The Lady and the Monster (Republic, 1944)

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

On Thursday, December 15 I ran my husband Charles a double bill of two movies from Republic Studios in 1944, The Lady and the Monster and Storm Over Lisbon. Both were vehicles created by Republic CEO Herbert J. Yates for the benefit of the woman he’d fallen in love – or at lost lust – with, Czech Olympic figure skater Vera Hruba. Yates met her when she signed with Republic for two movies to show off her skating skills – Sonj Henie had just become a star at 20th Century-Fox and other studios were looking for similarly talented skates they could turn into major attractions. These two films both billed Vera Hruba Ralston (the last name was Yates’s idea to “Americanize” her) above the title and their male leads, Richard Arlen and Erich von Stroheim, below it. They were both directed by George Sherman, co-written by Dane Lussier, and photographed by John Alton, who despite his unquestionable credentials as an atmospheric noir specialist proved less than equal to the challenge of making Vera Hruba Ralston sexy to anyone not named Herbert J. Yates. In a post from 2019 on the MacMcManus blog (https://maxmcmanus.com/2018/09/01/the-worst-actress-in-hollywood-queen-of-repubic-vera-hruba-ralston/), Charles Davis describes Vera Hruba Ralston as the real-life equivalent of Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane, stating that unlike the ostensible model, Marion Davies, who had genuine talent for light comedy, “the personable and intelligent Miss Ralston still came across as forcefully chipper but leaden on screen.”

The Lady and the Monster began life as Donodvan's Brain, a 1939 novel by Curt Siodmak, screenwriter (best known for The Wolf-Man) and wanna-be director – he was upset that his brother Robert Siodmak won the director’s chair and he hadn’t. The story was a science-fiction thriller about a scientist named Dr. Patrick Cory who steals the brain of tycoon Warren H. Donovan after Donovan’s private plane crashes in the Arizona desert, and keeps Donovan’s brain alive artificially until it becomes so powerful it takes over his personality and uses him to fulfill Donovan’s pre-mortem wishes. Curt Siodmak wanted to make it a condition of selling the movie rights that he’d get to direct the film himself, but he got screwed out of it. According to Tom Weaver’s Poverty Row Horrors!. Humphrey Bogart tried to get Jack Warner to buy the rights for him, and whine Bogart’s previous excursion into sci-fi, The Return of Doctor X, was one of his lamest movies, it’s fascinating to think of how he could have handled the role of a basically decent but weak scientist who gets trapped by the power of his own experiment. Alas, instead of Warner Bros. or another major studio, the rights ended up at Republic, where Yates and Sherman decided to make Dr. Cory (Richard Arlen) simply the assistant of a floridly mad scientist, Dr. Franz Mueller (Erich von Stroheim). He has an assistant of his own, Janice Farrell (Vera Hruba Ralston), and the two are in love but their attempts to date each other are continually being thwarted by Dr. Mueller, who keeps calling them back to the lab for one experiment or another. There’s a great scene which sums up their relationship in which Cory dons a lab coat oliver the evening-dress suit in which he’d planned to take Janice to a fancy party.

The Lady and the Monster proved that Republic was monumentally unable to make a convincing horror film; it’s a schizoid movie which mixes scenes taking place in “The Castle,” the old dark hose where Dr. Mueller lives and has his lab equipment, and scenes taken more or less from Siodmak’s novel in which Dr. Cory is trying to fulfill Donovan’s wishes in winning freedom for convicted murderer Roger Collins (Bill Henry). Collins is on death row for killing his stepfather, who had been Donovan’s private secretary, though we eventually learn that Donovan himself had killed him to suppress a book the secretary had written about him. There’s a bit of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Cory’s double persona, as Alton shoots Arlen’s face to look craggier when he’s under the influence of Donovan’s brain, and Charles wondered if Alton used the same trick Rouben Mamoulian and cinematographer Karl Struss had used in the 1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde film of using color-sensitive makeup and colored lighting to have Fredric March transition from one to the other on screen without double exposures or cuts. Independent producer Felix Feist made a much better film of Donovan’s Brain in 1953 with Lew Ayres as Cory and Nancy Davis (a year after she married Ronald Reagan) as his wife – and when I first saw The Lady and the Monster it was well after I’d seen the 1953 Donovan’s Brain and I was shocked to find it was an earlier version of the story. Later I ran down a copy of Curt Siodmak’s novel (a British import since it was then out of print in the U.S.) and found it a good deal better than either film.