Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942)

While Fox either didn’t manage to or didn’t want to secure the rights for further Holmes movies, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce deepened their footprints as the characters during a successful series of radio plays in the roles. So it makes a lot of sense that Universal studios, who eventually managed to make a deal with the Doyle estate, then went to that particular well and hired the men for their own cycle of Holmes movies.

These films weren’t given the full studio budget treatment of Fox’s Holmes films, however, but were strictly meant for the B slot of any given cinematic performance, leading to shorter and cheaper films made by the B-movie arm of Universal’s operation. On the plus side, Universal’s B arm did have better directors than the guys Fox put on their Holmes films.

As another, apparently still quite contentious in certain Holmes purist circles to this day, cost-cutting measure, the Universal films put Holmes into the present day, though a version of the present day that is drenched in shadows and fog more often than not. Because it was 1942, Universal also decided to start the films off as war propaganda. So this first outing finds Holmes thwarting a Lord Haw-Haw style Nazi radio propagandist who commands his spy minions to commit some rather spectacular (for the budget) acts of sabotage. Holmes ropes in the service of a thinly-coded prostitute (Evelyn Ankers) who convinces parts of the Underworld to do their patriotic duty with a really rather effective speech to counter the Nazi scum.

While the propagandist elements here can feel to be laid on rather thick (this certainly isn’t a Powell/Pressburger joint), I find myself rather taken with this aspect of the film. But then, if ever there was a reason for the people of Britain to be proudly patriotic, it was how they held out against Nazi Germany when the Americans here singing their praises were still twiddling their thumbs. And frankly, who else would you have Sherlock Holmes fight in 1942?

The film, directed by John Rawlins, is a nice little piece of pulpy entertainment, making moody use of Universal’s standing sets, and a script that’s just on the right side of overstuffed, with some cheap but cheerful action set-pieces, rousing speeches – Anker in particular really gives her all there – and a well-developed sense of the shadow-drenched mood I tend to hope for in Holmes media whenever it leaves the drawing room. The cast is fine, the villains dastardly, and I even didn’t mind the idiot version of Watson too much this time.

Son of Dracula (1943)

Warning: I’m going to spoil one major plot twist of this movie that’s not quite as old as my grandma!

Somewhere in the swampiest part of the US South. The Caldwell family is looking forward to a very special visitor, one Count Alucard (Lon Chaney Jr.). Apparently, “morbid” (actual quote) daughter Kay (Louise Allbritton) met that fascinating man with the oh so clever name while following her occult interests on her European tour. Kay’s long-time fiancée, Frank Stanley (Robert Paige) does fear the worst, though. Might his sweetheart not love him anymore and go for the aristocratic set now? Her mysterious pronouncements that he should trust her “whatever happens” is not the sort of thing to put a guy’s heart at ease.

The arrival of the Count does – of course – mark a bit of doom for the family. Kay’s pet witch – whom she imported and set up in the local swamp – has a fatal encounter with a bat, and soon after, Kay’s dear old dad dies rather mysteriously. As it happens, and to everyone’s surprise but Kay’s, the old man changed his will just shortly before his death. Unlike before, when the run-down family plantation and the family money were to be shared between Kay and her bland good girl sister Claire (Evelyn Ankers) equally, now the plantation goes to Kay alone and the rest of the fortune to Claire, who clearly has gotten the better deal, and reacts utterly confused by the whole affair. But Kay is surely going to marry Frank very soon now, and he’s got money, so things will be okay, right?

Family doctor Brewster (Frank Craven) is very suspicious about all that has happened these last few days, particularly since he actually figured out the good old Alucard/Dracula business right when he read the name, so he starts a campaign of sneaking around and various break-ins. And, boy, does he ever sneak around, probably because all that’s happening goes against every single one of his conservative ideas of propriety, whereas break-ins and attempts at breaking up romances that certainly are none of his business are a-okay as long as the guy committing them is a gentleman. He is, in a word, the Southern Patriarchy come to life. However, he doesn’t manage to hinder Kay from secretly marrying Dracula in the end.

The jilted ex-fiancée Frank for his part, never one to impress the viewer as a picture of mental stability, goes from whiny, to melodramatic, to creepy, to homicidal in very short order thanks to these events. When he tries to shoot Dracula, he seems to kill Kay instead. In truth, she is already one of the Undead.

The funny thing is, neither Dracula – who, by the way, isn’t the original Dracula but apparently really the titular son of or another relative - nor Frank have much of a clue about what’s actually going on. Kay, obviously a woman of strong opinions and a mind that can withstand the vampire mind whammy, has a plan of her own. Like a good femme fatale, she only marries Dracula Jr. for his immortality granting bite and plans to incite Frank to stake him for her, to then vampirize him and spend all eternity with the one guy less fit for such a thing than Dracula. I hope for her sake she’s lying about that last part to motivate Frank properly.

So yes, Robert Siodmak’s Son of Dracula is indeed a Southern Gothic noir movie about Dracula’s son finding his match in form of an awesome femme fatale. It is also actually as wonderful a film as that makes it sound. There’s nothing here on show of the jadedness Universal horror phase two very quickly succumbed too; this feels absolutely like a film made by people who wanted to make this specific movie, and for better reasons than just to cheaply satisfy an audience they didn’t particularly like.

I’ve read some internet grumbling about the casting of Lon Chaney Jr. as Dracula, which I do understand in theory. However, he is actually an excellent choice for the role and certainly is captured at a moment in his career when he could manage excellent performances when giving the right environment. One has to keep in mind, obviously, that he isn’t supposed to be Dracula, but another member of his line, and one, one can’t help but suspect who has his difficulties quite living up to his father’s particular talents while working the same job. Anyone seeing a parallel to anybody here? As a matter of fact, this Dracula is a bit of a fool in the end, but then, that’s the sort of thing Chaney was particularly good at portraying. He’s still a very dangerous and powerful fool, and while Chaney Jr.’s certainly not the picture of the suave vampire, there are a couple of scenes in which he presents a very convincing physical menace, using his height aggressively in a proto-Christopher Lee approach to vampirism that I found very effective.

The true and best villain of the piece is Allbritton’s Kay anyway, and the actress does some fine things presenting a woman with a plan in the body of an early born Southern goth, outmanoeuvring a guy who certainly is rather experienced at that sort of thing himself. It’s always refreshing to find a female character in a Universal horror film who is actually doing something. While it is a bit of a shame the main way for a woman to get into that sort of position was to become a villainess, yet Kay’s such a good villain – whose plan only fails because the man she chose as her helper is such an idiot – I wouldn’t want to exchange her for a heroine. It’s also not difficult to see why Kay turns to complicated masterplans and evil. The men around her are all absolutely horrible in a perfectly infuriating patriarchal way that more or less indirectly declares women like her who don’t fit into their picture of the world to be “morbid” or crazy, always think they know what’s best for them, and when in doubt, do whatever shitty thing they deem “necessary” to keep them down. It’s difficult, if not impossible to think that Siodmak didn’t construct the film this way on purpose, seeing that all male authority figures here are portrayed in ways that support this reading, while Frank is the archetype of the clingy, mentally unstable lover. Sure, things end with the patriarchal order restored, but I don’t think even a second that’s an ending the film would have had without the commercial and cultural pressures of its place and time.

However, even if a viewer isn’t interested in this sort of reading of the film, Son of Dracula is still something special. Siodmak, excellently assisted by the wonderfully creepy production design and sets and George Robinson’s camera that sits at the place where horror and noir intersect, makes a lot of the brilliant idea to set this Dracula movie (the first one after more than half a decade after the also very feminist Dracula’s Daughter) not in backlot Europe but a backlot South that’s just as creepily artificial as the European one, a macabre place of decay, dread and superstition. Southern gothic always shows parallels to the American idea of Europe being a comparable place, I believe, so it’s a perfect fit.

Siodmak holds the good-old-fashioned creepy atmosphere and sense of place throughout. Be it in the wonderful moment when Dracula glides upon the swamp waters to his lover, or in Kay’s visit to Frank in the prison, there’s a feel of the nightmare and the mythical to many scenes here.


Siodmak also avoids some typical Universal problems. The film is well-paced, without the too episodic feel that would dominate the monster mash phase of the studio’s horror output. There’s also no space wasted on comic relief. There’s some dark irony in certain of the situations on display, but otherwise, this is a film meant to make one shudder and think, not to make one laugh. Son of Dracula is very, very good at these things.

In short: Weird Woman (1944)

When Professor Norman Reed (Lon Chaney Jr.) returns from a research and book writing year somewhere in “jungles” of what I can only assume isn’t supposed to be Hawaii or Honolulu, even if the little we get to see of it in flashback suggest a really silly Hollywood version of one of these places, with his new wife Paula (Anne Gwynne), his star is on the rise. His book is a huge success, and he seems to be a shoe-in for the post of the department head of sociology. But are his actual achievements the reason for his success, or is it the magic Paula has brought with her from the island, and whose practice she hides from the unpleasantly rationalistic Norman? (Yes, I’m still a laissez-faire atheist and am perfectly alright with the people in my life having different beliefs than myself, Richard Dawkins and his ilk be damned, so Norman’s conniptions about Paula’s activities once he learns about them still make him look like a patronizing ass to me).

Be the working of magic as it may, his new fast-lane career is bound to make Norman some enemies. The worst of them is Illona Carr (Evelyn Ankers), the college librarian he once had a – seemingly quite public – “flirtation” with, and who learned of his marriage only when he and Paula arrived at the party she gave in honour of his return. Illona does her worst to drive Paula out and/or ruin Norman’s life, and given that people on that campus really fall for the most obvious attempts at manipulation, she just might succeed.

