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.

A different affair from Summertime

Another of the movies that had been sitting forlornly on my DVR waiting to be watched before it expired is The Venetian Affair. So, as is once again the case, I sat down, watched it, and then wrote up this review.

As you might have figured out, the movie is set in lovely Venice, Italy, although the story itself isn't quite so romantic. Instead, it starts off with some sort of international conference on disarmament, this being the days of the Cold War. Except that one of the participants in the conference blows the thing up, killing a dozen high-level diplomats!

Bill Fenner Robert Vaughn is an American journalist working in the New York bureau of the International Wire Service. This is a big story that needs more than one correspondent, so he's called to Venice where he's going to work with his colleague, Mike Ballard (Roger C. Carmel). Or, at least, that's what he thinks. At the airport, he's met by Frank Rosenfeld (Ed Asner, still early enough in his career that he's being referred to as Edward). Rosenfeld is a CIA station chief, and already knows Fenner because Fenner used to work for the CIA himself.

And, indeed, that's part of why Fenner was called in. He's got spy knowledge but, no longer being a spy, he can do things that the known spies can't really do. One of those things is to get close to Dr. Vaugiroud (Boris Karloff), who has written up a report on the investigation into the bombing at the conference. That report may itself be a bombshell, pun intended, so if the Americans can get their hands on the one copy of the report, never mind just knowing its contents before publication, so much the better. Fenner sees Vaugiroud at a press conference and learns the Americans may be coming out on the bad end of the report.

But that's not the only reason Fenner was brought over to Italy. It seems that one of the people who has more knowedge of what's going on that she's let on is one Sandra Fane (Elke Sommer). Sandra just happens to be the former Mrs. Bill Fenner, with the two divorcing in part because of Bill's character, and in part because of Sandra's politics.

There are, of course, people around who don't want the Americans to get the report, and they're more than willing to kill to get at the report. Not only that, but they're willing to do things that some might consider even worse, like mind control. So everybody flits around Venice for a good 90 minutes or so until it's decided to wrap up the story by blaming everything on the Communist Chinese, who were at this point still pariahs in the eyes of the First World.

I think I've stated before that the dark and cynical spy movie of the 1960s is not my favorite genre of film. And to be honest, The Venetian Affair might be even worse than other movies in the genre that I've seen like The Ipcress File. There's just no reason to care about any of these characters, and the movie is also very slow. I suspect it was an opportunity for the Americans involved to get a working holiday in Venice, which has always been a photogenic place. They just got lousy work to do.

Bedlam

With Halloween coming up, it might be a bit surprising that I haven't done much in the way of horror this month. But a nominal horror movie I recorded some months back is coming up on TCM again in the run-up to Halloween, so I watched it in order to be able to do the post here. That movie is Bedlam, which gets a showing tomorrow (October 28) at 3:30 PM.

It's 1761, which an opening title card informs us is the Age of Reason in Britain. St. Mary Bethlehem, which understandably got shortened to "Bedlam" and is a real place that is indeed the source of the word "bedlam" in modern English, is an insane asylum treating -- for some values of treating, as we'll see later in the movie -- mental patients. One of the patients tries to escape and falls off a roof to his death. At the same time, wealthy Lord Mortimer (Billy House) is driving by the asylum and, seeing the commotion, realizes the dead man is an acquaintance.

Mortimer has a girlfriend Nell (Anna Lee), who hears about this, and is horrified. What she doesn't know is things are a whole lot worse than this. Quaker stonemason Hannay (Richard Fraser) sees the head of the asylum, George Sims (Boris Karloff), about a job, and is offered the job on the understanding that he quote an official price more than what he told Sims he could do it for, with each of them pocketing some of the difference since the money is coming from the government. This sort of graft is a sign that there's more going wrong in the management of the asylum.

And then Nell learns how truly bad things are when Sims brings some of the patients to a party Mortimer is giving and having them provide "entertainment" that is in general degrading and even fatal to one of them. Nell is in attendance and is even more horrified by this, asking Mortimer and fellow politician John Wilkes to do something. The two seem willing to do something, but then Mortimer may be in on the graft too. Sims is no dummy, and starts whispering in Mortimer's ear that the improvements Nell would like would cost Mortimer hundreds of pounds in taxes. This is enough to get Mortimer to say no.

Worse, Mortimer and Sims realize what a danger Nell is to them. So they come up with a fairly ridiculous scheme, which is to have Nell committed involuntarily to the asylum through a committal hearing which seems like it has no real basis in law, although I'm not quite certain what the laws on these things were in early Georgian Britain. Thankfully, Nell had previously run into Hannay at some point, and Quakers have a reputation for wanting to institute the same sorts of social improvements that Nell did even if Nell isn't a Quaker herself. So Hannay tries to get in to see Nell, having to resort to trickery. Nell, for her part, tries to keep her sanity, and tries to find the closest to sane fellow inmates to try to see if she can enlist them in some sort of aid.

The opening credits to Bedlam state that the story is based loosely on that told in The Rake's Progress, a series of paintings by William Hogarth. Indeed, dissolves from one scene to the next use the paintings as a template, giving the movie a stylish appearance for a low budget 1940s horror film. The story is OK if not great, and the acting is certainly good enough. So while Bedlam is not an all-time classic, I think it certainly deserves to be better remembered than it is 80 years on.

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.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

TCM's "Is it a dream" spotlight this month brings a movie from a star I don't get to mention very often, I think because his movies are generally not from studios part of the old TCM library: Danny Kaye. That movie is The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which comes on tonight at 9:00 PM. (Yes, 9:00 PM ET might seem like an odd starting time for a TCM presentation since prime time begins invariably at 8:00 PM, but the first film at 8:00 is the 51-minute silent Sherlock Jr..)

Danny Kaye plays Walter Mitty, and you probably already know a bit about the character because the movie is loosely based on a short story by James Thurber; the Mitty name has entered the lexicon as a byword for a daydreamer; and there was another film version about a decade ago. Walter Mitty here is a daydreamer mostly to escape his crappy personal life. He lives in the New Jersey suburbs with his overbearing mother Eunice (Fay Bainter); commutes to New York to work as a proofreader at a publishing company that puts out pulp fiction, where his boss Mr. Pierce (Thurston Hall) steals his ideas; and has a fiancée Gertrude (Ann Rutherford) who you wonder whether she's part of an arranged marriage just to give Walter someone for a wife. Indeed, she's got another guy pursuing her. Dr. Hollingshead (Boris Karloff) comes along to give Walter a bad, unoriginal idea for another dime novel, and it's all too much.

So when Walter has to deal with the doctor, he finds himself imagining that he's a doctor, specifically a surgeon performing a celebrated new operation. Later, he sees himself as an RAF pilot fighting the Nazis in World War II, which also gives him the opportunity to sing a song when he's celebrating after another great aerial success. In all of these fantasies, there's a woman involved, a very pretty one indeed. It's also well known to everyone around Walter that he has a tendency to fantasize and is terribly absent-minded as a result, which is why nobody is going to believe him for the second half of the movie.

One day on the commuter train to work, whom should Walter see but the woman who's been in all those daydreams he's had! And, she approaches him! This time, it's a story that you'd think is so crazy even Walter can't believe it. The woman says her name is Roasalind van Hoorn (Virginia Mayo), and that she's being followed by another passenger on the train. So would Walter be so kind as to pretend to be Rosalind's boyfriend? Walter, being a fantasist, goes along at least until he gets to his office. But he forgets his briefcase, and his need to go back and get it is going to bring him much further into the intrigue with which Rosalind is involved.

The actual nature of the intrigue, and what everybody is looking for, is of course a macguffin. Suffice it to say, however, that the bad guys know Walter has (or had) what they're looking for, and they're willing to kill him for it. Moreover, because of all of Walter's daydreams, nobody believes him when he says that there are well and truly bad men after him.

James Thurber didn't care for this movie version of his work, and I can understand why. There's not enough in a short story to turn it into a full-length movie, and the Goldwyn studio both had to do a lot of padding and tailor the material to Danny Kaye's talents, which are not going to be to everyone's tastes. I didn't dislike this version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, but it's also certainly not a favorite movie of mine.

British Intelligence

I'm getting to the end of all those B movies that TCM ran during the spotlight to B movies back in July. Next up is one released at the start of the European theater of World War II, and obviously made in relation to the Nazis being the bad guys, but set during World War I: British Intelligence.

It's 1917, and World War I has more or less reached a stalemate that would eventually be broken by the arrival of the Americans. The British are trying to attack the Germans, but it seems as though every movie they make is figured out by a German agent the British only know by name, Strendler, and not appearance. They're going to have to get their best agent on the case. With that in mind, they call on a pilot, Frank Bennett (Bruce Lester) to pick up the agent.

