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Sometimes it takes a humoristic eye to illuminate horror, thus Charles Laughton's Dr. Moreau as a depraved Oliver Hardy under the direction of one of the original Keystone Kops. King Kong is still one year away, Richard Arlen adrift and delirious on a steamer in the uncharted South Seas is one more species added to the animalistic cargo. "The hand that makes" belongs to the "black-hearted, grave-robbing ghoul," white-suited and bullwhip-cracking at the center of a warped jungle serfdom. "All animal life is tending toward the human form," the vivisectionist from London is just speeding the process in the surgery chamber known by genetically altered islanders as "the House of Pain." From a panther emerges the sarong-wrapped beauty (Kathleen Burke), nuzzling a Klimt mane against Arlen's chest while the doctor nods: "How that little scene spurs the scientific imagination onward!" Wells' beastly allegorical satire, mounted by Erle C. Kenton as a pre-Code scald of the lunacy of colonial dominion. The compressed surrealism allows for incendiary glimpses of the lumpen proletariat in full, feral uprising, one oppressed mutant after another charging toward the camera with Eisensteinian fervor—Bela Lugosi's unmistakable mad eyes burn through the fur of the Sayer of the Law ("Not men... not beasts... things!"). The lack of music enhances the mood of Darwinian unease, an uncanny hush disrupted by moans, chants, and the grinding sound of window bars being removed as a simian Caliban breaks into the bedroom of the hero's fiancée (Leila Hyams). "Possibilities presented themselves," shrugs Moreau before the chaos, seen last enveloped by former patients wielding his own "little knives." Brando and Frankenheimer run with the Prospero angle in their own remarkable version. With Arthur Hohl, Stanley Fields, and Paul Hurst. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |