The Monster (Roland West Productions, Tec-Art, MGM, 1925)

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

After the Lifetime movie Secrets of the Surgeon’s Wife on October 26 I turned the TV off for an hour (I played through an odd 1968 album by an obscure band called Autosalvage) and then my husband Charles and I watched a truly odd film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase”: The Monster, a 1925 film starring Lon Chaney, Sr. as a mad scientist named Dr. Ziska who takes over a mental hospital formerly run by Dr. Edwards (Herbert Prior). Ziska was formerly a famous surgeon until he went crazy and ended up in Edwards’ sanitarium, whereupon he and three fellow patients – Caliban (Walter James), Rigo (George Austin), and Daffy Dan (Knute Erickson) – help him take over the asylum and imprison Edwards while running the place themselves. The Monster began life as a 1922 stage play by Crane Wilbur (1886-1973), who was the male lead in the 1914 serial The Perils of Pauline but was best known as a writer for both stage and screen. I had seen The Monster before in the 1970’s on a previous silent-film TV revival show and hadn’t liked it – it was a blend between horror and comedy, and most of the “comedy” struck me as relentlessly unfunny – but I decided to give it another chance because of the director. For some reason I had thought the director was either William Beaudine or William Nigh – both of whom had “A”-list careers in the silent era but were forced by the Depression and the coming of sound to make some of the sleaziest movies of all time for cheap studios like Monogram and PRC. Instead it was Roland West, a quite interesting figure whom William K. Everson described in The Detective in Film (1972) as one of the most creative directors of the silent-to-sound transition. “One director who used sound intelligently in his crime films was Roland West, although his ideas – intelligent and advanced then – were so quickly absorbed into the overall lexicon of film sound that these aspects of his films no longer impress,” Everson wrote. “Fortunately, he was also an extremely visual director, most of whose work was done in the silent period, and whose trademark … was a flair for striking, highly stylized, and often deliberately unreal physical composition.” West made his first film as director, A Woman’s Honor, in 1916, and his last, a stunning film about gangsters, bootleggers, and pirates called Corsair, in 1931. In 1935 West’s live-in partner, actress Thelma Todd, was found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning in a garage on the estate she and West shared. West was widely suspected of having murdered her, especially since the garage where she was found was on a part of the estate being used by West’s ex-wife, Jewel Carmen. No one was formally charged with the crime and the police ruled it an accident, but the modern consensus is that Todd was knocked off by people from the Mafia because they were after the highly successful restaurant she operated on Catalina Island. Nonetheless, the shadow of Todd’s mysterious murder hung over West during the remaining 17 years of his own life.

In addition to directing The Monster, West also co-wrote the script with Willard Mack and Albert Kenyon, and contemporary reviews praised the film for its able juxtaposition of comedy and horror. Sorry, but that juxtaposition looks considerably less able now than it did then. After a powerful opening scene in which local farmer John Bowman (uncredited) is kidnapped outside the asylum – his car went off the road after Ziska and his men lowered a mirror in front of the road and Bowman, thinking another car was bearing down on him, turned off the road and his car overturned – we get a lot of dreary small-town romantic comedy. Amos Rugg (Hallam Cooley) and Johnny Goodlittle (Johnny Arthur, who was big enough then he’s second-billed after Chaney) both work as clerks in the general store owned by Luke Watson (Edward McWade). They’re both interested in Watson’s daughter Betty (Gertrude Olmstead), though they act in such nellie fashion it seems more likely they’d be after each other. Amos has the advantage over Johnny in that he owns a car, which Johnny doesn’t, and Johnny laments that Betty no longer goes on dates with him since Amos got an automobile. Johnny is also taking a correspondence course in how to be a detective, and he carries around a textbook from it and boasts about using his "ingenuity" to solve crimes. The “How to Be a Detective” book couldn’t help but remind me of Buster Keaton’s dream-movie masterpiece in 1924, Sherlock, Jr., and I found myself wishing Keaton had played Johnny Arthur’s part. Then two investigators from the life insurance company that had insured John Bowman come to the small town where this film is set in hopes of finding Bowman alive so the company won’t have to pay off on his claim. Johnny has found a slip of paper bearing the name of Edwards’ sanitarium and, on the back side, the word “help” written in mirror-image, but the official investigators and the local police insist it’s meaningless because Edwards closed the sanitarium months ago and is now on sabbatical in Britain. Eventually Amos gets Betty to elope with him, only their car is sidetracked the same way Bowman’s was and they’re kidnapped and held inside Edwards’s sanitarium by Ziska and his men. Johnny ends up being imprisoned inside the sanitarium, too – he’s dumped there through a long slide, a gimmick West used again in his next film, The Bat (1926) – also based on a stage play, this time by Mary Roberts Rinehart. The rest of the movie is a lot of stalking and skulking around West’s old-dark-house set with results that are neither all that funny nor all that scary until a dramatic design of sorts emerges: Ziska has worked out a way of extracting a human’s soul and transplanting it into another body. The soul donor is put into something that looks a lot like a standard electric chair, and the recipient is strapped to a hospital bed. For some reason the recipient has to be a woman, and Ziska spends much of the movie frustrated that until they grab Betty his gang has given him only males.

Ultimately Ziska is killed when Caliban, thinking it’s Amos in the electric chair, throws the switch on the soul-exchange machine, and without another body on the bed Ziska’s soul is sucked out into the air, and he dies. Johnny trusses up Caliban and suspends him from a winch, which also left the fake boulder that concealed the underground cell in which the real Edwards, John Bowman (ya remember John Bowman?), and a third person whose identity we were not sure of were being held captive. The police and insurance investigators finally break into the sanitarium, take custody of Caliban and the other two sidekicks, and Johnny is offered a job as an insurance investigator and also wins Betty’s hand at the end. The Monster is one of those frustrating films in which the visual distinction can’t make up for the mind-numbing banality of the story. Though it appears to be the only time Lon Chaney played a mad scientist, it’s hardly a patch on the marvelous mad-scientist roles Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Lionel Atwill played in the early sound era. In the end The Monster is the sort of movie you want to like better than you actually do, and I found myself wondering about the similarities between The Monster and The House of Dr. Edwardes, a British mystery novel from 1927 which was also about a madman taking over an insane asylum and using his inmates to run it for him. The book was by John Palmer and Hillary A. Saunders under the pseudonym “Francis Beeding,” and the movie rights were bought by David O. Selznick and Alfred Hitchcock. The film they finally made from it was Spellbound (1945), though Hitchcock and his writers, Angus McPhail and Ben Hecht, changed the plot so extensively the movie had little to do with the book aside from the starting point of a mysterious impostor taking over a mental hospital. Even the character name “Edwards” appears in both, which makes me wonder whether Palmer and Saunders borrowed (or stole) their plot from Crane Wilbur’s!