The Return of Doctor X (Warner Bros., 1939)

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

The Return of Doctor X is also a long-time favorite of mine, though not because it’s any good but rather due to the sheer quirkiness of casting Humphrey Bogart as a high-tech vampire, Marshall Quesne (pronounced “Cain”), who in his previous existence as Dr. Xavier (not the same character as in the first film) was convicted of murdering a baby by deliberately starving it to death so he could see how long it took to die. Only he was revived by Dr. Francis Flagg (John Litel) in a series of high-tech gadgets that aren’t seen in the film but are shown in the original trailer. But Quesne’s artificially prolonged existence can only be sustained if he has a regular infusion of Type One blood. (One of the aspects of this movie that’s always puzzled me is that the blood types have numbers one through four instead of the letters – A, B, AB and O – we’re familiar with now.) That means that anyone in the vicinity of the hospital where Dr. Flagg works who has Type One blood, from professional blood donor Stanley Rodgers (John Ridgley) to the film’s heroine, nurse Joan Vance (Rosemary Lane), is at risk of being killed and vampirized by Marshall Quesne. Bogart’s own reaction to his bizarre casting is about what you’d expect: “This is one of the pictures that made me march in to [Warner Bros. studio chief Jack L. Warner] and ask for more money again. You can't believe what this one was like. I had a part that somebody like Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff should have played. I was this doctor, brought back to life, and the only thing that nourished this poor bastard was blood. If it had been Jack Warner's blood or [Harry Warner's] or [Sam Warner's], maybe I wouldn't have minded as much. The trouble was, they were drinking mine and I was making this stinking movie."

That was quoted in a “Trivia” entry on the film’s imdb.com page, and another entry says that the roke was actually intended for Karloff, who at the time the film was made was under contract to four different studios (Universal, Columbia, Warner Bros. and Monogram) at a time when most stars of his stature were locked in at just one company. Karloff’s tenure at Warners from 1935 to 1940 is one of the most enigmatic parts of his career; after his first film for them in a starring role, The Walking Dead – a high-tech sci-fi thriller with Karloff as a man unjustly convicted of murder and brought baclk to life by scientist Edmund “Santa Claus” Gwenn, a similar film to The Return of Doctor X but much better – Warners gave him stock villain roles in West oif Shanghai,The Invisible Menace (not a horror film despite the title) and British Intelligence, plus a rare hero role in Devil’s Island, a clever reworking of John Ford’s masterpiece The Prisoner of Shark Island in which Karloff plays a doctor unjustly convicted of murder who’s sent to the titular prison and whose professional skills come in handy when an epidemic strikes the island.

I’m still morbidly curious what ever possessed Jack Warner to order Bogart to do this movie when it’s so far out of his wheelbase, even though, as I’ve noted in previous comments on this film, Bogart’s attitude towards murder is much the same as that of the gangsters that were his main stock-in-trade as an actor at the time: neither feeling guilty about killing people more exulting in it, but simply accepting it as a sort of grim necessity for his own survival. The other thing about Bogart’s performance is that, even in a role in which he’s outrageously miscast, he’s still enough of a professional to bring depth and pathos to this ridiculous character. Aside from that it’s a typical Warner Bros. newspaper drama with a few horror elements grafted on. Hot-shot reporter Walter Garrett (Wayne Morris) is in hot water with his typically irascible editor (Joseph Crehan) because of a story he published that the stage star Angela Merrova (Lya Lys, who comes off as Warner Bros.’ attempt to create their own Marlene Dietrich) was dead. Garrett thought this because he’d actually come to Merrova’s room at the Park Vista Hotel to do an interview, only he’d found her stabbed and apparently lifeless – only Merrova herself shows up at the newspaper office and demands a retraction and threatens a lawsuit. Garrett notices that Merrova’s face looks pallid and bloodless, and he gives a sample of her blood from the alleged crime scene to his friend, Dr. Michael Rhodes (Dennis Morgan).

Both men look at the slide of the blood sample under a microscope and Dr. Rhodes says it’s like no blood he’s ever seen before, human or animal. It turns out it’s the synthetic blood Dr. Rhodes’ boss, Dr. Flagg, has invented and used to revive Merrova after she was fatally stabbed. Only the synthetic blood keeps its users alive for just a few days, so Merrova needs repeated infusions of it, and when she shows up at Dr. Flagg’s apartment for her latest transfusion while Garrett and Rhodes are staking out the place, I couldn’t help but joke, referencing a later, better-known and far superior Bogart movie, “Everybody comes to Flagg’s.” Charles caught the reference and said, “Of all the blood joints in all the world, she had to walk into mine.” In the end our intrepid heroes exhume Quesne’s coffin from the graveyard and find it empty, then hunt him down and he’s finally taken out in a shoot-out just as he’s about to ingest Joan Vance’s blood to keep himself alive. Among the many mysteries of the making of The Return of Doctor X is the major surgery it went through between its making and its release; imdb.com lists quite a few character actors, including George Reeves (later TV’s Superman), Howard Hickman and Arthur Aylesworth,who shot scenes that were deleted from the final cut. Also the original trailer contains quite a few scenes that didn’t make it into the released version, including an elaborate Frankenstein-esque sequence showing Marshall quesne’s high-tech resurrection. Over the years, as it’s become more common to include trailers as bonus items on DVD’s of films, Charles and I have frequently seen scenes in the trailer that didn’t make it into the actual movie (including shots of the barroom brawl involving sailors in the 1941 Abbott and Costello film In the Navy which were deleted from the film at the Navy Department’s request but ended up in the trailer), but offhand we can’t think of a film whose trailer contained as many deleted scenes as this one did.