by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After The Leopard Man Charles and I jumped forward two years to the 1945 film The Body Snatcher, based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story of the same name but heavily remodeled by writers Philip MacDonald and “Carlos Keith” (a pseudonym for Val Lewton). This one came about because of the sudden departure of Lewton’s immediate superior at RKO, Lew Ostrow, who had come to the company following the success of the Hardy Family series at MGM, Ostrow had personally produced these films but like his MGM mentor, Irving Thalberg, had not taken on-screen credit for them because “a credit you give yourself means nothing.” Alas, Ostrow was replaced by the appropriately named Jack J. Gross, who not only took on-screen credit on Lewton’s later films for RKO but directly interfered with his artistic vision in ways Ostrow never had. Among Gross’s decisions were the three-film contract with Boris Karloff which Gross signed and assigned the horror star to Lewton’s unit. Lewton was aghast – to him, Karloff represented exactly the kind of in-your-face horror from Universal that he had always tried to avoid. Then he and Karloff actually met, and Karloff began the meeting by telling Lewton he’d loved his films and was looking forward to working with him. But the advent of Karloff and Bela Lugosi, whom Gross had signed to make one film for the Lewton unit, had one detrimental effect on Lewton’s style; instead of setting his films in the contemporary world, he decided that the more stylized, pageant-like acting styles of Karloff and Lugosi would work better in period stories. For Lewton’s first film with Karloff he selected Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story “The Body Snatcher,” first published in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1884, a macabre tale Stevenson only sent to the magazine when they rejected a previous submission, “Markheim,” as too short. Though Stevenson himself thought “The Body Snatcher” “too horrific” for publication, he sent it to the magazine anyway – and it was an instant hit.
Stevenson’s inspiration for “The Body Snatcher” was the real-life case of William Burke and William Hare, two men in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1828 who were known as so-called “resurrection men” – crooks who stole recently dead bodies from graves and sold them to medical schools for dissection. Unfortunately, Edinburghians weren’t dying fast enough to meet the demand, so Burke and Hare decided to start increasing the supply by murdering people. After a two-month killing spree they were caught when fellow residents of the lodging house where they lived recognized their latest victim, Margaret Docherty, and called the police. Hare was given iimmunity for testifying against Burke and his wife, and in the end Burke was convicted and sentenced to death while his wife’s trial ended in a verdict of “not proven” – a Scottish invention in which the accused was technically acquitted but not legally exonerated. Burke’s own corpse was donated to the University of Edinburgh Medical School for dissection, and his skeleton is on display there to this day. Meanwhile, Robert Knox, the director of the University of Edinburgh Medical School who had authorized the purchase of bodies from Burke and Hare, was never prosecuted and went on to a long and respected career in British medicine until his own death in 1862.
Stevenson’s story starts with a framing sequence set in the 1880’s, when he wrote it, in a tavern called The George in Debenham, Scotland, in which four men were drinking and having a conversation. One of them, Donald Fettes, is a long-time homeless alcoholic who once went to medical school in Edinburgh and still remembers enough of his skills to set fractures and do other minor care for his fellow homeless people. He’s shocked out of his drunken stupor when he hears the voice of his old teacher, Dr. Wolfe Macfarlane, who has arrived at The George to treat a rich Londoner who had fallen ill while staying at the attached hotel. Fettes narrates the story of how when he was a young man, he was Dr. Macfarlane’s assistant, and his duties included dealing with “resurrection man” John Gray. He recalls one night when Fettes and Macfarlane met at a tavern and Gray came in and called Macfarlane “Toddy,” a nickname Macfarlane couldn’t stand. In a scene from the story MacDonald and “Keith” retained for the film, Macfarlane says to Gray, “Don't you call me that confounded name.” Gray says, “Hear him! Did you ever see the lads play knife? He would like to do that all over my body,” to which Fettes replies, “We medicals have a better way than that. 'When we dislike a dead friend of ours, we dissect him.”
MacDonald and “Keith” made the line even scarier by taking out the word “dead,” as if doctors were regularly knocking off no-longer-wanted friends by cutting them to pieces. In the story’s climax Macfarlane decides to get rid of Gray by killing and dissecting him, then have to take up grave-robbing themselves to keep the medical school supplied with cadavers. They set their sights on a recently deceased street person named Jane Galbraith and steal her body, only when they load it into their carriage they find that it has supernaturally transformed into, as Stevenson put it in his chilling closing line, “the body of the dead and long-dissected Gray.” Reflecting Val Lewton’s distaste for using supernatural elements in his films ujnless he absolutely had to, in the movie the dead Gray’s appearance in the carriage is only an hallucination on Macfarlane’s part, and while the story ended with both men surviving the carriage crash, the movie ends with Macfarlane dead from the crash and Fettes walking off, presumably to pursue a healthy and lucrative medical career of his own.
