Donovan's Brain (Allan Dowling Productions, United Artists, 1953)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, August 17) at about 10 p.m. I dug out an old home-recorded DVD I’d made off Turner Classic Movies in 2013, three years before Cox Cable and the media industry in general lowered the boom on home recordings off cable or on-air channels by making them “all-digital” and ensuring that VCR’s and home DVD recorders could no longer work with the new technology. It contained four movies, three of which we’d already watched together – Pirates of Tripoli, The Beast of Hollow Mountain, and Miami Exposé – but the one I wanted to run last night was the first film on the disc, the 1953 version of Curt Siodmak’s 1942 science-fiction novel Donovan’s Brain. It was produced by Allen Downing and directed by Felix E. Feist (whose only other claim to fame was making the 1936 one-reel musical Every Sunday, a classical-vs.-jazz musical battle with Deanna Durbin representing classical and Judy Garland trying her best to represent jazz; as great as she was Judy was never really a jazz singer, and when she was platonically dating Artie Shaw in 1938 when Billie Holiday was his band singer, Judy was flamingly jealous of Billie and wished she could sing like her), who also wrote the screenplay based on an adaptation by Hugh Brooke. Donovan’s Brain had previously been filmed by Republic in 1944 as The Lady and the Monster, a truly schizoid film in which the central character of Siodmak’s book, Dr. Patrick Cory (Richard Arlen in The Lady and the Monster, Lew Ayres here), is merely the assistant to a floridly mad scientist, Dr. Franz Mueller (Erich von Stroheim).

One difference between the two films is that where Dr. Mueller conducted his experiments in an old-dark-house style castle located in the middle of the Arizona desert, Dr. Cory performs his in a typical suburban ranch-style house, though similarly remotely located. The remote location is essential to the story, since it enables Dr. Cory and his friend and assistant Dr. Frank Schratt (Gene Evans), who’s being threatened with losing his job as the official county doctor because he’s an alcoholic and also because the head of the local board of supervisors has a brother-in-law he’d like to hire in Schratt’s place, to perform the sinister experiment at the heart of the plot in an out-of-the-way place free from prying eyes. Well, free from all but one set of prying eyes – more on that later. Dr. Cory has developed a method for removing an organism’s brain and keeping it alive in a solution by connecting electrodes to it and keeping it electronically stimulated, while the liquid in the fish tank he’s keeping it in will supply it with nutrients. He’s already tried this unsuccessfully on three monkeys, and when we meet him he’s driving home with a fourth monkey in tow while his wife Janice (Nancy Davis, born Anne Frances Robbins, later given the name of her stepfather Dr. Loyal Davis, and ultimately known as Nancy Reagan after she married Ronald Reagan in 1952) tries to comfort the monkey and asks her husband if they can keep it as a pet. (This film is already unintentionally weird enough politically – Mr. Conscientious Objector co-starring with Mrs. Ronald Reagan – but it gets even odder when Nancy’s character is portrayed as an animal-rights activist at least two decades early.)

Dr. Cory’s experiment with the fourth monkey is a success, and just then he’s called out of his home on a medical emergency to tend to multimillionaire Warren H. Donovan, whose private plane has crashed in the middle of the Arizona desert. Since there isn’t time to take Donovan’s body to a fully equipped hospital, Dr. Cory offers to operate on him at his home, which has an operating table and surgical supplies, but Dr. Cory soon realizes Donovan is too far gone to be revivable. Instead he and Dr. Schratt harvest Donovan’s brain and keep it alive in the fish tank, only of course the experiment works too well: given an unending supply of nutrients and no longer encumbered by the limitations of an attached body, Donovan’s brain gets more and more powerful over time and gradually takes over Dr. Cory’s body. Already Dr. Cory, Janice, and Dr. Schratt have grabbed hold of every publication they can find about the living Warren H. Donovan and have researched him. They’ve found, not too surprisingly, that the living Donovan was a self-made man who hated labor, hated charities, and above all hated the Internal Revenue Service. (In other words, he was your typical asshole Libertarian.) In fact, he set up at least five fake bank accounts to shield as much of his fortune as possible from the IRS, and through his growing telepathic contact with Donovan, Dr. Cory learns where those accounts are and in whose names they’re in so he can drain the money from them. The one person who gets suspicious of what Dr. Cory is doing is Herbie Yocum (Steve Brodie), a free-lance reporter and paparazzo who invades the Corys’ home, ostensibly to take a photo of the operating table on which Donovan died, though he also takes a shot of Donovan’s brain in its aquarium-like tank. Yocum threatens to expose the story to the whole world, but Donovan is able to send a pure beam of thought energy to Yocum so he crashes his car, gets killed, and is no longer a threat to Donovan, alive or dead.

Cory gives the money from Donovan’s secret accounts to Donovan’s former legal advisor, with instructions to use it to build an elaborate mausoleum for Donovan with the idea that the brain will be housed there permanently, taken care of by a round-the-clock team of medical specialists, and with its pure psychic energy will be able to dominate the world’s financial affairs and essentially have unlimited power. (Remember that when Curt Siodmak wrote it, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin were both alive and at the peaks of their powers, so a malevolent intelligence capable of ruling the world and turning it into a hellhole wasn’t altogether the stuff of science fiction.) Ultimately, in Dr. Cory’s absence, Dr. Schratt figures out a way to use the energy from a lightning storm to annihilate Donovan’s brain once and for all. In the book, he sacrifices his own life in the process of doing this; in the 1953 film, he survives. Alas, Brooke and Feist omitted one of the most fascinating subplots of Siodmak’s original: Donovan was ardently seeking a pardon and freedom for convicted murder Roger Collins (played by Bill Henry in The Lady and the Monster) for reasons that remained mysterious. A lot of people assumed it was because Collins was Donovan’s illegitimate son, but it turns out in the book that Donovan simply wanted Collins freed to show the extent of his power. (In Dane Lussier’s and Frederick Kohner’s script for The Lady and the Monster, the murder Collins had been convicted of and was scheduled to be executed for was actually committed by Donovan himself; the victim was a former secretary of his who was planning to publish a book exposing him and his crimes. In Siodmak’s novel, Collins was actually guilty, and after the death of Donovan’s brain Dr. Cory, who narrates the novel, laconically states that Collins has been executed, as he richly deserved to be.)

Both films of Donovan’s Brain were major frustrations for Curt Siodmak, because he wanted to direct the screen version of his novel but never got to do so. Curt was ferociously jealous of his brother, Robert Siodmak, for having got to direct films while Curt was still stuck as just a writer. Eventually Curt got to direct Bride of the Gorilla in 1951 – a surprisingly good horror cheapie with Lon Chaney, Jr. and Raymond Burr – and followed it with seven “B” movies and 12 episodes of a 1959 TV series called 13 Demon Street, but he never gained the reputation brother Robert had as a director (including Phantom Lady, The Spiral Staircase, Christmas Holiday – from the title and the stars, Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly, you’d expect a Christmas-themed musical but it’s really a film noir – and Burt Lancaster’s first film, The Killers). I remember reading Curt Siodmak’s novel and thinking it was better than either of the films (there was a third version in 1970 called simply The Brain, but I’ve never seen it), and Charles read the above and said he thought that a disembodied brain without any senses or any capability to feel anything would literally go crazy and show all the symptoms of paranoia. That would be an interesting remix of the story in case anyone out there wants to take a crack at a fourth version!