A curious little movie that deserves to be better known. Based on "The Dark Tower," a play by George S. Kaufman and Alexander Woolcott, which was also the inspiration for the better-known "The Man With Two Faces," it shares little except for its title and the theme of hypnotism with the boilerplate melodrama by the two celebrated Algonquin Roundtable wits of the 1930s.
Well-acted,well-written, well-shot, and well-lit, this motion picture operates on two levels, both of them terrifying. Superficially, it's a neat horror film starring an excellent Herbert Lom as "Torg," a Peter Lorre-type -- a rather off-putting and unhappy gentleman from some Central European country who, while absolutely loathing people, can mesmerize them to do his bidding. Ingratiating himself into a rundown provincial traveling circus in a pre-war England -- think an anglicized "La Strada" -- he makes himself indispensable, turning around the fortunes of this one-lion show.
On another level, the circus can be interpreted as a metaphor for Nazi Germany, with the Lom character standing in for the master propagandist Dr. Josef Goebbels, sans a limp. Every utterance of his drives home this resemblance, as "Torg," morphs from just plain Torg to Mr. Torg to ... Doctor Torg, using his power "to cloud men's minds" to bully his way into a position of power. To draw attention to this subtext, the circus parade features a platoon of uniformed blondes marching with arms extended (are they Sieg Heiling?), and a Col. Blimpish ringmaster who could be a stand-in for Field Marshal von Hindenburg.
This secondary theme isn't all that obvious,and perhaps it may not even exist (as Sigmund Freud himself said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar) but for one viewer it does lift this 1943 movie out of the realm of still another film of fright and frisson and instead, with its unspoken chilling and sinister message, places it in Hell.
