The
Psychotronic Zone
By
Ed Garea
Doctor
X (WB, 1932) – Director: Michael Curtiz.
Writers: Earl Baldwin, and Robert Tasker (s/p). George Rosener
(contribution to s/p construction; uncredited). Howard Warren
Comstock, Allen C. Miller (play, The Terror).
Stars: Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Lee Tracy, Preston Foster, John
Wray, Harry Beresford, Arthur Edmund Carewe, Leila Bennett,
Robert Warwick, George Rosener, Willard Robertson, Thomas E. Jackson,
Harry Holman, Mae Busch, & Tom Dugan. In two-strip Technicolor,
77 minutes.
“Now
listen, please, to what I have to say: one of us in this room may be
a murderer; a murderer who kills by the light of a full moon, leaving
his victim’s body mutilated; a cannibal…” –
Dr. Xavier (Lionel Atwill)
By
the year 1932, the Depression has firmly set in and Hollywood was
looking for new diversions to get the public into theaters. Studios
took note that Universal had a series of hits with their horror
films: Dracula, Frankenstein, and Murder
in the Rue Morgue that brought audiences into the theaters.
It
got to the point where even Warner Bros. was forced to get into the
game. But for Warners, known for its gritty urban dramas, horror was
unknown territory. Fortunately, they had a director who had cut his
teeth in Germany with such films – Michael Curtiz. He was assigned
to direct two films devoted to horror: Doctor X and Mystery
of the Wax Museum. To boost audience interest, the studio used
the two-strip Technicolor process, although audiences not in the
urban areas saw the pictures in black and white. And in keeping with
the studio’s philosophy, there was absolutely nothing supernatural
about each film: they were firmly rooted in the studio's urban
environment and ethos.
Lee
Taylor (Tracy) is a reporter investigating what the press has dubbed
“The Moon Murders,” a series of killings over the past six months
always committed under a full moon. Each victim has been neatly and
clinically stabbed and chunks of flesh are missing, insinuating some
form of cannibalism. Taylor is waiting outside the morgue, located
somewhere on New York's Lower East Side, acting on a tip that the
police are calling in an expert to do the postmortem on the latest
victim, a scrubwoman. Barred from entry, he ducks into a local
brothel to call his paper and give them an update on who’s
attending the postmortem.
The
police have called in Doctor Xavier (Atwill), the head of the nearby
Academy of Surgical Research, to perform the postmortem. Xavier
concludes that the old woman was strangled by a pair of powerful
hands before an incision was made at the base of her brain and her
left deltoid muscle removed, presumably for cannibalization.
Asked
by Police Commissioner Stevens (Warwick) his opinion of the killer,
Xavier replies that the killer is “A neurotic, of course.
Some poor devil suffering from a fixation ... A knot or kink tied to
the brain by some past experience. A madness that comes only at
certain times when the killer is brought into direct contact with
some vivid reminder of the past.”
Stevens
is more than a little skeptical, but Xavier continues, pointing to
his head: “But I tell you that locked in each human skull
is a little world all its own.”
When
Stevens asks what these ‘reminders’ would be, Xavier
responds, “Anything. The poor devil, sane at all other
times, is forced to live over the scene of the action that first
drove him mad.”
And
there we have it. While Universal is attributing its horrors for the
most part to supernatural causes, Warner Bros. is going straight to
Freud, with a side detour to Richard Kraft-Ebbing for the perverse
details, for its explanation. There’s nothing supernatural at all
about The Moon Killer; he is simply driven to do what he does by a
past traumatic experience.
But
to his consternation, Dr. Xavier discovers that the commissioner has
an ulterior motive for asking him to perform the postmortem. The
commissioner believes that someone from Xavier’s nearby Surgical
Academy is the killer. Xavier takes umbrage to the accusation. He
knows every student and faculty member personally and asks
Commissioner Stevens to allow him to conduct his own internal
investigation before officially proceeding. Stevens agrees to
Xavier’s request. Xavier, Stevens, and the others present leave the
morgue to see the Academy and meet its faculty.
Immediately
after the men leave, Taylor pops up from the slab where he has been
hiding – and listening – while the discussion has been going on.
Tracy’s character will perform tricks like this throughout the
film, lending some necessary comic relief to the gruesome
proceedings. He puts on his shoes and leaves to report what he has
heard to his editor and heads for the Academy.
At
the school, formerly titled “Xavier’s Academy of Surgical
Research,” Xavier’s daughter, Joanne (Fay Wray) discovers a
figure skulking in the dark. She lets out one of her famous screams
before turning on the lights only to find her father skimming through
the bookcases in his library. She begs him to take a break and get
some rest, but he replies that he cannot rest until he clears the
name of the school. As she opens the blinds to let in the moonlight,
Xavier tells her that he is bothered by the ghastly moon.
Dr.
Xavier introduces his faculty to the police, and a better group of
likely suspects could not exist. First up is Professor Wells
(Foster), an expert on cannibalism. Wells is working on an experiment
that is keeping a human heart beating through electrical impulses. He
tells Stevens and his staff that his left arm is bothering him, then
unscrews his artificial left hand.
Next
up is Professor Haines (John Wray), whose specialty is brain research
and is experimenting with brain grafting. He asks after Joanne in a
way that can best be described as unsettling. Xavier notes to the
police that Haines was part of an expedition that was shipwrecked. He
and two colleagues were adrift for days in a lifeboat. When they were
finally rescued, only two were still present. There was no trace of
the third.
The
other person left alive in the lifeboat is Dr. Rowitz (Carewe), who
also works at the Academy. His specialty is studying the effects of
the moon on a person’s mind. As he is explaining his work, he
begins to rhapsodize quite fancifully about the moon, while the light
beaming down on his face from the skylight above shows massive scars.
His rhapsodizing gets to the point where his grumpy, wheelchair-bound
partner Professor Duke (Beresford) interrupts to get him back on
track. After meeting the faculty, Stevens gives Xavier the 48 hours
he requested to finish his investigation.
As
Xavier is busy making introductions, Joanne catches Taylor prowling
around the grounds and threatens him with a gun. Taylor tries to
charm her, but to no avail. As he skulks in the dark, an unknown
figure creeps up behind him. He lights a cigar given to him by the
guard at the morgue as the figure grows closer. Suddenly, just as the
figure’s hands are about to close around his neck, the cigar
explodes, a payback from a cop he used a joy buzzer on when they
shook hands earlier (and something that will come into play later in
the movie to save Taylor’s life), and the unknown figure runs away,
unnoticed.
Taylor
later sneaks into the Xavier house, conning Mamie (Bennett), the
family maid. Joanne once again catches him, this time attempting to
steal photos of herself and her father for his paper. She becomes
further enraged when she learns that he wrote the story about her
father in that morning’s paper. However, as she’s busy taking
Taylor to task, she lets slip the fact that her father is convening
the faculty at his summer estate in Blackstone Shoals, Long Island,
for his internal investigation. Taylor follows the group out to the
estate.
At
the estate, Xavier tells the others his reasons for the move. He and
Professor Wells have devised a psychoneurological test to determine
if anyone of them is the guilty party. Xavier is also going to
subject himself to the test; the only person exempt will be Wells,
who Xavier has deduced can't be a suspect as he has only one hand.
Despite the protests of the professors, the test will begin in 10
minutes. Meanwhile, Taylor has snuck into the house, receiving a
series of frights as he tries to figure out what is going on. He
ducks into a closet full of skeletons, and while waiting, begins to
play with them. But one of the skeleton’s arms moves, exposing a
hole in the wall through which an eye is watching. The closet soon
fills with gas, knocking Taylor out.
For
the experiment, Xavier is using Mamie and Otto the butler (Rosener),
dressing them up as victim and killer to re-enact the murders under
the light of the full moon. Each of the professors, excepting Wells,
is handcuffed to a chair and hooked up to a set of tubes monitoring
their heartbeat, with each beat causing a reddish liquid to surge in
the tubes. The quicker the heartbeat, the higher the liquid goes,
which shows how excited the individual is becoming. If the tube
overflows, that individual is guilty. As the experiment goes on, the
lights go out, with chaos ensuing. Rowitz screams and as the lights
go on, Xavier determines he is the killer, as his tube is
overflowing. But Rowitz is dead, murdered like all the others. Wells
is later found conked on the head during the pandemonium and when he
comes to, he remembers nothing.
Despite
the horrors of the previous night, Xavier is determined to repeat the
experiment, but Mamie is too distraught to continue. Joanne
volunteers to take her place and dresses as one of the victims, this
time, a young girl who was murdered by the fiend while in the
hospital. Otto will once again play the killer. Taylor has wandered
off to examine the house and has discovered a secret passage to one
of the professor’s labs. Doctor Xavier thinks he’s slipped away
to send in his story, but Joanne is certain that he kept his promise
to her. Although they search, but cannot find him. But we saw that
while Taylor is snooping around, a cloaked figure suddenly grabs him
and imprisons him on the other side of a sliding panel.
In
his room setting up the experiment, Wells begins acting strangely. He
reaches behind some shelving and produces another hand. Although
it’s misshapen, it is real and quite functional. Slipping it into
his empty left sleeve, where it attaches itself to the stump of his
arm, he applies what looks like goop to his left stump,
all the while muttering the words “synthetic flesh.” The goop
sets and allows him to use the hand like a normal hand, only a much
stronger one. He turns on an electric arc generator and thrusts his
newly-attached hand into the current, with his reaction being a
rather strange combination of agony and ecstasy. He also applies the
goop to his face, once again muttering “synthetic flesh,” in case
we didn’t catch it the first time, creating a mask that looks
horribly distorted.
Wells
sneaks up on Otto and strangles him. He then heads for Joanne
grabbing her throat and reveling himself to the others, who are
struggling to escape from their cuffs. Wells taunts them with his new
makeover, revealing his insanity: “Yes, it is Wells! –
but a new Wells! A Wells whose name will live forever in the history
of science! Yes, look at it! A real hand! It’s alive – it’s
flesh! Synthetic flesh! For years I’ve been searching to find the
secret of a living manufactured flesh – and now I’ve found it!
You think I went to Africa to study cannibalism? I went there to get
samples of the human flesh that the natives eat! Yes, that’s what I
needed – living flesh from humans for my experiments! What
difference did it make if a few people had to die? Their flesh taught
me how to manufacture arms, legs, faces that are human! I’ll make a
crippled world whole again!”
As
Wells continues clutching Joanne by the throat, Taylor suddenly
springs out from the shadows and takes on Wells while Joanne manages
to free her father and the others. The insane Wells is powerful, but
just as Taylor appears to be overcome he uses his hand buzzer to
drive Wells back, grabs an oil lamp from the wall, and flings it at
the monster. The synthetic flesh catches fire and Taylor pushes Wells
through the window, where he plunges in flames to the beach far
below. Joanne and Taylor embrace as Lee phones in his story and tells
the society editor that a future matrimonial announcement may be
forthcoming.
Afterwords:
The
genesis of Doctor X was on Broadway in a three-act
melodrama/mystery originally entitled The Terror, by
Howard W. Comstock and Allen C. Miller. The title was changed
to Doctor X after one of its main characters to
avoid confusion (and a possible lawsuit) with a play of the same
name. It opened on Feb. 9, 1931, and closed in April 1931 after 80
performances. Warner’s story department bought the play for $5,000,
and while in preparation for filming, the screenwriters focused on
the horror elements of the story, making it more of a horror/comedy
and made the villain a monster instead of a mere serial killer. They
also changed the locale of Dr. Xavier’s mansion from East Orange,
N.J., to Long Island, N.Y., to give a more secluded and creepy
feeling.
As
the script began to evolve, the horror elements were downplayed and
new scenes with Lee Tracy were added to emphasize the comical aspects
of the story. Possibly it was felt that a film dealing with elements
of cannibalism, rape, and other repressed Freudian aspects would be a
little too much for the audience to take, as they couldn't merely
shrug it off as they could the Universal horrors by noting the
presence of the supernatural. One was far more likely to meet a fiend
like that in Doctor X than meet someone
like Dracula.
So
the writers ratcheted up Tracy’s presence, making him both the hero
and comic relief character. Usually in these sort of films where the
reporter is the hero, he has a comic relief sidekick who usually
works as his photographer. They also provided a subplot in the form
of a romance between Tracy’s character and Fay Wray’s Joanne
Xavier. Throughout most of the film she can’t stand him, but after
he comes to her rescue in the final reel, she not only falls
head-over-heels for him, but wedding bells are implied as the film
fades out. In the end, we get a horror-mystery where the hero places
emphasis on the comical aspects of the plot.
This
and the film that followed, Mystery of the Wax Museum,
were the last Warner Bros. would make using the two-strip Technicolor
process. The only reason they were made using this method at all was
to fulfill the contract with Technicolor, which was owed two more
films. What we know and love today as Technicolor is a three-strip
process combining blue, red and green to reproduce a wide range of
tones. Back in its early days, Technicolor was a two-strip process,
displaying colors only as shades of reds and greens. The company took
a shellacking from critics and public alike due to way too many
terrible, murky prints, and the public was said to be tired of it by
1932. Two-strip Technicolor was also hell for those who had to act
under its strong lights, which raised the temperature on sets to
around 120 degrees.
However,
in its last bow using the process, the studio decided to go out with
a little style. The producers asked Technicolor to work with them on
developing a color scheme that would enhance the mysterious
atmosphere they wished to create for the film. In addition, Ray
Rennahan, a pioneer in color cinematography, was asked to supervise
the photography on the film. This created a film that distanced
itself from the garish, unflattering reds and greens and moved
instead towards a pastel of aquas, grays, and browns. The result is
that the film takes on a nightmarish, otherworldly feeling. The
opening scene, with the full moon ever so slightly lighting the foggy
streets, effectively sets the mood for the rest of the film.
The
highlight, of course, is when the film reveals Wells (Foster) as the
monster. As he plasters layers of what he calls “synthetic flesh”
over his head and hands, the shades of pinkish-orange set off by
green shadows provide an unsettling experience for the viewer,
maximizing the mood. Max Factor, known by its reputation to glamorize
actors and actresses, created the makeup used by Foster for his
transformation.
But
spooky hues alone do not an effective film make. In order to keep the
audience riveted, the hues must emphasize something other than the
actors. And so, in order to make maximum use of the color palette,
Warner’s assigned art director Anton Grot, their resident genius
when it came to fantastic set designs, to create elaborate sets full
of wild and dangerous-looking electrical contraptions arranged
against dark, vast, and foreboding interiors. The result was a set
that mixed futurism with Art Deco, giving the film a look that is
distinctly – and unforgettably – odd.
Grot’s
design for the Doctor’s summer home, called “Cliff Manor,” is a
masterpiece of Gothic architecture gone wild, with its cavernous
hallways, secret passage and huge basement laboratory. Should we be
surprised that when reporter Taylor is driven to the place he is
taken there in a horse-drawn carriage driven by a cloaked coachman?
The
third slice of credit for the look of the film goes to director
Curtiz himself. His emphasis on shadows and splitting the colors in
order to emphasize one part of the frame, though not a horrifically
sharp as black and white, nevertheless makes for an undeniably
haunting experience. Curtis can also be credited, along with the
writers, for a most unique innovation: standing the Old Dark House
Mystery plot on its head.
In the standard variation, a group of
disparate people gathers at some wildly remote sinister old mansion.
An entity, which is thought to be supernatural, stalks them and kills
some off, until at last the hero and heroine reveal the killer not to
be a supernatural force or being, but perfectly human, usually
interested in being the last one standing to claim the inheritance.
(Many critics and bloggers have noted that this morphed into the
general plot for the animated series Scooby-Doo, Where Are
You?) In Doctor X, a group of people, all known to
each other, gather in a remote, sinister old mansion, only they
assume that which stalks them is perfectly natural, for this is the
20th century. But here, at the end, the killer is revealed to be just
a bizarre as he is human.
Just
as the standard Old Dark House Mystery has a slew of red herrings, so
does Doctor X; in fact, the film is awash in them, from
Professor Haines, who along with his colleague Dr. Rowitz (he who is
investigating the effects of moonlight on the brain), may have eaten
the other survivor of the shipwreck to stay alive, to the cranky
wheelchair-bound Professor Duke, who we later find could walk on his
own due to a hysterical reaction, to the Good Doctor himself. In the
scene in his library, when Joanne raises the blinds to let in the
moonlight, it causes her father to close his eyes, press his fingers
to the bridge of his nose, and complain to her that moonlight makes
him feel “nervous.”
As
stated previously, our guide to this bizarre, deviate world is
Sigmund Freud, with an assist from Kraft-Ebbing’s
textbook, Psychopathia Sexualis. Their
influence seems to be everywhere: in the killer Dr. Xavier claims is
responsible; in his staff with their unusual peccadillos; even in Dr.
Xavier himself. No one is immune, not even his daughter Joanne, who
shows tendencies of a definite Electra complex towards her father in
the way she constantly worriers after him and idolizes him. For
instance, Professor Haines is a voyeur. He enquires to Dr. Xavier
about his daughter in a creepy way; the police find a
semi-pornographic book entitled French Art hidden in
one of his textbooks; and when Lee Taylor and Joanne are at the
beach, Haines is watching them though a pair of binoculars. Last, but
certainly not least, let’s not forget that sequence at the
mansion’s laboratory when Xavier has all the scientists (excepting
Wells) chained to chair and forced to watch a reenactment of one of
the “Moon Killer’s” crimes while being tethered to a machine
calibrated to measure how excited they are by the scene.
But
the one who wrote the book on cannibalism, Dr. Wells, is the first
suspect the police hone in on, and in the end, revealed as the
killer. He was ruled out by both Xavier and the police due to the
fact he has only one hand and the victims were forcibly strangled by
a powerful pair of hands, but no one took notice of the “synthetic
flesh” he was making, and the cuts that were made to remove flesh
from the victim supposedly for rites of cannibalism were actually
made to obtain specimens to further his synthetic project. In the
scene where he reveals himself to the other while holding his hand to
the throat of a prostrate Fay Wray in a negligee, implying elements
of rape, also set the tone for future trends in horror movies. In
both Doctor
X and Mystery
of the Wax Museum,
the women (both played by Fay Wray) were bound and vulnerable
to assault by all too human fiends. The implications of Fay Wray
lying
prostrate and helpless in a negligee before the Moon Killer was the
stuff of which exploitation dreams are made, although we would have
to wait until the late ‘50s for this aspect to become fully
realized.
And
what of the performances? Though he was billed behind Lionel Atwill
and Fay Wray, this is clearly Lee Tracy’s movie. He plays one of
his typical fast-talking characters, which as noted above, was
written to fit into the plot. He comes off as brash and rude, but he
also has a vulnerability that shows not only his inventiveness but
also reveals a strange sense of humor. It’s this aspect that raises
the film from an adaptation of a stage play into something else
altogether. His upbeat attitude and morbid humor is in stark contrast
to the gravitas of the academics, who are prisoners of their own
logic. Tracy’s propensity to sneak into places where he doesn't
belong brings him a lot of trouble for his efforts. But when the
final moments arrive, he shows his mettle in battling Wells to the
death and his inventiveness is using a joy buzzer to throw his
opponent off just as it looked like Tracy was done. Tracy’s
quintessential role was that of the fast-talking newspaperman, a role
he first played as Hildy Johnson in the Broadway version of The
Front Page in 1928. Although Doctor X was a
departure from the films he was best known for, he took to the horror
format without any problems and it’s a shame he never returned; his
humor would have been most welcome.
This
was Lionel Atwill’s first foray into the realm of horror, but as we
know, it wouldn’t be his last. Atwill was as eccentric as some of
the mad scientists he played. His hobby was attending murder trials.
Were he acting today instead of back in the ‘30s we would expect to
see him playing such characters as Hercule Poirot or Inspector Morse
– he seemed born for those parts. It was Atwill’s alternation
between the sinister and the sympathetic – set off by his
distinguished voice – that allowed him to be so effective, an
effect seen even in his comic lines, as they were spoken by a
seemingly diabolical doctor and reflective of a sort of morbidity
that makes Doctor X so offbeat. Atwill’s attitude
is best seen in his attention towards his daughter. On one hand he is
the devoted and loving father, yet he comes off so icily and
logically menacing that we can easily visualize him killing her for
the sake of science. One of Atwill’s funnier moments was his
reading of the particularly awkward line “Oh, if only I were not
powerless here in chains!” He says it will all the aplomb of
someone having a rough time taking this seriously. Probably little
did he know at the time that he would be speaking even wackier lines
in cheaper movies.
Speaking
of daughters, Fay Wray acquits herself well in what was also for
first foray into the horror genre. Known as the Queen of Scream for
her role in King Kong, her screaming in Doctor X
seems as though it’s a warm-up. Her character doesn’t have
much to do in the film except to worry after her father and make for
a fetching victim in the film’s climax. The film even has a hard
time in distinguishing her character’s name, referring to her as
“Joanne” in some parts and “Joan” in others. However, she
does get to show the audience a little spunk when she stands down
Tracy with a gun after catching him peeping through the window at her
father's and tossing him from the house when she discovers that he
wrote the story that got her beloved dad in so much hot water. Her
romance with Tracy seems forced for the sake of the plot, but we get
a nice glimpse of how she took advantage of the Technicolor process
with her cream complexion and use of a green dominated wardrobe. I
loved her snobby pronunciation of the family name as “Zaave-vee-A”
And then … there’s that scream, which we first hear when she’s
startled in the library. It was her work in this film – and her
screaming – that caught the attention of Merian C. Cooper over at
RKO, who was preparing the ultimate version of Beauty and the
Beast, and needed someone who could give it her all when she
screamed.
The
most interesting performer was Preston Foster as the crazed Wells. It
wasn’t so much his performance, though, that interested as it was
his casting. Foster had the looks of a matinee star and had just come
off an excellent performance as Edward G. Robinson’s best friend
in Two Seconds (1932). And yet here he’s in a
character role. This would set the pattern for his later career:
strong supporting or character player in “A” films and leading
man in “B” productions. In Doctor X, he hits all the
right notes as Wells, who is driven to murder and mutilation by the
vision of the full moon. When he reveals himself in the movie’s
crucial scene, the garbed, choking noises he makes when the moonlight
envelops him are truly creepy and his enunciation of his concoction
as he applies it is truly terrifying because we know his next move.
George
Rosener, the original screenwriter of Doctor X, whose
script was totally redone by Baldwin and Tasker due to it’s being
“amateurish,” managed to salvage a little victory in the role of
Otto, the weirdest butler this side of Lurch. Leila Bennett, as
Mamie, the hysterical maid makes little out of a minor role. She
would later make an entire career out of playing strange servants,
competing with Maude Eburne, who also had the same typecasting.
Doctor
X was a nice entry in the Old Dark house murder mystery
genre; it’s great look and good performances making it a surreal,
enjoyable murder mystery. Credit to Warner Bros. for taking a
gruesome premise and to building around it one of their typical,
fast-paced urban dramas. In doing so, they managed to create the
first contemporary American horror movie they scored with the public,
earning $594,000 worldwide and returning a profit of $72,000, which
in 1932 Depression America was a strong plus as most of the studio’s
releases that year lost money. The profits were strong enough to
allow the studio to go ahead with Mystery of the Wax Museum,
also directed by Curtiz.
Trivia:
Director
Curtiz was a hard-driving martinet on the set, begrudging the cast
their lunch breaks and reportedly shooting 15-hour days, six days a
week, to impress Jack Warner with his efficiency. Others maintain
that Curtiz shot the film late at night after other units had left
the studio and told ghost stories to the cast in order to create the
proper atmosphere.
Doctor
X was the first of three films Curtiz made with Lionel
Atwill. The others were Mystery of the Wax Museum in
1932 and Captain Blood in 1935.
Doctor
X was also the first of three films Lionel Atwill made with
Fay Wray. Afterward they co-starred in The Mystery of the Wax
Museum and The Vampire Bat (both 1932).
Doctor
X was originally filmed simultaneously in color and in black
and white, and supposedly the two versions used different takes in
several scenes. When the film was included in a package of older
films syndicated to television in the late ‘50s, the Technicolor
version was thought to be lost. No print could be located, as
Technicolor had discarded most of their two-color negatives in 1948.
When Jack Warner died in 1978, a color negative was found in his
personal collection and has since been restored by the UCLA Film and
Television Archive. Since then, the black and white version has
become the more obscure.
The
love scenes between Lee Tracy and Fay Wray were shot in Laguna
Beach.
Some
of the film’s sets were recycled in Miss Pinkerton.
Memorable
Dialogue
After Xavier gives
Commissioner Stevens his view of the murders, he’s met with
skepticism.
Commissioner
Stevens: It’s hard to believe that!
Xavier: Yes,
for a policeman, I suppose it is.
