“The Lady and the Monster” is a horror movie made by George Sherman for Republic Pictures which gets into gear at about the three-quarter mark and comes home, if not a winner, a film that is imaginative and effective. The story has essentially to do with a crippled scientist (Erich von Stroheim) who discovers a way to keep a brain alive after the rest of its owner has died. The brain is kept alive in a solution that contains adrenalin and it records its aliveness through an invention of the scientist’s assistant (Richard Arlen) called the encephalograph. The encephalograph looks and acts like the mechanical arrangements for fountain-pen displays that show how long and nice a line the pen can make. When they have succeeded in keeping the brain alive and making wiggly pen lines, their problem is to find out what the brain is thinking or wanting to do with itself. After what I thought was a frivolous suggestion of Arlen’s—that they get to the brain with Morse Code—they hit on a plan of keying the brain up with more adrenalin and having Arlen empty himself of all thought and action so that the brain can use him as a telepathic agent.
At this point the picture and Arlen pick up wonderfully. Arlen is changed by the brain into the person the brain belonged to and goes to Los Angeles to finish up some of that person’s unfinished business. The change in Arlen from his usual tendency to be a piece of sculpture to his being an aggressive, dominating person is managed with real film imagination and talent. The people and environments he gets involved with under the brain’s direction are far less corny and more believable than those around the laboratory, and the main problem that turns up—about a misdirected murder trial—contains real interest and even suspense.
All of “The Lady and the Monster’s” troubles have to do with what are considered horror-movie fixtures. The real interest of the film is in what will come of the murder trial Arlen gets involved in and, for some reason, your concern over what the movie will decide is the social end of the brain discovery. But this is all evaded by bringing in two conventions. The scientist has to be a monster and there has to be a lady he is after; she finally influences Arlen to destroy the scientist and his work because Arlen is not himself any more, and she is afraid the scientist is in love with her, and that the whole business is illegal because the brain was stolen from a dead body, which is against the law. There are also the other conventions of horror movies: the wind ripping up outside a spookhouse, which looks like a Mongolian idiot produced by the marriage of a French castle and a Spanish bungalow in Los Angeles; the evil-eyed, crippled scientist puttering with glass retorts; a burlesque-proportioned blonde sliding in at every moment in a new silk gown and fearfully handing him a hemostat; in the background a mean-looking household drudge stands unnamed and untalked to; and then the scientist ominously calls for the “Jiggly-saw” to rip open someone’s skull.
But in spite of all this whirling around of cliché, it is a good example of the low-budget picture that is sometimes apt to take an unpromising script and a set of conventions and by really commendable work on the actual filming give it dignity and intelligence.
On the other hand, there is no reason to go to see another quickie made by the Pine and Thomas firm for Paramount, called “I Live on Danger.” But if you catch it on a double bill you will find it is not bad at all, and for many of the same reasons. The B’s have generally a more convincing actuality than the expensive films, probably for the fact that they have less money to spend building sets and lighting them so they shine and sparkle, and designing costumes that almost walk by themselves. With less money and time to inject spurious entertainment angles into his film, the B director is more likely to spend his time making what he has real rather than classy. There is not nearly so much need for him to make a box-office miracle of his film, so there is less selling of popular attitudes and less jazzing up of ordinary circumstances. B films are also an inevitable refuge for players who are no longer pretty or handsome enough to meet expensive film standards, or for those who are just hard up for work, and many of them are seasoned players. For instance, the film mentioned above, which is concerned with a radio reporter’s adventures, has Chester Morris, for my money a very capable and ingratiating actor.
May 1, 1944