Inevitably my movie book research runs into films that are just marginally relevant to the subject, the kind of thing that might fit in an appendix, or maybe skipped altogether.
HOUSE OF DRACULA (1945) marked the end of the Universal horror era that began with Frankenstein and Dracula. Kindly Dr. Edlemann (Onslow Stevens) finds himself treating Dracula (John Carradine) to restore his humanity, unaware the vampire’s real agenda is to seduce Edlemann’s nurse (Martha O’Driscoll). Edlemann’s main research is into using a fungus-derived treatment to make bones soft and malleable. This could cure his hunchbacked nurse Nina (Jane Adams) and Wolf Man Larry Talbot — it turns out the cause of lycanthropy is that Talbot’s skull is too tight around his brain (?). Oh, and Talbot and Edlemann discover the body of the Frankenstein monster which they bring to the lab but the doctor wisely refuses to reanimate … until Dracula gives the doctor a transfusion of his blood, which gives him an insane split personality. As I thought, there’s nothing terribly Jekyll/Hyde-like in this (though the nightmare Edlemann goes through may have been inspired by a similar sequence in the Spencer Tracy Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) but it’s the closest Universal came to adapting Stevenson during its peak monster years.
The results are a poor shadow of the company’s great horror films, particularly the Frankenstein creature: Glenn Strange spends the whole time lying on a laboratory table, then dies in some stock footage. Still, the cast does its best and Universal’s eerie mansions always look great. “I don’t like people who break their promises, Mr. Talbot.”
Mr. Roberts was a classic film in which Henry Fonda plays an officer on a dispirited WW II Naval vessel shipping supplies between Pacific bases while battling the tyrannical captain (James Cagney) and finding camaraderie with Ensign Pulver (Jack Lemmon) and ship’s doctor William Powell. The sequel, ENSIGN PULVER (1964), has no Mr. Roberts and replaces Lemmon and Cagney with Robert Walker (better known as Star Trek‘s Charlie X) and Burl Ives (Walter Matthau as the doctor is fine). The plot concerns Pulver struggling to fill Roberts’ shoes and mostly failing; what got my attention is that on movie night the captain always wants to watch the fictitious monster mashup, Young Dr. Jekyll Meets Frankenstein, created primarily by chopping up bits of Boris Karloff in The Walking Dead and adding a couple of shots of Morgan Paul as Young Jekyll. Not significant enough in any way to include in the book and not particularly good. “Alexander the Great conquered half the world just to show up to his father — but he still conquered it.”
HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM (1958) opens with a woman using a pair of gift binoculars only to discover they’re booby-trapped with needles that drive through her eyes into her brain. It’s one of several spectacular unsolved murders and arrogant true-crime writer Bancroft (Michael Gough) is ripping into Scotland Yard for not solving them — especially when the killing weapons are modeled on Scotland Yard’s own black museum of criminal memorabilia.
It turns out, however, that Bancroft is behind the killings, both to eliminate some inconvenient people and to give himself material for his writing. While his crippled leg seems to disqualify him, it turns out he’s been using his young aide Rick (Graham Cunrow), hypnotizing him and injecting him with Dr. Jekyll’s formula (unusual to have it an injection rather than something to drink) to turn him into an obedient assassin (“It is reality born out of legend, truth out of myth!”).
The murders shock but the film is more unpleasant than entertaining and not particularly intelligent; Jekyll’s formula feels completely unnecessary to the plot but it definitely qualifies the film for the appendix, if nothing else. “In every war, the historian receives more money than the foot soldier.”
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