But Bennett gets shot down and sent to a field hospital, where he's attended by nurses, including the very pretty Helen (Margaret Lindsay) while he's in hospital. He's so delerious that he thinks he's falling in love with her, but isn't really going to remember her when he gets out of the hospital. That's a plot point that's going to come up later in the movie.

The action switches to Berlin, where the Germans are giving an award to one of their agents, before informing said agent of her new assignment. That agent is one Fräulein Von Lorbeer, first name Helene, who just happens to be the same Helen that ministered to Bennett in the French field hospital! Helene's assignment is to get on a submarine that's heading for the Irish coast, although Ireland wasn't quite independent at the time, unlike World War II. From there, she'll make her way to Liverpool, while she'll get picked up by an agent Thompson.

Thompson takes her to London, where she is to play the part of a refugee and get herself ingratiated with one Arthur Bennett (Holmes Herbert), who is a new Cabinet minister and as such a ripe target for spying on. As you can guess, Arthur happens to be the father of Frank, who is going to come back home later in the movie and think he might recognize this "refugee".

Helene's contact in the house is one Valdar (Boris Karloff), the valet to Bennett who is also in the employ of the Germans. Valdar isn't overly open about exactly what Helene's duties are going to be. In fact, he suspects her of being too direct in trying to make contact with him. Valdar suspects Helene of possibly being a double agent and in cahoots with the British. But Helene finds that she also has reason to suspect Valdar of being the exact same thing.

Eventually, the Brits cotton on to the fact that the elder Bennett is in danger of being spied upon by the Germans, but they can't figure out who are the Germans in their midst. So they set up a trap and try to catch, well, somebody.

British Intelligence is a movie that has a surprising amount of twists and turns for a B movie. You can see how it got made to try to get American audiences on the side of the British while they were at war and the Americans were still neutral. At the same time, with a pretty brief running time even for a B movie, at a shade over one hour, British Intelligence doesn't get much chance to rise to greatness.

It's a fine example of a B movie, however, and one that mostly works at what it sets out to do, which is fairly modest. So it's definitely worth watching if you get the chance.

The Three Faces of Fear

TCM unsurprisingly ran a bunch of horror movies during October. They have access to a certain subset of horror, notably all those Hammer Frankenstein and Dracula movies, as well as the movies that Vincent Price made which I think were distributed by American International. A different movie AIP released was the American version of a horror anthology, called Black Sabbath in America. (The movie was originally made in Italy, with a title translating to The Three Faces of Fear.

The movie is an anthology of horror stories, and when Alicia Malone introduced it, she said this was going to be the version released in Italy. However, what they showed is, I'm pretty certain, the American version, as the two versions have a different ordering of the stories. Boris Karloff introduces each of the stories with a bit of Hitchcockian dark humor, and even stars in one of the stories.

First up in the American version is "The Drop of Water", supposedly is based on a story by Anton Chekhov. Jacqueline Pierreux plays Helen, a British nurse, who late one dark and stormy night gets a telephone call. The caller is a maid who works for a medium. Or worked, since the medium just died, hence the call to the nurse. The maid wants Helen to prepare the body for burial. When she arrives, she notices that the dead medium, who already looks like she's decaying bit, is wearing a gaudy sapphire ring. Nobody else has use for it, Helen thinks, so she decides to take the ring for herself. In the process of trying to remove it from the dead woman's hand, she knocks over a glass of water that was on the nightstand. When she gets home, she gets the distinct suspicion that every faucet in the apartment is dripping, and no matter how many times she shuts them off, she keeps hearing dripping, leading her to wonder whether she's being haunted by the medium.

That's followed in the US version by "The Telephone", with a claimed provenance by Guy de Maupassant. This one looks like it's set closer to the time the movie was made (1963). Rosy (Michèle Mercier) hears the phone ringing, and goes to pick it up. No answer. It rings again, and she picks it up; again no answer. Finally, the third time, she hears a man's voice, claiming it's someone she knows, and accurately describing how she's only got a towel on. The phone calls keep coming, and eventually we learn that the man is someone Rosy helped send to prison. So she calls her friend Mary for help, although doing so may not give her as much help as she needs.

Last but not least, is "The Wurdulak", based on a story by Aleksey Tolstoy (cousin of Leo; Karloff mistakenly calls him Ivan Tolstoy). This one is set in 19th century Serbia, and has Mark Damon as a count who comes a murder victim who was stabbed to death. Surprisingly, at the farmhouse he stops at, the people recognize the knife as belonging to one of their members. Meanwhile, the patriarch, Gorca (Boris Karloff) is hunting a "wurdulak", a vampire-like creature. But more people get killed, including a young child, and the parents are stupid enough not to stab the dead child through the heart to prevent it too from becoming a wurdulak. Sure enough, the child's face shows up outside the window of the farmhouse....

