Monster March II: The Batman vs. Dracula (2005)

Leave it to The Cinema King to find a way to work Batman into a month of monster movies. But for so very many reasons, how could we not review The Batman vs. Dracula? It’s got everything I love, with a perfect tie-in for October and an even more perfect excuse for me to check out one of the last corners of Gotham City I haven’t yet visited.

 

When The Penguin (Tom Kenny) and The Joker (Kevin Michael Richardson) break out of Arkham Asylum, their quest for loot leads The Penguin into a desolate Gotham crypt, where he accidentally reawakens the long-dead Count Dracula (Peter Stormare). But there’s only room for one bat-man in Gotham, as Bruce Wayne (Rino Romano) learns when he meets his latest supernatural foe.

 

It may surprise you to learn that I’ve never seen an episode of The Batman (2004-2008), the animated series to which The Batman vs. Dracula belongs. It was made just when I was phasing out of comics and ended just before I jumped back in, and I’ve never quite gotten used to the character designs, which look like inexpensive Saturday morning cartoons compared to Batman: The Animated Series (which, you’ll recall, is much more my jam). It ran for five years and sixty-five episodes, which is a significant investment of time for a project I’m not sure cuts the mustard for me.

 

After watching The Batman vs. Dracula, I’m still not sure if it’s “my” Gotham, per se, but I’m a little more intrigued after having dipped my toe. Still, The Batman vs. Dracula isn’t a new classic in the Gotham canon, a la Mask of the Phantasm or even Batman: Under the Red Hood. It’s perfectly serviceable but a little more shallow than some of my favorite Batman stories. It does exactly what it says on the tin – Batman does indeed fight Dracula – but it does so without the sophistication that might come of pitting two children of the night against each other. Indeed, the script feels very much like what might happen if you gave action figures of Batman and Dracula to a child: simple and straightforward, with a certain charm in its innocuous lack of depth.

 

Even before we meet Dracula, for example, when Bruce Wayne announces that he’s working on a device that will process solar energy, he may as well call it the deus ex machina, since we know it’s going to come up in the third act. Penguin, meanwhile, is relegated to the Renfield role without really doing much of anything else in the film; it’s perhaps just as well, since this Penguin seems to have the mentality of a twelve-year-old, with a scatological sense of humor to match. The Batman’s Joker is an interesting ragdoll of a man, with a husky voice and a colossal mop of green hair; while this isn’t the Joker I’d have written, it’s an intriguing and perfectly valid take on the villain, and Richardson captures that manic energy that makes the Clown Prince so compelling.

 

Then there’s our titular antagonist, and it’s hard to imagine better casting than Peter Stormare as Count Dracula. Stormare’s voice isn’t always recognizable – which is a shame, given how distinctive his line-readings can be (cf., The Big Lebowski, Seinfeld’s “The Frogger”) – but he’s clearly relishing the role, turning every line into a deep-throated snarl. The character is undercooked, only a surface-level interpretation of Stoker’s original, though perhaps anything would pale in comparison to Lugosi or Oldman. Stormare might have fared better in a longer theatrical release; as it is, direct-to-video animation doesn’t give this Dracula ample room to spread his wings. 

 

I’ve said almost nothing about Rino Romano’s Batman, but then again I grew up with Kevin Conroy, and there are very few who can hold a candle to his Dark Knight. Romano (no relation, apparently, to Andrea Romano, who assembled the voice cast that included Conroy) is evidently playing a younger Batman, and the script seems to lean into his inexperience. He assumes, for one, that Joker’s death in the opening sequence is permanent, but then again, the city later assumes Batman has gone rogue based on the word of only one less-than-credible witness. Perhaps this is overall a younger Gotham than I realized? Then again, Romano’s Batman simply isn’t as vocally distinctive as some of his Bat-counterparts, though I may feel differently after watching more of the cartoon.

 

All told, The Batman vs. Dracula is not a great Batman movie, nor is it a great Dracula movie. I can’t imagine it being of much interest to anyone beyond the most ardent aficionados of either franchise. It’s serviceable and inoffensive, and it is transparently a product of its time, a particular era of Saturday morning cartoon that is hard to describe if you didn’t live through it. Its soundtrack, full of wailing electric guitars, makes it feel as much like an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as anything else, and at least for this reviewer that’s not a tremendous compliment. 

 

The Batman vs. Dracula is not rated. Directed by Michael Goguen. Written by Duane Capizzi. Starring Rino Romano, Peter Stormare, Tara Strong, Tom Kenny, Kevin Michael Richardson, and Alastair Duncan.

Greenstreet/Lorre: The Verdict (1946)

We’ve come to the end of June, with five films starring Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, and if we’ve learned anything, it’s this – the whole of the Greenstreet/Lorre partnership is truly greater than the sum of its parts. Aside from The Maltese Falcon (and excepting Casablanca, in which they share no scenes), it’s safe to say that Lorre and Greenstreet cement their reputations in spite of, not because of, the films they headlined together. When you think of these two, you’ll sooner think of the net effect of their personae than of any one film of theirs. Case in point: The Verdict, which is neither very engaging nor is it generous toward its stars, who more often than not seem bored with the whole affair.

Sydney Greenstreet stars as George Edward Grodman, late of Scotland Yard but dismissed when an innocent man is hanged after his alibi arrives too late for the courts. Grodman slinks into ignominious retirement across the street from his best friend, the artist Victor Emmric (Peter Lorre). But when a locked-door murder mystery confounds Grodman’s replacement (George Coulouris), Grodman and Emmric find the opportunity to clear the former superintendent’s name while putting the new inspector in his place.

 

Locked-door mysteries are always a treat, and I will say that the solution in The Verdict is ingenious – inherently unsolvable, yes, but a clever trick. It’s a bit of a cheat on the audience (who may or may not predict the ending simply by random supposition among the suspects), but without spoiling I’ll say that The Verdict did keep me guessing until the mystery was solved, as Aristotle would want it, in a manner that was both surprising and inevitable. But it’s that surprise element that nags at me, leading me to believe that the film’s relative disinterest in follow-along sleuthing might better position The Verdict as Victorian noir rather than as a Victorian detective story. Poirot, this ain’t.

 

Greenstreet’s Grodman is the quintessential down-on-his-luck gumshoe, aiming to clear his name by solving One Last Case. The Verdict is very nearly worth the price of admission for Greenstreet’s sideburns, which are almost as large as he is. But something in Greenstreet’s performance seems lackadaisical, not quite sleepwalking but certainly drowsy and a bit disinterested. There’s something of that attitude intrinsic to the character, who is worn out and loathing retirement; like some aspiring writers, he dreads the prospect of composing and of finishing his book. However, that ennui doesn’t quite connect with the audience in the way of, say, Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep. More often than not, Greensteet seems only to need a nap.

 

Lorre, too, plays a bit more droopy-eyed than usual. Compared to his more dynamic writer in The Mask of Dimitrios, this artist seems disaffected, animated only by the prospect of helping his friend get revenge of a sort on the man who edged him out of Scotland Yard. Though he is an artist by trade, he too spends little time on his craft, apparently welcoming the distraction. Lorre’s best scene is one of the last in the film, in which it appears he’s about to confess to the film’s central murder. He doesn’t, alas, one of the film’s many red herrings, but Lorre sells the very intimation of a confession with his guilty behavior and stooped posture. When he tells Grodman how tired he is, you don’t just believe him – you feel it. 

 

What I didn’t feel during the film, however, was captivated. I found myself wishing I were watching The Maltese Falcon instead, reminding myself of just how fully good Lorre and Greenstreet could be. Often the still images of the pair are fodder for my wild imagination, while the films themselves never quite live up to the productions in my own head. I suppose that’s partially my fault, especially since Peter Lorre is my all-time favorite actor; having seen how good he can be, I tend to imagine that his vehicles are always as engaging as, say, Arsenic and Old Lace or Mad Love. Similarly, Greenstreet can make a meal of a monologue, but it seems that the five films this month were content simply to rest on his reputation without giving him much opportunity to spread his ample wings and do something astonishing.

 

Theirs was an archetypal camaraderie, a Laurel & Hardy for the graveyard crowd. It’s sublimely grotesque when Greenstreet supervises the exhumation of a corpse in The Verdict, with Lorre peering over his shoulder to declare, “I have always had a suppressed desire to see a grave opened... especially at night.” It’s a line so creepy that you might expect it to have come from a Lorre impersonator, but to their credit Lorre and Greenstreet always knew their lanes, never afraid to play to their strengths and embrace the risk of caricature. Indeed, their cameo in Hollywood Canteen, a brief sequence in which they play themselves, is unmissable for its laser-focused blend of menace and mischief. Sometimes, just the idea of them is enough.

 

It’s certainly been enough to get me through this month. Even though the films themselves may not be classics, it’s impossible to imagine any fan of either actor not seeking these flicks out at one point or another. At an impressionable age, I pored over The Films of Peter Lorre with obsessive devotion, repeatedly renting it from the library to the point that I’m surprised the librarians didn’t just give me the book. I knew these two actors were capable of greatness, and we’ve proven as much over the past five weeks. But I also imagined what it would be like to see more great films with Lorre and Greenstreet. After this month, I suppose I’m still imagining.

 

The Verdict is not rated. Directed by Don Siegel. Written by Peter Milne. Based on the novel The Big Bow Mystery by Israel Zangwill. Starring Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Joan Lorring, George Coulouris, and Rosalind Ivan.

Greenstreet/Lorre: Three Strangers (1946)

After a few weeks of Casablanca knockoffs, it’s refreshing to arrive at Three Strangers and find that it is instead an off-brand version of The Maltese Falcon, with three unsavory characters who find their lives changed by their obsession with a bronze statue. Aside from the headlining duo of Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, Three Strangers has a number of other tangential connections to The Maltese Falcon, but it’s ultimately a pale imitation of a greater film with good performances nonetheless from the usual suspects.

Crystal Shackleford (Geraldine Fitzgerald) invites two strangers to her apartment with an unlikely offer: her bronze statue of the goddess Kwan Yin will grant them all one wish at the stroke of midnight. The three strangers pool their resources on a sweepstakes ticket; charismatic drunk Johnny West (Peter Lorre) is charmed by the idea, but solicitor Jerome Arbutny (Sydney Greenstreet) is doubtful that he’ll see any money out of the affair. When the three part, their personal lives begin to crumble, but the looming promise of their joint ticket is never far from their minds.

 

Three Strangers is never quite a Maltese Falcon remake, though the connections are surprisingly myriad. You have the cast, yes, and the fixation with a mysterious statue, but you also have a screenplay co-written by John Huston. Director Jean Negulesco (who also helmed last week’s Mask of Dimitrios) had done some preproduction work on The Maltese Falcon before Huston claimed the project, while Geraldine Fitzgerald was an early contender for the Falcon role that eventually went to Mary Astor. Meanwhile, Three Strangers very nearly starred Humphrey Bogart in the Peter Lorre role, but Bogart was committed to The Big Sleep. Perhaps it’s just a big game of “six degrees on the Warner lot,” but it seems there is an unnatural tether between Three Strangers and its more perfect antecedent.

 

The greatest challenge in Three Strangers is that the three strangers spend most of the film estranged from one another. That is, aside from the opening and closing sequences, Greenstreet and Fitzgerald and Lorre never interact, which is both surprising and disappointing. One might expect, for example, that the strangers might find themselves in actuality tied to one another – particularly since one is a solicitor and another becomes involved in a murder trial. Instead, the plots branch off and never meet until the very ending scene at Crystal’s apartment, and consequently there are large sections of the movie that just aren’t very interesting. As has been the case all month, the few moments between Greenstreet and Lorre are so engaging that you’ll wish the whole movie had been made up of them. Apologies to Bogart, but they are the stuff dreams are made of.

 

Three Strangers is almost like watching three separate films that only tie together at the very end. Geraldine Fitzgerald’s subplot starts off with a bombshell but smolders away until nothing quite happens. Sydney Greenstreet gets the unusual opportunity to play a man driven mad by ambition and shortsighted greed; for a performer usually known as the coolest cat in the room, Greenstreet is clearly reveling in the opportunity to mug for the camera. But it’s Lorre who is the most dynamic actor in the film; he too gets to play against type, here headlining as the ostensible romantic lead of Three Strangers. Lorre is eminently charming as Johnny West, just about the only truly sympathetic character the film has, and Lorre plays him like an empathetic and decidedly less psychotic Raskolnikov, a likeable sort who may or may not have simply fallen in with the wrong crowd.

 

I wonder if Three Strangers would fare better on rewatch, since my principal objection to the film seems to be that it wasn’t the film I was expecting. Negulesco is highly competent, and there are some sequences that are undeniably arresting in their tension. Huston, meanwhile, is a gifted storyteller, and he makes his point quite eloquently that human life is a combination of chance and choice. Huston’s message seems to border on nihilism, but one senses also a strong moral compass in the film; the thieves and the philanderers get what’s coming to them, while the innocent get put through the wringer but emerge with a clearer sense of what truly matters in life.

 

It's only a shame that Three Strangers gets really good right at the end, but then I suspect that most audiences will remember that moment, the moment when the film goes from a slice-of-life to a Twilight Zone episode. It’s the kind of poetic justice that Rod Serling adored, and it’s the first film this month that hasn’t seemed to demand a sequel. Perhaps that’s a remarkable achievement in itself – these characters have run their narrative course. We left even The Maltese Falcon wishing for a sequel (and, in the case of Across the Pacific, very nearly got our wish), but Three Strangers wraps up nicely. Moreover, it cautions us to be careful what you wish for; longing for a sequel may not, the film suggests, be in our best interests.

