The Raven (1935)

Dr Richard Vollin (Bela Lugosi) is an interesting guy: a surgeon of genius, he has now retired to his mansion to do probably nasty experiments in a hidden lab. A great admirer of Poe, he also spends his free time quoting the man and spouting some highly dubious ideas about Great Men and the Torture of Love (caps most certainly his). It’ll come as no surprise to anyone that Vollin has also tricked out his house as a death trap with various mechanical torture devices – some of them inspired by Poe, of course.

When Judge Thatcher (Samuel S. Hinds) convinces Vollin to return to the operating room to save his daughter, professional dancer Jean (Irene Ware), Vollin falls madly (well, he does everything madly) in love with the much younger woman. She seems to develop something of a crush on the man too, so much so she’s even including an interpretative dance number of Poe’s “The Raven” in her program. Too bad she’s already engaged to be married to the intensely boring Dr Holden (Lester Matthews). Seeing the situation before anybody else involved, the Judge tries to warn Vollin off Jean, but only causes the man to lose it completely.

Now officially tortured by love™, Vollin presses the criminal Edmond Bateman (Boris Karloff) into his services by first doing some very evil work on his facial nerves and promising to make it all better if he behaves. It’s all part of Vollin’ genius plan to take his vengeance on the Judge, Holden and Jean. Finally, his death trap mansion can get a real workout.

This is clearly an attempt by Universal to repeat some of the magic of Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat, again putting Lugosi and Karloff into a tale full of torture and cruelty (some of it of course only implied) and quite a bit of perversity.

That it isn’t the classic the Ulmer film turned out to be is at least in part caused by the decision to let go of most visual tropes of expressionism, and instead aim for a visually naturalistic approach that’s much more Warner than Universal, and so results in a film that never looks and feels like anything coming out of Universal. Lew Landers (then still working as Louis Friedlander) is a great choice for this approach, though, and provides the material with quite a bit of pulpy energy, presenting the tale with a snappiness very atypical of Universal’s approach to horror, and lighting starkly was is usually hidden by shadows.

The script is, as was usual with Universal, a bit of a mess that leaves many a question open: why, for example, is Vollin taking so much effort with getting Bateman on board supposedly to have him do what he cannot do when he wants to get off freely after his “revenge”, when all he then does with Bateman is use him as his in-house murder assistant?

Logic is of course beside the point here: in truth, the point of the movie is to try and get away with implying as much gruesomeness as it can get away with (which is rather a lot), and to provide Lugosi and Karloff with proper horror movie star roles. That, it does very well indeed.

Karloff does get the more sympathetic role here, starting out as your typical working class murderer (with some bad phrenological nonsense thrown in), getting a pretty Frankenstein’s creature-like make-over (because that’s what sells tickets), and eventually sacrificing himself to save the day. Karloff makes this work rather well, giving a genuine likeability and sadness to a guy who really only wanted to be left alone somewhere.

Lugosi, on the other hand, is allowed to go all kinds of crazy, spouting line after line of impressive portentous nonsense, including all sorts of Great Men as the Übermensch business. His performance of all this is gleefully sadistic, with some of the best moments of evil gloating in his career when he shows Bateman his new, “improved” face in a room completely surrounded by mirrors. Vollin, as he plays him, is the kind of man who builds his own tower of bad theories so he can justify all of his sadistic impulses to himself (while blaming love). It’s pretty fantastic, really, as is the film, at least when you don’t go into it expecting The Raven II.