Science Meets Seance

Now Playing: The Devil Commands (1941)

Pros: Dark, forbidding atmosphere; Severe Anne Revere is a deliciously evil villainess
Cons: Ham-handed plot devices move things along briskly, but cause befuddlement and head-scratching

Since the dawn of history and humanity's first, crude attempts at reflective thought, we have been vexed and confounded by the greatest of all questions: what waits for us on the other side? (In my case, I've had a glimpse of the other side, and it's a veritable Shangri-la of green grass, a very nice deck with comfortable, all-weather furniture, and a high-end gas grill guarded by two huge black labrador retrievers, Cerberus and Pluto. Okay, so it's only my neighbor's back yard on the other side of a big wooden fence, but as old as I am, I'm not quite ready to go on the ultimate exploration of the other side, so my curiosity at this point is more earth-bound. And yes, I made up the part about the dogs' names.)

Kidding aside, the 19th and 20th centuries saw an explosion of interest in "the other side" and spiritualism (a horrendous civil war and two world wars that sent tens of millions to early graves, among other catastrophes, did wonders for focusing people's minds on questions of life after death). Gone (or at least held in abeyance) were the certainties of heaven and hell, eternal redemption and punishment from previous centuries. In this new scientific and technological age, there were seemingly as many theories of life after death, and pseudo-scientific methods for testing those theories, as there were people with the time, money and burning desire to answer the riddle once and for all. Ghost clubs and psychical research societies sprouted like weeds in a rundown cemetery.

Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes
and fervent believer in 'the Other Side'.

World renowned celebrities were inevitably drawn into the fray. On the credulous side, physician and writer Arthur Conan Doyle wanted desperately to believe in life after death, having lost his wife at the beginning of the century and a son, a brother, two brothers-in-law, and two nephews during and shortly after World War I. He belonged to several spiritualists' organizations and wrote numerous essays and books on the subject. On the skeptical side, magician and escape artist Harry Houdini dedicated his energies in the 1920s to debunking mediums and spiritualists (ironically, Conan Doyle, who was friends with Houdini for a time, insisted that Harry himself possessed supernatural powers -- Houdini never convinced his friend that his "powers" were simply based on very cleverly-constructed illusions).

In the 21st century, belief in life after death as another plane of existence apart from divine judgement is at a low ebb, while old-school Heaven and Hell has made a roaring comeback (at least in the United States).  Still, the war between the spiritualists and the debunkers continues, if in a somewhat muted, almost frivolous form (think John Edward and Penn and Teller).

Columbia Pictures' The Devil Commands was made at a time when it wasn't such a stretch to think of death as the gateway to another dimension, or to believe that scientific methods might ultimately reveal what lies beyond. Although it debuted toward the beginning of a war that would send millions more to "the other side" and deal yet another crushing blow to humanity's innocence and faith, the film seems the product of a different place and time altogether, at one and the same time innocent, yet dark and macabre. The mad scientist in this film is no one-dimensional stand-in for Nazi evil, but rather a gentle, scholarly man who has become unhinged by grief.

The film starts out with a long shot of a forbidding cliffside mansion on a dark and stormy night. As the camera tracks closer, one of the main characters, Anne Blair (Amanda Duff), introduces herself in voiceover and grimly intones:

"This was my father's house. In Barsham Harbor on nights like this, when lightning rips the night apart, why do people close the shutters that face toward my father's house, and lock their doors, and whisper? Why are they afraid? No one goes near my father's house. No one dares."

Now that we're thoroughly creeped out, cut to Midland University, seven years earlier. The famous Dr. Julian Blair (Boris Karloff) is demonstrating an early form of an electroencephalograph to five eminent colleagues. After strapping his assistant, Dr. Sayles (Richard Fiske) into an upright gurney and clamping a bizarre-looking helmet with large electrodes onto his head, Blair confidently tells the group, "you will be the first people with the exception of my wife and my assistant Dr. Sayles, to see the proof that the human brain can give off an impulse that can be recorded!"

An early experiment in electroencephalography.