 

Three Strangers is not rated. Directed by Jean Negulesco. Written by John Huston and Howard Koch. Starring Sydney Greenstreet, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Peter Lorre, Joan Lorring, and Alan Napier.

Greenstreet/Lorre: The Mask of Dimitrios (1944)

The Mask of Dimitrios is proof of one indisputable fact about the Golden Age of Hollywood – there’s never too much of a good thing when it comes to Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. After a few movies this month where the two didn’t have nearly enough screen time together, The Mask of Dimitrios brings us much more of the Greenstreet and Lorre goodness. When they’re on the screen, the film crackles, but its unusual frame narrative structure ends up being more of a tease than a treat.

Mystery writer Cornelius Leyden (Peter Lorre) becomes fascinated with the strange case of master criminal Dimitrios Makropoulos (Zachary Scott), who appears to have washed up dead in Turkey. Looking for inspiration for his next book, Leyden follows the clues into the past, egged on by the shadowy Mr. Peters (Sydney Greenstreet). Leyden begins to learn more about the crimes that shaped Dimitrios even as he begins his own investigation into Mr. Peters, who is following his every move across Europe. 

 

The structure of The Mask of Dimitrios is best described as “John Le Carré’s Citizen Kane,” with a central protagonist digging ever deeper into the world of espionage through the focal lens of one man’s biography. As this protagonist, Lorre is riveting, wrestling between his curiosity and his own innate timidity. In an early scene, a Turkish police colonel tells Leyden that he is not quite what one imagines when picturing a writer, and that’s because of the graceful ease Lorre brings to humanizing this (and every) character. He stoops and mumbles, but he lights up when the pieces start fitting together in his mind. Leyden’s arc throughout the film becomes a kind of bildungsroman in which the artist becomes a hero, and it’s a triumph to see Lorre enact that character, instead of being relegated to playing heavies, goons, and creeps.

 

Throughout the film, Lorre is matched, finally, with Greenstreet. After each extended flashback into the life of Dimitrios, there is inevitably a sequence in which Leyden returns to his hotel for an impromptu reunion with Mr. Peters. Where Lorre is unnerved and guarded, Greenstreet is his usual boisterous self, glad of confidence and disarmingly open-armed. Greenstreet proves himself among Lorre’s best co-stars (if not the outright best), and one senses that the two are enabling each other to reach greater heights than they would individually. Their chemistry is so unique, best summed up in the moment when Leyden says of Mr. Peters, “He’s my friend! Well, no, he’s not my friend, but he’s a nice man!” 

 

As for Dimitrios, though, I have to say I found this character uninspiring. It’s Zachary Scott’s film debut, but Dimitrios is a classic example of “show, don’t tell.” The other characters consistently tell Leyden what an amazing, devious, magnetic personality Dimitrios was, and they overhype the character to the point where no living actor could match that introduction. Moreover, unlike in Citizen Kane, the flashbacks here are often a bit dry, the performances stiff and unengaging. It’s a shame because the interstitial scenes that introduce the flashbacks, with Lorre and Greenstreet or particularly Lorre and Victor Francen, are effervescent, bubbling over with enough personality to fill a one-act play.

 

I will give The Mask of Dimitrios credit for its third-act turn, which I genuinely did not see coming. I should have, certainly, especially having read a few Le Carré novels in my day. Best of all, the developments of the film’s third act force Leyden and Peters even closer, to the point where they’ve almost become co-conspirators in a plot that seems inevitable only in hindsight. One wonders very much what hijinks Leyden and Peters might have found in a sequel, whether the two men might have been bound by friendship rather than circumstance. But, as Mr. Peters says throughout the film, “How little kindness there is in the world today!” The Mask of Dimitrios leaves you wanting more, but if one were to rewatch the film, it would only be to rewatch Peter Lorre in all his squirrelly greatness, emboldened by the magnificent Sydney Greenstreet.

 

The Mask of Dimitrios is not rated. Directed by Jean Negulesco. Written by Frank Gruber. Based on the novel by Eric Ambler. Starring Sydney Greenstreet, Zachary Scott, Faye Emerson, Peter Lorre, and Victor Francen.

Greenstreet/Lorre: Passage to Marseille (1944)

If last week’s Background to Danger was an attempt to recapture the magic of Casablanca, Passage to Marseille is an even more transparent effort to reunite the stars, the director, and the atmosphere of its iconic predecessor. Passage gets nearer to the mark, thanks especially to returning star Humphrey Bogart, though its labyrinthine structure plays a weird and distancing game with its audience.

Passage to Marseille begins with the journalist Manning (John Loder) interviewing Captain Freycinet (Claude Rains) about a Free French outpost in England. Freycinet tells Manning the incredible story of the naval voyage aboard the Ville de Nancy, where he was introduced to the garrison’s infamous gunner, Jean Matrac (Humphrey Bogart). There Matrac relays the strange way and his band (including Peter Lorre, Helmut Dantine, George Tobias, and Philip Dorn) made their way from the Devil’s Island into the service of the French air force. 

 

Passage to Marseille has become notable for its Inception-like plotting, which features a flashback within a flashback within a flashback. It’s evident that the film is an adaptation of a novel, where such narrative devices are commonplace, but in a film it’s a bit disorienting to be continually reminded that what we are seeing is actually just a story being told to one of the characters. Freycinet tells Manning about his first meeting with Matrac, at which time Matrac told him a story about being imprisoned on Devil’s Island, at which time the prisoners told each other the story of Matrac’s arrest. The film spirals ever backwards into history, with four separate timelines; none of it is too confusing, and as narrators go one could do a lot worse than Claude Rains, but it is peculiar to have to wait for nearly half the film to understand why we should care about most of the characters.

 

Fortunately, Bogart’s star power does much of the heavy lifting. The minute we see him, we too are eager to learn more about Matrac, this haunted and driven gunner. Bogart’s performance is clearly meant to emulate Rick Blaine of Casablanca, with his specific brand of morality driving him away from, then into, the Second World War. But there is something too of Fred C. Dobbs from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in Jean Matrac, particularly in the Devil’s Island sequence where we see Matrac wrestle with his captors, false imprisonment and his own budding madness. As ever, Bogart is electrifying, though the film neuters itself by reminding us that we have already seen that Matrac will escape.

