The Devil-Doll (1936)

Scientist Marcel (Henry B. Walthall) and his prison buddy Paul Lavond (Lionel Barrymore) manage to escape from the famed Devil’s Island. They make their way to the research hut where Marcel’s by now batshit insane wife Malita (Rafeaela Ottiano) has been continuing his research work for a decade or so. Marcel, you see, is worried about the future of an ever-growing humanity in a world with finite resources. His solution to the problem is obvious: develop a method to shrink down organic life, and food problems for the now tiny human population will shrink as well. One hopes he’s also planning to create an particularly effective insecticide.

And wouldn’t you know it, while Marcel was imprisoned, he had quite a bit of thinking time and found the solution that will actually make his idea work. He just manages to finish up with his work before he dies from the consequences of his dramatic flight, leaving Lavond and Malita to deepen and finish his research. Lavond has his own ideas about how to go about this, for he has reasons to seek revenge. Lavond was sent to prison for a crime he didn’t commit, framed by his business partners, leaving him in prison, his wife soon dead of the financial and social strain following his conviction, and his daughter Lorraine (Maureen O’Sullivan) embittered and sad. Lavond’s goal isn’t just revenge, it’s also to clear his name and secure a future for Lorraine.

All of which he might just manage to achieve with the help of two servants turned into mind-controlled doll people and quite a bit of cross-dressing.

For yes, Lionel Barrymore does indeed spend large parts of the film cross-dressing as an old lady, in a move that must have been pretty transgressive for its time and certainly fits well into director Tod Browning’s love for shaking up the squares in his audience (whenever the studios let him). However, neither Browning nor Barrymore treat this element of the film as particular out there, instead using it in a matter of course way that’s pretty refreshing and effective. It’s still weird, mind you, but only in that particular way that belongs to films taking place in a heightened reality where going undercover as old ladies is just what revenge seeking men do. One can’t help but think that Lavond would have quite a bit to talk about with a certain French fake hunchback.

Particularly Barrymore’s performance is lovely, never playing the cross-dressing for humour, nor showing the discomfort in his body language you get from a lot of actors getting into drag. He is also finding a wonderful balance between portraying Lavond as your typical horror movie maniac and a sad, old man who lost everything he loved for no fault of his own. The script (in theory based on Abraham Merritt’s “Burn Witch Burn” but in reality only taking a couple of ideas and names from it) by Browning, Guy “Werewolf of Paris” Endore, Garrett Fort and Erich von Stroheim(!) provides him with ample opportunity to make his character rather more complex than is typical in this sort of thing, too, adding a sadness to the character that feels well-earned. And how many horror movies do you know in which the man seeking revenge in somewhat unnatural ways also helps his daughter’s romance along, even if it is to an ambitious taxi driver with the rather unfortunate name of Toto.


For a film made in the mid 1930’s the special effects are very effective too, Browning using a combination of back projection,  larger-than-life sets and clever camera angles to make the “devil dolls” rather believable, often even a little creepy, and generally bizarre. There’s also a lovely sense of macabre creativity on display, with excellent flourishes like the final doll being delivered as a Christmas ornament to its victim. Which, in combination with the surprisingly friendly, yet not undeservedly so, ending, also turns this into an early example of the Christmas horror movie, now that I think about it.