A year or two ago, Fox jumped on the Halloween bandwagon by releasing the Fox Horror Classics Vol. 1 DVD set. The problem being that Fox never really jumped on the horror bandwagon back in the ’30s and ’40s, and hence they had a dearth of such material. Indeed, of the three films the set offered only one was really a ‘horror’ film, and even that movie, Undying Monster, was an Old Dark House flick with about ten seconds of werewolf action added at the end.
However, even if the remaining two features were more generally suspense than horror films, the fact is that they were very good suspense films indeed, and more than justified the set. Indeed, while one of these films was an extremely nifty number—the Jack the Ripper movie The Lodger—the other, Hangover Square, was superlative. It might not rank with the very best of, say, Hitchcock, but it came very close.
Apparently the set sold well enough to justify another, and again, the ‘horror’ offerings here are pretty sparse. Aside from our current subject, the set offers basically an exotic adventure movie, Chandu the Magician, which stars Bela Lugosi as the villain (although he himself later assayed the heroic Chandu in a theatrical serial), as well as the gothic suspense tale Dragonwyck, starring a young Vincent Price. Again, not horror, but hey, what old horror buff is going to complain about seeing two obscure flicks starring Lugosi and Price getting a good treatment?
Especially interesting to me is that I myself had never seen any of the three. I decided to start with the one film that could technically be called a horror film, Dr. Renault’s Secret. Sadly, it’s pretty weak tea. Fox again sort of looked down its nose at horror, and as a result their efforts in that direction were inevitably a bit half-hearted.
Larry, an American doctor, arrives in rural France (not a very convincing France either, despite typically nice set work from the pros on Fox’s ‘B’ lot) to collect his fiancée, Madelon. As he rests the night in a nearby inn, there’s a murder, one in which he himself may have been the intended target. The two prime suspects are hulking ‘former’ criminal Rogell and Noel, a very peculiar sort who though small is barrel-chested, extremely strong, and exhibits a fierce temper, although he’s otherwise very gentle. Both men, as it turns out, work for Madelon’s uncle, the scientist Dr. Renault (George Zucco).
Played more like a murder mystery—a genre Fox was much, much more comfortable with—for much of the spare 58 minute running time, the film tries to amp up the horror during the last fifteen minutes or so, but again without overmuch effect. I guess I’ll avoid revealing Renault’s titular ‘secret,’ which naturally involves Noel, although anyone conversant with genre movies of the time will recognize a familiar trope coming a mile off. And frankly, even the big revelation scene itself lacks juice, and is delivered in a comically off-hand manner.
Fox had a great B-movie unit, though—see the superlative DVD box sets for the studio’s trademark mystery series, including those for Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto and Mike Shayne—and despite the limp-wristed treatment the tech work is strong. The film also boasts a typically strong cast.
Rogell is played by the strapping ex-wrestler Mike Mizurki, who specialized in huge but dim-witted thugs. His best remembered role, probably, falls squarely into this type, when he appeared as the obsessive hood Moose Malloy 1944 Philip Marlowe movie Murder, My Sweet. His appearance here is one of his earlier roles, actually, and he is allowed to bring a very convincing low cunning to Rogell. Mr. Mizurki worked steadily through the ’70s, and continued to work more sporadically through 1990. He died in December of that year.
The main character, Noel, is played by J. Carrol Naish. Mr. Naish had been a veteran actor since the 1920s, and specialized in ethic characters. Indeed, his trademark role was as the protagonist of the radio comedy My Live with Luigi. Mr. Naish also appeared in several genre films, assaying the sly police detective opposite Peter Lorre in The Beast with Five Fingers; another cop in one of Lon Chaney Jr’s “Inner Sanctum” mysteries, Calling Dr. Death; the murderous hunchback Daniel in The House of Frankenstein, a mad scientists in both The Monster Maker and Jungle Woman (a film that bears strong thematic ties to this one). That’s just a few of his over 200 IMDB credits, however. His last performance, sadly, was as another Last of the Frankensteins in Al Adamson’s appalling Dracula vs. Frankenstein.
In any case, Naish really tries to do right by his character, using his great acrobatic gifts and while donning a padded suit to make his small frame seem weirdly burly (similar, in fact, to his appearance in House of Frankenstein). His efforts are mostly in vain, though, because again the film doesn’t really have any energy to it. Frankly, it’s staid.
Except, that is, for the film’s big ‘name,’ George Zucco. Zucco probably needs no introduction, but was aside from Lionel Atwill the biggest horror name of the era past the big guys like Lugosi and Karloff. Zucco played zillions of menacing characters, and specialized in mad scientists in skip row productions for PRC and Monogram and the like. As such, this is probably one of his better budgeted genre efforts, despite being a ‘B’ programmer.
The problem is that Zucco’s typically hammy, eye-popping performance clashes with the vanilla, serious tone of the rest of the actors. He plays it reserved going in, but by the end restraint has gone entirely out the window. The problem being, again, that this approach seems entirely out of sync here (although at least it was an attempt to lend the picture a bit of life). It’s like casting Jerry Lewis in a community theater production of Ibsen that everyone else was playing straight.
A side salute to Arthur Shields, who plays the village’s Irish (!) police Inspector via as naked an impersonation of Barry Fitzgerald as one can imagine. They may as well have hired Rich Little to play the part. Meanwhile, serial icon and sci-fi guy Ray “Crash” Corrigan shows up in photos wearing his ape suit.
Whatever team Fox has to put these sets together—and it’s clearly the same one who did the mystery sets mentioned above—really knows their stuff. Each film here has a little roughly 15 minute documentary (this one has various genre historians, including Kim Newman, providing background for the film and trying perhaps a bit too hard to push it as more than it is), and the Chandu film also offers a commentary by Lugosi biographer Gregory William Mank.
The film looks pretty good, but is invariably eye-poppingly detailed during the frequent close-ups. I don’t know if the director used different lenses for those or what, but the amount of fine detail in these shots is extremely impressive.
For most these will remain rental choices, but Amazon is selling the set at 42% off, or only $11.50 for all three films. It’s hard to argue with that.