 

While sporting an eyepatch, Claude Rains does his usual Claude Rains thing, all elegance and precision. I was a little surprised to see the film not flash back to the loss of Freycinet’s eye, though Rains weaves it into the understated backstory of the character, treating it not as a handicap but as a welcome challenge to how he can continue to serve France. Among the rest of the cast, Lorre is a stand-out, though perhaps I’m biased. His Marius seems to be Matrac’s deputy, helping first to recruit Matrac in the escape attempt and then aiding him as he leads the other men to freedom. In the Ville de Nancy timeline, Marius is eager to speak for himself and his brothers, while simultaneously deferring to Matrac when he deigns to lift his voice. 

 

Relative to our purposes this month, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre are once again kept apart for nearly all of the film, though the rampant chemistry between Bogart and Lorre is on full delightful display. Where he stumbled as a Nazi in Background to Danger, Greenstreet is better cast as the martinet Major Duval, who relies solely on his own intuition and who wields respect like a bullwhip. Greenstreet and Lorre only have the one significant scene together, in which Duval’s interrogation precedes Freycinet’s more sympathetic dialogue, and it’s a fine centerpiece for Greenstreet to tell us plenty about Duval. As usual, in this sequence Lorre tells us more about Marius in the moments when he’s not speaking, but one cannot help – especially this month – wanting more, more, more.

 

Director Michael Curtiz, himself of Casablanca, went to great pains to reassemble as much of the magic from that film in Passage to Marseille. So much of the cast returns for this one, right down to a cameo from singer Corinna Mura. (Even Michèle Morgan, in her thankless role as Matrac’s wife, has a Casablanca connection – she screen-tested for the role that inevitably went to Ingrid Bergman after Warner Bros lowballed RKO for a release from her contract.) Between Curtiz’s directorial eye and the musical ear of Max Steiner, who bombards the film with refrains from the French national anthem La Marseillaise, the film’s every impulse seems to invite comparisons with Casablanca – short of thinly remaking the film, as was the wont of the Golden Age of cinema, it seems there was little more that anyone could have done to make this film more like Casablanca. 

 

You don’t need me to tell you, however, that Casablanca needs no remake. It’s cute to watch them try, and a film starring Bogart in his prime is never a misuse of one’s time, but Passage to Marseille is neither quite what it aims to be nor precisely what its audience expects of it. As the old saying goes, though, here’s looking at you – even a vanilla Golden Age war film is still worth a look.

 

Passage to Marseille is not rated. Directed by Michael Curtiz. Written by Casey Robinson and Jack Moffitt. Based on the novel Sans Patrie by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. Starring Humphrey Bogart, Michèle Morgan, Claude Rains, Philip Dorn, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, George Tobias, and Helmut Dantine.

Greenstreet/Lorre: Background to Danger (1943)

For the month of June, we’ll be celebrating the 117th birthday of Peter Lorre – one of my all-time favorite actors – by looking at five of his lesser-known collaborations with fellow character actor Sydney Greenstreet. The two met during Greenstreet’s film debut in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and starred in eight films together (nine, if you count their fun cameo in Hollywood Canteen). Despite being two very different performers, their chemistry was electric, their mannerisms impeccable. When you see their names on a bill together, you know you’re in for a treat.

After The Maltese Falcon, Lorre and Greenstreet were not quite reunited in Casablanca (1942); both give unforgettable performances as the squirrely Ugarte and the voluminous Ferrari, respectively, but the only misstep in an otherwise perfect film is that they never share the screen. (Their presences are so indelible, however, that you’d be forgiven for not noticing until now.) It would not be until Background to Danger in 1943 that the pair inhabited the cinematic frame together, albeit only for one tense sequence. The film is one of a host of Casablanca imitators, unmemorable but not unwatchable.

 

George Raft stars as traveling salesman Joe Barton, secretly a spy for the United States. After meeting the beautiful but doomed Ana Remzi (Osa Massen) on a train to Turkey, Barton comes into possession of secret documents that indicate the Nazis are about to implicate the Soviet Union in a fictitious invasion of Turkey, the better for Germany to take control. Barton is pursued by the plan’s architect, the Nazi Colonel Robinson (Greenstreet), but he’s also caught the attention of two Soviet spies, Nikolai Zaleshoff (Lorre) and his sister Tamara (Brenda Marshall).

 

Background to Danger is surprisingly complex in its plotting, taking its cue perhaps from the similarly suspicious Maltese Falcon, in which no one can be trusted and everyone is lying about something. Here, the MacGuffin is likewise an artifact of deception; there is to be no invasion, but the Germans want Turkey to think there will be. With Greenstreet as provocateur, authoring fiction after fiction to cover his own failings, there is something prescient about the film’s emphasis on “fake news” and its value as a weapon of war. As his Gutman was in The Maltese Falcon, Greenstreet’s Robinson is the only character with all the answers, and his mere presence alone gives you a satisfactory antagonist.

 

One cannot help but feel, however, that Greenstreet is only slightly miscast as the German spymaster. There is nothing German about his performance, neither his accent nor his wardrobe; nor is his very name – Robinson – anything less than stiff upper-lip British. Greenstreet is delightfully villainous, but something in his performance feels held back, as though he’s careful not to have too much fun as a Nazi. Likewise, George Raft seems out of his element as Barton, a role that hinges on the reveal that he’s an American spy. When Barton plays the part of a salesman, there’s never a sense that he’s not in total control of the situation; it’s worth noting that the original novel saw Barton as a forerunner to Cary Grant in North by Northwest, bewildered after an accidental plunge into the world of espionage. (The change was made at Raft’s insistence.) Here, though, it’s hard to see why anyone buys Barton’s “babe in the woods” routine, and when he shifts into spy mode, it’s hard to see Raft as anything but the hardboiled gangsters he played.

 

Perhaps the only casting that really works – at least, of the cast with anything of note to do in the script – is Peter Lorre as the Russian spy Nikolai. There is something stagey about Lorre’s performance here, and I mean that in a good way; Lorre imbues the character with a broad physicality, all stooping hunches and balled fists, such that you can imagine his parts of the film being stage plays. Even when he’s not the focus of attention, Lorre is constantly doing something, clutching his fists to his head or bemoaning his lack of vodka. Of all the times that the film asks you to doubt what you suspect about a character, Lorre is the best at walking that line of uncertainty, and I can’t help but wish Nikolai had been a recurring character in other WWII films.

 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the best scene of the film is the moment when all the spies are in the same room together – Raft, Greenstreet, Lorre, and Marshall. At the top of the film’s third act, all the cards get put on the table, and all the actors get to play off each other like some of the more claustrophobic scenes from The Maltese Falcon. To add to the tension, everyone’s got a gun pointed at each other, but more importantly, it’s one of the most successful moments of shifting alliances and casual deception. Everything clicks in this scene, and the audience ought to be genuinely surprised at where the moment goes. It’s not quite the climax of the film, but everything that follows feels like denouement compared to the energy level of this dynamite sequence.

