The film was The Walking Dead, another in TCM’s Boris Karloff marathon last October 30, and a movie that took some typical Karloff situations (including casting him as a man who dies and is then brought back to life by scientific means) but gave them fresh spins and managed to create a quite somber mood very different from the sensational (for its time) horror of a lot of his better-known vehicles. It was made at Warner Bros., which had just signed Karloff to a five-film contract (at one point in 1939, the height of the studio system, when most Hollywood actors were working for just one company, Karloff had non-exclusive multi-picture contracts with four studios at once: Universal, Columbia, Warners and Monogram.) Indeed, for its first few minutes it seems like a typical Warners crime drama and one wonders just how they’re going to fit Karloff into it: Stephen Martin (Kenneth Harlan) is on trial (without a jury) before Judge Shaw (Joseph King) on the charge of defrauding the government on contracts. Martin is actually part of a gang of high-class criminals headed by his attorney, Nolan (Ricardo Cortez). They mount a campaign of intimidation and threats against Judge Shaw to get him to acquit Martin, but he convicts him anyway. Nolan meets with his associates in the gang — Loder (Barton MacLane), Werner (Henry O’Neill) and Blackstone (Paul Harvey) — and announces he’s hired a hit man named Trigger (Joseph Sawyer) to kill Judge Shaw. When the other gang members protest that this will draw more heat on them, not less, Nolan tells them not to worry: he’s got the perfect fall guy lined up (obviously playing Sam Spade in the first version of The Maltese Falcon five years earlier had taught Ricardo Cortez a thing or two about finding a fall guy). His patsy is John Ellman (Boris Karloff), who 10 years earlier was sentenced to a long prison term by Judge Shaw for killing a man who accosted his wife. Ellman has just been released two weeks before Trigger’s scheduled hit on Shaw, and they arrange to run Ellman’s car off the road and plant Shaw’s body in it after they kill him.
The frame works and Ellman is
tried, convicted and sentenced to death — Nolan, pretending he’s doing him a
favor, deliberately mishandles the trial so badly as to ensure Ellman’s
conviction (12 years before Orson Welles used the same plot gimmick in The
Lady from Shanghai) — but there’s one
complication. Jimmy (Warren Hull) and Nancy (Marguerite Churchill), two young
medical students working as lab assistants to medical researcher Dr. Beaumont
(Edmund Gwenn), actually witnessed the real killer run Ellman’s car off the
road and transfer Shaw’s body to it. Jimmy wants the two to come forward as
witnesses, but Nancy successfully talks him out of it until the night Ellman is
scheduled to be executed, when she finally breaks down and allows him to go to
Nolan with the information that can spare his client’s life. Nolan deliberately
delays reaching anyone in law enforcement with this information so he can make
a show of concern while really sabotaging things so that the governor’s
reprieve reaches the prison just after Ellman is executed. He hasn’t reckoned with Dr. Beaumont, who demands
that instead of being autopsied Ellman’s body be turned over to him at once,
whereupon he takes it to his lab and, with Jimmy and Nancy assisting, plugs it
into a bunch of Frankenstein-like
gizmos (including the so-called “Lindbergh heart,” which the celebrated aviator
and fascist apologist actually co-invented with Dr. Alexis Carrel, whose
real-life experiments with research partner Dr. Robert Cornish in attempting to
revive electrocution victims apparently inspired this film) that bring Ellman
back to life. At first Ellman is incapable of speech — he emits only non-verbal
whines, groans and snarls similar to those he used in Frankenstein — but eventually he comes to and achieves at least a
bit of his former intelligence. He also seems to acquire some sort of
extra-sensory power, because without any actual evidence he intuits the
identities of the people who set him up and starts knocking them off one by
one. Eventually the police close in on him and he’s shot down, and before he
dies the second time Beaumont frantically tries — and fails — to get Ellman to
describe what the experience of death (his first one) was actually like.
The Walking Dead is
an intriguing movie that tends to argue against my general field theory of
cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of
writers; though five people worked on this script (Ewart Adamson and Joseph
Fields get credit for the story and Adamson, Peter Milne, Robert Andrews and
Lillie Hayward for the script), it has a lot of felicitious touches. Asked if he has a last
request, Ellman is at first indignant — “You take my life and you want to grant
me a favor?” — but then comes up
with one: he asks that a live musician play his favorite piece as he’s walking
to the electric chair (and as he gets in the chair he gestures up to the
ceiling and says, “He will
forgive me,” meaning God). Indeed, the first half of this film is considerably
more moving and better as drama than the second half — though the whole piece
is presented with a remarkable subtlety for what was pretty obviously intended
as an exploitation piece aimed at Karloff’s core horror audience. Michael Curtiz
is the director, and he’s probably the best one Karloff worked with in the
1930’s other than James Whale (and maybe Edgar G. Ulmer). As Ellman, a
sympathetic victim of both criminals and law enforcement, Karloff underplays throughout the film — a far cry from the snarling
overacting he sometimes fell into with less carefully drafted scripts and less
assertive directors — creating a vivid impression of a sensitive man, not
especially bright but sympathetic and all too aware of what’s happening to him
and why.
The parallels to Frankenstein are there but they’re kept subtle — Ellman, even after he’s
revivified, remains a normal human being (albeit one with quirky
post-resurrection mental powers) and a likable if rather distant character
whose killings are sufficiently well motivated that they don’t cost him the
audience’s sympathy. The cinematographer is Hal Mohr (an Academy Award winner
for the 1935 A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a far more prestigious name than one would expect on a 62-minute
“B” picture), and even when he has Ellman doing Karloffian things like skulking
around in graveyards, he creates a vivid and somber atmosphere just as
effective as the outdoor scenes in Karloff’s 1930’s films for Universal. The
Walking Dead is a quite good movie, ably
showcasing Karloff’s remarkable sensitivity and subtlety as an actor and using
familiar horror/sci-fi elements in intriguingly different ways. It helps that
Edmund Gwenn’s character is also subtly played — instead of the usual “mad
scientist” he’s a totally benign figure, even avuncular (in fact Gwenn plays
this so much like his role as Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street 11 years later — and with his neatly trimmed white
beard he even looks like he did
as Santa Claus — that one half-expects him to announce to his lab assistants
Jimmy and Nancy that as soon as he finishes the experiment he’s going to have
to load his sleigh with toys to deliver them to all the children of the world
on Christmas eve), motivated not by some mad scheme to rule the world or even (as
Karloff was in most of his own mad-scientist roles) by an idea to help humanity
that he pursues in an unethical way, but simply by a sense of atonement for the
guilt of his associates in failing to stop Ellman’s execution. Though it sags a
bit in the second half as the plot turns towards more conventional 1930’s
horror situations, The Walking Dead
is still an estimable movie that contains one of Karloff’s very best
performances. Too bad his later work for Warners was in routine melodramas,
most of them remakes (Invisible Menace, West of Shanghai, Devil’s
Island, British Intelligence) that hardly
“stretched” him the way this one did! — 11/4/09
•••••
Last night at 10 p.m. I caught a short but quite moving film
on Turner Classic Movies, part of a program they were doing for the day before
Hallowe’en of especially short (60 to 70 minutes) horror films. The film I
watched was The Walking Dead, a 1936
movie from Warner Bros. that kicked off a five-film contract the studio had
made with Boris Karloff, who in the middle of the studio era in which actors
were typically under contract to a single company, had simultaneous
non-exclusive contracts with four
studios: Universal, Columbia, Warners and Monogram. The Walking Dead had unusually heavy-duty talent behind the cameras
for a 66-minute “B” — the director was Michael Curtiz and the cinematographer
was Hal Mohr — though the script was committee-written: Ewart Adamson and
Joseph Fields were credited with the story and Adamson, Peter Milne, Robert
Hardy Andrews and Lillie Hayward with the actual screenplay. The
Walking Dead — not to be confused with the
long-running modern AMC series about zombies — was a typically Warners-esque
mashup of horror and gangster tropes, and one quirk about it was it featured
former Sam Spade Ricardo Cortez and future Santa Claus Edmund Gwenn in the
cast. Cortez plays Nolan, corrupt attorney and head of the rackets in the
mid-sized city where this takes place. He and his associates Loder (a
relatively restrained Barton MacLane), Blackstone (Paul Harvey), Merritt
(Robert Strange) and Martin (Kenneth Harlan) decide to get rid of Judge Roger
Shaw (Joseph King) because Shaw, giving a bench trial to a member of the gang
accused of embezzling $350,000 from the city through phony contracts, found him
guilty and sentenced him to 10 years in prison despite the efforts of the gang
to get him to acquit. The gang needs a fall guy — apparently Cortez’s
experience starring in the 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon had taught him something — and they find him in John Ellman (Boris Karloff),
a musician who just got out of prison after serving a 10-year sentence for
killing his wife’s lover. Since Shaw presided over Ellman’s trial, the gang
decides he’s the perfect patsy: they set him up by having him surveil Shaw’s
house, ostensibly working for a private detective trying to get the goods on
Shaw on behalf of his wife, and in the end their hit man “Trigger” Smith
(Joseph Sawyer) kills Shaw and stashes the judge’s body in Ellman’s car. The
whole thing is witnessed by Jimmy (Warren Hull) and Nancy (Marguerite
Churchill), a couple who both work as assistants to the great scientist Dr.
Evan Beaumont (Edmund Gwenn, playing his part much the way Lionel Atwill did in
Curtiz’s previous horror films, Doctor “X” and Mystery of the Wax Museum), but the two are intimidated by the gang and don’t come forward until
the day Ellman is scheduled to be executed.
Nolan, who’s represented Ellman all
along but deliberately threw the case during his trial, holds up notifying the
state’s governor that there are two witnessed who could exonerate him until
after Ellman is already executed, but Beaumont claims the body and offers to
revive him via a new process he’s invented featuring something called the “Lindbergh
Heart.” This is a real deal, actually invented by former transatlantic flyer
and future Nazi apologist Charles Lindbergh, though in the movie it’s
incorporated into what’s otherwise some pretty familiar lab equipment from
Charles Strickfaden that had already been used to bring Karloff to life in Frankenstein and ditto for Elsa Lanchester in The Bride
of Frankenstein. This undoes the effect of
electrocution and restores Ellman to life, but it also gives him a supernatural
insight that makes him aware of the identities of the men who framed him and
determined to kill them all — though the writing committee makes it clear that
Ellman eliminates these people by scaring them rather than actually killing
them with his own hands. When he’s not doing that Ellman is hanging out at the
Jackson Memorial Cemetery, reflecting his in-between status, not dead but not
fully alive either. In the end the last two surviving gangsters, including
Nolan, confront Ellman at the cemetery and shoot him, and before he dies (permanently
this time) Dr. Beaumont tries to worm out of him the sensations he felt when he
died the first time — he lasts long enough to tell him it was peaceful but not
much more than that, and there’s a bit of religious dialogue repeated by both
Karloff and Gwenn that “the Lord is a jealous God” who zealously guards the
secret of just what happens to people when they make the transition from this
life to whatever may await us in the next one. The Walking Dead is actually one of Karloff’s best films from the period;
not only does it allow him to play a sympathetic character, it’s full of
felicitous touches, like Ellman requesting that a cellist perform his favorite
piece of music, “Kamennoi-Ostrow” by 19th century Russian composer
Anton Rubinstein (a piece that’s heard throughout the film and is the basis for
much of its music score), as he walks to the electric chair, and also turning
his head heavenward as the priest comes to give him last rites and saying, “He will forgive me” — meaning God.
Thanks to Curtiz’s
visually inventive direction and the quiet, dignified performance he got out of
Karloff, The Walking Dead emerges
as quite a good film, a showcase for Karloff that nonetheless remains rooted in
the sorts of gangster stories Warners did well and a good start for his brief
return to a studio where he’d made four films in 1931 (including his great role
as a slimeball reporter who poses as a priest to get a story in Five
Star Final and his brief turn as the father
of a talented boy dancer who essentially sells his kid to John Barrymore’s
club-footed choreographer in The Mad Genius, also directed by Curtiz), though Karloff’s
subsequent films in his Warners’ stint weren’t so interesting: the dull West
of Shanghai (Karloff as a Chinese warlord
in a knock-off of a Western called Three Bad Men), The Invisible Menace (a dull would-be thriller set on a U.S. military
base), Devil’s Island
(essentially a cheap ripoff of John Ford’s The Prisoner of Shark
Island, though it pissed off the French
government enough that it received only a minimal release until France fell to
the Nazis in 1940 and after that Warners couldn’t have cared less what the French thought of this particularly sordid part
of their history being dredged up), and British Intelligence (a 1940 remake of Constance Bennett’s 1930 World War
I espionage drama Three Faces East,
the first of two times Karloff would remake a role originally played by Erich
von Stroheim: the second time was Lured). — 10/31/19
