There are three kinds of people who know about Bela Lugosi. The first will praise him as a film god--he was Dracula, and the original, at that, not taking in that Max Shreck fella. The second will decry him as a hack. The third, probably most populous of three, will simply ask you, "Who?" All of these are valid responses; no actor lasts forever, and he turned in a mixture of both shitty and wonderful performances. If you want to see him shine, check him out in The Devil Bat and Bride of the Monster; he is poorly represented by The Ape Man and, in my mind, Dracula. In my mind, his ability to turn in either a stunningly bad performance or a stunningly amazing one is compelling--it's through Lugosi that I've been on my '40s horror kick recently. I may be reduced to scraping the bottom of the barrel, as '40s trash is some of the most painful of the bunch, but sometimes barrels are worth scraping. The search has exposed me to the odd impoverished wonders that are Bowery at Midnight, Black Dragons, and today's film, Voodoo Man.
Voodoo Man (along with Bowery and Black Dragons) was the result of a nine-film contract Lugosi signed with Monogram Pictures producer Sam Katzman. Monogram, along with Devil Bat producer PRC, were the literal Poverty Row of Hollywood, and each of the horror films they produced were rushed by any other company's standards, poorly edited in both production and scripting, and generally just cobbled together in the worst of ways. The Monogram Nine cemented Lugosi's status as a B- or C-actor, though he probably hit that when he made his first outing with Monogram with Mysterious Mr. Wong, which I have briefly discussed before. All the same, he manages to reel in a good performance in Voodoo Man, being one of many assets that this make a surprisingly good time.
As in the previous Monogram film, 1942's The Corpse Vanishes (featured on MST3K!), Lugosi plays a Dr. Orloff-esque scientist who has to restore life to a sickly female relative (his wife in this case). However, whereas The Corpse Vanishes saw Lugosi's Dr. Lorenz was doing the ol' harvest-their-glands trick that we also see in The Leech Woman and Atom Age Vampire, here Dr. Richard Marlowe has become the titular Voodoo Man. With the aid of his houngan George Zucco and brain-damaged henchman John Carradine, he strives to restore his dead wife from the grave. He kidnaps beautiful young women by means of roadblocks set up by crooked gas station workers under his employ, and also a machine that can short out car batteries at a range. He keeps the women in suspended animation until he needs them to transfer "mind to mind...soul to soul...life...to...DEATH!" Along the way, a sheriff pokes into things somewhat effectively, and the friends one of the victims eventually learns kindly Dr. Marlowe's terrible secret. And, of course, they stop him--an open-and-shut slice of life, in sixty minutes.
This is already a pretty solid pulp concept, and it's pure fun to see it put into action, but there are some interesting twists and turns along the way--almost all of which spawned through sheer brainlessness. Like some of the other Monogram flicks, this one used its poverty to subvert censorship standards at the time: there's the scene where one of the female leads get kidnapped by John Carradine when her car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. That he licks his lips and says, "Yer pertty" is one thing; the later suggestion that he feels up the comatose ladies his Master keeps in the cellar is another. (Of course, there was implied necrophilia in The Corpse Vanishes, too.) Here, the grime of Poverty Row makes the subject matter even seedier--it's jarring if you're used to older horror films being "clean." But the cheapness detracts, too, or at least makes things absurd. Take for example the fact that John Carradine bangs on a drum as part of the voodoo ritual, but we can only hear the drum when the camera cuts over to him. Or the fact that the Sheriff, upon visiting kindly Dr. Marlowe, comments on how gloomy his house is. Except the house isn't gloomy, it's as well-lit as a movie set! (Presumably to accommodate a camera that would be unable to record in actual darkness.) Which gets taken even further by Lugosi's response: "We use very little light in the house, my eyes are not in the best of shape." There is some attempt to use creepy lighting in the film but it's given maybe 2% of the film's total devotion. You can feel the lamp next to you, set down on the floor where there was room and vaguely aimed at the actors. Fortunately, Lugosi and Carradine can sustain tension, mystery, and atmosphere where the rest of the cast cannot.
I should still define myself when I say that Lugosi's acting is "fine" here. There are four moods that Dr. Marlowe displays depending on the scene: the first is the angry, violent person who lashes out at his servants. Physical violence is not becoming to the former Count Dracula, which is probably why most of the scenes of Lugosi actually hitting people happen between cuts. The second is the contrasting public personality, where he is almost childlike in his politeness, to deflect suspicion--he also does this in Black Dragons and to a hilariously passive-aggressive extent in The Devil Bat. Then there is creepy Bela, where he speaks precisely and moves slowly--the sort of thing he got famous for, him at his best, when the morphine wasn't throwing off his focus. Finally there's sad Bela. You can already envision it if you've seen Bride of the Monster. He's this close to belting out "'Ome? I have no 'ome." It's very clear that Lugosi had a style, and it was a style much more complex than most people think, even if there were many patches where he was essentially playing Dracula all over again. I think it's fascinating that in many of his movies you can find this same pattern of four: the misplaced violence, the courteous passive-aggression, the spookiness, and the hammy grieving. He had his limitations, so he's hardly a god, but he's far from the plank of cardboard a lot of people peg him as.
Speaking of vampires (or the people who played them): this and Corpse Vanishes are essentially vampire films, though they present the interesting twist of being vampirism by proxy, and with gland-juice and souls instead of blood. I feel like the theme of this one is how horrifying it is for the old to burn the young to sustain their lives. It's safe to say that's where a lot of the horror of vampirism ultimately comes from--something ancient denying the turn of progress by constantly feeding on the agents of progress. If you want to be pretentious about it, it's the horror behind the Biblical Moloch: throw the babies into the burning idol, so that the devil-god doesn't kill the non-babies. Or it's like Cronus, devouring his children to sustain his power. What's dead is dead, and passed is passed; don't chain up a bunch of ladies in white nightgowns in your basement to steal life-force from. Because eventually, the monster of the past has to be staked through the heart, or castrated by the children. Or, hell, maybe it's all just supposed to be a don't-tamper-in-Baron-Samedi's-domain sorta thing. The writers may not have given it much thought, but any writers, cheap or otherwise, is going to channel the conventions and tropes of the culture they live in, and those tropes are worth examining.
And of course there has to be a twist at the end. The main character turns out to be a Hollywood screenwriter who presents his write-up of his adventure to his boss under the title Voodoo Man, to star Bela Lugosi. Ha, ha. Earlier there's a bit too where he and another character discuss the possibility of zombies, but he rules them out: "They're just a scene writer's nightmare!" It's weird, though, because Robert Charles, the screenwriter of Voodoo Man, only wrote this plus Return of the Ape Man from later that year. The name could have been a pseudonym, of course, but to me it's funny that he'd be complaining about zombie movies he never made. I mostly wish I knew which zombie movies in particular he meant, 'cause if he wrote this, I'd love to see what he could've done with the walking dead.
No comments:
Post a Comment