 

Between the restrictions of the Hays Code and the rah-rah patriotism of the era, there are not many surprises in how the film turns out, and it leads to an ending that is perhaps too overtly cheery to fit with the rest of the film, which tries to be a shadowy tale out of John le Carré’s playbook. Background to Danger is fairly emblematic of the Warner Brothers brand of 1940s war films, with most of its familiar faces flitting in and out. It’s not as good as Casablanca – but, then again, few films are.

 

Background to Danger is not rated. Directed by Raoul Walsh. Written by W.R. Burnett. Based on the novel Uncommon Danger by Eric Ambler. Starring George Raft, Brenda Marshall, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Osa Massen, and Turhan Bey.

Monster March: She-Wolf of London (1946)

When in doubt, the Universal Classic Monsters had a formula – “son of,” “daughter of,” or “bride of.” We’ve seen diminishing returns on that front, though occasionally shaking up the gender of the main monster has been grounds for cinematic gold. When I planned out Monster March, I assumed from the title that the last film on the docket would be more of that same sequel reinvention, that She-Wolf of London might as well be the story of Lorena Talbot or something like that. Imagine my surprise, then, to find out that She-Wolf of London is instead another example of something else the Universal Monsters often did well: false advertising.

Phyllis Allenby (June Lockhart) is set to marry well-to-do barrister Barry Lanfield (Don Porter), but a rash of brutal murders have led her to suspect that she has fallen victim to the legendary Allenby curse of werewolfism. Her aunt Martha (Sara Haden) dismisses these ideas as superstition but all the same asks her to keep this notion a secret from Phyllis’s cousin Carol (Jan Wiley), who is herself betrothed to starving artist Dwight Severn (Martin Koslack). As Phyllis’s wedding approaches, Scotland Yard draws a tighter dragnet until inspectors are knocking on the Allenby front door.

 

I can’t talk about She-Wolf of London without talking about the ending, so if there’s any part of you that might one day want to watch it unspoiled, thanks for joining us for Monster March, and have a pleasant tomorrow. I’ll note, however, that the twist ending to She-Wolf isn’t exactly hard to deduce; within the 61-minute runtime, a semi-conscious audience member can probably crack it in twenty. For those of you sticking around, you’ve probably made the right choice because this film doesn’t actually belong in Monster March. You see, there is no werewolf in She-Wolf of London. In fact, were it not included in my “Wolf Man” DVD box set, I wouldn’t be reviewing it. I had gently complained throughout See-Thru Thursdays that Universal’s “Invisible Man” franchise was barely a franchise, but She-Wolf goes one step further, actively arguing against being enrolled in the nascent cinematic universe.

 

I had said a few weeks ago that there might be a very interesting version of The Wolf Man where the werewolf might merely be in Lawrence Talbot’s mind, and it’s as though the makers of She-Wolf heard me – though She-Wolf ends up pushing the other extreme by creating a narrative in which the werewolf is definitively a product of the imagination. The film Gaslight was released two years earlier, and I have a strong suspicion that screenwriters George Bricker and Dwight V. Babcock had seen it. The twist that Phyllis is being gaslit by Aunt Martha is telegraphed pretty early on, especially when Martha explains to her daughter Carol all the misfortune that will befall the family if either of the impending marriages is allowed to transpire. And while the film tries to bait-and-switch you – first that Phyllis is the werewolf, then that Carol might be – Sara Haden plays Aunt Martha like the wicked stepmother in a Disney film. It’s a good thing the film is in black-and-white, because otherwise we’d see the technicolor glow of an enormous neon sign pointing “VILLAIN” at Martha.

 

It’s not that She-Wolf is badly made. I think, under any other circumstance, I’d have been more forgiving of its wolf-less plot. Certainly June Lockhart fits the bill for terrified protagonist; her wide-eyed pallor and fits of hysteria acquit her very well, especially for a filmgoer who only recognizes her as television moms on Lassie and Lost in Space. Once you notice, though, that the film is lacking in transformation scenes like the ones that let Jack Pierce work his magic on Lon Chaney Jr., you’re not long for solving the mystery. Still, one can’t help but wish Lockhart had gotten a better script, one that explains a bit more about the fabled Allenby curse or even why Phyllis has only just now gotten it into her head. There’s a brief nod toward Phyllis turning an ear to local superstition, though I wish the film had explored that angle less perfunctorily. There’s also some business about whether Aunt Martha is actually an Allenby or not, a matter that clogs up her first scene in the film before the question is brushed aside entirely.

 

Or perhaps it’s too much to ask that She-Wolf of London has a werewolf in it. I hate to sound like an entitled moviegoer, because I’ll settle for Dracula not meeting the other monsters in a “monster mash.” But after living and breathing monster movies for an entire month, I can’t say that I’m entirely thrilled to be duped into watching a movie without a werewolf, and I’m a little sorry to have wasted your time. But maybe this is a good reminder that, despite what Van Helsing says, there is no such thing as vampires. It’s charming to think there might be, but the real world is terrifying enough without werewolves. Perhaps that’s why She-Wolf of London has me so down – because it denied me the very escapism for which I created Monster March. Like Henry Frankenstein, my creation has grown beyond my control. And like Phyllis Allenby, I’ve been kept up into the long hours of the night, thinking about werewolves and other unreal creatures. They’re not real, and they don’t exist.

 

Then again, as Ernest Hemingway put it, and as the entire dreamscape of cinema suggests over and over again, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” 

She-Wolf of London is not rated. Directed by Jean Yarbrough. Written by George Bricker and Dwight V. Babcock. Starring June Lockhart, Don Porter, Sara Haden, Eily Malyon, and Jan Wiley.

Monster March: House of Dracula (1945)

As the third monster mash in an ostensible trilogy with Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and House of Frankenstein, it’s hard for me to find a Marvel Cinematic Universe analogy to explain what House of Dracula contributes to the Universal Classic Monsters franchise. Instead, I find myself looking at House of Dracula like Return of the Jedi – a third installment that doesn’t really do anything wrong but neither does it quite excel. There are flashes of brilliance, but on the whole there’s nothing that we haven’t seen before.

Dr. Franz Edelmann (Onslow Stevens) receives a strange visitor just before sunrise – Count Dracula (John Carradine), seeking a cure for his vampirism. While the doctor prepares a blood transfusion to cure the count, who is himself conspiring to consume the doctor’s assistant Milizia (Martha O’Driscoll), Dr. Edelmann takes on another patient – Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), who believes the doctor can rid him of the curse of the werewolf. Meanwhile, in the caves beneath Dr. Edelmann’s castle lies the lifeless body of the Frankenstein monster (Glenn Strange), and soon it will take all of Dr. Edelmann’s strength to keep these creatures from tearing down his home.

