Ventriloquism for Dummies: Devil Doll (1964)

Now Playing: Devil Doll (1964)

Pros: Manages an uncanny atmosphere, especially in scenes in which Vorelli (the ventriloquist) and Hugo (the dummy) argue as they perform their stage act.
Cons: Skimpy production values; Yvonne Romain is somewhat wasted in a role where she is in a hypnotic trance or semi-conscious for much of the movie

This post about a man and his devilish dummy is part of The Mismatched Couples Blogathon hosted by the prolific and ever reliable bloggers Gill at Realweegiemidget Reviews and Barry at Cinematic Catharsis.

According to Psych Times, pupaphobia, or fear of puppets, is a real anxiety that can be debilitating for adults as well as children. While most of us don’t break out in a cold sweat at the sight of a ventriloquist’s dummy or a marionette (or heaven forbid, a muppet), it’s not for the entertainment industry’s lack of trying. Marionettes are one thing, but ventriloquist’s dummies, with their larger size and moving heads, mouths and eyes, can evoke a sense of the uncanny in even the most rational adult.

In 1945, the mother (or should I say father?) of all creepy dummies, Hugo, appeared in the pioneering UK anthology horror film Dead of Night. Years later, Hugo inspired not one but two sentient dummy episodes on The Twilight Zone: “The Dummy” (S3, Ep. 3, 1962), featuring a ventriloquist (Cliff Robertson) whose dummy is the real brains of the act, and “Caesar and Me,” (S5, Ep. 22, 1964), which tells the tale of an alcoholic ventriloquist (Jackie Cooper) whose wooden sidekick convinces him to pull off a series of robberies. (Interestingly, the same dummy prop was used in both episodes.)

I hope this dummy was smart enough to collect overtime from Mr. Serling.

Even before The Twilight Zone became a home for delinquent dummies, Alfred Hitchcock Presents got in on the act with the episode “And So Died Riabouchinska,” (S1, Ep. 20, 1956). Based on a Ray Bradbury short story , Riabouchinska flips the dummy script with an uncanny and beautiful female mannequin who cannot tell a lie -- and becomes a witness in a murder investigation involving her ventriloquist (Claude Rains).

And then there’s Magic (1976), about a sort of love triangle involving a man, his dummy, and the ravishing Ann-Margaret. (Magic’s box office didn’t do anyone associated with it any favors, but it has since acquired a minor cult reputation.)

Perhaps as much as any of the above listed movies or TV episodes, Devil Doll will put your pupaphobia to the test (or maybe jump start a bad case if you don’t already have it). The titular “doll” Hugo, like his Dead of Night namesake, is unsettlingly ugly in the classic evil dummy way. This particular Hugo ups the creepiness factor in his ability to walk around on his own with no strings or hands attached (courtesy of 4’ 1” Sadie Corrie, who wore a Hugo costume for those scenes).

His “master,” The Great Vorelli (Bryant Haliday), is no less off-putting, but in an intense, Svengali-like way. Together they make an exceedingly creepy mismatched couple.

But they’re not the only odd pair in Devil Doll; the film is positively brimming with regrettable or unlikely relationships among abusers, abusees and those about to be abused. Let’s count:

1. Vorelli and Hugo. Vorelli, who has been selling out shows in the London theater district, has a dual act: hypnotizing volunteers on stage, and then closing with the dummy Hugo, who departs from the usual ventriloquist routine by getting up, walking up to the footlights, and addressing the audience on his own.

Vorelli has a sadistic streak. In an early scene, he hypnotizes a volunteer and convinces the poor blubbering man that he’s about to be executed. The ventriloquist part of his act is all about taunting Hugo that he’s just a dumb block of wood, while Vorelli can eat and drink wine and live life to the fullest. Hugo (or is it really Vorelli?) protests that he can drink wine too, and is thirsty. It’s a sad, depressing routine, but then, Hugo shuffling around the stage is a genuine showstopper. (Later, there’s an additional hint that Vorelli isn’t in complete control of his dummy when we see that he locks Hugo in a cage when he’s not performing.)

Vorelli pours himself a glass of wine while Hugo wishes he had an esophagus.

2. Mark English and Marianne Horn. Mark (William Sylvester) is an American expat working as a reporter for a London tabloid. His editor wants him to get the scoop on the new sensation in town, The Great Vorelli. He enlists his girlfriend, the beautiful and wealthy Marianne (Yvonne Romain) to volunteer to be hypnotized at Vorelli’s next show in the hopes of exposing him as a charlatan.

Mark and Marianne are a mismatched couple -- he’s rough around the edges and pushy, and she’s somewhat passive and unsure of herself. At the theater Marianne gets cold feet about volunteering, but Mark, thinking about nothing but his story, goads her into it. Big mistake. Considering her elite status and how beautiful she is, she could do a lot better.

"C'mon, don't be such a baby -- what's the worst that can happen?"

3. Vorelli and Marianne. Vorelli couldn’t have hoped for a better subject to fall into his hypnotic clutches. Using his sinister powers, he wrangles an invitation to a charity ball being hosted by Marianne’s wealthy aunt. At the ball, Vorelli solidifies his hypnotic power over Marianne, and she falls into a feverish semi-coma. When she comes out of it, she robotically professes her love for the hypnotist and tells Mark she plans to marry Vorelli.

Maybe this couple isn’t as mismatched as it seems -- he likes money and she’s got a lot of it. Except that once they’re married, her life won’t be worth a plugged nickel.

Don't look him in the eyes...

4. Vorelli and Magda the buxom stage assistant. Poor Magda (Sandra Dorne) has hopelessly fallen for her boss, but his attentions are lasered in on the beautiful Marianne. In desperation, she threatens to turn him into the police if he doesn’t make an honest woman of her. Vorelli deals with the situation by telling Hugo that Magda is dishing dirt on him. Exit Magda.

But perhaps the biggest mismatch of all is the combination of hypnosis and ventriloquism in Vorelli’s act (I guess they don’t call him the Great Vorelli for nothing). Sure, hypnosis and ventriloquism have been mainstays of vaudeville for years, but it seems like combining the two could quickly go south -- like a tired Vorelli mixing up the routines and trying to stick his hand in a **ahem** inappropriate place on his volunteer’s person.

Vorelli has another great talent: tuning out things he doesn't want to hear.

Producer Richard Gordon, whose credits include such B gems as The Haunted Strangler (1958) and Corridors of Blood (1958; both starring Boris Karloff), and cult sci-fi favorites like Fiend Without a Face (1958) and First Man Into Space (1959), was proud to have pioneered this odd mash-up:  

“One of the interesting things about Devil Doll is that it’s the first time that hypnotism and ventriloquism were brought together and incorporated into one film. Hypnotism in the movies goes back to the days of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari [1919]; and in 1926, Boris Karloff played a Caligari-like hypnotist in a picture called The Bells, in which he uses hypnosis to unmask Lionel Barrymore as a murderer. And Barrymore himself used hypnotism to solve the killings in Mark of the Vampire [1935]. But I don’t think it had ever been used in conjunction with ventriloquism before.” [Tom Weaver, The Horror Hits of Richard Gordon: A Book-Length Interview, BearManor Media, 2011, p. 111.]

Devil Doll’s script, by Ronald Kinnoch and Charles Vetter, was based on a story by Frederick E. Smith that had appeared in an English pulp magazine.

The film definitely lives up to (or down to, according to your taste) its pulp roots. There are a lot of close-ups of Vorelli mesmerizing his victims, and of Hugo’s pug-ugly face with only a slight movement of the eyes betraying that he’s anything other than a wooden prop. (Especially pulpy is a scene in which Vorelli, trying to mollify Magda, beds her, and we get a peek at the voluptuous assistant in her birthday suit.)

Seriously now, DON'T LOOK HIM IN THE EYES!

The frequent close-ups lend the film a sort of claustrophobic feeling, as if we the viewers are being hypnotized and can only see and obey Vorelli. Relying on close-ups also allowed Gordon to get the film in the can for something between $60 - $70 K, less than even the previous Karloff films or the sci-fi Bs:

“In making any low-budget movie, one tended to use closeups more frequently and more prominently than otherwise, because it helped to reduce production costs; you didn’t have to light and dress up a whole set in order to shoot a scene.” [Weaver, p. 112]

Of course, the real star of the show is Hugo, who is both animated and ambulatory. Dummies who could move on their own had been done before, but they tended to work in the shadows when no one was looking.

On the other hand, Devil Doll Hugo’s uncanny ability to walk is part of Vorelli’s stage act, so something else is going on beyond hallucinations or a disturbed ventriloquist investing his dummy with the other half of his split personality.

