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Med school confidential, Val Lewton style: "When we dislike a friend, we dissect him." The theme is dilated from Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale, the murky base of the obelisk of art and science -- who’s in charge of the cadavers in anatomy lectures? Two slum-bred hopefuls in fin-de-siècle Edinburgh, one becomes a physician and pedant (Henry Daniell) and the other a coachman and all-around ghoul (Boris Karloff). The doctor’s anguished rationality ("a lot of knowledge, no understanding") and the cab-driver’s cultured ghastliness remain locked in continuous symbiosis. "The pit yawns for both of them," Daniell’s mistress (Edith Atwater) declares. Observing the danse macabre is the naïve, blank-slate apprentice (Russell Wade), whose "medical career milestones" include recognizing the fresh corpse delivered for class. Researchers and healers are closer to the subjects on the autopsy slab than to their living patients in this acerbic chimera of shadow and sacrifice, grave-robbing becomes "the resurrection business." Robert Wise does justice to the cobbled streets and bottomless cellars of Lewton’s netherworld in one resourceful camera setup: Carriage, arched hallway, fog, a beggar woman’s song suddenly stilled. The off-screen brutality (including one gruesome bit staged behind drawn curtains) doesn’t lessen the existential horror of characters unceremoniously becoming sheet-wrapped bodies slung over a whimsical butcher’s shoulders. Bela Lugosi’s appearance as Daniell’s bent, creeping, unwisely blackmailing servant gazes back mournfully on the Black Cat duo, the crippled child and the impassive equine reappear in Au Hasard Balthazar. The sustained chiaroscuro gives way to the lightning-blanched folia of the climax, Hippocrates has the last word: "The roads of learning begin in darkness..." With Rita Corday, Sharyn Moffett, and Donna Lee. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |