Supernatural (Paramount, 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The other movie I watched with Charles last night was Supernatural, a quite good 1933 film directed by Victor Halperin and produced by his brother Edward for Paramount, which gave them a major-studio contract right after the surprise success of their independent production White Zombie, starring Bela Lugosi. Supernatural deals with convicted murderess Ruth Rogen (Vivienne Osborne), who turned so violently against men in general that she killed three guys she’d been dating in rapid succession -- she’s also a painter and she’s done a life-sized self-portrait in which she poses holding an apple (a marvelous piece of symbolism tying her in with Eve as the original “bad girl”) -- and Roma Courtney (Carole Lombard), an heiress who’s been moping around her big mansion since the unexpected accidental death of her fraternal twin brother John (Lyman Williams -- though he’s dead at the outset of the narrative and there are no formal flashbacks, he’s seen enough in photos, ghostly images and, at one point, his voice on a private record he and Roma made they needed an actor to play him). She has a boyfriend named Grant Wilson (played by Randolph Scott well before he got “typed” as a Western star) as well as a father-like figure named Dr. Carl Houston (H. B. Warner, who played Jesus Christ in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 silent The King of Kings -- so when he said, “There is life after death,” I joked, “Look at me! I was crucified and resurrected! I should know!”) and the family attorney, Nick Hammond (William Farnum).

The villain is Paul Bavian (Allan Dinehart), a phony spiritualist who concocts a plan to extract some or all of Roma’s fortune by pretending to put her in touch with her brother’s spirit -- indeed, he goes so far as to break into the mortuary where John Courtney’s body is being readied for burial with some plaster of Parks so he can make a death mask of him for use in his fake seance. Dr. Houston has concocted a theory that the souls of especially notorious criminals live on after they’re executed and inhabit the bodies of others to make them commit similar crimes, and to test his theory he requests the body of Ruth Rogen after her execution to see if he can extract her soul and preserve it so it can’t work its way into someone else’s body -- only he chooses to do this experiment on the proverbial dark and stormy night and the lightning screws things up so instead of getting trapped in Dr. Houston’s equipment, Ruth’s soul finds it way into Roma’s body and goes out to murder Bavian. It seems that Ruth’s homicidal madness started when she was having an affair with Bavian, only he broke it off and gave her a hatred of all men, leading her first to seduce and then kill her hapless victims. (The open portrayal of Ruth’s sexuality and how it drives her homicidal mania very much marks this movie as a product of the so-called “pre-Code” era.)

Though Supernatural has some surprising crudities for a major-studio production -- including some stretches, especially early on, when the soundtrack goes completely quiet, without even any background noise, which made Charles think Supernatural came off more like a film from 1929 than one from 1933 -- it’s a movie I’ve always quite liked. I’m particularly impressed with Carole Lombard’s performance and her ability to change her demeanor, mannerisms and voice depending on whether she’s Roma or Ruth: the same skill Joanne Woodward and Sally Field later brought to their multiple personality movies (The Three Faces of Eve and Sybil, respectively). Charles mentioned Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a precedent for the multiple-personality movie -- and so, when we watched it as a bonus item, did the film’s original trailer -- but the actors who’d played Dr. Jekyll (including Fredric March in a Paramount production from a year earlier, from which I suspect the Halperins recycled some of the sets since the grungy Greenwich Village neighborhood in which Bavian lives, and where he off-handedly kills his obnoxious landlady with a poison-injecting ring he always wears, look a good deal more like 1890’s London than 1930’s New York) wore makeup to make themselves look different, while Lombard didn’t have that sort of help. (In fact Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde specified that Hyde was smaller than Jekyll since he contained only the evil of Jekyll’s personality -- which made me think that the best way to have cast it in the 1930’s or 1940’s would have been to use two actors: Boris Karloff as Jekyll and Peter Lorre as Hyde.)

Supernatural is a little-known but surprisingly effective movie that suggests Lombard had a wider range than the screwball comedy heroines she played in her most famous films, and I suspect both she and Jean Harlow would have been excellent femmes fatales if they’d lived into the film noir era. About the only things I wish the makers of Supernatural had done differently would have been to make Roma’s late brother John one of Ruth Rogen’s victims, which would have more tightly integrated the two big plot strands; and, as much as I love Allan Dinehart’s performance as the villain (both here and in his other best-known film, the Sherlock Holmes drama A Study in Scarlet) I can’t help but wonder how this film might have been even more interesting if the Halperins had got Lugosi to work for them again and play the role.

Previous moviemagg blog post on Supernatural: https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2016/09/supernatural-paramount-1933.html