When Jean Thatcher (Irene Ware) is dangerously hurt in a car accident, her father Judge "I don't need no stinking first name" Thatcher (Samuel S. Hinds) turns to the only man who seems capable to successfully operate on Jean for help. Dr. Richard Vollin (Bela Lugosi) is a retired physician with a Poe obsession and the rather unpleasant self-interpretation of "Nietzschean superman", yet he is also a (self-)certified genius.
Vollin saves Jean's life without breaking a sweat, but one look at his patient also has him falling madly in love with her.
When she is alright again, Vollin and Jean start socializing. The young woman even seems to take a shine to the good Doctor, a fact that highly displeases the Judge. After all, she is already eloped to one of the non-entities one is eloped to in films like this (Lester Matthews).´
Obviously, instead of impressing onto his daughter the importance of thinking about which man she actually wants and letting her do the sorting out herself (or, good Lord!, just letting her be), the Judge has a little talk with Vollin, starting from the assumption that a man like Vollin would of course never be drawn to someone like his daughter (ah, the respect), and even if he did would never act upon it when it displeases her father. Vollin is rather displeased with the Judge's position himself, even more so because all this love business isn't good for his superior brain.
Surprisingly, the good doctor's command to "Send her to me!" doesn't endear him to Judge Thatcher, and the whole civilized talk business just ends with him growing murderously mad and the judge getting into a (this time understandable) hissy fit.
Obviously, a mad genius like Vollin is not going to take this lying down. But how to avenge himself? Fortunately, soon after this discussion, a solution to Vollin's problem in form of the escaped killer Edmond Bateman (Boris Karloff) stumbles into Vollin's mansion. He wants Vollin to change the appearance of his face, not just to escape the attention of the police, but to become a better person by being prettier. Vollin agrees to operate Bateman.
Alas, instead of the Valentino look Bateman was probably hoping for, Vollin (who has a slight disposition towards sadism, I must say) rather goes for Karloff in Frankenstein. This is not only bound to make Bateman more evil, it is also a nice basis to press the man into helping Vollin get his revenge.
Now it's just a question of inviting everyone Vollin wants to see dead (who knows for what reason in the case of half of them) to a little party over the weekend and acquainting them with the beauty of one's home built torture devices and very special home improvements - after a little (very very dumb) philosophizing about Poe, love and torture.
The Raven is one of the lesser known Universal horror films, a forerunner of the trend of picking the title of a random Poe story or poem to then not follow the plot of one's source in the least. It's a perfectly fine way to go about it, of course, as long as the resulting film is as entertaining as this one.
Films like this and its brethren always rise (or fall) with the enthusiasm of their villains, since nobody in the 30s or 40s ever bothered to make the supposed heroes and heroines of a film even remotely interesting or likeable. So it should come as no surprise that it is rather difficult to have much empathy with the Judge, the fiancee who acts like the heroine's daddy or the additional random annoying people Bela wants to kill. Jean herself is a little more open-minded than your typical heroine (which means that she at least apologizes when she treats the disfigured Karloff shabbily), but the rest of them is of no further interest at all. What exactly does it say about the morals of a culture when its theoretically ideal embodiments press the viewer into adopting a torturing maniac as his hero?
Be that as it may, Lugosi and Karloff are both in excellent form here, carrying the film despite a rather dumb script (that takes itself to be quite clever, I'm afraid), bland direction and wretched co-stars right into the realm of unfairly ignored films.
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