Columbia Horror (Region B) (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Dec 04, 2024
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
-
Director
John Francis Dillon/Roy William Neill/Albert Rogell/Charles Barton/Henry Levin/Will JasonRelease Date(s)
1932-1944 (October 28, 2024)Studio(s)
Columbia Pictures (Indicator/Powerhouse Films)- Film/Program Grade: See Below
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: A-
- Extras Grade: A-
- Overall Grade: A
Review
[Editor’s Note: This is a Region B-locked British Blu-ray import.]
Powerhouse Films’ Columbia Horror is a pleasant surprise, its six titles a mix of obscure and familiar titles: Behind the Mask (1932), Black Moon (1934), Air Hawks (1935), Island of Doomed Men (1940), Cry of the Werewolf (1944), and The Soul of a Monster (1944).
I imagined, incorrectly as it turned out, that all of these were once part of Screen Gems’ “Shock” and “Son of Shock” television packages, movies syndicated to local TV markets in the U.S. in the late-1950s by Columbia’s television arm. That package mostly consisted of Universal horror titles from the ‘30s and ‘40s but, to fill out the program, included a fair number of Columbia titles, some not really horror films at all. However, only Behind the Mask and Island of Doomed Men appeared in either of those packages; roughly half of these titles will be new to fans of such pictures. Most, however, aren’t predominantly horror films, and a couple, most obviously Air Hawks, arguably have no horror elements at all.
Behind the Mask (1932) is a crime film with slight horror elements, though it does co-star Boris Karloff and Edward Van Sloan (Dracula, Frankenstein). Jack Holt heads the cast as Quinn, convict and cellmate to Jim Henderson (Karloff). Quinn escapes from prison, and on Henderson’s advice visits Arnold (Claude King), part of a drug-smuggling operation headed by the mysterious Mr. X. At Arnold’s mansion Quinn also encounters Arnold’s beautiful daughter, Julie (Constance Cummings), and nurse Edwards (Bertha Mann), who looks after the ailing Arnold but, in reality, is reporting Arnold’s movements to Mr. X via an early phone answering-messaging device.
Quinn also meets another part of the criminal enterprise, Dr. August Steiner (Van Sloan), who owns a private hospital where he has a little laboratory filled with Kenneth Strickfadden’s electric gizmos prominently seen in films like Bride of Frankenstein and, much later, Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein. Steiner uses his surgical skills to dispose of government agents investing the drug smugglers.
Written by Jo Swerling, later a prominent screenwriter whose credits include The Pride of the Yankees, Lifeboat, Leave Her to Heaven, and It’s a Wonderful Life, Behind the Mask is essentially a genre-fusing programmer, the 69-minute film is reasonably entertaining but not great, and certainly no horror film. However, the climactic scene, in which Steiner threatens Quinn with an agonizing death on the operating table without the benefit of anesthetic, has a pre-Code tenseness.
The film isn’t much, but classic horror fans will enjoy watching Karloff and Van Sloan deviate from their usual screen personae. Karloff’s Henderson is not so much menacing as garrulous and animated, a lower-level criminal who doesn’t know when to keep his trap shut. Up to this point Karloff’s only classic horror credit was Frankenstein, with The Old Dark House, The Mask of Fu Manchu, and The Mummy coming later in 1932.
Classic horror fans will instantly recognize Van Sloan playing a dual role here, as Steiner and another respected sawbones, Dr. Alec Munsell, clearly pegging the latter as the mysterious Mr. X. As Steiner, Van Sloan is made up with a beard and Coke bottle-eyeglasses, rather like Lionel Atwill in several films; he’s rather good in this atypical part. (Film Rating: B-)
Not bad, Black Moon (1934) is a pre-Code voodoo horror film, again with Jack Holt, joined by Fay Wray, Dorothy Burgess, and Clarence Muse. Its inadequate screenplay by Wells Root (from Clements Ripley’s story) keeps the audience in the dark about the source of the horror for too long, but Neill’s direction and Joseph August’s cinematography are excellent.
Stephen Lane (Holt) struggles to come to terms with his psychologically troubled wife, Juanita (Burgess), who’s compelled to return to Caribbean island where she was raised, bringing along their young daughter, Nancy (Cora Sue Collins, still among the living at 97!), nanny, and Lane’s secretary, Gail Hamilton (Wray), she secretly in love with her boss. Her mother and father dead, she stays at the plantation of her uncle, Dr. Perez (Arnold Korff). The black natives, practitioners of voodoo, welcome her return, seemingly regarding her as some kind of goddess. After the nanny is found dead in a lava pit—there are volcanos in the Caribbean?—a concerned Lane arrives to take them all back, but their schooner is stolen and the wireless destroyed by the voodoo worshipers, closing in on the non-believer whites.
Juanita’s relationship with the natives and her strange behavior generally isn’t adequately expressed or explained until the picture is nearly over. Similar to Paramount’s White Woman, made the year before, Black Moon is impressively moody and, in its last act, pretty suspenseful, but the muddled narrative works against its overall effectiveness. Holt and especially Wray are very good, though the less-remembered Dorothy Burgess is inadequate as the mysterious Juanita. She doesn’t have much range and the script doesn’t give her anything to work with.
However, the cinematography and direction—Neill later the director of most of the moody ‘40s Sherlock Holmes films with Basil Rathbone—help a lot, and this release offers viewers the choice to view the film in both black-and-white and with the original tinting scheme. The tinting further enhances the viewing experience. (Film Rating: B-)
Air Hawks isn’t a horror film at all, but rather something like a B-movie Only Angels Have Wings reworked as a Republic serial, with a slight, out of nowhere sci-fi angle. Ralph Bellamy stars as pilot Barry Eldon, owner of the struggling Independent Transcontinental Lines (ITL), an air mail service in direct competition with the more powerful Consolidated Airlines and its owner, Martin Drewen (Robert Middlemass). When Eldon refuses to sell out to Drewen, he arranges with nightclub owner Victor Arnold (Douglass Dumbrille) to hire renegade German scientist Shulter (Edward Van Sloan) to employ his newly perfected death ray (!) on Eldon’s fleet of planes, firing his mobile ray from a truck positioned along ITL’s route.
Running just over an hour, Air Hawks is fast-paced and entertaining, if more than a little disjointed. Eldon is stubbornly disconnected from menace, even after government agents alert him that Shulter’s invention might be bringing his planes down, and when determined reporter Tiny (Victor Kilian) stumbles upon the inventor’s hideout (with no explanation as to how he found it), Eldon refuses even to listen to him, and Tiny for no clear reason declines to tell Eldon that he lost his job at the paper sticking up for the bullheaded aviator.
Edward Van Sloan, his billing dipping lower with each new release—11th in this case—delivers another surprisingly varied characterization, one quite different from Behind the Mask, here sporting a limp and German accent. He’s surrounded by even more Kenneth Strickfadden electrical equipment, and gets to work his full-size ray gun from a truck similar to that used in Republic’s later serial Flying Disc Man from Mars (1950).
Outrageously billed third in the cast is celebrated aviator Wiley Post, playing himself. It’s an incredible cheat, as he has all of one minute of screentime, but it’s still a fascinating bit of historical footage, shot before his fatal crash (with Will Rogers) three months after this film’s release. (Film Rating: B)
As the only film of the set made, more or less, as a vehicle for a horror star, Island of Doomed Men (1940) is a disappointment, yet another variation of White Woman, this time with Peter Lorre at his most sadistic, lording over slaves working a diamond mine. The script is weak and Lorre, playing a completely unsympathetic character—even his great role in M was not without humanity—all but sleepwalks through his part. This is the same actor who dazzled as Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon but a year later?
Mark Sheldon (Robert Wilcox), alias undercover government Agent 64, is assigned to investigate the doings of Stephen Danel (Lorre), who gets his mitts on parolees only to keep them as veritable slaves on his remote island somewhere off the Atlantic coast. Sheldon’s superior is assassinated on orders from Danel, but tight-lipped Sheldon does the time. (Why? He spends more than a year in prison needlessly.) Danel, aware Sheldon is an agent (making Sheldon’s prison time even more pointless), takes charge of Sheldon when he’s paroled, the agent seemingly doomed to work Danel’s diamond mine, actually Bronson Canyon, just under the famous Hollywood sign.
Danel’s wife, Lorraine (Rochelle Hudson), a prisoner herself, wants Sheldon to get her away from Danel and his unpredictable temper, he particularly agitated by servant Siggy’s (George E. Stone) pet monkey. Danel’s foremen are a rogue’s gallery of baddies, too: Charles Middleton as Cort (in a role that seems written more for a Barton MacLane type), velvety-voiced Three Stooges villain Kenneth McDonald as a disgraced medico, and... Don Beddoe?
Though efficiently directed by Charles Barton, Robert Hardy Andrews’s screenplay is tired and, at times, wildly improbable. Why does Danel treat each new batch of prisoners to a lavish meal before pulling the rug out from under them, banishing them to a chain-gang-like existence? Why does he hate Siggy’s monkey so much? Andrews, one of several writers, got more mileage out of Lorre’s sadism in MGM’s wild The Cross of Lorraine. (Film Rating: C)
Cry of the Werewolf (1944) has a poor reputation, but in fact the first few reels are atmospheric and well-done. Only later, when the film gets bogged down in a police investigation—with too many comically inept officers—and the werewolf angle takes over, does the film begin to fall apart.
Researcher Dr. Charles Morris (Fritz Leiber, father of the future sci-fi writer), operating out of a museum on the occult and former home of alleged werewolf Maria LaTour, has made a startling find about LaTour’s alleged lycanthropy. Devoted assistant Elsa Chauvet (Osa Massen) cautions that a voodoo-like doll may be a death threat against him, but Morris is willing to take the risk of seeing his research to the end. Bad idea. He’s murdered and museum guide Peter Althius (John Abbott) is driven mad by something tucked away in a secret cellar, accessible only through a hidden panel in the fireplace.
Morris’s son Bob (Stephen Crane) returns home and begins romancing Elsa. Meanwhile, behind the murders is a caravan of gypsies including Princess Celeste LaTour (Nina Foch) and Jan Spavero (Ivan Triesault), the latter working undercover at the museum as a janitor. Elsewhere, easily-agitated Police Lt. Barry Lane (Barton MacLane) contends with incompetent underlings, including Pinkie (Fred Graff) and Homer (Robert B. Williams).
Debuting director Henry Levin, later helmer of prominent films including Journey to the Center of the Earth and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, is able to generate some interest in the early scenes, aided by cinematographer L. William O’Connell, but once the overly-packed comedy relief business with the police begins to dominate, the picture goes downhill.
The film also shamelessly cribs from Universal Wolf Man films with its gypsies and their caravan, incongruously living out of 19th century wagons in present-day Louisiana. (Romani people did immigrate to Louisiana but probably didn’t resemble those found in the picture, one presumes.) Alas, there are no neat-o monster transformation scenes or special make-ups: Princess Celeste transforms into a wolf with a simple camera dissolve. Further, the fast pace of the production, probably 15 days or less, didn’t allow for careful handling of the animal playing the title creature. In some scenes it looks like it’s enjoying a dollop of peanut butter, and when it attacks the hero, it seems to be enjoying itself. Even better-crafted films including virtually every version of The Hound of the Baskervilles runs into this problem; it’s hard to make an ordinary mutt, or even a wolf, appear terrifying. (Film rating: C+)
The Soul of a Monster (1944), like its original co-feature Cry of the Werewolf, has its fair share of atmospheric moments, but ultimately is unsatisfying. All of America seems to be on a death watch when saintly physician Dr. George Winson (George Macready), terminally ill, is on his deathbed. Winson’s own physician, Dr. Roger Vance (Jim Bannon) and pastor Fred Stevens (Erik Rolf) can do nothing, leaving Winson’s desperate wife, Ann (Jeanne Bates), to call upon the forces of darkness for help. Enter mysterious Lilyan Gregg (Rose Hobart, top-billed), who turns up at the house unannounced, forces her way into Winson’s room and, after an all-night vigil, the celebrated Winson miraculously recovers.
However, under Lilyan’s black magic spell, Winson undergoes a radical personality shift, becoming cold-hearted and aloof, Vance later discovering Winson has no pulse!
Cinematographer Burnett Guffey, later the DP of such films as From Here to Eternity and Bonnie and Clyde (winning Oscars for both), gives the Columbia backlot a real workout, with plenty of noir-like atmosphere, and generating interest particular following Lilyan’s eerie nighttime stroll across town toward the Winson residence, Hobart moving with unearthly determination.
The plot, however, is a mess. The set-up with newspaper headlines and various townsfolk mourning Winson’s imminent demise in the opening scenes isn’t enough to create the necessary contrast between the selfless, kind-hearted, and generous Winson of before with the devilish living dead Winson after his “cure.” The audience sees Winson only after, and played by George Macready, no less, who specialized in erudite villainous roles. Lilyan’s motives and methods are never clear, and the film’s conclusion is an enormous cheat, negating all that had come before. (Film rating: C)
All six films are presented in their original black-and-white, 1.37:1 standard frame format. Oddly, only Island of Doomed Men looks less than great; that film seems sourced from less than ideal film elements, or maybe it’s an older video transfer. All six are offered in LPCM 1.0 mono, this time with The Soul of the Monster being the odd man out; its audio is noticeably distorted, wobbly like a warped record album, most noticeable in the underscoring. Overall, though, these films look and sound great, especially the earliest titles, and the tinting option on Black Moon is a nice bonus. Optional English subtitles are provided on these Region “B” discs, with two features per disc. The set is limited to a run of 6,000 numbered copies.
New audio commentaries abound: filmmaker and film historian Daniel Kremer on Behind the Mask; critics and authors Stephen Jones and Kim Newman on Black Moon; film historian Jeremy Arnold on Air Hawks; film historians Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Josh Nelson on Island of Doomed Men; academic and curator Eloise Ross on Cry of the Werewolf; and critics and authors Stephen Jones and Kim Newman on The Soul of a Monster. New video essays consist of Sheldon Hall on Jack Holt; Jonathan Rigby on Peter Lorre; and Tom Vincent on Burnett Guffey. Also included is a 1997 BEHP interview with Constance Cummings in conversation with Roy Fowler, and an excerpt from New York to Berlin in Twenty-Six Hours (1933) on the exploits of aviator Wiley Post; Don’t Kill Your Friends (1943), World War II propaganda short film featuring Cry of the Werewolf star Nina Foch; and image galleries: promotional and publicity materials.
For this review, we received check discs only, and thus did not receive the final packaging with the 100-page booklet included in this release. It features new essays by Bethan Roberts, Ellen Wright, Sergio Angelini, Paul Duane, Tim Snelson, and Jeff Billington; archival profiles of actors Boris Karloff, Fay Wray, and Rochelle Hudson; archival reports on the death of Air Hawks actor Wiley Post; extracts from Cry of the Werewolf’s pressbook; a new piece on actor Rose Hobart’s blacklisting; new writing on the short films; and film credits.
All six films in this set are minor and few of them could even be considered “good,” yet Columbia Horror is an intriguing, sometimes fascinating set of mostly obscure titles that will appeal to fans of B-movies (in the literal sense), and horror-laced potboilers. Recommended.
- Stuart Galbraith IV