The Island of Lost Souls (1932)

The Island of Lost Souls (Erle C. Kenton, 1932) You gotta be careful who you meet in your travels.  As they say in Casablanca, there are vultures...vultures everywhere.  Thing is, on The Island of Lost Souls (based on H.G. Wells' oft-filmed "The Island of Dr. Moreau"), they just might be vultures, literally.

Or, at least, some human-vulture hybrid.

Edward Parker (Richard Arlen), though, will take any port in a storm.  Ship-wrecked, he's picked up by a freighter delivering supplies to a nearby island.  After Parker causes some trouble after seeing the Captain attack one of the crewmen, he is thrown off the ship to the boat that meets it to pick up the supplies.  It is manned by Montgomery (Arthur Hohl) and Dr. Moreau (Charles Laughton), and the doctor is only too happy to take the ship-wrecked Parker to his island.

It's not a pretty sight.  All jungle and dark and creepy, until Moreau introduces him to a young native named Lota (Kathleen Burke), who is entranced with Parker.  While Parker tries carry on a conversation with her, screams are heard, which frighten them, but mostly Lota who enigmatically says that they come from "The House of Pain."

Parker investigates and finds Moreau and Montgomery performing surgery on a strange creature on an operating table.  Alarmed that his host is a madman, Parker tries to leave the island but is stopped by a crowd of deformed brutes, until Moreau appears, cracks his whip and forces the creatures to obedience, making the Sayer of the Law (Bela Lugosi) recite the rules, which are echoed by the other creatures: 

Not to eat meat, that is the law. Are we not men?
Are we not men? 
Not to go on all fours, that is the law. Are we not men? 
Are we not men?
Not to spill blood, that is the law. Are we not men? 
Are we not men?

"Are we not men?"  Not just a Devo lyric (remember this was 1932. slightly before "their time"), but a profound question of identity. Turns out Moreau is a mad-man with God aspirations, an anti-Frankenstein, the difference being the German doctor was trying to bring life back from death, whereas the doctor with the South Seas practice is altering life, trying to "do" Darwin generations faster by "un-natural selection"—surgically, chemically, any way he can think of, attempting to turn animals into homo sapiens.

And doing a bad job, by the looks of it.  The pre-code movie Moreau presages Dr. Mengele's work for the Nazis by a few years, with vivisection as a specialty, and dictator as a hobby.* Having started with plants and moving on in his designs, his hybrids live as beasts and only the one subject that has yielded the best results—Lota, "the Panther Woman"—has met his standards. Sociopathic in his methods, Messianic in his goals, he sees throwing Lota at Parker as an experiment in biology.  Nothing more.  And Laughton plays the scene like an avid voyeur.

Subsequent films have been make-up experiments to see how realistically latex can be applied to actors to make the illusion playable.  The Island of Lost Souls does a fine job of it, but is expressly concerned with making the hybrids monsters, and the situation nightmarish (as opposed to believable). Realism isn't the goal with this version, so much as driving home the point of the novel (although Wells thought the result was completely different. burying the novel's intentions in horror—he was spared having to see the other versions).  

This movie inspired the phrase "The natives are restless."  No.  Really.

* "Moreau" has been filmed a couple times (once with Burt Lancaster and most recently with a risible Marlon Brando as Moreau, that was frankly a bit incomprehensible), but those times the methods have been "magical" injections that can turn men to beasts and/or vice versa, more in tune with Dr. Jekyll than Dr. Moreau.  Supposedly, there's a new one in the works from Leonardo DiCaprio's company.

Witness for the Prosecution (1957)

Witness for the Prosecution (Billy Wilder, 1957) Lady Justice is having some work done as we first approach "The Old Bailey," where the majority of the drama for Witness for the Prosecution takes place.  Good thing, too, although some attention should probably be paid to the legal loop-holes that keep cropping up inside the chambers.  This Agatha Christie-penned theater chestnut is given a nice presentation by Wilder, who has added much comic-relief in the form of giving brilliant barrister Sir Wilfrid Robarts, QC (Charles Laughton), a nurse after a debillitating heart-arttack (played by Laughton's wife, Elsa Lanchester).*

It was the third re-write of the story in as many adaptations, starting with Christie adding a justifiable coda to her original story for the theater adptation, and Wilder providing further complications in order to have Lanchester's presence, and giving Marlene Dietrich a song and a romantic scene with Tyrone Power in flashback (although both actors can't really pull off playing young at this point in their careers).

And that's an interesting point: the acting is what this one is all about.  This is Power's last completed film, and his anguished defendent is an interesting mix of distraught agitation and Big Studio Heart-throb mannerisms.  Laughton's performance is hilarious and dry as vermouth, while Lanchester fusses and kvetches. 

And Dietrich is as cool as can be.  Quite past her prime as a fascinating beauty, she is still fascinating, playing her Christine Vole as cold and aloof—Dietrich excelled at that, but with a simmering quality underneath the surface, especially in her work with Joseph von Sternberg, like an iceberg with a volcano at its heart.  She always was just on the edge of camp-sexiness,** but the heavy lidded smoldering eyes always had an air of superiority that were deadly serious.  And those eyes are still in play here, never revealing much, and keeping the characters and the audience off-guard...and then on, especially when she turns on the dramatic fire-works in the latter stages of the film.

Laughton and Lanchester were given Oscar nominations for their performances,*** but I'd make a case that Dietrich was robbed of a nomination—maybe because of the stunt-casting, the nature of the part, but also...maybe...because they didn't recognize how good she is.

* Er...she plays the nurse, not the heart attack...

** Her mannerisms were devastatingly lampooned by Madeleine Kahn in Blazing Saddles.

*** He lost to Alec Guinness for The Bridge on the River Kwai, and she to Miyoshi Umeki for Sayonara.  Can't argue with the first one.

The Night of the Hunter

"The Night Of the Hunter" (Charles Laughton, 1955) One of the most stylized, creepiest movies ever made--the only one ever directed by actor Charles Laughton--"The Night of the Hunter" tells the story of an almost-elementally corrupt minister who comes to town seeking fortune by seducing and murdering the wife and terrifying the children of his old cell-mate, and tells it in the manner of a magical fairy tale. As two of the targets of the Rev.'s obsessions are the impressionable children of Willa Harper (Shelley Winters), the film becomes a battle between Good and Evil as seen through their eyes. The Good is represented by the Grandmother, played forthrightly by silent film star Lillian Gish. The Evil is the right Rev. Harry Powell, who strides into town with the conflicts in his soul tatooed on his fists. It's a bravura performance by Robert Mitchum, who wasn't known for bravura performances, usually satisfied maintaining a laconic air to get by. Here he brays and exhorts like a bull and it's an amazing thing to see so theatrical a performance out of him--in fact, it's the role he's best remembered for. The film itself is a creepy blend of reality and fantasy, of realism and theatricality and the clashes of those sensibilities jar one's attention, while burrowing into the soft places of one's skull. Despite poor box-office and crtical pans when it opened in 1955, "The Night of the Hunter" abides. It abides and it endures.