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.
