The Invisible Ray

TCM unsurprisingly ran a bunch of horror films last October. One that I didn't get around to watching until just before it expired from my DVR was The Invisible Ray. Having finally watched it, I wrote up this post and saved it in drafts to post at a suitable time.

Boris Karloff plays Dr. Rukh, an astronomer living in what is probably Romania together whith his blind mother (Violet Kemble Cooper) and his wife Diana (Frances Drake), who is the daughter of Rukh's deceased scientific partner. Rukh has supposedly come across some great scientific discovery, involving looking at distant galaxies as a way of seeing Earth's own past. It's a hypothesis that brings researcher Dr. Benet (Bela Lugosi) in from the more civilized parts of Europe together with his sponsors, the British Sir Francis Stevens and his wife Lady Stevens (Beulah Bondi) together with their nephew Drake (Frank Lawton).

Rukh's experiments appear to show that a meteorite hit Earth in what is now Africa some time in the planet's distant past, and that this impact produced something that people in the movie call "Element Radium X". Now, at the time the movie was made, radiation therapy was in its infancy; people knew about radium and how the Curies discovered it as well as how it killed Marie. But the movie extrapolates from that into a bunch of stuff that's factual nonsense albeit entertaining nonsense. In any case, since the source of Radium X is in Africa, everybody goes off to Africa to find it.

During the expedition, Dr. Rukh separates from everybody else mostly because the rest of the cast is as much interested in doing charity work performing medical services on the natives while Rukh is obsessed with finding that Radium X. Rukh does find the meteorite, but it comes at a cost. He gets some form or radiation poisoning which results in his having a "deah touch" in that if he touches anybody else, it quickly kills them. Benet is the only person he can tell, and Benet comes up with some sort of, if not antidote, at least a treatment that will temporarily stop the effects of Radium X.

Meanwhile, Rukh also learns that during the expedition, his wife has fallen in love with Drake, which is none too surprising considering that she pretty much only married Rukh out of convenience sinces she was stuck in eastern Europe when her father died. But apparently another effect of Radium X poisoning is insane jealousy.

Everybody returns to Paris, and Dr. Rukh's plan is to kill the rest of the people in the expedition as a form of revenge. After all, all he has to do is stop taking Benet's antidote and he'll just be able to touch them and render them really quite dead. He even fakes his own death to aid in this. But Benet is no dummy, and after a couple of murders he figures out what's going on and comes up with a way to lure the supposedly dead Rukh out of hiding for the climax....

In terms of science, The Invisible Ray is a bunch of nonsense. But it's very entertaining nonsense, thanks in large part to the acting of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Thanks as well to the Production Code, you know where the movie is going to end up, but it's still an enjoyable watch.

Not to be confused with that Richard Widmark movie

Bela Lugosi was TCM's Star of the Month in October 2024, so I recorded several of his movies that I hadn't seen before. One of his non-horror movies that I finally got around to watching just before it expired from my DVR was a murder mystery, The Death Kiss.

The movie stars off with a scene of a woman meeting a man outside a big-city café, kissing him, and walking in, after which the man is shot. The camera then pulls out to reveal that this is in fact a soundstage at a Hollywood studio, where they're filming a movie called, naturally enough, The Death Kiss. They're about to do another take of the same scene when suddenly the lead actress screams: it turns out that Myles Brent, the actor who was shot in the scene, has actually died because somebody presumably put real bullets in the gun. (This was long before Alec Baldwin was born.)

This presents all sorts of problems: the film was behind schedule so one studio boss is worried about the financials; another studio boss, Joseph Steiner (Bela Lugosi in a supporting role) has to deal with the PR mess; and, when the police come in, it turns out that pretty much everybody on the lot had some sort of reason for not being displeased that Brent was killed. This means that anybody and everybody could be a suspect, since it doesn't have to be the person who pulled the trigger who put the real bullets in the gun.