 

My chief complaint about House of Dracula carries over from House of Frankenstein – the monsters never truly meet. After seeing Chaney and Lugosi on screen together for much of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, it’s a shame that Dracula, the Wolf Man, and Frankenstein’s monster are kept at arm’s length from each other. Talbot meets the other two, but it’s a far cry from the elegant way that Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein brought the same three monsters together into the same plot. 

 

Instead, what we get in House of Dracula is something akin to the setup for a joke – a vampire, a werewolf, and a Frankenstein walk into a doctor’s office. The plot then becomes a revolving door; when Dracula leaves the office, Talbot enters, and their treatments continue in alternating sequence. I had hoped that there might be some larger string that ties all this together, some way that it all related to a larger plot by Count Dracula, but again the filmmakers seem set on putting the monsters on the same bill without ever featuring them on the same screen. 

 

It's another cash-grab, to be sure, but there seemed to be something more genuine about it in House of Frankenstein. Perhaps it was the legitimating presence of Boris Karloff, who felt like an appropriate thread to unify the whole piece. I hope it’s no slight to Onslow Stevens to say that he’s no Boris Karloff, but there is something a little disingenuous about bringing the whole cinematic universe back together through an actor making his franchise debut in the role. Stevens is perfectly serviceable, at times recalling particularly in his voice a B-movie Orson Welles, but for the most part we’re left wondering what’s so special about this doctor. For one, I’m still not sure what sort of reputation a doctor might have to suggest he could cure both vampirism and lycanthropy, but Karloff never invited that question. Karloff had a presence and a history, but Stevens only has half of one of those. One almost wishes, based on the way the film develops, Dr. Edelmann had instead been Dr. Jekyll – that’d resolve a few of the film’s problems straight away.

There’s the problem of overwhelming coincidence in the film – why is all of this happening now, in this doctor’s office – but there’s a larger problem of continuity, which the Universal Monsters movies have usually been so careful to avoid. For starters, if House of Frankenstein is any indication, at least two of these monsters should be dead. Now I’ll grant you, “dead” is a relative term for this crew, but House of Dracula very carefully and deliberately acknowledges the fate of the Frankenstein monster from House of Frankenstein while glossing over where that film left Dracula and the Wolf Man. The net effect, then, of disregarding continuity – especially at this late date in the franchise, when this is effectively the conclusion of the series before the spoof era begins – is the feeling that none of this matters much, that all of this happened before, and that it was better that time around. There’s something a little cynical about the “do it again but differently” approach in House of Dracula, something that makes me a little sad this is the way it all ended.

That’s not to say, though, that there isn’t good material here. John Carradine acquits himself better as Dracula this time around, particularly in a scene where he seduces a nurse playing “Moonlight Sonata” on the piano – it’s an archetypal image that I’m retroactively surprised didn’t originate with Lugosi. Dracula’s motivations might not make much sense in this film (he wants to be healed, until he doesn’t, and why he leaves his coffin in direct sunlight is anyone’s guess), but at least his presence dials into what the film needs, even if I’m still not convinced he’s the Count Dracula. Indeed, his presence looms over the whole film, as it does on the poster, such that you’re always waiting for Dracula to reenter the picture. That he doesn’t – and that the titular house isn’t even his – is to the film’s discredit.

 

In their respective roles, Chaney and Strange appear, after several movies of doing decent work, to be phoning it in. Chaney is trying, but there’s a weariness in his performance, an overly familiar attitude like slipping into a pair of shoes just before you know they’re about to give out. Just about the only new thing this film adds to Lawrence Talbot is a mustache, along with the unusual revelation that lycanthropy is just a case of pressure on the brain that can be alleviated by fractionally enlarging the skull. As hokey as that sounds, it’s the kind of preposterous balderdash that usually makes these films fun, but when the rest of the film doesn’t hold up, that kind of hokum gets the scrutiny it doesn’t deserve and can’t withstand. Strange, meanwhile, has two settings in this film – comatose and raging – and so there’s little to say beyond his inclusion feeling perfunctory. The film plainly doesn’t know what to do with the Monster; he was at least a vessel for Dr. Niemann’s revenge in House of Frankenstein, but here he’s little more than an action figure pulled out of storage.

 

So falls the Universal Classic Monsters cinematic universe – in a sense, the House of Dracula, the house that Dracula built back in 1931. We might see this as a case of “how the mighty have fallen,” but on another level we might see that House of Dracula is the moment when these creatures escape the bounds of their respective franchises and enter the level of myth. Unburdened by continuity, these monsters are now free to go wherever the next generation of creators will take them; recall that the Abbott and Costello films made no pretense about being true sequels. Rather, the monsters became mythic nightmares, haunting phantoms from a bygone era that operated not on the level of narrative continuity but as freeze-frame images – a swirling cape or a glinting fang, a lumbering giant, or a primal evolutionary throwback. Maybe that’s what the House of Dracula has been all along: not a literal castle in which the vampire resides, but a conceptual wheelhouse of metaphors and filmic illusions not unlike a waxwork house of horrors. We’ve been tenants in that house for the past month; now maybe it’s time to build our own additions and rewrite our own nightmares. 

House of Dracula is not rated. Directed by Erle C. Kenton. Written by Edward T. Lowe. Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Martha O’Driscoll, John Carradine, Lionel Atwill, Onslow Stevens, Glenn Strange, and Jane Adams.  

Tune in tomorrow for Wolf Man Wednesday – the final installment in Monster March – with She-Wolf of London (1945) starring June Lockhart.

Monster March: The Mummy's Curse (1944)

Before I watched The Mummy’s Curse, the final mummy movie for Monster March, I feared that I would end up saying the same things I had said for each of the Karloff-less mummies: that it was the umpteenth remake of the same basic premise, stodgy and lumbering, uncharismatic and mildly xenophobic – in short, that I had seen all this before and hadn’t much liked it then. Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that The Mummy’s Curse does some things I hadn’t yet seen in a Universal Monster movie, though that still doesn’t amount to a hearty recommendation.

Twenty-five years after The Mummy’s Ghost, chief excavator Pat Walsh (Addison Richards) is draining the local swamp when he is approached by two men from the Scripps Museum, James Halsey (Dennis Moore) and Dr. Zandaab (Peter Coe), who have come to recover two mummies lost to the swamp ages ago. The murder of a worker suggests, however, that the mummy Kharis (Lon Chaney Jr.) has already risen, while a mysterious woman (Virginia Christine) from the swamps may be the resurrected Princess Ananka herself.

 

For the final film in the franchise, The Mummy’s Curse is a mixed bag. There is so much of what we have seen before – literally, in the case of replaying footage from The Mummy and The Mummy’s Hand (in which, yes, it is distracting to see Boris Karloff and Tom Tyler again). There’s a resurrection plot, those omnipresent tana leaves, a secret society led by a sinister foreigner in a fez; there’s an incredulous populace and a staggering body count. There’s even a damsel in distress carted away by Kharis right at the top of the third act, with such mechanical precision that you can almost set your watch by it. 

