Dr. X

Here is dialogue exactly transcribed from Michael Curtiz' 1932 horror film, Dr. X :   One mad scientist -- If she were my daughter, she wouldn't be up there on that bed with nothing on (other) than a nightgown just to satisfy some lunatic's experiment!  Second mad scientist (referring to the comely and half-naked Fay Wray):  Don't criticize Joanne for her state of undress!  Indeed.  Dr. X is a zany monster movie, tongue firmly embedded in cheek, that delivers a few macabre chills.  The movie is stylishly designed, short at 77 minutes, and, even so, packed with all sorts of bizarre elements.  The scenarist and director seem hell-bent to devise a horror film that contains all elements of all known horror films, something that surpasses with sheer crazy alacrity every other picture in this genre.  Instead of one mad doctor, we get -- count 'em! -- five mad doctors.  The plot and the heavily expressionistic sets, all looming beams and cross-timbers shot from low angles, strange cubist niches, and dense, but articulate shadows (menacing profiles and grotesquely enlarged shadow figures), incorporate aspects of The Phantom of the Opera, Frankenstein, The Black Cat, The Cat and the Canary, and innumerable other pictures.  The story is a compound of Jack the Ripper and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with comedy sequences and a lame romance tossed in for a good measure.  This is a pre-Code film and some of the violence is stark and realistically filmed; further, the movie ends with a dirty joke, albeit one that takes place as a sound-cue only after the fade-out on the final clinch.  This is the kind of picture where Fay Wray's devotion to her mad scientist father, played by Lionel Atwill, seems more than a little unsavory.  When the cub reporter gets tossed out of a water-front morgue where he trying to snatch a journalistic scoop, he goes into the a nearby building that is obviously a brothel -- the soiled doves tease him while he makes a tough-talking, wise-cracking newspaper-man call to his curmudgeonly boss.  Among the whores is one played by Mae Busch, showing an acre of creamy décolletage -- she's the actress who always appears as Oliver Hardy's wife in the thirties Laurel and Hardy two reelers and features such as Sons of the Desert. 

Cub reporter Tim Taylor loiters near a water-front morgue apparently in New York City.  He has a hunch that a mad murderer who strikes during the full of the moon has killed someone.  His hunch is right and, after the aforementioned detour through the brothel, Taylor ends up supine and hiding under a sheet in the morgue.  (This is played for laughs, hilarity in the morgue.)  The murder victim has sustained a surgical wound to the base of her brain, an incision made by a highly specialized tool.  Her deltoid muscle has been excised as well, evidence of cannibalism.   As it happen, there's a sinister scientific institution nearby -- the Institute of Surgical Research -- where dissections are conducted using the very same special scalpel whose wound appears on the cadaver.  The police investigate, without any real effect -- the police detectives' inquiry is just an ingenious way to provide an great deal of expository information.  Lionel Atwill is the chief mad scientist at the Surgical Institute, a haven for other mad scientists.  It's amusing that one of these scientists is the world's foremost expert on cannibalism.  Two of the other mad scientists are survivors of a shipwreck in which -- you guessed it! -- one of the seafarers was apparently eaten by the survivors.  The fourth mad doctor is a badly mutilated German surgeon -- I'm not sure what his connection is to cannibalism but he's ugly enough to be scary.  (The shadow of World War One hangs heavily over the plot -- the cannibalism expert is missing an arm and the German wears a black monocle to conceal scarring around his eye-socket presumably incurred in the war).  After these characters are introduced, the action shifts to a gothic castle on Long Island set atop cliffs above a perpetually raging sea -- this is Atwill's mansion complete with spooky hanging skeletons, weird Hindu gods, and a nightmare butler, the kind of role that Bela Lugosi would later sometimes play, a sinister hirsute fellow who acts as an all-purpose red herring.  The leader of the cohort of mad scientists decides to stage an experiment -- he will have a woman simulate the lunatic killer's victim and, then, monitor the blood pressure and reactions of the other mad scientists, using this prototype lie detector to determine the identity of the real killer.  During the first experiment, one of the mad scientist's gets killed by an unseen assailant.  This leads to a second experiment in which all of the subjects are literally chained in chairs. -- it's in this experiment, conducted on a dark and stormy night, that Atwill's comely daughter, played by Fay Wray is pressed into service.  Concealed in the woodwork, the resourceful reporter Tim Taylor watches the proceedings and comes to the fair damsel's rescue when the hideously disfigured killer attacks her.  Tyler rears back, spits on his hands, and, then, lunges into fisticuffs with the murderer -- it's the exact same gesture that Huntz Hall would employ before leading the Bowery Boys into brawls in innumerable cheapie films made in the late thirties.  Tyler kills the monster and ends up winning the girl.  He's a scrawny, incredibly irritating chap, prone to playing jokes with a joy-buzzer in the palm of his hand.  (Do you remember this item?  with exploding cigars  and flatulent whoopee cushions, joy buzzers were always on sale on the back page of the comic books that I read when I was a kid; I can picture right now the victim in the ad grimacing with hair standing on end as a result of the electric charge.)   Tyler is a horrible mismatch for the winsome and sophisticated looking Fay Wray and you end up thinking she would better be paired with the dignified and nobly hideous monster than this twerp.  The movie has got just about everything you want in a horror film:  eerie shadows, dark corridors, corpses under white sheets wiggling around, skeletons goosing the hero, hideous murderers, and laboratories full of flashing Tesla coils and bubbling vats of fog-producing acid.  It's all quite funny and the dialogue is totally "over-the-top" -- "I am making synthetic flesh for a crippled world," a villain shrieks.  Another mad scientist shouts to Lionel Atwill:  "Doctor, you've given everything for science including your daughter!"   The film as it now exists is credited to the UCLA Film Archives and the print has been colorized -- this gives the movie the strange yellow-tint of the old German color process, AGFA-color.  The color makes the movie seem even more peculiar.  This is inaccurate -- see below.

(The Joy Buzzer handshake practical joke was invented by S. S. Sorenson, the Danish immigrant responsible for Cachoo (sneeze) powder, itching powder, bug in a ice-cube, etc.  Sorenson invented the buzzer in 1928, which doesn't deliver a real electric shock, but instead relies upon a tightly wound spring to create a tingle when pressed in a handshake.  A patent for the joy buzzer significantly improving the design dates back to 1932, the year of the film.  Joy buzzers and other practical jokes of this kind were manufactured until the mid-sixties in Asbury Park, New Jersey.)

Michael Curtiz shot Dr. X and a slightly later picture with Fay Wray, The Mystery of the Wax Museum in a two-color Technicolor process.  Accordingly, the curious color scheme in this movie is original.  These films were thought to be lost -- at least, in color versions.  However, color prints of these films were found in an archives in the United Kingdom and restored at UCLA.