As Blair fires up his lab equipment (somewhat reminiscent of a guy named Frankenstein), a large pen slowly records wave forms on a wall-sized chart. (While this technology is, excuse the pun, a no-brainer for us today, one can imagine that this was something of an eye-opener for audiences of the early '40s when all this was very new.) Blair tells his colleagues that each brain has its own wavelength, and no two are alike. He gets a chance to demonstrate on a second person when his wife Helen (Shirley Warde) comes to pick him up. She gamely agrees and dons the equipment. Feminists take note: her graph is much more pronounced and bold than Sayles': "Every demonstration that I've made so far clearly shows that the wave impulse of woman, the so-called weaker sex, is much stronger and more regular than man's," explains Blair. "Evidently there's a greater natural power in the brain of woman, any woman." (Actually, everyone take note, for it will be important later.)

Before his wife can hustle him out of the laboratory to go pick up their daughter Anne from the train station, Blair boldly predicts that eventually he'll be able to record and read the thoughts of any person, and even send pure thoughts like radio waves across vast distances. (Of course, today people send their (im)pure, unadulterated thoughts instantly, to the whole world, in the form of tweets. Heaven help us!)

That same night, tragedy strikes. Helen drops her husband off at the baker's to get a cake for Anne's birthday before heading over to the train station. Circling the block in the driving rain, she crashes the car and is killed instantly. After the funeral, the despondent scientist goes back to his lab to be alone with his grief. Absentmindedly he turns the equipment on, and amidst the crackling of arcing electricity, he sees the exact same waveform being recorded right underneath the one his wife recorded on her last night! And of course, there's no one wearing the electro-helmet. From this he deduces that Helen's brainwaves still exist and can be intercepted, and perhaps he can even communicate with her.

When he tries to tell Anne, Richard and his scientific colleagues the good news, they chalk it up to his overwhelming grief. Blair's intensity frightens his colleagues, and they caution him that if he's truly right, opening up a portal to the dead might have unintended consequences:

1st colleague: But what if you do find a way to pierce the veil between us and them…
2nd colleague: And let the world of the dead back in upon the living?
1st colleague: We don't know what evil may be lurking behind that veil waiting to get through!
3rd colleague: I know one thing Julian, there are things human beings have no right to know!

A ghostly visit from the other side or something else?

It's a veritable Greek chorus of fear, loathing and dread. Seeing his boss' frustration with these small, cowardly men, Blair's somewhat simple-minded but good-hearted lab assistant Karl (Cy Shindell) suggests that there are other ways of communicating with the dead -- Karl has been seeing a medium and talking with his dead mother. Ever the scientist, Blair is skeptical at first, but then agrees to attend with Karl. The seance is presided over by the formidable looking Blanche Walters (Anne Revere), a supposed medium.

During the eerie proceedings, as the ghostly visage of Karl's mother hovers over the group and gives her son a comforting message, Blair is sizing up everything. After the seance, Blair stays behind to talk with Walters. He strides over to a nearby wall, brushes aside a curtain and reveals a cabinet from which the ghost -- a dummy wrapped in gauze -- emerges each session. He then traces a wire to a hidden microphone that broadcasts the supposed voices from beyond. Walters is clearly not pleased, and tells him to get out. Blair has one more question for the fraudulent medium: how did she manage to shock him with a strong electrical charge as she held his hand during the seance? "Are you crazy, I've never used electricity at a seance in my life!" she responds indignantly. Just like that, the good doctor concludes that in spite of her phony methods, Walters nonetheless possesses extraordinary brain and energy potential that might just allow her to communicate with the dead for real. He bribes her to come back to the lab with him for some tests (uh-huh), and sensing a meal ticket, she quickly grabs her coat.

Dr. Blair's methods are a real eye-opener for
Blanche, the phony medium (Anne Revere).

Thus begins a dark and deadly relationship. First, Blair puts the phony medium through a series of risky-looking tests involving electricity, and concludes that the woman can both "receive and transmit" huge amounts of energy -- that in effect, she's the perfect antenna for channeling communications between our world and the one beyond. Next, in order to further amplify the effect, Blair hooks poor Karl up to the equipment in a sort of psychic circuit with Walters, and succeeds in frying his brain in the process.

Walters convinces Blair to pack up, send the daughter away, and move out to the remote New England coast where they can resume their experiments without inconvenient questions from the authorities about brain-frying and other dodgy practices. But their work doesn't go unnoticed by the backward, superstitious villagers of nearby Barsham Harbor. They (and the local sheriff) wonder who the dark, severe-looking woman is who refuses to let anyone see Dr. Blair. Who (or what) is the shambling, mute brute of a man who wanders around the mansion's dark hallways? Why have seven fresh bodies disappeared from the local cemetery since Blair and his odd "family" moved in? And what in tarnation are those strange lights and eerie sounds emanating from the Blair house on dark and stormy nights?

Can Anne and Sayles save Blair from himself and the malign influence of Walters before the villagers light the torches, grab their pitchforks and take matters into their own hands?

The Devil Commands is based on a (now) little-known science fiction/horror novel, The Edge of Running Water (1939), by William M. Sloane. Back in the late '60s I discovered the novel while browsing a drugstore paperback rack. I'm not sure what drew me to it-- the cover art was unexceptional and the understated title didn't cry out sci-fi or horror. But for whatever reason I bought it, and by the time I put it down, I was having disturbing dreams. This, and Sloane's other notable science fiction novel, To Walk the Night (1937) are masterpieces of mood, well-realized and richly-described characters and places, and slowly building suspense. (While Sloane's own output was regrettably sparse -- in addition to the two novels he wrote several plays and edited a couple of science fiction collections -- he became an eminent publisher, and spent the last twenty years of his life as director of the Rutgers University Press.)

Columbia's adaptation does as good a job as can be expected of capturing the novel's dark mood and some of its more disturbing details in a crisp 65 minute running time. One of the very interesting elements of both book and movie is the mad scientist's technological simulation of a seance circle. From the book:

"The apparatus itself was so much of a nightmare that my glance slid off it the first time without any precise attempt to understand what I saw. My impression was of seated figures, human and yet horribly not human, ranged round a black table with a sort of lectern at one end…  There were seven of them. One, with its back toward me, at the rear end of the table, and three along either side. … They were, I saw, all alike, all polished till the copper of their wires glowed, and they were holding hands. At least, their arms ended in five filaments of wire and these were, in each case, linked with the fingers of the figures on either side. From head to foot they were made of wire and there was something terrible in the fact that I could look clean through them."

Science melds with the occult to produce a seance
straight from the bowels of Hell!

The movie takes this chilling description and adds an even more macabre element to it (which I hint at above). When Karloff/Blair fires up the apparatus, it moves in an uncanny and unsettling way. The Devil Commands is the most interesting and unusual of director Edward Dmytryk's B assignments, predating his breakout Murder, My Sweet (1944) by several years (see also my review of another Dmytryk-helmed B horror-thriller, Captive Wild Woman). For Boris, the film was another in a long line of cookie-cutter mad scientist roles, but to my mind, the unusual story, Dmytryk's solid direction, and the eerily effective production design set it a notch or two above his other horror-thriller programmers from this era.

But the film really belongs to Anne Revere (Blanche Walters). She exudes a quiet menace that is right up there with Gale Sondergaard's evil best. She's bad enough scamming credulous rich people as a fake medium, but when she gets her hooks into poor Dr. Blair, all hell (literally) breaks loose. Revere was nominated 3 times for a best supporting Oscar, winning for her role as Mrs. Brown in National Velvet (1944). (Ironically, both she and Dmytryk were caught up in the anti-communist blacklist hysteria of the late '40s and early '50s. She stood her ground, and didn't make another movie for 20 years. Dmytryk recanted and named names, saving his career, but earned the enmity of many who never forgave him.)

Whether you're a Boris Karloff fan, curious about Anne Revere's B movie career, or just intrigued by Gothic-tinged horror with a sci-fi twist, The Devil Commands is well worth checking out on Amazon Instant Video or DVD.

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Where to find it:

Amazon DVD

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An Anne Revere tribute:

Going Ape Chic

Now Playing: Captive Wild Woman (1943)

Pros: Good performances by John Carradine and Fay Helm; Effective wild woman make-up
Cons: Weak script; Way too much inserted footage of wild animal tamer Clyde Beatty abusing lions and tigers, way too little of the wild woman

Some people are never satisfied. Since time immemorial, human beings have observed the grace, speed, agility and frightening power of animals, and found their own relatively hairless and weak bodies wanting. So they've dreamed of (or had nightmares about) beings with the intelligence of humans and the most coveted traits of animals. The ancient Egyptians had a whole panoply of gods associated with sacred animals. Interestingly, many of these gods and goddesses sported the heads of animals (but presumably kept their superhuman intelligence): Thoth, maintainer of the universe, was depicted variously with the head of an ibis or a baboon; Horus sported the head of either a falcon or a hawk; Annubis, the god most associated with mummification and the afterlife, commonly appeared jackal-headed; and the warrior-goddess Sekhment was appropriately equipped with a lioness' head.

The ancient Greeks turned this animal symbology on its head, so to speak, and came up with all sorts of hybrid man-animal and animal-animal combinations: Centaurs, Gorgons, Minotaurs, Furies and Sirens all featured some aspect of the human anatomy, while the Hippalectryon, the Chimera and the Manticore seemed to spring from some ancient game of Mad Libs featuring animal parts.

The dour Europeans of the Middle Ages took pagan animal worship and typically turned it into something evil -- the Great God Pan became his Satanic Majesty with goat legs and cloven hooves. Even with the Renaissance, the association of the animalistic with evil remained fixed in the mass psyche. The werewolf became a well-known symbol of the dark side of man.

In the late 19th century, H.G. Wells updated the old human=good, animal=bad trope with his novel The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896).  After being marooned for months with the wretched half-human, half-animal results of Moreau's cruel experiments, Edward Prendick returns to civilization only to be driven to near madness with his heightened awareness of the "animal" in even the most supposedly refined of men. Wells' modern fable struck a chord (or perhaps an atavistic instinct) sufficient to produce half a dozen film adaptations in the 20th century, and influence many more films, TV shows and even comic books.

Speaking of Mad Libs, Captive Wild Woman is the movie equivalent, combining a little bit of Wells, a little bit of Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Wolf Man, and even a teensy bit of Tarzan into a somewhat less-than-satisfying (and occasionally unintentionally funny) whole.  If the title sounds like a circus sideshow, it reflects both the circus setting and the fact that the movie was something of a sideshow for Universal at the time. It came smack dab in the middle of Universal's classic monster revival of the 1940s, but even though it was popular enough to spawn two sequels, Jungle Woman (1944) and The Jungle Captive (1945), subsequent years have not been kind to the wild woman's reputation. (It probably didn't help that the follow-ups were pretty wretched. While the original was released in 2009 as part of the Universal Horror: Classic Movie Archive collection, its shaggy, flea-bitten sequels never graduated from VHS to decent DVD releases.)

Sigmund Walters (John Carradine)
practices his mad scientist stare.

Captive starts out with the return of wild animal trapper/trainer Fred Mason (Milburn Stone of later Gunsmoke fame) from a two-year-long seagoing expedition to secure lions and tigers (but no bears) for his employer, the John Whipple circus (no relation to Mr. Whipple of Charmin bathroom tissue fame). An exuberant Fred brags to his girlfriend (and Mr. Whipple's secretary) Beth Colman (Evelyn Ankers) about all the animals he's captured for the circus, including a female gorilla named Cheela (obviously the feminine derivative of Cheetah). Shortly after he introduces the lively and intelligent ape to Beth, a poorly-secured box containing a tiger crashes to the dock, releasing its cargo. Fearless Fred shows off his quick thinking and animal control skills by grabbing a cane and a chair and single-handedly trapping the man-eater in a vacant dockside office.

With one crisis averted, Beth tells Fred that her sister Dorothy (Martha Vickers) is ill with a mysterious glandular disease. Sparing no expense, she's managed to get her sister into the Crestview Sanatorium, run by one of the world's leading endocrinologists, Dr. Sigmund Walters (John Carradine). In classic B horror form, as Beth tells Fred about the Sanatorium, the entrance is seen in flashback-- the wind is howling, leaves are blowing, strange shadows are playing across the Crestview sign, and the camera tracks back to reveal a creepy, haunted-looking place that no one in their right mind would get within 10 miles of.  But, she continues, her mind was set at ease when she picked up a medical journal in the lobby detailing the doctor's accomplishments at furthering "not one, but three separate attempts at racial improvement."  Okaaaayyyyy….. Not to worry Beth, Dr. Mengele, er, Dr. Walters is going to take good care of your sister…

Walters is indeed smooth and charming, and Beth takes such a shine to him that she invites him to take a behind-the-scenes tour of the circus. He joins Fred and the circus owner Mr. Whipple (Lloyd Corrigan) in watching the lions and tigers being rounded up and fed. A ruckus over at the gorilla's cage diverts their attention -- an inebriated animal handler (Paul Fix) is tormenting Cheela with a stick when she grabs him by the head through the cage bars. After Fred manages to get her to let him go, Whipple fires him on the spot. Fred demonstrates her amazing intelligence to the group, getting her to turn around for a back scratch and then shaking his hand. Walters is impressed, and we can almost see the gears turning in his head as he compliments the circus people on their find. He offers to buy Cheela, but Fred good-naturedly turns him down, explaining that the personable gorilla is "priceless."

Back at the sanatorium, the devious doctor complains to his assistant, Nurse Strand (Fay Helm) that the animals they're currently working with are inadequate for the lofty goals of his experiments. He tells Strand that he intends to take sex hormone secretions from Dorothy (supposedly a by-product of her disease!) and inject them into Cheela. After all, glands can "transform physical matter into any size, shape or appearance" (we all knew that, right?). When Strand protests that the authorities will never allow it, Walters chides her: "I see you're not truly a scientist at heart Miss Strand. The things we're trying to do… one must be daring."

Walters hires the fired animal handler to kidnap Cheela for his experiments. In the dead of night, the henchman gets Cheela, cage and all, into Walters' truck. When he demands his dough, Walters, with a cold, evil grin on his face, pushes the ex-circus man into the cage, where off-camera Cheela goes to work on him. Later, with the newspapers blaring headlines about a killer ape on the loose, Whipple is in a tizzy, telling Fred that if she attacks anyone else, the circus is done for. Fred nonchalantly tells him not to worry, that she'll show up sooner or later (huh???).

Meanwhile, after transfusing Dorothy's hormones into Cheela and turning her into an exotic-looking beauty, Walters exhibits a curious nonchalance of his own. When Strand once again protests that experimenting with animals is one thing, but that the operations are sapping the life out of Dorothy, Walters, looking puzzled, asks the nurse, "Why should a single life be so important?" As the indignant nurse lectures Walters that his fine mind has become warped and he's tampering with things "no man or woman should ever touch," he decides that a human cerebrum transplanted into the ape woman is just what's needed to complete the experiment, and Nurse Strand's will do very nicely. Ouch! So much for all those years of selfless service to the great man and his dream to create a race of supermen!

Behold! The Bride of the Gorilla! (Oh wait, that was another B movie...)

In a scene just a little reminiscent of Bride of Frankenstein, Walters unwraps Cheela's bandages to reveal Acquanetta, Universal's newest starlet (more on her later). She looks absolutely fabulous for a creature who had been a highland gorilla just a few hours before. And thanks to Nurse Strand, she has both looks and brains. He immediately dubs her "Paula Dupree" (maybe the name of an old girlfriend?).

The audacious scientist decides to show off Paula to his new friends at the circus. The animals begin pacing and growling, and Whipple comments that they seem to be afraid of something. Fred has convinced his boss to let him work up a super-dangerous act with both lions and tigers (but no bears), and he's practicing with the snarling beasts when Walters and Paula show up. Suddenly a platform topples over and knocks Fred out cold. Paula runs into the cage and stares down a lion that was thinking of having Fred for a mid-day snack. Everyone is amazed at the girl's power over the big cats, and Fred excitedly talks his boss into hiring her for the act, to stand outside of the cage, keeping the beasts calm (or afraid) while Fred does his thing.

These best-laid plans go awry, however, when Paula/Cheela sees Fred embracing Beth. Even as a gorilla, Paula had had a thing for Fred, so she has a temper tantrum when she sees him with the beautiful blonde. As a result, Paula partially reverts back, looking somewhat like a fetching neanderthal. In her bestial state, she pays Beth a visit in the dead of night, stealthily advancing toward her bed. Beth wakes up in the nick of time, sees the dark, hairy humanoid looming at her, and lets out a healthy, patented-Evelyn Ankers scream. When the housemaid appears at the doorway, the ape woman goes after her, sparing the shivering Beth. The next day, the autopsy reveals that the housemaid was killed in exactly the same way as the drunken animal handler, by super-powerful hands that snapped the spinal cord at the base of the neck.

Things come to a head on a dark and stormy night. Even though Paula has gone missing, fearless Fred decides to go ahead with the lion and tiger act. Meanwhile, back at the lab, Paula is becoming more girl-illa by the minute. Walters decides she needs another donation of glandular secretions from Dorothy, but the hapless patient is finally wise to the demented doctor, and calls her sister to come rescue her. Will Fred survive in a cage full of lions and tigers (but no bears) without Paula's help? Will Dorothy be sacrificed to attain Walters' goal of creating a race of super gorilla-men?

Captive Wild Woman was released at a time when Universal was cranking out B programmers like sausages, many of them series like Sherlock Holmes and The Inner Sanctum mysteries (patterned after the popular radio show). These low-budget movies were the television of their time, serving up familiar, entertaining characters and plots to a war-weary public. It's testimony to the huge demand for such content that the studio tried to make a series out of the relatively weak Paula Dupree ape woman character.

Eat your heart out Larry Talbot!

Film snobs sniff at what Universal did in the '40s to the Laemmles' lovingly-crafted classic monsters, pairing and tripling them in the B movie equivalents of WWE SmackDowns, then, to add insult to injury, letting Abbott and Costello have a crack at them. I've found it's a lot more fun to ignore the snotty condescension and just enjoy them for what they are-- given the right frame of mind, things like Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943), House of Frankenstein (1944), and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) are wonderfully corny and entertaining.

Unfortunately, Captive Wild Woman takes more work to appreciate. There's a strange flashback and narration sequence toward the beginning that's just bad plot construction. Someone mistakenly thought that endless inserted footage of animals being abused by a whip-cracking animal tamer made for great entertainment (the footage was of famed circus performer Clyde Beatty, pulled from his 1933 film The Big Cage). Milburn Stone, at the time a ho-hum second banana for Universal's low budget programmers, makes a pretty weak (and puny) leading man. But worst of all, the monster (and beautiful Acquanetta herself) are given precious little film time between all the animal taming and the impassioned speeches about creating a race of supermen. She doesn't speak a single word in the whole film. As Paula her most dramatic moment comes when she silently stares down a man-eating lion. She has even less screen time as the ape woman who is regressing back to being a full-fledged gorilla (even though Jack Pierce's half-woman, half-gorilla makeup is pretty good).

Any B movie maker worth his or her salt knows that you lead with the monster, not relegate it to a minor sideshow attraction. The exotic Acquanetta was billed as the "Venezuelan Volcano," but by varying accounts she was either half-Arapaho, born on a reservation in Wyoming, or born in a working class neighborhood in Philadelphia. (Tom Weaver, et. al, Universal Horrors: The Studio's Classic Films, 1931 -1946, 2nd edition, McFarland, 2007.)

B movie inventory: Mad scientist? Check. Young woman in distress?
Check. Gorilla in a cage? Check. Evelyn Ankers? Check.

Director Edward Dmytryk helmed one of the great film-noirs, Murder My Sweet with Dick Powell, over at RKO around the same time he punched the clock for Universal on Captive Wild Woman (he later went on to direct such classics as Crossfire, 1947, The Caine Mutiny, 1954, and The Young Lions, 1958). What a difference a great script, a bigger budget, and true star power makes! He did, however, manage to get some pretty good performances out of Universal regulars Carradine and Fay Helm (nurse Strand). John had already acquired a reputation as a big ham, but in Captive he's dapper and charming when Walters is trying to get his mitts on the unsuspecting Dorothy, and then delivers just the right amount of mad intensity as he fulfills his dream of transforming a brutish gorilla into an alluring young woman. Helm has the dubious honor of delivering some of the more hoary, cliched lines in the film, yet does it with gusto. I can't think of another mad scientist's assistant in all of B movies that has such a conscience or objects as strenuously when she sees Science veering off into Evil. If the real world had had more Nurse Strands at the time, World War II might never have happened.

In an interview with Tom Weaver, Dmytryk related how Carradine's reputation had preceded him on the set:

He had always been kind of a ham. I hadn't known him personally, but I had [known of him] when he used to walk the streets of Hollywood, even in summertime, with a topcoat thrown over his shoulders Barrymore-style and wearing his Barrymore-style hat. He used to go down and try to get the attention of Doug Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin at the Cinegrill, the little downstairs cafe at the Roosevelt Hotel… So I was really afraid of what he would do in Captive Wild Woman, but I had a little talk with him and I think we got a very controlled performance out of him for a mad scientist. [Ibid.]

Indeed! Carradine, and to a certain extent Fay Helm, ended up being the main attractions of the film, while poor, mute Acquanetta was effectively pushed aside. Still, Captive Wild Woman is a part of Universal's Silver Age of monsters, and it would be a shame for a true fan not to make her acquaintance.

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"Creature of evil, running amok, blazing a trail of fear-crazed horror!"