Mystery of Edwin Drood (Universal, 1935)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards my husband Charles and I watched a Blu-Ray disc of the 1935 Universal film Mystery of Edwin Drood, based on Charles Dickens’ last novel which was left unfinished when he died in 1870. The Mystery of Edwin Drood (the book itself used the definite article in the title, and so have all the films made from it except this one) was Dickens’ first attempt at a crime thriller, and frustratingly he never wrote down who the murderer was supposed to be – though three people who knew him, including Dickens’ son Charles, Jr., said Dickens had told them he intended to have Edwin Drood’s uncle, John Jasper, be his killer. Universal put this film into production after the enormous success of The Invisible Man (1933), which introduced its star, Claude Rains, to movie audiences even though Rains, as the title character, was never seen on screen until the last minute or so of the film. (Rains had made one previous film, a minor role in a British silent called Bulld Thy House in 1920, but he was almost totally unknown to movie audiences in either his native Britain or the U.S. until James Whale cast him in The Invisible Man precisely because he wanted audiences not to have any idea of what the invisible man actually looked like.) Universal suddenly had a major star on their hands with little or no idea what to do with him. They cast him in an anti-war melodrama called The Man Who Reclaimed His Head (1934), an elusive film because of a plagiarism lawsuit filed against it by Jean Bart, author of the play on which it was based, and then they developed this project for him.

Universal already had had a major hit with an adaptation of another late Dickens novel, Great Expectations (1934), and film historian Richard Griffith argued that the major studios, Universal and MGM in particular, embraced Dickens as a story source because then they could deal with social issues safely, at a century’s remove, instead of being accused of taking sides in mid-1930’s American politics. Though Mystery of Edwin Drood is clearly a product of the period after late 1934, when under pressure from a Roman Catholic lobbying group called the Legion of Decency (the name says it all) the studios got far more serious about enforcing the Motion Picture Production Code – this film bears Production Code Seal number 544 – director Stuart Walker and writers John L. Balderston and Gladys Under (working from an “adaptation” by Leopold Atlas and Bradley King) were at least able to start the story the way Dickens had, with John Jasper (Claude Rains) in an opium den in London despite the Production Code’s flat prohibition of any depiction of drug addiction. The drug den is run by an old woman (Zeffie Tillbury, who later that same year would play one of two old landladies who unknowingly rent a room to werewolf Henry Hull in The Werewolf of London, also directed by Stuart Walker and to my mind a much better film than 1941’s The Wolf-Man) and its other customers are clearly decrepit, haggard and barely conscious. Jasper lives in the British village of Closterham, where he works as the cathedral’s choir director and occasional soloist, though the only piece he’s shown singing is the largo “Where’er You Walk” from Handel’s oratorio Semele ("Samuel"). (It’s almost certainly Rains’ own voice, since it’s not good enough to be a double.)

The 34-year-old Jasper is obsessively in love with Rosa Bud (Heather Angel), who’s just turned 18 and since they were both children has been intended for Jasper’s 21-year-old nephew Edwin Drood (David Manners). Both Drood and Rosa are orphans; Drood is being raised by his uncle and Rosa is going to a women’s boarding school where Jasper is teaching her to sing. (The script makes a point of telling us exactly how old the three principal characters are.) Into this mix comes Neville Landless (Douglass Montgomery), a refugee from Ceylon (now known as Sri Lanka) with a quick temper that got him into one fight too many . Neville has just arrived in Closterham with his sister Helene (Valerie Hobson, surprisingly ill-used given how luminous she was in The Werewolf of London and even more so in James Whale’s horror masterpiece, The Bride of Frankenstein). Rosa falls head over heels in love with the dashing Neville, and Drood is enough of a good sport about it that he agrees to release Rosa from their engagement. Alas, he doesn’t tell Jasper about this, so Jasper goes ahead with his plan to murder Drood. He’s found out from Durdles (Forrester Harvey), keeper of the crypt at Closterham Cathedral, that the crypt contains not only graves with bodies in them but graves without them, and at least one of the empty spaces is filled with quicklime so any body placed in it will dissolve and become unrecognizable. Jasper kills Drood and, using a key he’s made with a soap impression of Durdles’ real one, lets himself into the crypt and puts Drood’s body in the quicklime. Then Jasper makes a big show of grief over his missing nephew and vows to bring the perpetrator to justice,like so many other movie murderers. He also arranges for Neville Landless to be accused of the crime, convicted and executed, so he’ll be rid of both his rivals for Rosa’s affections and she’ll have no one else to turn to.

Only his drug dealer back in London hears his insane opium-fueled rantings about “Ned,” puts two and two together and goes to Closterham to rat him out. Drood’s body has disintegrated beyond recognition but he’s identified by the engagement ring from Rosa’s mother, which had been given to her by the headmistress of her school after her mom’s death. She had given it to Drood and worn it as a symbol of their engagement, but the night he broke up with her he had returned the ring to her, and it’s found on his body. Jasper flees from a mob of irate villagers and ultimately commits suicide by leaping to his death from the church’s bell tower. Though Mystery of Edwin Drood isn’t really a horror film, Universal sure made it look like one. They assigned George Robinson to photograph it, and Robinson’s cinematography and Albert D’Agostino’s art direction went to the max in duplicating the Gothic style of Laemmle-era Universal horror. Indeed, this film hewed so closely to Universal’s horror style that in 1957 Universal and Columbia, co-venturing in TV film sales, put it in the original Shock Theatre package of 52 films to be sold to TV along with such acknowledged classics of the genre as Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy and The Wolf-Man. Mystery of Edwin Drood is an odd movie, suffering from Walker’s usual directorial inconsistency – scenes that work beautifully alternate with others that work well enough to get by, but only barely (a problem with The Werewolf of London as weil), but at its best moments it’s magnificent and definitely helped by Rains’ intensity in the principal role. Rains seemed headed for major stardom, but he ultimately found his niche as a character actor – albeit an uncommonly great one, bringing force and power to roles in films like The Adventures of Robin Hood, Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and as the corrupt police chief who’s reformed at the end by Humphrey Bogart’s sacrifice in Casablanca.