The Walking Dead

Michael Curtiz made The Walking Dead for Warner Bros. in 1936.  It's a compact and tightly woven parable about conscience and quite unsettling.  The film derives in many respects from Frankenstein, but is far more ambiguous and peculiar.  Four or five mobsters own a city somewhere.  The scene is set schematically and the characters are all types.  We see a hammer gaveling a court to order:  a corrupt politician is sentenced to five years in prison although the Judge is warned that, if he executes justice, his own life will be in jeopardy.  A young couple work for a mad scientist -- he seems to wish to thwart their plans for marriage.  The politician is sent to jail and the cronies of the convicted man, all of them mobsters with their smarmy lawyer, hire "Trigger" Smith to murder the presiding Judge.  The gangsters plan to pin the crime on a hapless felon just released from the pen, John Elman, played by Boris Karloff.  The young couple accidentally observe the gangsters dumping the Judge's body in Elman's car.  But they don't want to get involved and don't contact the authorities.  Elman was previously sentenced by the deceased judge and he's the obvious suspect for the murder.  A trial ensues that the young couple attend, but in which they don't testify and don't come forth due to cowardice.  Elman is condemned to death.  The young man and woman, now, realize that they are culpable for Elman's conviction and try to intervene -- but, it's too late and Elman is electrocuted.  His body is immediately committed to the care of the mad scientist who, somehow, revives him.  (The resurrection scene is an elaborate fantasia on themes earlier developed in Universal's Frankenstein -- there are canted shots, bolts of Tesla-coil electricity, and many alchemical vessels bubbling over with sinister potions.)  The resurrected Karloff seems to know all about the scheme that resulted in him being framed for the Judge's murder.  He visits each of the bad guys, a walking corpse and the embodiment of an avenging conscience.  The bad guys, of course, are terrified and react with panic -- in each case, the villain is, more or less, accidentally killed when he flees Karloff.  There's a final confrontation in a rainswept cemetery -- Karloff is fatally shot and the head mobster with his henchman, fleeing the graveyard, crashes his sleek black sedan into an utility pole, triggering his own electrocution.  Karloff dies a second time just as he is about to reveal what he learned about the afterlife when he was killed in the electric chair a few days before.   This elaborate plot, involving four or five flamboyantly staged killings, spectacular lab scenes, two trials, several musical concerts (Elman was a concert pianist) is crammed in 65 minutes.  Curtiz' craft is so sure and his hand so steady that the film doesn't seem rushed, and is completely lucid even though the plot of exceedingly convoluted.  Karloff is not really a monster -- he is just a sad, lumbering, uncouth figure with piercing and pathetic eyes.  Death has tutored him in what he otherwise would not know -- the identities of the men responsible for his death and he visits them implacably, begging to know:  Why did you kill me?  The curious aspect of the film, and a feature that makes the movie profoundly unsettling is that there are no innocent characters anywhere in sight.  The young couple, who are the nominal heroes of the movie, are cowardly, self-interested, and just as responsible for Elman's death as the bad guys -- after all, their testimony, which they knowingly withheld, could have saved him.  At the climax of the movie, the mad scientist, who looks like a little Louis Pasteur, proposes to literally vivisect Karloff's character to study what is in his brain and this scientist becomes obsessed with learning the secrets of the afterlife.  The young man and woman act in concert with the District Attorney -- but didn't the DA  use the full power of the law to prosecute the hapless and innocent Elman.  Karloff shuffles through the movie bandy-legged, as if the victim of childhood rickets, and he is a totally destroyed figure even before framed -- he's impoverished, seems to be starving, can't find a job, and is entirely friendless.  The film is quickly cut and edited and a masterpiece of frenzied, if fully legible, narrative -- it's all shadows, dark cars careening through thunderstorms, and sinister cells of men conspiring against one another.  The film is also exceedingly inventive and scenes in which the staggering, pathetic Karloff appears out of the darkness to harass his persecutors are genuinely frightening:  a man runs terrified through a dark house, the storm wind gusts through a window and displaces the curtains -- there's a flash of lightning and, in a mirror, we catch a subliminal glimpse of Karloff standing in a corner of the room.  This is powerful stuff and effectively presented.