The Horror!? 63: The Monster Maker (1944)

Dr. Igor Markoff is a man with many interests. He is a medical practitioner, dabbles a little in hypnosis, owns (I bet you never saw that one coming) a murderous gorilla with a terrible fear of dogs, is a distinguished expert for disturbances of the glandular system and tries to create a cure for acromegaly, when he is not trying out his own variant of the disease on unsuspecting lab animals. He also has a secret - he killed the real Dr. Markoff years ago in Europe. The original Markoff was the lover of fake-Markoff's wife, so obviously they both had to die. And what better way is there to kill one's spouse than to infect her with one's special brand of acromegaly?
Years later in America, Markoff attends a concert by the pianist Lawrence and soon recognizes in Lawrence's daughter Patricia the spitting image of his own wife. Obviously he has to possess her (and I use the word "possess" very deliberately). And what better way is there to win a woman's love than to first stalk her and later, after having been told off, to infect her father with one's favorite disease and try to blackmail her into marriage?
The Monster Maker is a passable PRC movie, relatively well acted (as in "everyone but the villain seems quite bland and disinterested, though not completely incompetent"), relatively tight (as in "the first half of the film actually moves along at a nice pace, while the second half drags considerably"), with a relatively complex, though also very unambitious villain (played relatively exciting by J. Carrol Naish) and a lot of interesting subtext. I am absolutely sure that director Sam Newfield (or Siegmund Neufeld, as he called his producer-self) didn't mean to create a commentary on the concept of women as possessions of men (aka objectification), but it is nonetheless hard not to interpret the film this way, seeing that Markoff knows absolutely nothing about Patricia as a person and first tries to blackmail only her father into letting her marry him, showing an extreme disinterest in the will of his future wife. The fact that she is finally rescued by her sick father and her incredibly jerky fiancé makes this reading even clearer.
So it's a (relatively) competent movie with some interesting aspects, although probably not a good starting point for viewers new to Poverty Row.


Darling of the Day (of course spoken by fiancé jerk):
"Funny people these foreigner!"