According to one of my old spiral-bound movie notebooks, I saw Doctor X (1932, directed by Michael Curtiz) some time during my time as a video store owner back in the day. I still have the database from that fiasco, and sure enough, Doctor X was in our inventory. I don't remember seeing it, though. My suspicion is that the version we had on VHS was a seriously deficient edition, probably the black and white version of the film, though it's possible we had a washed out version in technicolor. The timing was right. It's a miracle that the technicolor version exists at all, given that it was thought to be a lost film after Warner Brothers discarded all their two strip technicolor materials in 1948. A print was found in Jack Warner's collection of private film holdings after his death in 1978, however, which found its way into distribution over the next decade or so. It underwent an extensive restoration in 2020.
All of the major Hollywood studios were getting into the horror movie business in 1932 after seeing box office returns for Dracula and Frankenstein a year before. All of the major studios except MGM--and all of the minor ones too--were in dire financial straits in 1932. It was the worst year of the Great Depression. Everyone was desperate enough to try anything to stay afloat. Movie studios were not exempt. They were even willing to try horror movies. Warners handed the keys to Michael Curtiz for a pair of technicolor horror films--the other one was The Mystery of the Wax Museum the following year. Both are distinct from the films made by Universal or Paramount (we'll get into that as the month goes on). They feel like Warner Brothers movies, in spite of the horror elements. Doctor X in particular is more overtly a characteristic pre-Code film than most of the films Universal was making, particularly in regards to the strata of society it was willing to depict. The ostensible hero--or at least the audience surrogate--is a hard boiled reporter who hangs out in whore houses. This is not in the subtext. It's right there on screen. Warners always strove for street cred, for want of a better phrase. They were the studio of the common man, the everyday Joe, The New Deal, and that runs through their horror movies and makes them distinct. That they were willing to lavish two strip technicolor--a process that was not at all common--on horror movies WAS out of character, but it was a gamble that paid off handsomely. Both films were successes for a studio that desperately needed them.
The story in Doctor X involves a series of murders committed in the vicinity of a medical research school. The murder weapon is a scalpel that could only have come from the school, prompting the police to pressure the school's proprietor, Dr. Jerry Xavier, to investigate his institution. Xavier prevails on the police to allow him to conduct his own investigation in order to head off any negative press, and he gathers his fellow scientists at his mansion on Long Island to conduct an experiment that he believes will reveal the murderer. There, he wires his colleagues and himself into a device that measures their reaction to various stressors and reenacts the murders in front of them. Meanwhile, intrepid reporter Lee Taylor had been shadowing Xavier and follows him to his mansion, He's caught by Xavier's daughter, Joanne, who he sweet talks and romances, much to her initial annoyance. Xavier's first attempt to flush the murderer ends in disaster. His second attempt is up against the deadline given him by the police, and he hasn't accounted for the scientific research behind which the murderer has concealed himself...
If you believe cultural historians like David Skal, the horror movies that appeared between the world wars were a trauma response to the calamity of the Great War to End All Wars. Even during the silent period, you have a gallery of maimed men driven to violent extremes when they are unable to adjust to society. You have that here with a couple of characters who have various disfigurements. This film goes out of its way to flout the production code. Beyond its usual racy sexuality, it touches on themes of cannibalism and implied rape. It is also more willing to look at the deformity of its characters than anything after the code might stomach. It's an uncomfortable film even ninety years later.
An audience with an awareness of how horror movies worked during this period will have a choice of murderers, and will probably suspect Dr. X himself, given that the film bears his name. The film plays its mystery close to the vest, and the identity of the killer is a surprise, but not out of character. The mask of synthetic flesh he wears is more deformed than his everyday appearance. You can sense the glee of make-up artist Max Factor who was usually responsible for making actors beautiful for the camera, but is here given free reign to create grotesques. (He does make Fay Wray look positively luminous, it should be noted). This is amplified by the otherworldly oranges and greens created by two-strip technicolor.
The design of the film by Anton Grot creates an art deco nightmare with the film's array of scientific equipment. These two are illuminated in vivid oranges and greens by the film's color design. This is state of the art production design that borrows a bit from the grandiosity of some of the German silent films like Metropolis, and it is beautiful. The UCLA restoration is stunning. Michael Curtiz was one of the great directors for creating vivid otherwheres, whether the Spanish Main in Captain Blood, Casablanca in the film of the same name, or Sherwood Forest in The Adventures of Robin Hood. He experiments with some of his later effects here. The sword fight between Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne in The Adventures of Robin Hood has a passage where the camera watches the action from above, down a spiral stone staircase where it can see only the shadowplay of the duel. That scene looks a LOT like how he films his sets and his action here. Curtiz doesn't get the respect he probably should because he's not a traditional auteur, but damned if he didn't make more great movies than many directors who bear that label.
Lionel Atwill isn't usually mentioned in the same breath as Karloff or Lugosi, but in the early 1930s he was co-equal with them as one of the faces of horror movies. It's not for nothing that he appeared alongside Karloff and Lugosi in Son of Frankenstein. Doctor X is one of the high points of his career, and one of the few times he got to play a nominally heroic character (in truth, my favorite of his roles is as one of the actors in Jack Benny's troupe in To Be or Not To Be; Lubitsch had a taste for horror actors, given that he also had a pretty good non-horror part for Lugosi in Ninotchka This is off in the weeds, though). Fay Wray is the other big name in the cast, and she's good here. She's not nearly as helpless as some of the damsels she played in other films (hellooooo Kong). She was known as one of the best screamers in the business, principally from the films she made in 1932 and 1933. This is the start of that reputation. The ostensible leading man, the newspaperman played by Lee Tracy, is the film's weak link. He functions as the David Manners character, if that means something to you, AND he plays the comic relief. It's an uneasy mix. He seems out of his depth, though that's the character that's been written for him as much as it is his performance. That he gets the girl in the end seems more incredible than any of the film's weird science.
Welcome to this year's October Horror Movie Challenge. I'm participating in my friend, Aaron Christensen's annual fundraiser during this year's challenge. Aaron has chosen the Women's Reproductive Rights Assistance Project as this year's recipient for our community's largess, so if you've got a few bucks lying around, here's a donation link for the donor drive. You know what to do.
As usual with the challenge, I'll be prioritizing films that are new to me, so I'm off to a good start there. I'll also be prioritizing pre-Code and silent horror this year, because during the last few decades, the genre has gotten too big to really track. We'll see how it goes.
My current progress:
New to me films: 1
Total films: 2
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