama, not very interesting mystery, and sub-Frank Capra gestures, without ever seeming to get to the actual point. Unless the point is to tell us that capitalists are evil bastards out to exploit even genius chemist Lon Chaney Jr., in which case I can only say “No shit, Sherlock”.

Pillow of Death (1945): This final Inner Sanctum mystery finds beleaguered Lon Chaney Jr. again having trouble with a murdered wife. An absurdly old-fashioned (for 1945) old dark house mystery ensues, fake séances are held by a psychic investigator called Julian Julian, and a guy who steals corpses and stalks the film’s heroine gets the girl in the end. The script of this thing is so crack-brained, it’s not difficult to imagine this to be a Monogram picture – nobody’s motives and actions ever have anything to do with each other, the film’s murder reveal tries and fails to get away with the old “he’s crazy, so it doesn’t need to make sense”, and things like attempted murders by gassing have no repercussions for the people involved whatsoever.

Because director Wallace Fox (him of Monogram’s magnum opus The Corpse Vanishes) does his job with visible enthusiasm expressed via random fast camera movements, and the script seems to be totally at one with its own idiocy, the resulting film is a very entertaining example of its type, the sort of thing I’d recommend to everyone who has seen all Monogram productions with Bela Lugosi and wants to see more of the same, just with Lonnie and a slightly higher budget. Which describes myself pretty well, actually. God be merciful on our souls.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,mystery,horror,melodrama,lon chaney jr,j. carrol naish,wallace fox,reginald le borg,john hoffman

In short: Calling Doctor Death (1943)

Popular neurologist Dr. Mark Steel (Lon Chaney Jr.) might have a wonderful career but when it comes to his private life, he’s a rather unlucky chap. His wife Maria (Ramsay Ames), you see, has only married him for his money and social position, and really likes to rub his nose in it too. Of course, she doesn’t agree to a divorce. It’s enough to make even somebody as exceedingly mild-mannered as Steel think about murder.

As luck will have it, Maria is found dead soon enough, hit with a blunt object and mutilated with acid. Curiously, it is the exact same weekend Maria is murdered when Steel has a nice little blackout followed by amnesia. Why, a neurologist might think there’s a bit of repression going on here! The investigating Inspector, a certain Gregg (J. Carrol Naish) is all too interested in Steel a suspect, even after Steel’s loving secretary, bookkeeper and nurse Stella (Patricia Morison) decides to give her boss an alibi. Gregg isn’t even happy after Maria’s lover Bob Duval (David Bruce) turns up, making just as nice a suspect as Steel himself.

Steel, stricken by feelings of guilt and hounded by the cop, isn’t happy with the situation either. Perhaps hypnosis will make things clearer to him?

I have already gone on record as not a great admirer of Lon Chaney Jr., despite his fine casting as Universal’s original wolfman. Turns out, I quite like his performances in the films based on the popular (and often excellent) Inner Sanctum Mysteries radio show. These films gave Chaney an unexpected opportunity to play characters a bit more suave than typical for him while, still providing enough room for his hangdog expression and general air of being hopelessly beaten before he even begins a fight. And because at that point in his life, he wasn’t quite the alcoholic wreck he’d become all too soon, Chaney actually made good use of the opportunity, turning out likeable and effective performances.

The first Inner Sanctum movie, Calling Dr. Death, is a case in point, with Chaney giving his successful doctor as someone it is difficult not to have sympathy with, while not overdoing the whole helplessness shtick. Cleverly, the script even makes a point out of the contrast between his abilities in his profession and his dire private life.

At its core, the film is of course a comparatively cheaply made programmer, a mystery more than bordering on the field of the noir with the plot and many of its elements (predatory women, amnesia, hypnosis) certainly belonging into the genre. One could, of course, argue Reginald Le Borg’s direction to be a bit too straightforward (with a handful of choice exceptions) for everyone’s favourite non-genre, and I wouldn’t even be able to disagree very much, but when a film’s every idea is this deep inside the well of a certain genre, I’m inclined to place it there as a whole.

Wobbly genre definitions aside, Calling Dr. Death is certainly a fine little film that may be rather obvious, but doesn’t outstay its welcome, and provides Chaney as well as J. Carrol Naish with opportunities to show themselves from their best sides. As an added bonus, there’s also a head in a crystal ball starting the film with a narration that has little to do with anything that comes after (and the same speech then was also used as an intro most of the following Inner Sanctum movies, with just as little connection to the actual films following it there).

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,noir,mystery,reginald le borg,lon chaney jr,patricia morison,j. carrol naish

House of Frankenstein (1944)

Mad scientist and Frankenstein fanboy Dr. Niemann (Boris Karloff) has been incarcerated for trying to put a human brain into a dog (or was it the other way round?) and has been in jail for fifteen years now. At least, prison life has brought him the acquaintance of a proper hunchbacked assistant, a certain Daniel (J. Carrol Naish), who'd do just about anything for any cackling madman promising him a new and improved body.

Really bad weather frees the duo from its imprisonment, and shortly thereafter they meet Professor Lampini (George Zucco) and his mobile chamber of horrors. As luck will have it, the good Professor drives around with the skeleton of Count Dracula (John Carradine), just waiting to lose its stake and come back to life again. When Lampini shows to be unsympathetic to a change of his travelling destination to somewhere convenient to Niemann, Daniel strangles the man and his master and he take over the chamber of horrors.

Niemann plans to use Dracula to take his revenge on the people responsible for his imprisonment, and surely, the friendly vampire does kill the first of Niemann's enemies for him. Alas, the poor bloodsucker doesn't survive the following coach chase (don't ask). At least our hero madmen escape.

Niemann's next stop is the beautiful village of Frankenstein, where he hopes to find the research notes of his idol. Before he and Daniel can visit the obligatory castle ruin, Daniel falls for "beautiful gypsy girl" Ilonka (Elena Verdugo), who is fastly added to the entourage. I'm sure this will end will.

Later at the castle ruin, Niemann fails at his spot hidden roll, though, and has to employ the help of Larry "The Wolfman" Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), who - like Frankenstein's monster - just happens to lie frozen in the ruins of Frankenstein's castle. For a promise of being freed from the werewolf curse, Larry is more than willing to show Niemann what he's looking for.

Afterwards, the merry band - now also including the unconscious monster, for no reason I could fathom - travels to Niemann's home lab, so that Larry can whine a lot and through his awesome power of whining about killing people instead of trying to actually keep himself from doing it, charm Ilonka, Daniel can get jealous and Niemann can plan the big brain switcheroo of '44 - something about putting the monster's brain in Talbot's body and putting Talbot's brain into some anti-climactically caught enemy of Niemann's. Of course, there will come torch-wielding villagers.

House of Frankenstein is the premier example of the late period of Universal Studio's classic monster films, when nobody behind the camera, and certainly nobody from the business side, cared about making watchable films anymore and instead threw any old crap together they thought they could get away with. The order of the day was to cynically milk the last pennies out of franchises none of the involved had ever cared about and an audience the studio obviously loathed.

Viewed from that perspective (and with knowledge of how dreadful most of Universal's genre films of the period were), it is a small wonder House of Frankenstein turned out as entertaining as it is.

The film's entertainment factor certainly has nothing at all to do with the terrible script by Edward T. Lowe Jr. Lowe just randomly throws all Universal horror clichés at the viewer as if the writer had never even heard of words like "character motivation" or "plotting". The script is episodic, sloppy, and makes less sense than the average Dardano Sacchetti script. Obviously, seeing the absence of even the simplest bit of artfulness, concepts like thematic unity between the episodes making up the film are right out. What is most disappointing here, though, is that there is no interaction between the monsters at all; it's strictly one monster after the other. You could think nobody responsible even realized having the monsters interact with each other would be rather fun. Instead, you get a monster meet-up in which the monsters don't meet.

On the plus side, the film is rather energetic and really throws a lot of stuff into little more than an hour of running time, so much of it in fact that some of it just has to be fun, at least for people who like the clichés of classical Universal horror.

I'm not too enamoured of Erle C. Kenton's direction either. Sure, Kenton wasn't the worst of Universal's directors at the time, which is to say that he sometimes accidentally manages to shoot an atmospheric scene, but compare his work here to Val Lewton's contemporary productions at RKO, and you'll see how little thought and care has been put into House of Frankenstein (don't compare the scripts, or you'll want to cry).

Where the people behind the camera don't give a toss, the actors step up to the occasion and do the only thing anyone could do given material like this. They start to chew the scenery with as much melodramatic vigour as possible. Well, at least Karloff and Naish - troopers that they are - do. Carradine doesn't have more than a guest role and just isn't Bela Lugosi (and therefore somewhat boring), while Chaney Jr. is hurt by the script's idiotic assumption that anyone watching will care about his character's plight or the "tragic" love triangle.

Still, having said all that, as a train wreck, House of Frankenstein can be a lot of fun, if a viewer can keep her love for those Universal films which were actually good (or even just passable) at bay. Watching it, I was swinging back and forth between two very different emotions. The first was sadness about what little respect the film showed for some of the early high points of US horror filmmaking that were among its predecessors. The second amusement about the campy excess of it all, something I would have found easier if this hadn't been a Universal film, but something thrown together by enthusiastic but misguided fans of the original films.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,reviews,boris karloff,lon chaney jr,j. carrol naish,john carradine

The Whistler (1944)

Earl Conrad (Richard Dix) has been suffering from a severe depression since his wife died in a maritime disaster. He feels so guilty for her death he just wants to die. Well, what better way to kill yourself can there be than hiring a professional killer to murder you?

Shortly after he has arranged the contract through a middleman, he learns that his wife isn't dead at all, but just in Japanese captivity and on her way to be shipped home. Conrad now desperately wants to live, but it's not that easy to call the hit off, for his middleman got himself shot by the police directly after the deal was perfect and the killer (J. Carrol Naish) is not of a very sound mind, either.

 

The Whistler is the first of six movies based on an Old Time Radio show. The titular character is just the narrator of the piece, although he still gets to do a little whistling.

It is also an early directorial work by William Castle, years before he perfected his matinee cinema formula. The film is another example that shows how underappreciated a director Castle was. His style lacks some of the more obvious flashiness other noir films showed, but Castle shows himself perfectly able to turn a rather pedestrian script and very bland work by his protagonist Richard Dix into a wonderfully effective little thriller. The rest of the cast (especially always dependable J. Carrol Naish as the psychotic killer) does a fine job to let the shady part of life during World War II come to life and the movie doesn't overstay its welcome with a running time of barely an hour.

Very much recommended to friends of suspense movies of the era.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,reviews,film noir,william castle,j. carrol naish

In short: Dr. Renault's Secret (1942)

Dr. Larry Forbes (Shepperd Strudwick - best name for the young male lead in a film of this kind I ever saw, to my chagrin billed as John Shepperd) has come to France to take his fiancé Madelon Renault (Lynne Roberts) back to the states with him to get married.

The first night he spends at an inn near the Renault's mansion, another traveling American is murdered there. The trouble is that the man was sleeping in a room that was supposed to be Larry's. It could be a coincidence, or someone could want to see Larry dead.

Dr. Renault (George Zucco) doesn't believe in such nonsense, but what would you expect from a man whose gardener is a convicted felon and whose servant Noel (J. Carrol Naish) is actually the product of Renault's experiments in transmutation - a gorilla who now is neither man nor beast?
Noel is completely infatuated with Madelon, which is no surprise since she is the only one who treats him with any decency; Dr. Renault being just too mad to be human in any way.

"Oh, who might be the killer?" he asked with a puzzled expression.

 

Dr. Renault's Secret was produced by Fox's b-division, compared to Poverty Row productions however it looks absolutely lavish. The script is technically a lot sounder than you'd see on Poverty Row, the higher budget does away with the need to stretch the running time with the help of much pointless dialogue. Instead, the film can afford something amounting to action.

Still, I can't help to think a Poverty Row film would be a lot more fun to watch. This movie's script might be comparatively tight, yet it is also lacking a certain amount of madness. That's the problem with solid craft - it seldom is as interesting as great craft or as surprising as amateur efforts can be.

The same can be said for Harry Lachman's direction. It's very competent but mostly lacking spark or fantasy.

The acting however makes the film worth watching anyway. Zucco is of course a wonderful mad scientist, even if his madness is a lot more low-key than we are used from him. The real star of the film is Naish who makes the ape-turned-man Noel a more tragic and much more believable character than he has any right to be. The apeman make-up here for once is rather effective as well, avoiding most of the silliness inherent in the concept.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,in short,george zucco,j. carroll naish,horror,mystery