The film The Body Snatcher takes place in 1831, just three years after the Burke and Hare murders, and the public revulson against them has made it harder than ever for Dr. Wolfe Macfarlane (Henry Daniell) to get specimens for his anatomy classes. The film basically follows the outline of Stevenson’s plot but adds a few wrinkles that to my mind mostly add richness and fine detail to the tale. Their principal change was to add the character of Georgina Marsh (Sharyn Moffett, from whom director Robert Wise extracts a performance almost as good as the one he got from Ann Carter in The Curse of the Cat People), whose mother (Rita Corday, a surprising role for a woman best known as a femme fatale in RKO’s various detective series) is desperate to get Dr. Macfarlane to operate on her disabled daughter. She got crippled in the same carriage accident that killed her father and forced her mom to raise her as a single parent, and her disease is getting worse and so is her level of pain. Dr. Macfarlane originally doesn’t want to operate – he’s worried if he says yes, so many patients will flood his schedule he’ll have no time left for teaching, and he’s also scared that he might not be a good enough doctor to do the job. But John Gray (Boris Karloff), who in this version is a cab driver as well as a grave-robber and who has already taken an interest in the little crippled girl and her welfare, blackmails Macfarlane into performing the operation. Georgina has taken a fondness to Gray’s white horse and he’s promised her that one day the animal will call to her and she’ll be able to walk to the horse and greet her (or him, since the horse’s gender is unspecified), which I figured was MacDonald and “Keith” making a deposit in the clichébank for withdrawal when they need to shock Georgina into wanting to walk again. (Surprisingly, they didn’t.)
They also give Dr. Macfarlane a wife, Meg Cameron (Edith Atwater) – though for reasons of prestige he feels he has to pass her off as a maid – and she’s effectively drawn as a woman sexually obsessed with her husband but also not happy with what he does and how he lives his life outside the bedroom. And Dr. Macfarlane also has a manservant, Joseph (Bela Lugosi, in his last of eight films with Karloff), a rather slow-witted man who in the two legendary horror actors’ final scene together tries to blackmail Gray into paying him to keep quiet about the murder Gray committed to supply Macfarlane with a fresh corpse. Gray inveigles Joseph into joining him in a scheme to “Burke” various people and sings him a doggerel ballad about the original Burke and Hare. (Boris Karloff was proud of his singing voice and he was persuaded to play a mad opera singer in the 1936 film Charlie Chan at the Opera with the promise that he could sing himself, but at the last minute the producers decided Karloff’s voice wasn’t good enough and he was dubbed.) Gray offers to demonstrate to Joseph how Burke and Hare killed their victims through an in-your-face strangulation that left no wounds that would have made the bodies useless for dissection, but it’s all a ruse for Gray to kill the slow-witted Joseph. Gray later sends the body to Macfarlane and Fettes for dissection, and this gives him even more leverage because “you wouldn’t want the world to know that the great Dr. Macfarlane gets bodies for dissection from his own household.”
The woman whose murder unravels the whole plot becomes a well-known street singer (Donna Lee) whose sole repertoire seems to be the Scottish folk song “Huntingtown,” also known as “When Ye Gang Away, Jamie?” Val Lewton and Robert Wise stage her demise in a haunting way that epitomizes Lewton’s less-is-more approach to horror: we see merely a dark street with a small light at the end of a path, and we hear Donna Lee’s voice singing the song until she makes a brief strangling noise – and then she’s silent, to indicate she’s dead. (In 1945 Universal made the last in their “Mummy” sequence, The Mummy’s Curse, a pretty bad movie but one that shows the folks at Universal had been watching Lewton’s films. They tried to graft his approach onto theirs by setting The Mummy’s Curse in a Louisiana bayou and having much of the film take place around a grungy nightclub with a proprietress who entertains there – only they had a hard time tapping into the Lewton formula while still having a big, ugly monster clunking around the set. In The Mummy’s Curse, the mummy patiently waits for the nightclub performer to finish her song before he kills her.)
The most fascinating things about The Body Snatcher are the multidimensionality of the characters – particularly the principal villains, Wolfe Macfarlane and John Gray – and the progressive social commentary and clear disdain for the British class system. Not only does Mrs. Macfarlane have to hide her status from the world and pose as merely his maid instead of his wife, but there’s one scene in which John Gray explains himself and says, “As long as I can make the great Dr. Macfarlane jump to my will, then I am a man, Without that, I am nothing.” (I know virtually nothing about Val Lewton’s politics, but judging from his films they were probably pretty progressive.) Henry Daniell is playing the sort of role Karloff himself had played in a number of previous movies (most of them for Columbia): the dedicated scientist and educator who wants to create something that will help humanity, but pursues it in an unethical way that eventually turns him evil. And Karloff becomes a figure of real pathos; in this (and, to a lesser extent, in his two other films for Lewton, Isle of the Dead and Bedlam), he’s evil but he’s also understandable, and we feel for him far more than we do for the creepy Macfarlane. Two films after The Body Snatcher Daniell played Professor Moriarty in The Woman in Green, one of the last Sherlock Holmes films with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, and he’s clearly warming up for that role here. The Body Snatcher is a morally complex film (much more so than Stevenson’s original story!) which ultimately is about not only how evil can come from good but how good can come from evil: crippled Georgina can walk again only because the film’s two principal villains get together and make it happen. Looking at the fine Gothic atmospherics of Robert Wise’s direction, it’s hard to believe that 21 years later he would be directing The Sound of Music!
