Mad Doctors in Love: Special Valentine’s Day Edition

At first glance, B-movie mad doctors would not seem to be a natural subject for a Valentine’s Day post. As I pointed out in "The Best Laid Plans of Not-so-nice Madmen," most mad doctors were far too busy stitching together body parts or trying to create armies of zombies to pursue any sort of amorous relationship. 

They reserved their passions for proving their insane theories, wreaking revenge on the colleagues who laughed at them, and showing the world their brilliance. And they were often willing to sacrifice anyone, including friends, family and would-be lovers, in their demented quests.

Still, not every mad doctor of the movies was immune from Cupid’s arrows. A select few became mad and used their knowledge for evil because of lost or frustrated love.

To celebrate the occasion, Films From Beyond presents Valentines from a scattered assortment of oddball, passionate B-movie doctors who, unlike many of their crazy colleagues, did it all for love.

Dr. Gogol and Yvonne Orlac, Mad Love (1935)

"I have conquered science, why can't I conquer love?"

Dr. Gogol (Peter Lorre), an accomplished surgeon, is obsessed with theater actress Yvonne (Frances Drake), attending all of her performances at the 'Théâtre des Horreurs' in Paris. He is devastated when he learns that Yvonne plans to quit the theater to marry concert pianist Stephen Orlac (Colin Clive) and move to England.

Unhinged, Gogol buys a wax figure of Yvonne from the theater, setting it up in his home and talking to it as if it were alive. When Stephen’s hands are mangled in a train accident, Yvonne, knowing of Gogol’s reputation as a top surgeon, pleads with him to help her husband. Gogol uses the hands of a recently executed murderer -- Rollo, a skilled knife thrower -- in a transplant operation.

Orlac’s new hands are useless for playing the piano, but he finds he’s now very good at throwing knives. Gogol tries to convince Yvonne to leave her husband as Stephen’s mental state deteriorates. Yvonne stands by her man, but the deranged surgeon will try anything, including posing as the resuscitated murderer Rollo, to break up the couple and have her all to himself.

Fun Fact: Mad Love is based on Maurice Renard’s novel The Hands of Orlac (Les Mains d'Orlac, 1920). It was the second film adaptation of the novel -- a silent version was released in 1924. The novel would be adapted four more times (the last, Roxana’s Hands, 2012, switches Orlac’s gender and makes her a concert violinist).

Dr. George Lorenz and the Countess Lorenz, The Corpse Vanishes (1942)

Countess Lorenz: "Can you bear to look at me now?"
Dr. Lorenz: "Of course, you are beautiful, and I shall always keep you that way!"

Police are baffled when blushing brides start collapsing at the altar and their bodies disappear on the way to the morgue. Intrepid reporter Patricia Hunter (Luana Walters) traces the deaths and disappearances to mysterious orchids that were delivered to each wedding.

When she consults a renowned orchid specialist Dr. Lorenz (Bela Lugosi), she stumbles on his fiendish plot to extract glandular fluid from the brides to keep his aging wife (Elizabeth Russell) young and beautiful. Hunter has to fend off Lorenz and his minions, a demented housekeeper and her two thuggish sons, to keep from being the next supplier of the anti-aging elixir.

Fun Fact: Just a year later in The Ape Man (1943), Bela portrayed yet another mad doctor messing around with bodily fluids -- this time spinal fluid -- in order to reverse the effects of an experiment gone wrong. See "The Best Laid Plans of Not-so-nice Madmen."

Bill Leggat and Lena Maitland, Four Sided Triangle (1953)

"In all my life I've only wanted two things -- knowledge and... love. I used the first to try and gain the second."

Childhood friends Robin Grant (John Van Eyssen) and Bill Leggat (Stephen Murray) have made the scientific big-time. After getting degrees at Cambridge, they have returned to their tiny English village to work on a secret project: a matter duplicator.

They demonstrate their invention to the village doctor (James Hayter) and Robin’s rich father (Percy Marmont), duplicating the doctor’s watch and a bank check down to the smallest detail.

However, there is a cloud on the horizon. A third childhood friend, beautiful Lena Maitland (Barbara Payton), has returned from an extended stay in America. Although Bill has secretly been in love with Lena all his life, to his dismay Lena falls for Robin and they get married.

Bill redoubles his efforts to figure out how to duplicate living organisms while Robin is away in London consulting with government authorities on their invention. He finally perfects the process, and convinces Lena to submit to being duplicated in the mad hope that he can have his Lena and Robin can have one too.

