The Man Who Reclaimed His Head (Universal, 1934)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, December 18) my husband Charles and I watched a grey-label DVD of a film that’s a long-time quirky favorite of mine: The Man Who Reclaimed His Head, a 1934 anti-war drama from Universal starring Claude Rains, Joan Bennett and Lionel Atwill and directed by Edward Ludwig based on a play by Jean Bart. I’d tried to chase down this movie for nearly 20 years, starting in the late 1960’s; it would periodically turn up listed in the TV sections of newspapers but it never materialized when it was supposed to. I finally saw it in the 1980’s and wondered if its anti-war politics had anything to do with its damned elusiveness. Later I found out that the trouble was Jean Bart, or rather her estate. She was originally named Marie Antoinette Sarlabous, and though she died in 1955 at the age of 75 her heirs continued to give Universal trouble over the rights to this story. Though Bart co-wrote the screenplay with Samuel Ornitz, in later years she and/or her heirs tried to suppress the film. Apparently part of the trouble was that Universal had done an unauthorized remake called Strange Confession as part of the Inner Sanctum series in 1945, and the credits for that one billed it as “Based on a Composition by Jean Bart” – which made it seem like something she’d written in grade school. (According to imdb.com, various other Universal writers – Finley Peter Dunne, Erwin Gelsey, The Bride of Frankenstein author William Hurlbut, George O’Neil and George Yohalem – are listed as “contributors to treatment.”)

The Man Who Reclaimed His Head starts in 1915, with former journalist Paul Verin (Claude Rains) on the run through the streets of Paris after he’s gone AWOL from the carnage at Verdun, one of World War I’s most notoriously bloody battles. Paul comes to the home of a well-known attorney, Fernand de Marnay (Henry O’Neill), carrying a satchel and with his child, daughter Linette (Juanita Quigley, billed as “Baby Jane” – so there was a real one!), in tow. De Marnay insists that he’s too busy to take on any new cases, but Paul pleads with him to hear his story to the end. De Marnay also looks inside Paul’s satchel, and though we don’t see what he sees he’s sufficiently horrified by the contents that we guess it’s a severed human head. Then Paul relates the story, which begins a year or so before the war begins, when he was a struggling writer and editor in Clichy, a northwest suburb of Paris. He’d just had a bad experience editing a paper called the Bordeaux Radical until he’d had a falling-out with his publisher and financial backer, Henri Dumont (Lionel Atwill). Paul is understandably reluctant to get involved with Dumont again, but his wife Adele (Joan Bennett) is equally determined to see that her husband makes a steady income instead of her having to keep him and their daughter alive on his meager earnings as a free-lancer. The two start a paper called the People’s Voice and Dumont passes off Paul’s anti-war editorials as his own work. Thanks to the paper, Dumont becomes a major political leader in France and attracts the attention of various munitions makers, who try to buy him off. (The head of the syndicate of munitions companies is played by an uncredited Edward Van Sloan.) Dumont also starts romancing Adele Verin – the rotter! – taking her to see Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the Paris Opéra (no doubt the big set Universal built for the 1925 film The Phantom of the Opera, starring Lon Chaney, Sr.) while Paul, stuck at home writing the latest “Dumont” editorial, plays a record of the Prelude for himself and his daughter.

Then Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand gets assassinated, and overnight Dumont switches sides and becomes a warmonger. Paul has just completed a book about the international arms trade, including documented evidence that the big arms manufacturers are selling to both sides and using neutral Switzerland as a front, but once the war starts his book is suppressed and Dumont takes his evidence and either hides or destroys it. Paul runs into an old friend of his from Clichy, “Curly” (Wallace Ford), who gets beaten up in the street by a mob angry at his questioning the war, and Paul himself is assaulted when he tries to rescue his friend. Paul ends up drafted and rises to corporal – where he ingratiates himself by writing letters for his fellow servicemembers to their loved ones, since many of the men in his company can’t read or write at all – but he learns from gossip within the ranks that every time he gets a leave to go to Paris, Dumont makes sure it’s canceled so he doesn’t have to worry about the competition for Adele. This news makes Paul flee into a rage; he deserts and goes to Paris to confront Dumont – whom he finds with Adele (ironically, she had just told him she was ending their affair, but he refused to accept it). Brandishing his military sword, Paul charges Dumont with murder in his eyes – the vivid closeup of Claude Rains playing this scene is one of the best parts of the movie and its one true horror moment – and … At the end of the story Fernand de Marnay announces that he’ll take Paul’s case, Adele shows up and is reunited with Paul and their daughter, and de Marnay says that by stealing Henri Dumont and severing his head, Paul had literally stolen back his mind and “no jury in the world would convict you.” (Wanna bet? Actually the only way any attorney could have won Paul an acquittal, especially under the French system in which the burden of proof is on the defendant instead of the state, is to plead diminished capacity and possibly analogize the situation to that of David, Bathsheba and Uriah.)

The Man Who Reclaimed His Head was directed by Edward Ludwig, a pretty hacky director with a spotty reputation at best – he later became a favorite of John Wayne and in 1952 made Big Jim McLain, a really silly Right-wing propaganda movie in which Wayne played an investigator for the House Committee on Un-American Activities on the trail of Communists plotting a campaign of terror and sabotage in Hawai’i – but here he made a near-masterpiece. (Ludwig began his career in silents as a shorts director, using the name “Edward Luddy,” in 1920, but he didn’t get his first features, Steady Company and They Just Had to Get Married, until 1932, well into the sound era.) The Man Who Reclaimed His Head holds up remarkably well as a parable of capitalism and patriotism run amok, and a character study of a decent, idealistic man caught up and used by greedy bad guys. According to the film’s Wikipedia page, Claude Rains also starred in the 1932 premiere stage production of Bart’s play, and in that version Paul was physically disabled. That, as Charles pointed out, explained the many references to Paul’s ugliness in the dialogue even though he’s not disabled in the film, probably thanks to Rains’s ego. When Universal gave him the starring role in the first sound version of The Phantom of the Opera in 1943, he insisted that he only wear a minimal amount of “scar” makeup instead of the skull-like appearance Lon Chaney, Sr. concocted for himself in the 1925 silent, still by far the best film of this story. It’s certainly ironic to hear the “Marseillaise” on the soundtrack as the French armies march off to the carnage of World War I, especially given the far more famous movie Rains made eight years later, Casablanca, with its quite different use of the “Marseillaise.” And seeing this film right now, after reading Rachel Maddow’s Prequel and at least one of the books from the 1940’s that inspired it, Under Cover by John Roy Carlson, it’s interesting to be reminded of just why so many Americans were isolationist in the 1930’s and how hard it was for President Franklin Roosevelt and his administration to get the U.S. public to support American involvement in World War II; the cynicism with which the arms industry and the politicians who do its bidding by supporting war are depicted in The Man Who Reclaimed His Head was very much a part of the American public mood at the time.