Brent's co-star in the movie-within-a-movie was Marcia Lane (Adrienne Ames), who is also the ex-Mrs. Brent, which in itself is a reason to make her a suspect. She's on the rebound with Franklyn Drew (David Manners), a screenwriter at the studio who is always up for a good mystery because he thinks he can write a better mystery than the real thing. So he starts to investigate, together with a security guard at the studio, Gulliver. Brent quickly finds a bullet casing in the wall of the set which to him conclusively proves this is a murder case since it's of a different caliber than the guns filled with blanks.

And where there's one murder in a movie like this, it's not a surprise that other people are going to be in danger. Never mind that Franklyn also has a personal interest in this case since his girlfriend is going to be one of the suspects, being the ex-wife of the dead guy. It all leads to an exciting climax as Franklyn is about to reveal the identity of the murderer on the set.

Murder mysteries are a common genre in the movies, and were especially common back in the 1930s. Murder mysteries set against the backdrop of making a movie is not uncommon either; I did a review of The Preview Murder Mystery 18 months ago. In trying to find that title, I found two other titles from that era involving murder mysteries at a movie studio, The Studio Murder Mystery and a British film called Murder on the Set. In any case, it's a convenient enough place to set a murder mystery and The Death Kiss does an entertaining job of it, even if one ultimately doesn't care all that much about who actually committed the murder.

Bud Abbott Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein

Bela Lugosi was TCM's Star of the Month in October 2024, which makes sense since that's the month with Halloween and Lugosi is generally remembered for his horror films. I recorded several films that aired as part of the salute, but I don't know that I got around to watching them all before they expired from the DVR. One that I did watch was Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

Now, as you might guess, Lugosi isn't one of the title characters since Lugosi was better knwon for playing Dracula. Indeed, here Lugosi reprises his role as Dracula, although we're getting ahead of ourselves. Frankenstein's Monster is played here by Glenn Strange, but even before that we meet Abbott and Costello. The two of them, as Chick Young and Wilbur Gray respectively, are clerks at a middle-of-nowhere train station. A Mr. McDougal (Frank Ferguson) is expecting a couple of crates with statues for his wax museum. Before McDougal can pick them up, the Wolf Man (Lon Chaney Jr.) phones the station to tell Wilbur that the crates actually have real live monsters in them, not statues.

Of course, Wilbur doesn't believe any of this stuff, but when they open the crate to deliver what's inside, they find Dracula's coffin. Dracula is even able to open the coffin from inside, which is a pretty neat trick. Dracula has the power of hypnosis if you're stupid enough to look into his eyes, and believe me, Wilbur is that stupid. With this, Dracula is able to abscond with Frankenstein's Monster to an island lair owned by Dr. Mornay (Lenore Aubert). Their plan is to perform an operation on the Monster that will give him a much more obedient brain. Of course, they actually need a suitable brain, and Mornay has decided that Wilbur is just the person for the job.

The plan is to invite Wilbur to a costume ball from where Mornay can leave with him to take him back to the island for the eventual drugging and surgery. However, Wilbur actually has a girlfriend already in the form of Joan Raymond (Jane Randolph), and Wilbur was already planning on going to the party with Joan. Ah, at least there are now two women, which means that Chick has someone to go with, too. But this also means that there will be more help nearby when Dracula and Mornay try to carry out their nefarious scheme. This especially once the Wolf Man, in his human guise of Lawrence Talbot, shows up at the party. Remember, he's the one who knows of the danger of Dracula.

The characters all wind up back on Mornay's island for the comic finale, although you know that because of the Production Code, Mornay and Dracula aren't going to succeed in their plan of putting Wilbur's brain into the body of Frankenstein's monster.

Despite the presence of some of Universal's great horror monsters, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is comedy first and horror second. As a comedy, however, I think it works well precisely because of the monsters and the fact that the two sets of characters are radically different. The movie is a pleasant little light comedy with a bunch of horror movie tropes, but nothing that anybody can seriously think of as frightening. Sit back and allow yourself to be entertained for 80 minutes.