Black Sabbath was directed by Mario Bava, the Italian director who would go on to define what's known as "giallo". Here, the stories are all adequate; there's nothing wrong with them although they weren't quite my cup of tea. Much more worth mentioning was Bava's use of light and a garish color palette, starting off with the green light coming in through the window at the beginning of "The Drop of Water" that reminded me of the neon lights in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. It's distinctive, and makes the movie much more memorable than it otherwise might be.

Black Sabbath is probably more worth mentioning in October than January, but it's worth watching any time.

The Old Dark House

So I recorded The Old Dark House when it was on TCM last Halloween, and finally got around to watching it. It's available on DVD, so I'm comfortable doing a full-length post on it.

Philip and Margaret Waverton (Raymond Massey and Gloria Stuart respectively) are driving through a rainstorm in the middle of nowhere, with snarky Penderel (Melvyn Douglas) in the back seat. The road becomes impassable, so they stop at the nearest house and ask to spend the night. The house is owned by the Femms, Horace (Ernest Thesiger) and Rebecca (Eva Moore), who have a servant in Morgan (Boris Karloff). They're none too happy about having guests, acting very strangely. Morgan is the worst of the lot, looking frightening with a beard.

Into all this come another couple, Sir William (Charles Laughton) and his girlfriend Gladys (Lilian Bond). Actually, Gladys seems like more of a kept woman, and when she and Penderel meet they fall in love. Still, all of the guests begin to get the impression that there's something wrong going on in the house, although they can't quite put their finger on what. It goes on like this.

I have to admit that I was left a bit cold by The Old Dark House. I found some of the characterizations annoying, and the story never really seemed to go anywhere for me, with it just suddenly ending. Perhaps I wasn't paying close enough attention. There was also a scene where the curtains were set on fire, and that fire didn't get put out from what I could tell.

Having said that, The Old Dark House became a template for a whole sub-genre within the horror film cycle. Also on Halloween, TCM ran a later movie in that sub-genre, The Cat and the Canary, which I reviewed here several weeks back. That one was better because it gave everybody coherent motivations where this original is closer to a slice of life movie in that nobody has any motivations.

The Old Dark House is generally highly-rated, or at least higher than I would rate it, so it's certainly another movie where you should probably watch and judge for yourself.

70 years before AMC

Coming up overnight tonight (or very early tomorrow morning, I suppose) at 3:30 AM as part of TCM Underground is The Walking Dead. No, not the AMC TV show, but a 1936 movie with a completely different premise.

Ricardo Cortez plays Nolan a defense attorney we see at the beginning of the movie defending a guy who is ultimately convicted and sentenced to a long sentence by Judge Shaw. The man whom Nolan was defending was apparently part of the racketeering gang that seems to plague cities in films of the 1930s, and Nolan isn't just the defense attorney, but the brains behind the criminal organization. (What sort of criminality they engage in isn't exactly explained.) So when one of their men gets sent up, they're none too happy about it, and want to get Shaw out of the way.

Cut to the institute of one Dr. Beaumont (Edmund Gwenn). He'd probably be a mad scientist in any other movie, but he's supposed to be the good guy here, having an animal heart beating under glass in his laboratory, with assistants Jimmy (Warren Hull) and Nancy (Marguerite Churchill) who are in love with each other. This brief scene is only an establishing scene for Beaumont's presence which is to be much bigger later.

Meanwhile, back to our racketeers and their plan to do away with Shaw. They hire one John Ellman (Boris Karloff), who had been sentenced by Shaw a decade ago and only recently got out of prison. He's to work ostensibly for a private detective, watching Shaw's house, but what he doesn't know is that he's being set up as the patsy for when Nolan's men murder Shaw and dispose of the body in Ellman's car. However, Jimmy and Nancy see the bad guys putting Shaw's body in Ellman's car, and Ellman sees them drive off, so he knows he's got witnesses who can prove his innocence, if only they'll show up at his trial. Yeah, right. They're too afraid to speak up, so Ellman is convicted and sentenced to the electric chair, with Jimmy and Nancy only showing up to clear Ellman on the night of his execution.