Except there’s a catch: the duplicate Lena, renamed Helen, is exact in every detail… including her feelings for Robin.

Not-so-Fun fact: Somewhat like Lena, the beautiful Barbara Payton was used to having men compete for her affections. The most notorious instance was when actors Tom Neal and Franchot Tone had a knockdown, drag-out fight over her, which sent Tone to the hospital.

After all the bad publicity, Payton traveled to the UK to jumpstart her flagging career, making a couple of B movies, including Four Sided Triangle, for the fledgling Hammer Films. It was nothing doing -- by 1955 her short-lived film career was over.

Dr. Bill Cortner and Jan Compton, The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962)

"I want you as a complete woman, not part of one. Is it a crime to want to keep you alive?"

Dr. Bill Cortner (Jason Evers) is an arrogant, hotshot young doctor who insists that lives can be saved with new, experimental techniques. Although Bill proves himself by saving the life of a man everyone had given up for dead, his father, also a surgeon, is uncomfortable with the idea of using people as guinea pigs.

Bill gets a call from his lab assistant Kurt (Anthony La Penna) telling him that there’s an emergency in the lab located at the family’s country house. Bill, along with his fiancee Jan (Virginia Leith), races off in his souped up convertible. His lead foot results in tragedy when he fails to negotiate a sharp turn and the car crashes down a ravine.

Bill has been thrown clear, but when he recovers and checks the wreckage, he’s horrified to find that Jan has been decapitated. The panicked doctor wraps Jan’s head in a blanket and runs the rest of the way to the lab, where he sets up the head in a tray and feeds it a serum he’s invented to keep it alive.

Jan wants to die, but Bill won’t let her go so easily. He’s confident that the new serum will enable him to transplant Jan’s head onto a new body. While he goes body-shopping at the local strip club (naturally!), Jan, now telepathically charged due to the serum, is making friends with the horrific failed experiment -- a thing made up of discarded body parts -- that Bill has locked up in a closet.

Fun Fact: Since 2009, The Brain that Wouldn’t Die has inspired no fewer than four (!) stage musical adaptations and one movie re-make. 

Dr. Anton Phibes and Victoria Regina Phibes, The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

"My love, sweet queen and noble wife, I alone remain to bring delivery of your pain. Severed my darling, too quickly from this life. Of fires drawn and memories met, I shall hold our two hearts again in single time."

In 1920s London, prominent physicians are being murdered in bizarre ways: one by an infestation of bats, another by an ingenious frog mask designed to choke the wearer to death, and yet another has had every ounce of blood drained from his body.

Following up on a clue -- a strange amulet left at the scene of one of the murders -- Scotland Yard Inspector Trout (Peter Jeffrey) learns from a Rabbi that the symbol on the amulet represents the ten Old Testament curses inflicted upon ancient Egypt.

As the bodies pile up, Trout figures out that all of the victims worked under Dr. Vesalius (Joseph Cotten). Vesalius soon meets the scourge of the London medical community -- Dr. Anton Phibes (Vincent Price), inventor, concert organist and all-around Renaissance monster.

It seems Phibes, who had supposedly died in a car accident, blames Vesalius and his surgical team for the death of his beloved young wife on the operating table. And the hideously disfigured Phibes is determined to visit one more Old Testament plague on Vesalius in retribution.

Fun Fact: ‘70s scream queen and Bond girl Caroline Munro appears (uncredited) in a non-speaking role as Anton Phibe’s dead wife, Victoria.

Dark Moon Over Miami

The Chase (1946)

A veteran comes home from a long war to a supposedly grateful nation, but instead of finding a job and a caring community, he finds himself staring longingly through the window of a diner in a cold, impersonal city, unable to afford even the cost of a good breakfast. It's an old story, and unfortunately, a very current one as well. Lost in all the heroic tales of the "good" war -- World War II -- is the fact that countless veterans struggled to find jobs in an economy that wasn't ready for them, and bore physical and psychological scars that remained with them the rest of their lives. During the war years and the following period of angst and malaise, a new kind of crime drama emerged. Heroes were replaced by anti-heroes, deduction replaced by seduction, and the world in which these dramas played out was dark, unforgiving, and festering with corruption.

The Chase's opening scene finds luckless Chuck Scott (Robert Cummings) walking the grimy streets of Miami, wondering where his next meal is coming from. As he dejectedly turns away from the diner window, he stumbles into a seemingly lucky break in the form of a wallet lying on the sidewalk. After helping himself to a hearty breakfast from the wad of cash, he decides to do the right thing and return the wallet. In typical noir fashion, this small, honorable act propels him into a seething world of sociopathic gangsters, illicit love, murderous jealousy, and danger.