I don't think I've done a post on a Bowery Boys movie before

And, to be honest, this review isn't going to be about a Bowery Boys movie, at least not technically. TCM has on multiple occasions run through the entire set of four dozen or so movies that the Bowery Boys made after World War II. The Bowery Boys were what eventually came out of a group of players from the movie Dead End (which I did a post on ages ago). At some point along the way, first Universal and then Monogram wound up with those "Dead End Kids" under contract, and called them the "East Side Kids". And it's one of those movies that I have on my DVR and recently watched: Ghosts on the Loose.

The movie starts with the Kids rehearsing musical numbers, led by the "conductor" Mugs (Leo Gorcey), who seems to know the technical aspects of music about as well as the rest of the kids do. Another of the kids, Glimpy (Huntz Hall), has a sister Betty (Ava Gardner in a very early role, and yes, the idea of Ava Gardner and Huntz Hall being siblings is ridiculous), and she's about to get married to a guy named Jack (Rick Vallin). Betty and Jack are going to be moving to the edge of town because that's where they were able to get a really good deal on a house.

We then learn that there's a reason for the good deal, which is that the previous owners of the house are convinced that the neighboring house is haunted. There are mysterious goings-on, but of course no actual ghosts; think the Scooby-Doo cartoons with the bad guys thinking they would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling kids. The kids are about to meddle, albeit not intentionally.

Betty and Jack go off on their honeymoon, and Glimpy and his friends decide they're going to do a favor for the new couple by helping to decorate the new house for when the new couple gets home. The only thing is, they get the address wrong, and go to the house that's allegedly haunted. In fact, it's not haunted, although it has a lot of the tropes of haunted-house films like secret passages and paintings with the eyes cut out so that people can look into another room without getting caught.

The master, if you will, of the allegedly haunted house is Emil (Bela Lugosi), and he's really the leader of a ring of fifth columnists who have been printing Nazi propaganda out of this house which Mugs and Glimpy figure out when they find a printing press in one of the basement rooms along with a bunch of said propaganda that's been left there with the baddies not expecting anybody to trespass. (Ghosts on the Loose was released in 1943; right in the middle of US involvement in World War II.) The Kids go to inform the authorities, but thanks to those secret passages it takes a while for everything to work out right in the end. Not too long however, as this is only a B movie with a running time of about 66 minutes.

After leaving the big studios -- Dead End was a Goldwyn film IIRC and the Dead End Kids made multiple films at Warner Bros. -- the East Side Kids and then Bowery Boys films became low-budget affairs with formulaic plots. Ghosts on the Loose is definitely that way, although I think it's ultimately watchable for the ridiculousness of the Bela Lugosi half of the movie. It's also not a bad way to introduce people to what Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, and company were all about.

No relation to Kevin McCarthy

TCM is doing a morning and part of the afternoon of Val Lewton's films tomorrow, April 8. I happen to have one of those on my DVR, so I'll put up a post on it now: The Body Snatcher, at 1:30 PM.

The scene is Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1831. Donald Fettes (Russell Wade) is a medical student who had been studying with Dr. MacFarlane (Henry Daniell), this being an era when dedicated medical schools weren't a thing. But he's going to have to give up those studies for monetary reasons. He's stopped by a cemetery for no other reason than to come up with an expository scene mentioning body snatching, which is digging up the grave for the body therein, not for any valuables that might have been buried. Body snatchers were a thing back in those days because the anatomist-doctors teaching the next generation of doctors needed bodies to do that teaching, and they couldn't get enough legally, say from people who would othewise be buried in potters' field.

Fettes goes to see Dr. MacFarlane at the same time a difficult paralysis case shows up: Mrs. Marsh is bringing her daughter Georgina, hoping that MacFarlane can operate on her. MacFarlane has no bedside manner to get Georgina to explain exactly what the pain is like which would help diagnose exactly where and what the injury is. Fettes, however, does have a bedside manner, so MacFarlane makes him his assistant.

Meanwhile, the Marshes were brought to MacFarlane in a cab driven by John Gray (Boris Karloff). What Fettes doesn't (yet) know is that John is in fact a body snatcher, bringing the bodies to MacFarlane. Fettes is disturbed by this, but MacFarlane explains that the bodies are absolutely necessary for the advancement of science.

