La jena: L'uomo di mezzanotte

Val Lewton has produced some of the most important horror classics of all time. His collaborations with the great Jacques Tourneur are the most noteworthy in his filmography, but some of the others are of note also. Like this one for example. The Body Snatcher is a psychological horror film, a study of guilt, and an expose on how people sometimes have to do bad things in order to do good, even though those bad deeds may well consume them. This is shown through the story of Wolfe MacFarlane, a doctor and teacher of medicine that employs cabbie John Gray to steal corpses from the local cemetery so that he can use them to show his students how to operate on a patient. However, this arrangement has put the cabbie/gravedigger in a position of power over the upper class doctor, and that is something that John Gray intends to capitalise on...

Boris Karloff stars as the grave digging John Gray, and does an absolutely excellent job with it. Karloff has to prove nothing to nobody after his portrayal of Frankenstein's monster, but his embodiment of exactly what you would expect a grave robbing, amoral lower class man to be like is right on cue. Fellow legend Bela Lugosi makes a welcome, if brief appearance also and the other lead role is taken by Henry Daniell. I haven't seen this man before...well, I didn't think I had - he's actually been in many well-respected classics including The Philadelphia Story and The Great Dictator. He does a great job as the lead; his performance bodes well with the film, and just like Karloff he's very believable in his role. The real star of the show, however, is the lush black and white cinematography which capture's the movie's many beautiful settings. Val Lewton has become famous for capturing this sort of atmosphere, and The Body Snatcher is one of the films that does it best.

The use of 'less is more' is right on cue in this film, and there is one sequence in particular involving Boris Karloff, a dark alley and a street singer that will be of particular note to film fans. In short; The Body Snatcher is a great horror film, and one that anyone who considers themselves a fan of great horror will not want to miss!