Dark Eyes of London, a.k.a. The Human Monster (John Argyle Productions, Pathé, Monogram, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Dateless to Dangerous on Saturday, June 21 my husband Charles and I watched a pretty quirky half-thriller, half-horror film from Britain in 1939 called Dark Eyes of London – after the Edgar Wallace novel on which it was based – in the U.K. but with its title changed to The Human Monster for its U.S. release. The movie was produced by John Argyle Productions – Argyle also co-wrote the script with Walter Summers (who also directed, with quite a flair for the Gothic) and Patrick Kirwan – and released by Pathé in Britain and Monogram in America. Lugosi had already worked for the first iteration of Monogram in one of its worst movies, The Mysterious Mr. Wong (1935), but it was after this film that he signed with Sam Katzman’s Banner Productions and Monogram to make nine largely wretched horror movies that are probably Lugosi’s worst credits until Ed Wood got hold of him. Dark Eyes of London a.k.a. The Human Monster is actually a pretty well-done film that cast Lugosi in a dual role. He’s Dr. Feodor Orloff, a medical student who wasn’t given a license to practice because he developed megalomania (no shit!) and was therefore forced to make a living as an insurance broker; and he’s also John Dearborn, who runs a charity home for blind people and, in the film’s most haunting scene, is shown preaching a sermon and reading from a Bible printed in Braille.

But because there was no way Lugosi’s Hungarian accent would be believable coming from a character who was supposedly British (though Lugosi had played a Brit convincingly in one of his finest films, the early Charlie Chan mystery The Black Camel from 1931), Argyle hired another actor, O. B. Clarence, to dub his voice when he was playing Dearborn. That at least is what most people think, though Charles thought that Clarence was actually playing Dearborn on screen as well as on the soundtrack. His key piece of evidence was that director Summers shot the big reveal scene that was supposed to let us know Orloff and Dearborn were the same person from a distant camera with the actor(s) in shadow. The gimmick is that Orloff is running an insurance agency and writing big policies on various individuals who come to him for loans. Orloff insists that they take out life insurance policies on themselves with phony beneficiaries, and then he woos them to Dearborn’s home for the blind. There they’re killed by Orloff’s assistant, Jake (Wilfrid Walter), an oddly made up character who looks half-Black and half-Neanderthal. (I suspect the makeup artist, who’s uncredited on imdb.com, was inspired by Fredric March’s Neanderthal makeup as Mr. Hyde in Rouben Mamoulian’s 1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.)

Unfortunately for him, one of Orloff’s victims was a middle-aged man named Henry Stuart (Gerald Pring), and his daughter Diana (a quite impressive performance by Greta Gynt) shows up in London to find out what happened to him. The police have noticed a series of mysterious deaths among men who had taken out big life insurance policies just before they croaked, and assigned Detective Inspector Larry Holt (Hugh Williams) to investigate. Holt in turn has the unwelcome assistance of Lt. Patrick O’Reilly (Edmon Ryan, whose American accent is really surprisingly good) from the Chicago Police Department. O’Reilly was there to escort American criminal Fred Grogan (Alexander Field) to be extradited for a crime he committed on a previous trip to Britain. There’s also an engaging character named Lou (Arthur E. Owen), a blind and dumb street musician who plays violin and receives instructions from Dr. Orloff printed out on slips of paper with a Braille typewriter, and who gets “offed” by Jake when he learns too much about what’s going on. Ultimately the cops catch on to Dr. Orloff and they show up to arrest him, though in a scene that Charles found disappointing he ends up being pushed by Jake into the same mud bog along the shore of the Thames that has previously been the final destination of most of the insurance scam’s victims.

Charles was hoping the film would end like White Zombie seven years earlier, in which Lugosi’s character was driven from the parapet of his old castle by the newly freed zombies he’d enslaved on his sugar plantation in the Caribbean. I was also hoping for a similarly apocalyptic ending along the lines of Bowery at Midnight, made by Lugosi for Katzman, Banner, and Monogram three years later, in which Lugosi’s murder victims, brought back to life by a drug-addicted doctor he’d sheltered at his mission, gang up on him and essentially lynch him at the end. Still, Dark Eyes of London is an engaging movie and a cut above most of the dreck Lugosi would get once he returned to America (John Argyle deserves credit for giving Lugosi a quite substantial speaking role and letting for him to learn all those lines phonetically, since Lugosi never learned more than the simplest English), even though it’s hardly at the level of Murders in the Rue Morgue, White Zombie or his surprisingly effective romantic lead in the 1934 serial The Return of Chandu.