This, however, is also where that opening scene at the cemetery comes back into play. While at the cemetery, Fettes met a woman whose son died and whose dog is mourning at the grave 24/7. Gray knows about the boy having died, but when he goes to the cemetery and gets confronted by the poor dog, Gray hits the dog over the head with a shovel, killing it. Good like getting bodies from the cemetery, now that all of them will be given police protection.

So what does Gray do? Why, turn to murder! Unfortunately, he decides to murder a woman who was trying to eke out a living by singing on the street in exchange for coins. He brings this body to MacFarlane but Fettes recognizes it and realizes that Gray is now murdering people and MacFarlane is complicit in it. (Granted, Fettes has his own problems by not going straight to the police.) This sets the denouement of the film into motion.

The Body Snatcher is based on a story by Robert Louis Stevenson, which explains why Val Lewton wound up making a movie set in 19th century Scotland. It's not quite in the same vein as the straight-up horror movies Lewton produced like Cat People or The Seventh Victim. Since we know who's doing the killing, it's more of a horror-tinged melodrama. That's not to say that The Body Snatcher is bad, although once again the fact that the ending is going to have to satisfy the Production Code office does raise some issues with the film.

Still, Karloff and the rest of the cast are effective enough for what was only ever meant to be a programmer and not some sort of prestige film. In that light, The Body Snatcher works quite well and is definitely worth a watch.

What's Kay Kyser like?

Tastes change, and things that were popular decades ago may not be so popular today. I think a good example of that would be bandleader Kay Kyser, who hosted a radio show calle the Kollege of Musical Knowledge that involved Kyser dressing like a professor among other this. It was popular enough that he was brought to Hollywood and made several movies. One that happens to be on my DVR is You'll Find Out, and you'll find out indeed if you watch the movie.

The movie opens up with a fictionalized version of Kyser doing his radio show. Chuck Deems (Dennis O'Keefe) is the band's manager, and he's got a girlfriend in socialite Janis Bellacrest (Helen Parrish). She's about to turn 21, and is living with her aunt Margo (Alma Kruger) at the family estate on an island with only one bridge (which means some obvious foreshadowing). But before everyone can get to the mansion, somebody tries to bump off Janis as she's exiting the auditorium where Kay Kyser does his show.

Kay and the band go to the mansion because they've been hired to perform for Janis' 21st birthday party, which gives Kay the chance to meet a bunch of offbeat characters. That's because Aunt Margo is one of those people that populated movies back in the day who believed in spiritualism. She's hired Prince Saliano (Bela Lugosi), who is a medium, to hold séances at which he can supposedly speak to the dead and which will allow Margo to hear from her dearly departed brother (ie. Janis' father). Kay doesn't believe in this stuff and wants to disprove it, while Janis and Chuck are worried that Aunt Margo is being scammed financially.

Kay would like to leave, but of course the storm that's been going on outside destroys the bridge. So Kay has to stay for the séance, which is a good thing because there's another attempt on Janis' life at the séance and Kay basically saves Janis. But who's trying to kill Janis, and why? Perhaps Prof. Fenninger (Peter Lorre), or Margo's lawyer, Judge Mainwaring (Boris Karloff), can answer those questions. More likely, it's going to be up to Kay and his band members to solve the mystery themselves.

As I mentioned above, the movie starts off with Kay doing his show, and frankly, it's full of the sort of cornball humor that may have worked in the days before World War II (the movie was released in 1940) but today is worse than groan-inducing. And some of Kay's band members are even worse, notably the cornetist with terrible hair who was given the stage name Ish Kabibble. One positive is that Kay is pretty much only playing himself, since I don't get any impression that he had much acting ability.

The story isn't exactly bad, although it's unoriginal, being part of a genre of haunted house movies that had started in the early 1930s and began to include comedy in the late 1930s with movies like The Cat and the Canary. Fans of the genre will probably enjoy seeing Karloff, Lugosi, and Lorre together, but the film isn't that great.

Dracula (1931)

I mentioned in my original post on Bela Lugosi as TCM's Star of the Month for October that the 1931 version of Dracula was going to get two airings: one on the first night of the tribute, and a second on Halloween itself. So I recorded the first airing to be able to watch it and do a post for the second, which is tomorrow (October 31) at 3:45 PM.

