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Med school confidential, Val Lewton style: "When we dislike a friend, we dissect him." The theme is dilated out of Robert Louis Stevenson, the murky base of the obelisk of science and art—who's in charge of the cadavers in anatomy lectures? Two slum-bred hopefuls in 1871 Edinburgh, one becomes a physician and pedant (Henry Daniell) while the other a coachman and ghoul (Boris Karloff). The doctor's anguished rationality ("knowledge but no understanding") and the cabbie's cultivated ghastliness remain locked in continuous symbiosis, "the pit yawns for them." Contemplating their danse macabre is the blank-slate apprentice (Russell Wade) who recognizes the fresh corpses delivered to class. "You can count it as a milestone in your medical career." Researchers and healers are closer to the subjects on the autopsy slab than to their living patients in this mordant chimera of shadow and sacrifice, Burke and Hare are a fresh memory in "the resurrection business." Robert Wise does justice to the cobblestone streets and bottomless cellars of Lewton's netherworld in one resourceful camera setup: Carriage, arched hallway, fog, a beggar girl's song abruptly halted. Off-screen brutality (one gruesome bit is staged behind heavy curtains) scarcely lessens the existential horror of characters unceremoniously becoming sheet-wrapped bodies slung over a whimsical butcher's shoulders. Bela Lugosi's appearance as the creeping, unwisely blackmailing servant gazes back mournfully on The Black Cat, Bresson has paralytic child and impassive equine in Au Hasard Balthazar. The sustained chiaroscuro gives way to the thunderstruck madness of the climax, Hippocrates has the last word. "The roads of learning begin in darkness..." Cinematography by Robert De Grasse. With Edith Atwater, Rita Corday, Sharyn Moffett, and Donna Lee. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |