Monday, February 3, 2020

The Raven (Universal, 1935)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I had enough time together last night to fit in a second movie after Variety Lights, and it was the leftover film from our recent night of Edgar Allan Poe-inspired movies that began on Poe’s birthday with Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) and The Black Cat (1934). This was the 1935 Universal horror “B” The Raven, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi (billed only by their last names in their above-the-title credit card: this was the era in which Universal was putting out trailers billing Karloff as “Karloff — The Uncanny!,” suggesting he was an actual monster or freak instead of an ordinary human actor just particularly good at playing such roles). The Raven was eiter the second or third movie to co-star Karloff and Lugosi, depending on whether you count their guest appearance as themselves in the 1934 Universal movie Gift of Gab (a typical rubes-crash-Hollywood story and the one Karloff-Lugosi film I’ve never seen; when Universal Home Video put out a DVD boxed set called Universal Rarities, Volume 1 consisting exclusively of Paramount films Universal’s TV subsidiary Revue had bought in the 1950’s, I expressed the hope that there would be a Universal Rarities, Volume 2 of films Universal had produced itself, and Gift of Gab was one of the movies I wished they’d include along with Night World, The Kiss Before the Mirror, The Man Who Reclaimed His Head — a macabre anti-war masterpiece with Claude Rains and Lionel Atwill — and The Crimson Canary).

In essence it followed a similar plot template to their first one, 1934’s The Black Cat (a really quirky movie directed by Edgar G. Ulmer) but with the Karloff and Lugosi characters reversed. The film opens on the typical dark and stormy night (I was watching it with my mother one night and she said, “Doesn’t anyone ever commit murder on a sunny day?” — she also noticed how old Karloff looked on screen and said, “Wasn’t Boris Karloff ever young?,” to which I replied, “Not when we saw him, he wasn’t; he was 42 when he made Frankenstein”) in which dancer Jean Thatcher (Irene Ware) is involved in a car accident when she misses a detour sign and drives off the road. She suffers from a pinched nerve in the back of her neck which will either paralyze or kill her unless her father, Judge Thatcher (Samuel S. Hinds), and the doctors attending her (including Jerry Halden, played by Lester Matthews, who’s also her fiancé) can persuade the eminent super-surgeon Dr. Richard Vollin (Bela Lugosi) to come out of retirement and use his skills to relieve the nerve. Dr. Vollin shows up and performs the operation but is instantly smitten with Jean and determined to marry her even though she already has an age-peer boyfriend and her dad (whose first name we never learn) doesn’t want to see her tie herself down to a much older man. Dr. Vollin is also a huge devotee of Edgar Allan Poe; he possesses the largest privately-held collection of Poe memorabilia in the world, he has a Maltese falcon-like black statuette of a raven on his desk, he’s fond of reciting “The Raven” every time he has an even remotely interested listener (like the museum official who comes to his home to bid on his Poe collection), and he has a secret basement room in which he’s built life-size working models of torture devices from “The Pit and the Pendulum” and other Poe stories.

In a film that lasts only 61 minutes and was directed by Louis Friedlander — who later shortened his name to Lew Landers and cranked out a lot of watchable (and sometimes unwatchable) trash (including another film with Lugosi, The Return of the Vampire) in the late 1930’s and 1940’s before he ended up doing series TV in the 1950’s — the action moves quickly as Dr. Vollin encounters Edmond Bateman (Boris Karloff), an escaped criminal from San Quentin who burned up a bank guard’s face with an acetylene torch while robbing a bank in Arizona after his escape and is now wanted nationwide. He’s heard from an underworld contact that Dr. Vollin can remodel his face and make him a) unrecognizable and b) better-looking, because in the one true bit of Karloff pathos in an otherwise nothing role (a barely articulate gangster similar to the roles he’d been playing in the early 1930’s before Frankenstein revitalized his career and “typed” him as a horror actor), Bateman tells Dr. Vollin, “Maybe, when a man is ugly, that makes him do ugly things.” Alas, Dr. Vollin says he’ll only do the operation if Bateman does him a favor, though; the favor he has in mind is to kidnap Jean Thatcher and murder both her father and her inconvenient fiancé. He also double-crosses Bateman and makes him look uglier, not better. There are two scenes in which the now even more monstrous-looking Bateman breaks into Jean’s room to carry her off — an obvious cop from the big scene in Frankenstein in which Karloff similarly grabbed Mae Clarke, which itself was ripped off from a similar scene with Conrad Veidt and Lil Dagover in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari — and a scene in which Jean’s boyfriend tries to rescue her, not realizing that her room is actually an elevator and Vollin has lowered it so anyone trying to enter it from the level it was on will fall to his death through the shaft. (The scene in which Lester Matthews pulls himself away from the shaft and back to safety got unintended laughs when The Raven was previewed, but they kept it in anyway.)

Vollin locks Judge Thatcher onto the slab for the pit-and-the-pendulum torture (which is staged effectively but not as chillingly as Roger Corman and Vincent Price did it in their 1960 film of Poe’s original story, or something resembling it) and puts Jean and her boyfriend into a room whose walls will come together and crush them — only the good guys manage to turn the tables and it’s Vollin himself who’s crushed to death in that room. The Raven manages to be haunting despite a somewhat silly script by David Boehm that gives Lugosi all too many tempting opportunities to overact — notably his climactic line, “Poe, you are avenged!,” as his sinister schemes to off his enemies seem to be working — and gives Karloff surprisingly little to do at all. Apparently Lugosi resented that, though his was clearly the lead role, Karloff got first billing and twice as much money ($10,000 to Lugosi’s $5,000). Still, The Raven is a surprisingly stylish film — one doesn’t expect a Lew Landers movie in which his direction is better than the script, but here it is — and a fun little romp through Hollywood’s version of the macabre even though better writing and more sensitive direction (like Lugosi had got from Barry Beranger and Ray Taylor in the quite remarkable serial The Return of Chandu in 1934, in which he was actually the romantic lead!) could have made Vollin a more rich and complex character instead of a cardboard mad villain.