 

The Mummy’s Curse also continues the bizarre tradition of the retcon. I hadn’t made much about these in each preceding film, but since we’re at the end of the mummy road, it’s worth noting that every mummy film, excepting Karloff’s, has been a continuation of the same story. That story, however, has had its backstory revisited and rewritten, changing the motivations of Kharis and his connection to the Princess Ananka. Moreover, dead high priests return to life without a scratch, while mummies emerge from flames as though their bandages were made of asbestos. It’s also worth noting that the mummy films very deliberately explain lengthy gaps of time between installments, as with the aging of Tomb’s Stephen Banning (Dick Foran); if you followed the internal chronology of the films, Curse ought to be somewhere in the 1990s, not 1944.

 

The final continuity gaffe ends up being oddly central to The Mummy’s Curse. In The Mummy’s Ghost, Kharis and Ananka went into a swamp in upstate New York; in Curse, the swamp is somehow in Louisiana, deep in the heart of Cajun territory. The film stops short of any voodoo subplot – though that could have been interesting to mix with Egyptian mysticism – but we do have characters explicitly named Cajun Joe and Tante Berthe. (If you want voodoo with your Universal Monsters, you’ll have to check out Son of Dracula.) This continuity error exists largely on the level of set dressing, so it’s a bit bewildering why it even happens, but it’s a clear and deliberate choice to relocate the story. 

 

In a way, though, I’ve neglected to make much ado about these continuity goofs because they’re part of the odd charm of the Universal Classic Monsters cinematic universe; you’d never recast Tony Stark or Luke Skywalker today (indeed, the crew of The Mandalorian bent over backwards not to), but these monster movies have always been a bit like planes built mid-flight, cobbled together with spare parts and scripts banged out over the course of a weekend. Even the early monster films like Dracula and Frankenstein were still working out the kinks of the talkies, actively struggling to transition from the stagey silent pictures into the slick productions of the 1940s. 

 

You could even make the argument, specious though it may be, that the Universal Monsters helped usher in the eras of sequels and remakes. (I say specious, because both had literary precedent, and even Sophocles had his Oedipus trilogy.) The Mummy franchise has been a little bit of both, at once continuing and revisiting the same basic story. But it’s also been pushing the boundaries of invention; for all their Son of and family tree games, the Universal Monsters have also played with gender in interesting ways. Dracula’s Daughter may have been a bust, but The Mummy’s Curse introduces us to the first female mummy. Sofia Boutella, eat your heart out: Virginia Christine is captivating as Princess Ananka, and the silent sequence in which she rises from the swamp and bathes away the mud and embalming is as captivating as anything the mummy movies have given us. Even her amnesiac performance, as she struggles to account for her memories of Kharis, is a fine angle for the fifth film to take. One almost wishes that Curse had spent more time on that dimension, because the Kharis stuff is not unlike the mummy himself – stale, slow, and long past its prime. 

 

The Mummy’s Curse is not rated. Directed by Leslie Goodwins. Written by Bernard Schubert, Leon Abrams, and Dwight V. Babcock. Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Peter Coe, Dennis Moore, Kay Harding, Martin Kosleck, Virginia Christine, and Addison Richards. 

Tune in tomorrow for Transylvania Tuesday, with House of Dracula (1945) starring John Carradine, Lon Chaney Jr., Onslow Stevens, and Glenn Strange.

Monster March: Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955)

Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy is a film of lasts. It’s Abbott and Costello’s last film at Universal (and their penultimate film together), it’s the final mummy film in the Classic Monsters cycle, and it’s the last movie I’ve watched in reviewing Monster March. There is, for me, an unintentional sense of finality in this movie, which can only work in favor of the film; it also helps that this is, as Mummy Mondays have taught us, the second-best of the original mummy films.

Bud Abbott and Lou Costello (playing themselves, lest the credits fool you) overhear that the mummy Klaris (Eddie Parker) has been discovered – and with him the fabled treasure of Princess Ara. Abbott and Costello blunder their way into a murder investigation, the disappearance of a crucial amulet, and eventually the dig site itself as they try to dodge treasure seekers (Marie Windsor, Michael Ansara) and high priests (Richard Deacon) alike.

 

Where Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man felt tired and overlong, a collision of genres that didn’t play well together, Meet the Mummy is tight, energetic, and laser-focused on spoofing the Egyptian adventure genre. The plot is overfull, to be sure, particularly when it comes to gangs of avaricious conspirators (many of whom look perplexingly similar), but there’s a sense that Abbott and Costello don’t quite know what’s going on either, making it much easier to roll with the punches. 

 

This being Monster March, there is a surprising dearth of mummy action. There is a mummy, though it’s unclear whether Klaris is Kharis with a name change or an entirely different mummy defending a princess’s tomb. He’s not on screen very much, though, and he never leaves his tomb. His wrappings look a little more like striped pajamas, but there is something iconic about the way his nose is obscured by a bandage as he snarls and hisses at his prey. Where the other mummies looked a bit like they were wearing full-face masks or faces made of papier-mâché, this mummy finally looks as though there’s a rotting corpse under the bandages. It’s only a pity we don’t get to see more of him on screen – though as fast as Costello runs away from danger, a lumbering mummy stands no chance of catching him.

 

While we don’t have as much mummy as the title promises, the chemistry between Abbott and Costello is stronger than it was in Meet the Invisible Man. For one, they don’t have to work around the premise of being private detectives or boxers; those aren’t highbrow concepts, to be sure, but compare that to Meet Frankenstein, in which their occupation as delivery boys was only incidental to the plot and quickly disregarded. Here, they’re just two drifters who happen to bumble into the plot, fumble around it, and tumble headlong into the mummy’s tomb for the final act. It’s a perfect set-up for a monster movie send-up, especially continuing the cynic/believer dynamic from Meet Frankenstein. What’s more, their patter is back to form; in one hilarious sequence, they argue about the meaning of the word “pick” – “My pick is the shovel!” “My pick is the pick!” and so on. 

 

In another great moment, Abbott and Costello try to pawn a cursed medallion off on each other. It’s first a game of pickpocketing, then a back-and-forth burger swap with one burger containing the amulet as an ersatz topping. While these bits go exactly where you would expect, the cumulative effect of seeing the situation play out longer and longer, doubling down on confusion rather than trying to illuminate, is uproarious. Compounding the comedy, perhaps more than in the other two parody films, Lou Costello has a penchant for breaking the fourth wall with a well-timed stare. Sometimes he’s saying, “Look what I have to put up with,” while other times it’s an impish “Ain’t I a stinker?” Every time he does it, without fail, it’s good for a chuckle.

 

It’s a boon that Abbott and Costello are so engaging here, because the rest of the cast is comprised of human “wet paint” signs. As the treasure seekers, Marie Windsor and Michael Ansara are mostly lifeless; their only saving grace is that their accomplice is played by Dan Seymour, sporting the same fez he wore in Casablanca, where he played the doorman Abdul. I point this out as a good thing because any reminder of Casablanca automatically raises my estimations of the movie (see also Invisible Agent). Meanwhile, Richard Deacon plays the cult leader Semu like a somnambulant Miguel Ferrer. It’s hard to imagine anyone being intimidated by this lanky, balding, sentient monotone; say what you will about George Zucco, dying multiple times as the same character in the same franchise – at least he had presence. 

 

At the end of the day, though, the Universal Classic Monsters franchise has never thrived with strong supporting casts. You get by with a little help from your mummy, and this is the first time since Karloff that I’ve enjoyed a mummy movie. Abbott and Costello are back to form here, sniping at every Egyptian cliché and genre trope. Meet the Mummy does a lot without doing too much, and watching this as my thirtieth monster movie took Monster March out with a smile. But don’t you go anywhere – you’ve still got three more days to go!

 

Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy is not rated. Directed by Charles Lamont. Written by Lee Loeb and John Grant. Starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Marie Windsor, Michael Ansara, Richard Deacon, and Eddie Parker. 

Tune in tomorrow for Mummy Monday, with The Mummy’s Curse (1944) starring Lon Chaney Jr. and Virginia Christie.

Monster March: The Creature Walks Among Us (1956)

As Monster March winds down, you’ve seen me start to get more nostalgic and reflective. We’ve still got a few days of reviews yet to go, but The Creature Walks Among Us represents the end of the road. From 1956, it’s the third installment in the Gill-Man trilogy, but more importantly it’s the final Universal Classic Monsters movie. (The gauntlet would more or less pass the following year to Hammer Horror, with 1957’s The Curse of Frankenstein.) You might expect a robust cinematic universe to go out with a bang, but the truth is that The Creature Walks Among Us is, for a number of reasons, a very sad finale.

Abusive husband and scientist William Barton (Jeff Morrow) sets off with his wife Marcia (Leigh Snowden) in search of the Gill-Man (Don Megowan and Ricou Browning) after the creature’s escape from a Florida theme park. Against the protests of fellow scientist Tom Morgan (Rex Reason), Barton captures the Gill-Man and experiments on the creature, stripping away his gills and activating his dormant lungs to force him to breathe oxygen before interring him in a private zoo.

 

If The Creature Walks Among Us sounds bleak, it is. When it’s not cripplingly dull, which its first half interminably is, this Creature is horrifyingly depressing. The first two movies introduced an intriguing new monster to the Universal canon, a creature who could garner our attention whether he was stalked by humans or was gleefully eradicating them. Director Jack Arnold, who helmed the first two, managed to create a compelling atmosphere of tension and terror (even if Revenge of the Creature took its sweet time getting there). With John Sherwood at the wheel, however, there is no fear, no terror, despite the heavy lifting done by Henry Mancini’s blaring, shrieking score. There is only pity – abject pity – for the Gill-Man.

 

You’re probably thinking one of two things: either you acknowledge that a Universal Monsters movie always has some degree of sympathy for the monster, or you’re incredulous that one could feel any sympathy for an unthinking murderous beast. On the former count, you would be absolutely right. We’ve always already felt sympathetic toward Frankenstein’s monster as he struggles to find his place in the world, and we couldn’t help but empathize with the Wolf Man when he wrestled with his own darkest impulses. But other monsters have also been entirely heartless, especially the more monstrous they became – Dracula and the mummies, for example, bear little semblance to their own long-dead humanity. They’re entertaining to watch, but it’s hard to root for them beyond that popcorn factor.

 

How, then, does one end up feeling so compassionate toward the Gill-Man, serial killer of the sea? The Creature Walks Among Us spends much of its nearly 80 minutes visiting torment and torture upon the body of the Gill-Man, reducing him to a tragic victim of a litany of violence he cannot understand. Indeed, of all the cinematic subgenres the Universal Monsters can be said to have inspired, this Creature might well be an early forerunner of modern-day torture porn. (Heads-up that I’ll need to spoil the film to explain fully the true horrors in this film.) After stalking the Creature and spearing him with no less than three harpoons, the so-called scientists light him on fire, melting away his outer scales. While the Gill-Man lies in pain, Barton begins to play Mengele by surgically “enhancing” the creature, performing a tracheotomy and essentially rewriting the beast’s DNA to turn him into a land creature. This process, we’re told, likely breaks the creature’s mind, and he cannot understand why he can no longer breathe underwater. Then the horror continues when the creature is jailed in an ad hoc zoo, where he spends his time blankly staring at the sea just beyond his reach. He’s then framed for murder and electrocuted before he tears down the electric fence, kills the mad scientist, and wades into the sea, presumably to drown.

 

The whole film is fairly numbing in its brutality, particularly because the film takes great pains to remind us that the Gill-man is unable to speak or to reason, especially after sustaining significant brain damage to match his new physical scars. Unlike Karloff’s Monster, the Gill-Man has no capacity to learn, no way to understand why his every waking moment has become agony once the scientists trap him in a body he cannot use. It’s truly horrifying to watch, which may be the whole point, but there’s no ethical center to the film beyond Dr. Morgan’s halfhearted and unheeded pleas that all this is wrong. What’s more, no one in the film is particularly bothered by the fate of the Gill-Man, and even his one redemptive act is tossed aside in a brief epilogue in which the characters rationalize away the plot. (Then again, killing Dr. Barton to save his put-upon bride is a far cry from the horny fish monster we met in Creature from the Black Lagoon.) Again, if the film identified any of them as complicit, it’d be a compelling moral claim about who the true monsters were – a hallmark of the Universal canon. Instead, the film is only interested in the violence visited upon the Gill-Man’s body insofar as it makes him more monstrous, more gruesome to behold.

 

Nobody’s likeable, the monster is pitiable to the point of pathetic, and it’s such an overall dour proceeding that it’s hard to find anything to appreciate in The Creature Walks Among Us. There’s a very compelling message in here somewhere about man’s capacity for destruction and the way that we build cages to imprison the things we love; there’s even an ecological reading about environmental destruction buried somewhere in the ruined body of the Gill-Man. But the film is mired by its own squandered potential – another sad tradition of the Universal Classic Monsters, especially the sequels. What could be an opportunity for fresh horror and a fitting conclusion for a trilogy quickly becomes the cinematic equivalent of rubbernecking at roadkill.

The Creature Walks Among Us is not rated. Directed by John Sherwood. Written by Arthur A. Ross. Starring Jeff Morrow, Rex Reason, Leigh Snowden, Don Megowan, and Ricou Browning.

Tune in tomorrow for Silly Sunday, with Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955) starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, and Eddie Parker.