Chuck traces the owner's address to an ornate, gleaming white mansion in a swanky part of town. Sporting a cheap, dirty suit and a heavy five o'clock shadow, Chuck is a bit uneasy as he rings the bell. In a neat little visual twist, the grinning head of a winged cherub on the door swings up and is replaced by a an eye staring out of a peephole and a gruff voice asking "what do you want?"  The door opens and Chuck is confronted by a life-sized, sneering "cherub" in the form of assistant Gino (Peter Lorre), an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth. Gino plays it cagey, refusing to introduce himself. "What have you got?" he languidly asks Chuck. "You're not Mister Roman," Chuck counters. "How do you know?" "You just don't fit," Chuck says, a little of his confidence returning.

Chuck knows he's not in Kansas anymore as he cools his heels in an opulent waiting room with huge chandeliers and classical statuary. Two women emerge from an adjoining room-- one is crying and the other is consoling her companion. This is a big clue that Chuck needs to turn tail and run, but then, film-noir protagonists tend to be stubborn, unlucky, and not always the sharpest pencils in the box. Gino introduces Chuck to the master of the house (and apparently master of lucrative schemes) Eddie Roman (Steve Cochran). Eddie is obviously very well off, dressed in an expensive double-breasted suit and hat, with a carefully folded handkerchief in his breast pocket. He's busy with a phone call as Chuck hands him the wallet. The ensuing conversation is a second big clue that Chuck should turn and walk away:

Eddie: Where did you find it?
Chuck: I don't remember the name of the street… it was in front of a restaurant…
Eddie (warily): How much was in it?
Chuck (sheepishly): 81 dollars. I spent a dollar and a half for breakfast… there's 79.50 there now.
Eddie (pausing, not quite believing what he's hearing): How do you like that… an honest guy!
Gino: I don't! Silly law-abiding jerk!
Eddie: How do you like that? He comes all the way out here just because he found it! … You know, you ought to get a medal… Gino, go buy him a medal.
Chuck (perturbed): Thanks, I've got a medal.

The ultimate set-up for the backseat driver.

Apparently Eddie's contempt for honest men doesn't extend to veterans, and in a weak moment he offers Chuck a job as his chauffeur. Circumstances being what they are, Chuck has little choice but to accept the offer. However, the seemingly innocuous job very quickly puts him in deadly danger. The dapper pillar of Miami society decides to test Chuck his first time out. Eddie's car has been rigged with a second accelerator and brake on the floor of the back seat. With a cruel smirk, he overrides Chuck's controls and slowly presses the back-seat accelerator to the floor. As the car speeds up seemingly by itself, an alarmed Chuck reports to his boss that there seems to be something wrong, only to be reassured by a very calm Eddie: "Relax, I take care of all of that back here… just keep your hands on the wheel." Eddie is apparently both a control freak and an adrenaline junkie. The car is speeding at 100 miles an hour toward a train, as Gino pleads with his boss, "But you don't know how he drives!" Eddie brakes just in time, allowing Chuck to swerve to avoid hitting the speeding train.

This is only a small taste of the dangers that lie ahead for Chuck. Like many noir chumps, he falls for an alluring dame, only this dame is the boss' wife! Ouch! One moment he's driving the sad, beautiful Lorna Roman (Michele Morgan) to the beach to stare vacantly and longingly at the crashing waves, and the next he's fleeing to Havana (pre-Castro Cuba) on a tramp steamer with her. And the next, he's being framed for her murder, desperately explaining to the Cuban police inspector that the knife that killed her only looks like the one he purchased in an out-of-the-way curio shop.

The Chase is based on a Cornell Woolrich novel, The Black Path of Fear (Doubleday, 1944). Woolrich was an odd duck-- a near-recluse who lived most of his life with his mother and rarely ventured outside of New York City. Yet this sheltered man wrote dozens of dark, wildly imaginative novels and short stories that helped launch the film-noir wave of the '40s and '50s. Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) is the best-known Woolrich adaptation (originally published as "It Had to be Murder"). An IMDb search on Woolrich's name demonstrates his extraordinary influence-- nearly 160 films and TV shows based on his work. In his essay "Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich," David Schmid cites Woolrich as one of the signal founders of the genre:

Although his work is not as widely read as that of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich almost single-handedly invented the noir genre--creating a dark, psychologically menacing world--and producing some of the greatest works of pure suspense fiction ever written. … Woolrich's heroes [are] victimized and damaged by forces of evil that are often abstract, nameless, and all-powerful. Woolrich's plots and techniques reflect a worldview far more bleak and pessimistic than that of most other hard-boiled writers, and his ability to evoke the dilemmas of those unfortunates caught in his world is his most signal contribution to the genre. ("American Hard-Boiled Crime Writers" in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 226. Gale, 2000.)

