by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Afterwards I ran one of the three movies from the 1930’s I’d
planned for the evening: Condemned to Live,
in a download from an .mp4 file (an .avi was also available and I probably
should have gone with that one instead). Condemned to Live was a 1935 production from the short-lived
Invincible film company, which along with a sister studio called Chesterfield
made independent films that were considerably better produced than most. The
reason was that they had a distribution deal with Universal, and their contract
allowed them to film their movies at Universal City Studios and use all the
sets and props Universal wasn’t using for their own films at the moment. Condemned
to Live was directed by one of the
quirkiest talents in Hollywood history: Frank R. Strayer, who in 1933 had made The
Vampire Bat at an even shorter-lived
studio, Majestic, and — aided by an excellent script by Edward T. Lowe that
artfully combined the Frankenstein
and Dracula premises (mad
scientist Lionel Atwill has created a hunk of artificial protoplasm in his lab,
but to feed it he needs a steady supply of human blood, which he obtains by
posing as a vampire and killing people for their blood) — as well as a cast of
people who were simultaneously playing leads at major studios (including Melvyn
Douglas and Fay Wray) — he came up with a horror classic that ran for years
(largely due to Douglas’s continued popularity). For Condemned to
Live he worked with writer Karen De Wolfe
and came up with another human vampire tale; it begins in Africa, in which
Martha Kristan (Barbara Bedford), Dr Duprez (Robert Frazer) and Dr. Anders
Bizet (Pedro de Cordoba) are the only white people left alive in an encampment
that’s under siege by a native army. Only that’s not the worst of their
problems: Martha is attacked by a giant vampire bat, though she lasts long
enough to give birth to the baby (she was pregnant when this happened), which
Dr. Bizet takes home and raises as his own. Flash-forward and the baby is now
the adult Dr. Paul Kristan (Ralph Morgan, brother of Frank “Wizard of Oz”
Morgan and usually the milquetoast-looking guy who turns out to be the mystery
murderer at the end), who’s acquired a saintly reputation in his mittel-Europan town for treating all comers and generally helping
out everybody. John Mane (Carl Stockdale), the town’s richest man, has arranged
for his daughter Marguerite (Maxine Doyle) to marry Paul, but she’s genuinely
in awe of him but her romantic and sexual attractions run more to a man her own
age, David (a quite good Russell Gleason).
A series of mysterious murders
starts occurring in the town, in which townspeople are found in the caves in
the cliffs just outside town with all the blood drained from their bodies. The
townspeople are at a loss, though they assume their town is being invaded by a
giant bat who’s killing the people, flying their bodies to the caves and
leaving them there after having sucked out their blood. David is the only one
smart enough to realize that’s preposterous and the murders are most likely
being committed by a human being — but who? It takes Frank Strayer and Karen De
Wolfe about half this movie’s 65-minute running time to tell us, but not
surprisingly Paul Kristan is actually the killer, having been infected with
something or other when that bat bit his mom back in Africa while he was still
in her womb (you remember — though for years prints of Condemned to
Live circulated with that prologue deleted
so when the whole thing gets explained at the end, audiences were probably
baffled). He went through childhood, medical training and adulthood without the
whatever-it-is manifesting itself, but eventually it did when he worked himself
to exhaustion and therefore his immune system weakened enough the bat-virus (or
whatever) took him over whenever it turned dark (except for the obligatory full
moon) and he became a monstrous killer. We learn this for sure about halfway
through the movie when he attacks and kills Marguerite’s maid Anna (Hedi Shope)
in Marguerite’s home, but it takes longer for the townspeople to figure it out
and their first suspect is Paul’s manservant, the hunchbacked Zaan (Mischa
Auer, almost unrecognizable and surprisingly good in a Dwight Frye-type role).
When I first saw this film what struck me most was the almost homoerotic
“bromance” between Paul and Zaan; Zaan, unlike Paul, knows from the get-go that
Paul is the killer (he witnessed the first murder personally) and devotes
himself to covering for Paul, even to the point of offering himself to the
lynch mob in Paul’s place. In the end Paul is cornered in the caves, discloses
to the townspeople that he, not
Zaan is the killer, and commits suicide by falling to his death down a
subterranean cavern — whereupon Zaan, faithful to the end, follows him and also
jumps to his death.
Had this been a Universal production and had James Whale
been the director, Condemned to Live in general and the scenes between Paul and Zaan in particular would
probably have been dissected by film scholars for decades — but instead, as an
independent production made by a director who later worked for years helming
the Blondie series (based on Chic
Young’s comic strip) at Columbia (giving up a potentially interesting career as
a horror director for a steady paycheck making sitcoms), Condemned to
Live sank into “Forgotten Horrors”
obscurity. Condemned to Live has
its problems — Strayer didn’t have a cast anywhere near as good as the one for The
Vampire Bat (though Ralph Morgan — albeit
still cast as the guy who turns out to be the killer at the end — gave the
performance of a lifetime), and Maxine Doyle in particular seems determined to
chew every line as if it were kale she were trying to eat, and the film seems
oddly slow at times — but overall it’s a quite capable piece and fits neatly
into the quite extensive library of stories about people going through
unwitting transformations that turn them into monsters, including Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (an obvious antecedent
even though Dr. Kristan does not
transform through a self-experiment the way Dr. Jekyll does), The
Werewolf of London (made the same year by
Universal itself and a far greater film than the better-known The
Wolf Man), Edgar G. Ulmer’s superb Bluebeard (also a movie showing what a genuinely imaginative,
artistic director could do on a “B” budget), and on up through today with the
Incredible Hulk and even, arguably, Hannibal Lecter (who, like Paul Kristan in Condemned
to Live and Gaston Morel in Bluebeard, is shown as a warm, likable character when he isn’t
actually killing).