Lugosi of course plays Dracula, the vampire living in Transylvania. But we have to meet him first, and this character establishment is done in the form of a British estate agent, Renfield (Dwight Frye), going to Romania to see Dracula. Dracula has decided to visit England, since the people in Transylvania seem to know what a monster Dracula is and the English won't know this. Renfield has found a place for Dracula to stay and is there with the contracts. Of course, Dracula has the ability to hypnotize victims just by holding up his hand and staring at the poor unsuspecting dupes. Dracula does this to Renfield, turns Renfield into a fellow blood-sucker, and sets off for England aboard a tramp steamer.

When the boat gets to England, Renfield is the only one alive, seemingly having gone made. Dracula turned into a bat as he has the ability to do and flew off, one assumes. Renfield is sent to a sanatorium run by Dr. Seward. Seward has a lovely daughter, Mina (Helen Chandler), who is engaged to nice young Harker (David Manners). Dracula meets Seward and realizes he's got the opportunity to get at some very lovely young women to turn into his slave-brides. But poor Dracula doesn't realize that Seward has a friend, Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan), who knows a few things about vampires, and is able to deduce that Dracula is a vampire turning others into fellow vampires. Van Helsing also has a strong will and knows how not to fall into that hypnotism schtick.

To be honest, the story in this version of Dracula isn't the strongest. To me, a lot of it seemed to rely on the idea that the English were a bunch of ignoramuses. What is worth watching, however, is the acting from Lugosi, who takes the role (well, actually he'd done it on Broadway already as this movie is an adaptation of a stage play based on the book) and milks it for all it's worth and then some. Dwight Frye isn't bad either.

If you haven't seen the 1932 Dracula before, now's your chance.

Mark of the Vampire

Today being Halloween, I wanted to do a post on a horror movie, so I picked one that TCM ran earlier this month, the quickie Mark of the Vampire.

In a small village somewhere in the rural part of either Bohemia or Moravia, what would now be the Czech Republic, the residents have a fear of vampires, to the point that people put some plant they call "batthorn" (something that as far as I can tell is totaly fictitious) on their doors and windows to keep away the vampires. That, and a lot of people don't want to go out after dark. Things get worse when one of the wealthy villagers, Sir Karell Borotyn (Holmes Herbert) is found dead at his desk in the study of the old castle where he lived. This just before the planned wedding of his daughter Irena (Elizabeth Allan) to Fedor.

The townsfolk are practically in a panic, and they believe the killing was done by a vampire -- specifically, Count Mora (Bela Lugosi) or his creepy daughter Luna -- because the dead man has marks on his neck that sure look like they could be fang marks, and because he was drained of all his blood. Obviously, men of science don't believe this sort of stuff, and the authorities send in someone from the big city, police inspector Neumann (Lionel Atwill), to investigate.

Also coming in is Professor Zelin (Lionel Barrymore), who hopes to disprove the notion that it was a vampire that killed the elder Borotyn. Together with Irena's guardian, Baron Otto (Jean Hersholt), they start investigating. Time is of the essence, because Count Mora seems to be menacing poor Irena, and nobody would want to see her turned into a vampire. She starts acting erratically, scaring the bejeezus out of poor Fedor.

Even though Mark of the Vampire has Lionel Barrymore and Bela Lugosi, it feels like it's not even up to the level of a programmer. I think a lot of that is down to the script, with an ending that feels like a deus ex machina and some actions that seriously require suspension of disbelief. The tone also feels mixed, like it's too much of a comedy at some points and a serious film at others. Looking at Wikipedia suggests that MGM's original intention may have been for an 80-minute programmer-length movie that got cut down, something that certainly seems plausible.

Still, Mark of the Vampire is an interesting enough misfire, and if you do watch it, you've only spent an hour of your life on it.

White Zombie

With Halloween coming up, another movie I watched in TCM's Halloween horror spotlight is White Zombie.