Usually, I don’t find it very difficult to separate movie adaptations of books that diverge heftily from their sources in my mind from the novels they don’t do justice to, and can try to appreciate them as their own entities.

In the case of this first adaptation of Fritz Leiber’s “Conjure Wife”, I find this approach a rather difficult one to take. Watching Weird Woman, I spent most of my time groaning about the changes to the book that devalue the supernatural content in a way which also turns a complex treatment of the connections between superstition and rationality, that is also doing ironic work on 40s concepts of marriage, the supposed differences between men and women, and campus politics, into a simple case of a morally and intellectually black and white thriller. Gone are the ambiguities of Leiber’s book, gone are some excellent moments of supernatural menace, and gone is much of the characterization, all to be replaced by a melodramatic thriller about campus politics that goes through a lot of plot beats of the novel while completely ignoring their meaning, simplifying everything for no reason apart from Universal’s mid-40s hatred of anything supernatural.

If I could get over my problems with these weaknesses, I would probably find something good to say about the film. At the very least, its preposterous melodramatic finale is a thing of perfection in its own little way, carried by performances of Ankers and a wildly, effectively, overacting Elizabeth Russell in tandem with blunt, yet wonderful, noir-expressionist editing and camera work. Director Reginald Le Borg does one of his finer jobs here anyway, providing Weird Woman with many a scene of shadowy moodiness, which makes it probably quite the effective film for anyone not as grumpy about Scott Darling’s adaptation of Leiber’s novel as I am. Of course that mood in the service of an actual supernatural tale would have been quite the thing.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,thriller,reginald le borg,lon chaney jr,anne gwynne,evelyn ankers

In short: The Frozen Ghost (1945)

Radio mentalist Alex Gregor aka Gregor the Great (Lon Chaney Jr.) suffers a breakdown when he thinks he has accidentally willed a drunken audience member to death. He breaks off all contact with his medium and girlfriend Maura (Evelyn Ankers), and doesn’t exactly act like the picture of mental health in other respects either.

His helpful agent and friend George Keene (Milburn Stone) has just the idea for a relaxing way for Alex to get his act back together. Why not move into the wax museum of Madame Valerie Monet (Tala Birell)? It will come as a complete surprise for everyone in the audience that things don’t go too well there for Alex. Ignoring the atmosphere of the place, there’s also the fact that the museum’s resident artist, former plastic surgeon Rudi Polden (Martin Kosleck), is a creepy eccentric who talks with his wax figures as if they were living human beings and hates Alex on sight, perhaps because Valerie’s niece Nina (Elena Verdugo) adores the man as if he were a singer in a boy band, or Frank Sinatra, to use a more timely comparison. As an additional problem, Valerie is very much in love with Alex, a feeling he doesn’t reciprocate.

When he friend-zones Valerie, the resulting scene ends with Valerie falling down (dead? unconscious? just very sleepy?), and Alex doing what he does best – running away. When he returns with George, his potential victim has disappeared, and the dumbest cop in town (Douglass Dumbrille) treats Alex as his main suspect in what can clearly only have been murder, right? Oh the mystery and excitement!

But seriously, Harold Young’s The Frozen Ghost, the fourth entry in Universal’s series of films branded after radio’s Inner Sanctum Mysteries – alas without excellent elements like the Creaking Door, or the cheesily cynical narrator - is a perfectly good time, if you’re not afraid of a mystery that is both obvious and just as preposterously constructed as it would have been in comparable Poverty Row movies. This being a Universal production, the production values are quite a bit higher than that of the poor relations, though, with some decently atmospheric sets (probably re-used from higher budget efforts), a director whose nickname isn’t “One-Shot”, and who consequently actually seems to have directed beyond shouting “cut!”, and acting that is at least decent, sometimes, like in the delightful scenery chewing of Martin Kosleck, decidedly enjoyable to watch.

Like the other Inner Sanctum movies, the film is also a showcase for the talents of Lon Chaney Jr., at this point in time credited without the “Jr.”, playing more suave and better dressed characters than you’d expect if you only know him as poor Larry Talbot or in his later incarnation of alcoholic wreck, in usually more convincing ways than you might fear. These films did of course know that what Chaney did best was reacting to pressure in ways even I’d call wimpy and milked that fact generally too much, but The Frozen Ghost at least isn’t overdoing it, and, like a few of the other Inner Sanctum films, also realizes the importance of giving Chaney’s characters some redeeming back bone when it is most needed. Despite their varying quality, the more of these films I see, the more respect I develop for Chaney as the kind of actor who actually could make something out of the things a script gave him, providing his characters with a dignity that made them worth rooting for because of their relatable weakness, or who at the very least gave it his best try.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,mystery,harold young,lon chaney jr,evelyn ankers,martin kosleck