The Dummy walks!

When, after the charity ball, Hugo visits Mark in the middle of night and cryptically implores him to “Help me. Find me in Berlin… 1948…” Mark takes the hint and travels to the German capital to look into Vorelli’s and Hugo’s past. Apparently Vorelli was no mere classically trained hypnotist or vaudevillian, but was also a dedicated student of Eastern occult arts. And it’s that occult knowledge, combined with hypnosis, that has Mark worried about Vorelli’s designs on Marianne.

Speaking of interesting pasts, Bryant Haliday had as much of an intriguing, if less sinister, career arc as the character he played. Initially interested in theology, he spent some time in a monastery, then took a detour to study international law at Harvard University.

At Harvard Haliday caught the acting bug, and guaranteed himself a wealth of experience by helping to establish the Brattle Theater company and the Cambridge Drama Festival. Then, branching out into films, he and a Harvard colleague co-founded Janus Films, the first American distributor of such international cinema luminaries as Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Michelangelo Antonioni. (Haliday has been featured on the blog before -- see my review of another Richard Gordon / Bryant Haliday collaboration, The Projected Man.) 

Bryant Haliday gives his pitch to a potential Janus Films investor.

Also no stranger to the blog is Yvonne Romain (Marianne), who was last seen here providing the love interest for Oliver Reed in Hammer’s swashbuckler Night Creatures (aka Captain Clegg, 1962). Romain's horror credits include a small role in Gordon's Corridors of Blood (1958), Circus of Horrors (1960; in which her disfigured face is restored by a scheming plastic surgeon played by Anton Diffring), and Curse of the Werewolf (1961; where she once again hooks up with the cursed Oliver Reed).

American William Sylvester’s notable genre appearances include Gorgo (1961; playing a sailor who helps his Captain capture a juvenile prehistoric monster), and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968; playing a NASA administrator trying to deal with the discovery of a mysterious monolith on the moon).

While Devil Doll is not the perfect cinematic ventriloquist’s act -- the emphasis on close-ups makes it seem more like a TV show than a movie, and it squanders Yvonne Romain by keeping her hypnotized and/or semi-conscious for much of the running time -- it does manage a few genuinely creepy moments.

Shots of Hugo staring (but maybe not quite blankly) out from between the bars of his cage, and close-ups of his small, stiff legs as he shuffles down a hallway in the dead of night, are enough to elicit an uncanny shudder or two. There is a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode featuring Devil Doll out there, but I would take in this ventriloquist act without the hijinks.

Hugo bides his time in solitary confinement

Where to find it: Streaming | DVD  

Phantom of the Sci-Fi Soap Opera

Now Playing: The Projected Man (1966)

Pros: Some suspense and pathos materialize towards the end; Relatively effective monster make-up
Cons: Lackadaisical love triangle; Villains’ motives are unclear; Intriguing aspects of teleportation are unexplored

What is life without taking risks? No life at all, for even the most staid and cautious among us have to realize that simply moving around and engaging in any sort of activity, no matter how mundane, entails some level of risk. The baby takes a chance with its first steps. The common commuter takes daily risks driving or riding to work. Even the most hidebound, obsessive-compulsive creature of habit has risked more than he or she cares to think about – after all, there had to be a first time, and an element of risk, however small, in that behavior or practice that through repetition has become an unexamined part of everyday life.

Of course there’s risk, and then there’s batsh*t crazy dangerous. I am a science fiction fan of long-standing. Heck, I was there, dagnabbit!, sitting cross-legged in front of the old black and white TV when the crew of the Enterprise went where no man has gone before for the very first time! (September 8, 1966 for those who are counting). So you know I’ve watched and read some crazy stuff over the years, and then inevitably wondered “what if?” Board a starship and zip across the universe at greater-than-light warp speed? Sign me up! Travel through time to the age of the dinosaurs or the far future? Where’s my camera? Have all the atoms that make up the unique, irreplaceable person I call me scanned, disassembled, teleported, then reassembled at a distant location? Wait, hold up, don’t even think about touching that lever!

Pizza delivery of the future:
"Get it in 30 milliseconds or less or it's free!" ®

Demonstrate this technology to me using a rock, or bottle, or maybe a model of the starship Enterprise, and I’ll be very, very impressed. But I have to think that a living organism, especially a human being, is more than just the sum of its parts. Dammit, we’re not furniture kits from IKEA to be hauled off and reassembled somewhere! No matter how quick and efficient, teleportation is the ultimate risky form of travel. You can buy a toothbrush if you lose it in transit, but what about your soul (or your unique consciousness for those of a less religious persuasion)?

By the 23rd century of the Star Trek universe, we’re asked to believe that no one gave the metaphysics of “beam me up” a second thought. Like elevators, transporters were just another ho-hum daily means of transportation, a device to quickly get those red-shirted crewmen down on the surface of a new planet where they could be eaten, mangled or otherwise abused by the local fauna. Sure accidents happened, just like the occasional elevator accident, but who’s going to let an astronomically small chance of being reassembled inside-out get in the way of such convenience?

Come to think of it, my all-time favorite Star Trek character, Leonard “Bones” McCoy, was famously leery of transporters (but then he was grumpy about a lot of things, thus my identification with the character). Perhaps by the time he got to Star Fleet Academy, McCoy had done the mental calisthenics around the whole concept and come to some horrifying conclusions – like the character Badger on Breaking Bad, whose weed-fueled monologue on the perverse risks of transporters (and misuse in pie-eating contests) attracted a lot of attention when it was aired.

While George Langelaan’s 1957 short story “The Fly” was not the first to feature scientific teleportation, the first movie it inspired, The Fly (1958, directed by Kurt Neumann and starring David Hedison and Vincent Price) certainly helped to move the concept front and center into popular consciousness. (Supposedly the original film and its teleportation concept were brought to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s attention as a cost effective way to move his characters around fictional worlds.) David Cronenberg’s thought-provoking 1986 remake further highlighted the technological risks in a very intense and graphic way (while also suggesting the dangers of relying too much on computer programs and artificial “intelligence”).

The Projected Man is no The Fly, or even on par with an average episode of the original Star Trek series. But it does feature a couple of fairly suspenseful moments and at least tries to leave the monster that emerges from the botched teleportation attempt with a little bit of its humanity intact.

Dr. Steiner (Bryant Haliday, left) is under the gun from the
weaselly foundation director to produce results or else.

The plot: Genius physicist Dr. Paul Steiner (Bryant Haliday) and his assistant Dr. Chris Mitchel (Ronald Allen) are on the verge of perfecting a laser-based system for turning matter into pure energy, storing it in a receiving cell, then projecting it wherever they want. At first they’re elated when they successfully project a live guinea pig. Elation turns to disappointment when Steiner touches it and it promptly dies, giving him a shock in the process. Inexplicably, the imperious director of the foundation that they work for, Dr. Blanchard (Norman Wooland) threatens to pull the project's funding if they don’t make more progress, and fast (like teleporting inanimate matter is just routine—no, nothing to see here folks, can’t think of any lucrative applications for that! There’s some speculation between Steiner and Mitchel that Blanchard is jealous of Steiner’s success, but that doesn’t explain at all why the director would sit on the greatest scientific breakthrough of all time.)

Steiner brings in a former colleague, pathologist Patricia Hill (Mary Peach), to help sort out the issues with projecting living organisms. At first the young, attractive doctor doesn’t seem to be too impressed as Steiner explains the technology. But when the team disintegrates her watch and brings it back again, she finally gets excited and deems the whole thing “incredible!” All three seem dumbfounded when they see the hands of the rematerialized watch spinning around the dial. When Hill touches it and gets a shock, the hands spin even faster.

"What part of 'Danger! High Voltage'
did you not understand?"

A lot of jargon gets thrown around about “changes in the direction and polarity” of the transporter chamber’s magnetic field and needing a “time phase adjustment,” but the scientists seem to think they’re on to something. Applying what they’ve learned, they try to project another living animal, this time a monkey. After it materializes seemingly fit and healthy (and shock-free), Patricia gives it the most cursory of examinations and declares success. Meanwhile, Blanchard meets with a shadowy but apparently well-connected co-conspirator to work out a nefarious scheme to discredit Steiner. Blanchard arranges for world-renowned physicist and Steiner’s mentor Prof. Lembach (Gerard Heinz) to attend a teleportation demonstration – one that they will conveniently sabotage. Steiner protests that he’s not ready, but goes along to keep his funding. To add to his distraction, Patricia and Mitchel seem to be getting along quite well. He brushes off suggestions that he has feelings for the attractive pathologist, but the budding romance obviously bothers him. Of course, the demonstration for Lembach goes disastrously wrong in a shower of sparks and flame. Mitchel notices that a vital piece of equipment has been purposely corroded with acid and alerts the disconsolate senior scientist. They work feverishly to get the equipment back up and running.

"Hold still, you've got something on your face."

At a dinner party Blanchard is holding for Lembach at his townhouse, Steiner protests that his equipment’s been sabotaged, but the smug director declares that the project is dead nonetheless. Steiner verifies that the dinner guests will be sticking around the townhouse for the next couple of hours and storms out. He rushes back to the lab and grabs bubble-headed receptionist Sheila (Tracy Crisp) to help project him in dramatic fashion right into Blanchard’s dining room (there’s no time to round up Mitchel and Hill and do things by the book). Naturally, the projection doesn’t go quite as planned, and Steiner ends up in a dark alley outside of Blanchard’s place, one side of his face and a hand horribly burned. And, he’s a walking power generator who can kill with a mere touch. Not to mention, he’s mightily pissed off (I guess I’d be upset too). The Projected Man fritters away a lot of suspense in its first two-thirds with duplicative lab scenes, a desultory, oddly dispassionate love triangle, and an unconvincing Snidely-Whiplash villain (Blanchard) whose motivations are obscure to say the least. (Is he trying to steal Steiner’s work? Is he working for a foreign government? Is he just jealous? Get a grip man! You don’t sabotage something that can make you world-famous and a billionaire!)

In the last third the film gets dark (literally and figuratively) and becomes more horror than sci-fi film. When I watched the projected Steiner, a cloth covering the ruined part of his face, confronting lovebirds Mitchel and Hill in the assistant scientist’s apartment, an image of Herbert Lom in Hammer’s version of The Phantom of the Opera (1962) beamed into my brain. Like Lom’s Phantom (and Claude Rains’ in Universal’s 1943 version), Steiner is a genius whose work has been stolen by an unscrupulous higher-up, and in trying to get it back (along with his dignity), he’s inadvertently turned himself into a monster. There’s a moment of pathos in the apartment scene when Steiner, his burned face turned toward a darkened window, listens for a moment to Mitchel and Hill pleading to let them help him. But Steiner won’t have it—he’s literally got bigger fish to fry. As Steiner stalks off, Mitchel tries to console Patricia and himself: “Think of him as the projected man who has nothing in common with Paul Steiner.” It's an interesting concept — are you still you after your atoms have been scrambled and reassembled? – that is left largely unexplored in the rush to get to the B movie climax.

The Phantom of the Projection Lab
shows up at Mitchel's apartment.

Projected Man Bryant Haliday made only a handful of films, most of them horror/sci-fi for UK B producer Richard Gordon (as the Great Vorelli in Devil Doll, 1964; Voodoo Blood Death, aka Curse of the Voodoo, 1965; and Horror on Snape Island, aka Tower of Evil, 1972). Unlike many B movie actors who saw these films as just a paycheck and preferred to forget about them, Haliday was a big horror movie fan.

In Tom Weaver’s The Horror Hits of Richard Gordon (BearManor Media, 2011), Gordon (who didn’t produce the film himself but put together the deal for the double-bill of The Projected Man and Island of Terror with Peter Cushing) paid Haliday a great compliment:

"I thought Bryant was very effective and handled his role extremely well. Towards the end, he was actually able to arouse the sympathy of the audience and did not come across as just a monster on a killing spree. It reminded me of so many films in which Boris Karloff had played a scientist who becomes a monster through no fault of his own, as opposed to Bela Lugosi who was usually an outright villain. In fact, you might say that Bryant paid tribute to the memory of Bela in Devil Doll and Karloff in The Projected Man! As for the female lead, Mary Peach, she became Mrs. Jimmy Sangster in the 1990s, and the last time I saw her was with Sangster at one of the FANEX conventions in Baltimore [July 1997]. When I mentioned The Projected Man, she said, ‘Oh, I don’t want to talk about that film!’ – I think she didn’t want to appear to have been a horror film leading lady and become a part of that ‘clan’..."

Somewhat like the mutated results of a covered-up top secret experiment, The Projected Man is only whispered about in dark alleyways by hard-core sci-fi fans. It’s no The Fly, but it hardly deserves the obscurity into which it’s been teleported.

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Where to find it:

Sinister Cinema


"Science runs amok when human beings tamper with unknown forces!"