Suspense (radio series): "Donovan's Brain" (CBS, Roma Wines, aired May 18 and 25, 1944)

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

Last night (Monday, August 18) my husband Charles and I rushed home from the Monday night organ-and-orchestra concert in Balboa Park (see https://musicmagg.blogspot.com/2025/08/san-diego-civic-organist-raul-prieto.html) and ultimately ended up listening to a quite effective radio version of Donovan’s Brain aired on the CBS show Suspense in two parts on May 18 and 25, 1944. The only people credited on the program were producer-director William Spier and the star, Orson Welles, who played the central role of Dr. Patrick Cory. I had seen this program mentioned on the Wikipedia page for Donovan’s Brain and, since I’d already downloaded all the extant episodes of Suspense from archive.org, I decided to dig them out. The basic story is familiar: Dr. Patrick Cory, a research scientist, lives in a remote community in the Arizona desert with his wife Janice and – in this version – their son David. He runs a lab where he experiments on keeping monkey brains alive by submerging them in an artificial solution, running a synthetic artery into them, and connecting them to electrodes to keep them alive without their bodies still being attached. He gets the chance to take his experiment to the next level when a private plane crashes near his home. The entire crew of the plane dies in the crash but their passenger, William H. Donovan (he’s called “Warren Donovan” in the other versions, Curt Siodmak’s 1942 novel and the two major films, 1944’s The Lady and the Monster and the 1953 film Charles and I had watched), is alive, though barely. His legs are so badly injured they would have to be amputated and his other bodily functions are so incapacitated he would die within hours anyway, so Dr. Cory and his sometimes assistant Dr. Schratt extract Donovan’s brain and plug it into his apparatus. Only Donovan’s brain keeps growing stronger and more powerful, especially without the encumbrance of a physical body to cart around, and it starts taking over more and more of Dr. Cory’s will.

The story is narrated by Dr. Cory via a journal he’d been keeping all along detailing his experiments, and it begins with an announcement that this is the last entry he will ever make in his lifetime because … Then it flashes back to his early failed experiment with the capuchin monkey, his decision that the reason he’d failed to keep the monkey’s brain alive was that he’d killed the monkey first, and his determination not to make that same mistake again but to extract Donovan’s brain while he was still alive, albeit barely. His wife Janice tries to stop him, saying that it’s murder, but he goes ahead anyway. Only Donovan’s brain keeps taking more and more control over Cory, and at one point under Donovan’s influence he literally has his wife committed to a mental hospital for fear she would interfere with his great experiment. I don’t know who wrote this radio adaptation, but I give him or her a lot of credit for cleverly adapting Curt Siodmak’s story for radio. The writer(s) gave Donovan a recurring phrase – “Sure, sure, sure” – which the pre-mortem Donovan was fond of uttering so we can tell whether Cory is thinking his own thoughts or Donovan’s, imposed on him by the sheer will power of Donovan’s disembodied brain. In this version Donovan hypnotizes Cory into murdering his own son so he can implant Donovan’s brain inside David Cory’s body, and once he’s regained a body Donovan can continue with his plan to become a dictator and eventually rule the world. The writer(s) seemed to be evoking memories of Welles’s similar performance as Professor Pierson in his infamous October 30, 1938 broadcast of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, likewise looking out on an apocalypse and pondering his own responsibility for it.

The writing also powerfully evokes both Frankenstein (particularly Colin Clive’s tortured performance as Frankenstein in the 1931 film, especially the scene in which he says, “I made it with my own hands, and with my own hands I shall have to destroy it”) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (particularly the tortured ending of Robert Louis Stevenson’s original novel, in which Dr. Henry Jekyll recounts his own history and the experiment that went terribly wrong on the eve of his own suicide). There’s a nice touch towards the end as Dr. Cory literally sacrifices his own son to make him a suitable habitat for Donovan’s brain (though Charles said that, at least as depicted in the 1953 film, Donovan’s brain grew so much in size during the experiment that it’s hard to imagine it fitting inside any human cranium). In his final monologue he compares himself to the Biblical Abraham, who was told by God to sacrifice his son Isaac on the Mount of Olives and laments that God didn’t stop him from sacrificing his son as he did with Abraham. We then get a postlude informing us that the remains of Dr. Cory and his son were buried in the Mount of Olives cemetery, and Janice Cory, who was previously unjustly committed to a mental institution, has now gone genuinely crazy and legitimately been committed to the same institution after the mysterious deaths of her husband and their son. And in its concept of a psychopathic egomaniac seeking to use a young, attractive body as his vehicle in a plot literally to conquer the world, Donovan’s Brain not only evokes such real-life dictators as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin (both of whom were alive, well, and pretty much at the peak of their powers when Curt Siodmak wrote the novel) but it can’t help but bring to mind such modern-day dictators or wanna-be dictators as Vladimir Putin and his good buddy, Donald Trump. (Well, you didn’t think I could write two blog posts on successive days about a story about an evil financier with ambitions for world domination and not mention Donald Trump, did you?)