A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, October 5, 2023

Doctor X (Michael Curtiz, 1932)

Lionel Atwill in Doctor X
Cast: 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. Screenplay: Robert Taskner, Earl Baldwin, based on a play by Howard Warren Comstock and Allen C. Miller. Cinematography: Ray Rennahan. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: George Amy.

In Doctor X, Lee Tracy is called on to do two incompatible things: serve as comic relief and play the romantic lead. He succeeds at the former more than he does at the latter, which is not saying much.  (The comic shtick involves things like joy buzzers and exploding cigars, which gives you a sense of the level of humor Tracy is asked to participate in.) The film is a whodunit horror about a serial killer who strikes at the full moon and who leaves his victims mutilated. (The movie calls it cannibalism, but I don't recall any evidence that the killer actually ate the people he murdered.) The chief forensic clue is that the victims were sliced up with a particular kind of scalpel, used only by one facility in the city: a research institute headed by Dr. Jerry Xavier (Lionel Atwill). When the police detectives call on Xavier, they are introduced to his research staff, each of whom becomes a suspect in the killings. Meanwhile, Lee Taylor (Tracy), one of those anything-for-a-story reporters Hollywood was fond of, is snooping around too, trying to uncover the Full Moon Killer before the police do. This involves Taylor breaking and entering at not only the institute but also Dr. Xavier's creepy gothic mansion on a cliff in Long Island, where he lurks around in some skeleton-filled closets. (Cue the obvious gags.) He also meets Dr. Xavier's lovely daughter, Joanne (Fay Wray), and they inexplicably (at least where she's concerned) hit it off. Naturally, Joanne has to be put in jeopardy and Taylor has to rescue her. Doctor X is mostly remembered for its experiment with two-strip Technicolor, which yields some interesting if washed-out looking images, but also seems inappropriate for the film's sinister old dark house setting. There are a few nice scares among all the goofiness and pseudo-scientific poppycock -- the usual foaming and smoking beakers and flasks and some sparking and arcing electric apparatus -- but in a golden age for horror movies, Doctor X is decidedly second-tier.  
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