Doctor X (Warner Bros. as "First National", 1932)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 I brought out a DVD collection called Legends of Horror, containing six vaguely horrific films made at either MGM or Warner Bros. duringt he early- to mid-1930’s. The two I wanted to watch last night were the 1932 film Doctor X – in previous posts about this remarkable movie I’ve inserted quotation marks around the letter “X” in the title, bu9t that’s wrong – and the alleged sequel from 1939, The Return of Doctor X. I’ve long been a fan of the 1932 Doctor X because it’s really a science-fiction film, and the first one ever made in color. When the proprietor of the late and sadly lamented “Vintage Sci-Fi” film screenings in Golden Hill the third Saturday of every month until the COVID-19 pandemic showed the 1950 space-travel film Destination Moon and proclaimed it the first science-fiction film ever made in color, I was aghast at theis rank example of “first-itis” and said, “Destination Moon was not the first science-fiction film ever made in color! That was Doctor X, 18 years earlier!” Doctor X was shot in the early two-strip version of Technicolor, which Warner Bros. heavily invested in in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s; having already propelled themselves into major-studio status with the sensational success of The Jazz Singer and its launch of the talkie revolution, in 1929 Jack and Harry Warner became convinced that color was the new sound. Accordingly they contracted with Technicolor tomake a large number of their films in color – with the result that they overwhelmed the limited resources of Technicolor and many of the films had poor image quality due to the rushed color processing.

The early Technicolor processes – both two-strip, which was used from 1922 to 1933, and the three-strip process that replaced it and lasted until the early 1950’s – involved a process similar to lithography in which the films were shot on separate red and green strips of film, and the fnegatives were blended together when the films were printed. The major limitation of two-strip was that it could not photograph blue, which has the shortest wave length of any color; the three-strip process added a blue strip to the original red and green and is the one in which such classics as The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind were shot, and it’s amusing to watch some of the early three-strip films in which just about everyone is wearing blue clothes and living in blue rooms, when they’re not spending time outdoors in front of blue skies and blue seas, just to show off that now the process could accommodate blue. I’ve long been a fan of two-strip Technicolor and find well-preserved examples of it often more beautiful than the often garish three-strip process that replaced it; there’s a burnished, almost painterly quality to the best two-strip. Ini Doctor X there’s a quite lovely scene between the male lead, New York World reporter Lee Taylor (Lee Tracy) and ingénue Joanne Xavier (Fay Wray), at a beach, and the scene is a welcome respite from the science-fiction and horror elements of the rest of the movie even though the sky is beige and the ocean is green.

The plot centers around a series of murders that are only committed during nights with a full moon, and in each case the victim is strangled to death and then had a hunk of flesh expertly removed from their body post-mortem with a surgical scalpel. (One of the most inadvertently funny aspects of the movie is the pronunciation the film’s star, Lionel Atwill, adopts for the word “scalpel” – he says “scal-PEL” throughout the film.) Lionel Atwill plays Dr. Jerry Xavier (this time around I found myself wondering is X-Men creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby got the name of Professor Xavier, leader of the X-Men, from this movie), Joanne’s father and head of something called the Institute for Surgical Research, which my husband Charles on a previous viewing of the film called “a mad scientists’ think tank.” The other researchers at the Institute are Dr. Wells (Preston Foster), who is missing his left arm; Dr. Haines (John Wray, who in 1932 also played the Lon Chaney. Sr. part in a remake of Chaney’s star-making film, 1919’s The Miracle Man); Dr. Rowitz (Arthur Edmund Carewe, who played the undercover French police officer in the 1925 The Phantom of the Opera, also with Chaney); and Dr. Duke (Harry Beresford), who uses a wheelchair. (I’m sure it’s the same wheelchair Atwill himself used in a later two-strip Technicolor horror film from Warner Bros. in 1933, Mystery of the Wax Museum, also co-starring Fay Wray.) The cops, in the persons of Police Commissioner Stevens (Robert Warwick) and Detective O’Halloran (Willard Robertson), visit the Institute and announced to Dr. Xavier that they’re convinced one of his scientists is the “Moon Killer.”

The reasons they’re so sure is all the killings occurred within the vicinity of the Institute, some members of the Insittujte have researched cannibalism (Wells is a student of it and has frequently visited cannibal tribes, and one of the other researchers returned from a trip in which his ship sank; there were three men aboard when their life raft sailed but only two when they were finally rescued), and the murder weapon was a special European type of scal-PEL which exists in the U.S. only at Xavier’s institute. Xavier pleads with the police to give him time to test the various members of the Institute; he’s convinced itat if one of them is committing the moon murders, the psychological battery of tets he’s administering them will identify the guilty man. Among the tests he intends to give his crew is a staged re-enactment of one of the murders with Xavier’s maid Mamie (Leila Bennett) as the victim and hissinister butler Otto (George Rosener, who according to imdb/com also did some uncredited work on the script) as the killer. Since the police have told Dr. Xavier that the victims were strangled by someone with two working arms, for Xavier’s two attempts to find the killer among his people he has Dr. Wells work the controls while the others, including Xavier himself, are locked down and handcuffed to their chairs. Xavier takes this precaution in his second attempt after Dr. Rowitz is stabbed to death in the first one.

There are some spectacular fright scenes, including one scene in which a skeleton is being moved across the hallway of the deserted mansion on Long Island where Xavier moves the Institute’s personnel to keep them away from the prying eyes of the police, and a great climax in which [spoiler alert!] Dr. Wells turns out to be the killer after all. It turns out he’s rebuilt his left arm with a form of synthetic flesh he’s invented from the material he’s harvested from his victims, and when Xavier and the others realize that he’s the murderer they’re too late to stop him and are helpless before him. Eventually Joanne Xavier breaks free of her restraints and grabs the keys to the restraints, while Lee Taylor grabs an oil lamp, throws it at Dr. Wells and literally sets him on fire. He expires in a burst of flame as he falls to his death on the beach rocks below – a spectacular flash of red in the otherwise green-and-brown color scheme of the rest of the movie. Doctor X is a long-time favorite film of mine, well directed by Michael Curtiz from a script by Robert Tasker and Earl Baldwin based on a play by Howard Warren Comstock and Allan C. Miller. The cinematographer on this film was Ray Rennahan, who was actually employed by Technicolor, not Warners; when a studio contracted with Technicolor, the color company would send out one of their own staff cinematographers to work with whoever the studio assigned to the film to make sure the color process was used effectively, and that was frequently Rennahan. For this film Warners decided simply to let Rennahan shoot it himself, and he did a marvelous job; he, Curtiz and the writers avoided daylight exteriors except for the aforementioned beach scene.

The acting is also quite good; Lionel Atwill is superb as Dr. Xavier, Fay Wray (a year before King Kong, the only film of hers anyone remembered even though she’d been Erich von Stroheim’s personal choice to play the female lead in The Wedding March and she’d appeared with Gary Cooper and other major stars of the day) gets to deliver one of her famous screams when she realizes Dr. Wells is about to murder her; and Preston Foster, usually dramatically inert as a hero, responds quite well to the challenge of playing a super-villain. Even Lee Tracy is less obnoxious and annoying than usual, though I couldn’t help wishing Warner Bros. had given the part to James Cagney instead!