They're too late, but Dr. Beaumont makes a special request. He wants the body, and brings Ellman back to life! Like I said, he is a mad scientist, but he's supposed to be the good guy here. He's just doing research, wanting to find out from Ellman what death is like, and what there is on the other side. Ellman is having none of that. Although he claims Beaumont, as well as District Attorney Werner are his friends, he also knows his enemies when he sees them, as when he first meets Nolan after being brought back to life. Not that Ellman has any idea how he knows any of this. And not that Ellman is even fully alive. He really is the personification of the "walking dead", looking alive but only being there to make certain the bad guys get what's coming to them, which starts to happen with one fishy unexplained death, and then another.

The Walking Dead is a weird little movie, the sort of thing you just know that Warner Bros. churned out simply to have enough material to play as the second bill under one of their prestige movies, and probably never gave another thought to. The people actually working on the movie, however, clearly did care. Karloff is good in a difficult role that requires him to be befuddled in the first half and have a mostly blank expression in the second half. Ricardo Cortez is slick as usual, which perfectly fits the character. Gwenn is oddly cast, but it's the sort of casting that works for the movie. Direction is handled by Michael Curtiz who could simply have done a workmanlike job and have the movie look like any other B movie, but decided to use a bunch of interesting camera angles and lighting techniques. Sure, the plot of The Walking Dead is nuts and takes too much time to get to the good part, but the movie is still quite interesting.

I'm not certain whether The Walking Dead is available on DVD. Unfortunately, the Amazon link at IMDb leads to a search on the phrase "walking dead", which of course yields a ton of hits for DVDs of the TV series. TCM's schedule page, as well as their search, also leads to hits on the TV series.

The Sorcerers

A few months ago TCM showed a new-to-me movie called The Sorcerers. It's on again tonight at 6:30 PM on TCM, and is definitely worth a watch.

Boris Karloff stars as Prof. Monserrat, an elderly, down on his luck hypnotist/pyschologist. It's to the point that he has to advertise at corner shops, and can barely pay for those advertisements. But he's been working with his wife Estelle (Catherine Lacey) on a new invention, one that's sure to revolutionize society! The only problem is, to prove that the machine will work, they need to find a young, healthy person on whom they can experiment without the person being aware as to what's going one and what the experiment will entail. Sounds highly unethical, but I suppose if the elderly couple were ethical, we wouldn't have much of a movie, would we?

Thankfully, the couple lives in London during the swingin' 60s, so there are a lot of young people around who like to experience life. They find Mike (Ian Ogilvy), a guy who likes to go out to the clubs with his girlfriend Nicole (Elizabeth Ercy) butalways seems to find himself winding up bored with the whole thing. So when he leaves the club to take a walk by himself and Monserrat approaches him, Mike decides to take Monserrat up up on the offer of having the wildest experience he's ever had, although Mike is understandably skeptical about the whole thing and is really only doing it on a lark.

And so they set out on the experiment, which involves strapping Mike into some ghastly machine while he watches, well, something that looks like an abstract video of lights, colors, and shapes. In fact, this mind-blowing contraption is supposed to put Mike into some sort of super hypnotic trance through which the Professor and his wife will be able to control Mike. But what makes the device revolutionary is not that they'll be able to control Mike, but the fact that they will be able to feel Mike's experiences. And in fact, the experiment seems to be a success as the elderly couple can feel when Mike cracks an egg open on his hand, and then washes his hand.

Think of the good that this contraption could be used for! Professor Monserrat believes it will be a boon to seniors and other shut-ins who will have a better ability to experience the world around him. Yeah right. If that were what the device were going to be used for, we once again wouldn't have much of a movie. Instead, Estelle gets ideas of her own. She's always wanted a fur coat, and with the device giving her the ability to control Mike, perhaps she can get him to break into a furrier and steal a coat for her! And Estelle wants more than that, much more. The Professor wants to stop her, of course, but does he have to will to do it? And won't everybody around Mike figure out that something bizarre is going on?

The Sorcerers is one of those movies that probably shouldn't be thought of as very good, but boy is it entertaining. Boris Karloff for the most part, and Catherine Lacey especially, are confined to one set of their tiny London flat for the entire movie. The hypnotic induction sequence was frankly laughable, albeit reminiscent of The Ipcress File, which is supposed to be a much more serious movie. Poor Ian Ogilvy has to act like an automaton for much of the movie. And yet, The Sorcerers is a heck of a lot of fun. Put it on when you just want to be entertained, and don't have to think too hard.