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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 10, No. 5 |
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A Headless Ghost Haunts
An Ancient Cornish Mine
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FILMS FROM THE GOLDEN AGE OF HORROR (1930-1946) AND THEIR AVAILABILITY ON HOME VIDEO. |
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
Because horror films have been an enormously popular genre in the home video market, the big commercial distributors of DVDs are busily scrounging up the last few titles still awaiting their first release in a digital format. That's good news for fans since many of the "forgotten" horror films never have been released commercially, even in the old videotape format.
Some legendary titles, such as RKO's "The Monkey's Paw," may no longer exist, thanks to deterioration of their original nitrate negatives. Other's like Republic's "The Lady and the Monster" (1944), the first film version of Curt Siodmak's classic novel "Donovan's Brain," may be tied up in rights litigation. But most of the titles now coming to market probably never were viewed as commercially viable by distributors because they weren't big hits upon their original release to theaters.
That, of course, means nothing to "completists" like me, who want copies of every horror film released during the Golden Age.
That's why boxed sets like the two "Fox Horror Classics" packages released during the past two years are so welcome. One lumps three films by director John Brahm together, including the neglected classic "The Undying Monster" (1942). Some of the other packagers have rounded up several neglected films made at the same studio by such horror stars as Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. MCA Universal has such packages on the market featuring the minor films made by Karloff and Lugosi at Universal. Columbia also has a set with Karloff's minor features made at that studio.
Some of the "forgotten" horror films have been available for years on the so-called "collectors market," which often means some collector recorded them off TV screenings on cable channels like Turner Classic Movies (TCM), which has no commercial interruptions, then just re-copied them in the DVD-R digital format, which can be played on most DVD players in the U.S. and Canada.
Today I'm going to discuss an obscure Warner Bros. film, "The Mysterious Doctor," which was released in 1943 and is now available in a top quality DVD-R version from the nearly always reliable Sinister Cinema of Medford, Oregon. This company finds the best possible source material, in some cases 16mm prints, and takes special care in putting out a flawless duplicate, often with a copy of the original film poster reproduced on the cover. (That illustration at the top of this page is the cover of the Sinister Cinema edition.)
If you read the mini-review in Leonard Maltin's "Classic Movie Guide," you'll see the original film gets only two and a half stars for quality. Nobody raves about it and the note that the cast is "adequate" is almost a putdown.
Truthfully, "The Mysterious Doctor" is no lost classic, but it has some strong points. First and foremost, it offers us a chance to see one of the great film actresses, Eleanor Parker, in one of her very early leading lady roles when she was a 21-year-old Warners starlet, fresh from The Pasadena Playhouse.
There's not much opportunity for Parker to display any acting chops in "The Mysteriosu Doctor," where she inexplicably plays a young villager in the Cornwall district of England, but has no British accent. But, boy, was she a good-looking gal at 21! Though she went on to much meatier roles that didn't depend much on her beauty, Parker never became a great star of the magnitude of her studio's legendary leading ladies, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, which remains a mystery to me.
For example, just look at Parker's work in her three Oscar-nominated Best Actress performances: "Caged" (1950), where she plays a young woman turned into a hardened criminal by her grim life behind bars; "Detective Story" (1951), where she's the neglected wife of cop Kirk Douglas, and "Interrupted Melody" (1955), playing polio-stricken real-life opera star Marjorie Lawrence. I've just recently renewed my acquaintance with "Caged" and now feel that's one of the screen's best ever performances by an actress.
Of her many other fine performances, I also urge you to see Parker in "The Man With the Golden Arm" (1955) and Warners' "The Woman in White" (1948), in which she plays a dual role. The latter film also fits into the horror category--and has never been commercially released on DVD. (I have a copy from the collector's market.)
"The Mysterious Doctor" of the title is Dr. Frederick Holmes (Lester Matthews), who suddenly appears one night on the English moors and stops a horse-drawn carriage that's coming along the lonely, fog-shrouded road through that section of Cornwall. The "doctor" tells the driver that he's on a walking tour of the area and hopes to find an inn where he can spend the night.
Just before the doctor looms up beside the carriage, the driver believes he has just seen a headless man coming through the trees toward him. Was it his imagination enhancing the mysterious quality of the hiking doctor--or was it the headless ghost of "Black Morgan," searching the moors for his head, as local legend would have it?
Whatever the answer, we know this is not a very hospitable neighborhood. When the carriage driver drops off the doctor at the Running Horse Inn, located in the village of Morgan's Head, the doctor is shocked when a man wearing an executioner's hood answers his knock at the inn. It turns out the innkeeper (Frank Mayo) wears the hood to cover up his disfigurement caused by a dynamite explosion some years earlier.
"He doesn't have much face left," explains one of the local beer-drinkers when the innkeeper finally lets the doctor inside.
Dr. Holmes isn't at the bar very long before he learns that Morgan's Head is the site of a once prosperous tin mine that has been shut down because the miners refuse to enter the mine now haunted by the ghost of Black Morgan, who was beheaded hundreds of years earlier and is still searching for his missing head.
Naturally, Dr. Holmes decides to stay around for a few more days, hoping to expose the haunted mine story as a hoax. He's hoping he can return the tin mine to production since England is now at war (World War II was then in full sway) and needs the tin. But when he enters the mine on his own, he's stalked by the headless ghost and his body is found the next day, beheaded.
What's going on down in that mine? Well, that's the rest of the story and it wouldn't be fair to disclose it for those who might want to see "The Mysterious Doctor" and judge its worth on their own.
Of special interest to horror fans may be the casting of big, strong Matt Willis as the village idiot. Willis is best remembered as the "wolf man" disciple of Bela Lugosi in Columbia's "Return of the Vampire," released in 1944, the year after Willis was seen in "The Mysterious Doctor." Willis' character is very important to the windup of this movie, but I'll let the movie keep all its secrets for the time being.
If you want to acquire this movie, go to
the website of Sinister Cinema at www.sinistercinema.com and
check the catalog. The list price is $16.95 for the DVD-R version.
(A VHS tape edition is also available). But check for special
sales on the site. I paid about $10 for the film during a special
sale.
©2009 by Ron Miller. The illustration is courtesy of Warner Bros. and Sinister Cinema. This column first posted Jan. 12, 2009.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
His background in the horror genre includes interviews with the
late Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, Jr., Vincent Price, John Carradine
and many other stars of horror classics.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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