John Harron and Madge Bellamy play Neil and Madeline, a pair of lovers in Haiti who are about to get married at the plantation house of the wealthy Mr. Beaumont (Robert Frazer). On the way, they pass a creepy man, "Murder" Legendre (Bela Lugosi) who steals Madeline's scarf. When they get to the Beaumont house, we learn that Madeline knew him in the past but doesn't really like him. They're only getting married there because of that.

Beaumont, for his part, still has designs on Madeline. To that end, he goes to see Legendre. Ostensibly, Legendre runs a sugar mill, but as we see, all of his employees are zombies, which I suppose would really cut down on labor costs. Beaumont knows about Legendre's skill with zombies, which is why Beaumont has gone to see him. He wants Legendre to come up with some sort of potion that will make Madeline love him instead of Neil.

Beaumont administers the potion to Madeline at the meal after the wedding, and the first effect is to make it look like she's dead, which is partly by design to get Neil to believe she's dead. Of course, she's only undead, and after a suitable amount of time Beaumont and Legendre's zombies go and retrieve Madeline's body. The only problem is, she doesn't really have any emotion. She wasn't turned into somebody who would love Beaumont, but a slave.

What Beaumont doesn't realize is that this was Legendre's plan. Have seen Madeline, he wants her for himself too, and he knows how to get her. Beaumont still has her, and so Legendre has to turn Beaumont into a zombie, which he does with a potion that will zombify Beaumont in slow motion. Neil, meanwhile, has reason to believe something is wrong, helped by a local priest. He stays behind, trying to get back into Beaumont's mansion, hoping to rescue Madeline....

I have to admit that the story behind White Zombie is one that rather strains credulity. But the movie itself is a lot of fun. Lugosi is a joy to watch, and the sets are really stylish. Although it's a horror movie, I didn't find this one particularly horrifying, but that doesn't mean the movie is at all bad. It's more that I tend to be less frightened by these 1930s horror films.

White Zombie is available on DVD should you wish to watch yourself.

Sorry, no pancakes

One of the DVDs I picked up in my most recent set of DVD purchases was a 10-film W.C. Fields box set. Among the movies on it was the completely new-to-me International House.

In the Chinese city of Wuhu, Dr. Wong (Edmund Breese) has invented a "radioscope", a new type of television, or something to compete with the other television-like devices that were in their infancy at the time the movie was released in 1933. Wong wants to sell the rights to the device for western markets, so people from around the world are coming to visit. There's a Russian general (Bela Lugosi), and representing America is Tommy Nash (Stewart Erwin). Except that he's having trouble getting to Wuhu, having to carpool with Peggy Hopkins Joyce (playing herself more or less; the real Joyce was a chorus girl known for marrying rich men).

Into all of this comes the noted adventurer Quail (W.C. Fields). Quail is flying his autogyro somewhere, although where he's supposed to be flying it is part of the joke, as the map shows him going literally all over the place. Quail lands on top of the international hotel in Wuhu, and proceeds to make life difficult for people as he tries to get a room.

That's the plot, more or less. There's not much plot here, and that's part of the point of the movie. Instead, there are a series of sketches, most notably involving George Burns and Gracie Allen, whom I most recently mentioned in the Carole Lombard comedy We're Not Dressing. Allen was noted for playing the ditz and driving Burns nuts, something she does as well here as in everything else I've ever seen her in. The hotel also puts on a musical number involving among others, Sterling Holloway. The television serves a useful purpose here, as every time Dr. Wong tries to tune into the six-day bicycle race, he winds up tuning into another musical act. There's Baby Rose Marie, who by this time was nine years old, so not much of a baby any more. Rudy Vallee does a number, but for me, the highlight was Cab Calloway.

The result is a movie that really has no rights being very good. And yet despite the relative lack of a plot, I found myself laughing quite a bit, which I suppose is a sign that the movie was successful in entertaining. The box set is cheap, so even if you don't like International House, there's likely to be some other movie on the set you'll enjoy. Amazon also lists International House as being available on a standalone DVD as part of Universal's MOD scheme. I have no idea if the print is better; I didn't notice a particularly bad print on the box set.