Lorna wonders if she can ever truly escape
from her psychopathic husband.

The Chase takes some liberties with the source material. The book starts off with Mrs. Roman's murder (Eve in the book), while the film leisurely works up to it, immersing the viewer in the pathos and near-hopelessness of the illicit love affair before setting the chase and the murder in motion. Lorna is a beautiful, ethereal vision in her expensive evening dress and long, flowing hair, yet living for three years with a sociopath has left her cold and bloodless, almost zombie-like. Her only joy is to stand on the shore, watching the crashing waves and wondering what it's like beyond. "What's out there, straight ahead?" she asks Chuck, the new chauffeur.

Chuck: "Havana I think."
Lorna: "Have you ever been there?"
Chuck: "Yes, I was a long time ago."
Lorna: "What was it like?"
Chuck: "Oh, for me it was cheap hotels, cheap restaurants, cheap friends… all places are alike when you're broke you know."

The next thing you know, she's offering him $1000 to take her there-- and their fate together seems to be sealed. Having almost immediately fallen in love with her, Chuck begs off the financial part of the deal. They flee to Havana, but realize it can only be a brief way station. They plan to go to South America to get as far away as possible from the implacable Eddie. Stranded in the heart of the chaotic city with little time left before their ship sails, she asks Chuck, "How much time do we have left?", and it's not quite clear if she means how much time before the boat leaves, or how much time before her psycho husband catches up with them.

The Chase employs a very different narrative structure, and springs a plot "cheat" about two thirds of the way through that is risky for a B movie aimed at a fairly broad audience. It ultimately wraps things up a little too neatly for film-noir, especially for something based on Cornell Woolrich's dark, pessimistic visions. Still, it rewards the open-minded viewer with fascinating characters, biting, hard-boiled dialog, and haunting imagery.

Eddie (Cochran) and Gino (Lorre) make a deliciously evil pair. They act like a couple who've been together just a little too long-- mercurial Eddie alternates between bored and disinterested one minute and homicidal the next, while dour Gino grumbles and second-guesses his boss at every opportunity. A scene in which the black-hearted pair, nattily attired in white dinner jackets, have some cruel fun at the expense of a clueless business rival is priceless (see the clip below). Steve and Peter specialized in meaty, villainous roles, and their combined film-noir resume includes some of the great classics: Stranger on the Third Floor (1940, Lorre), The Maltese Falcon (1941, Lorre), The Mask of Dimitrios (1944, Lorre), White Heat (1949, Cochran), and The Damned Don't Cry (1950, Cochran).

Doomed love in the shadows.

Michele Morgan / Lorna Roman is achingly beautiful, and almost unreal-- like a too-perfect robot. Three years of marriage to a manipulative, controlling psychopath has practically drained her of any emotion. We don't often see characters this beautiful and this pitiable. Cinematographer Franz Planer saves his best stuff for Lorna: standing silhouetted on the shore, longingly staring at the waves; looking apprehensively out of the porthole of the Havana-bound ship, shadows creeping up and down the side; embracing Chuck in a hansom cab, her face glowing in soft, white light, his obscured in deep shadow.

Cummings, better known for light comedy and the folksy The Bob Cummings Show of the late '50s - early '60s, is nonetheless effective as the down-on-his luck everyman thrust by fate into the arms of a sad, angelic beauty. His everyman image also appealed to Alfred Hitchcock, who featured him in two of his better mystery-thrillers, Saboteur (1942) and Dial M for Murder (1954).

With the economy still sputtering and more and more politicians, business executives and entertainers acting like Eddie and Gino, it seems like we're all living in a noir world. But while the Eddies and Ginos of the world may be bat-sh*t crazy, they also make for great entertainment. So don't despair-- sit back and enjoy the show!

The Chase is available online at the Internet Archive, and on DVD from Alpha Video.


Crime boss Eddie Roman (Steve Cochran) and henchman Gino (Peter Lorre) practice their own special art of persuasion on a rival businessman: