The Soul of a Monster (1944)

After having dabbled in horror with four Boris Karloff mad scientist movies (the most interesting of which was probably the last, The Devil Commands (1941)) and the Lugosi-starrer Return of the Vampire (1943), in 1944, Columbia rather surprisingly tried to imitate RKO’s Val Lewton films in two pictures.

One was the tepid Cry of the Werewolf, originally announced as Bride of the Vampire, a sequel to Return of the Vampire. (According to a Showmen’s Trade Review news item, Columbia promised “authentic voodoo rhythms, played on Haitian percussion instruments and conches”. In the finished movie, we get gypsies, but it is perhaps indicative that it starts with a tour guide talking about vampires and voodoo, as if nobody could be bothered to remove traces of earlier drafts.)

The other one was The Soul of a Monster, originally announced in February 1944, as Death Walks Alone and described as a “psychological mystery” in the trades. It was produced from May 25 to June 13, 1944, and released in August.

Into the lives of many come strange realities — into the lives of others come equally strange dreams — weird dreams that shape and guide their destinies.

You may have lived or perhaps dreamed the story you are about to see. To many of you it may be grim reality; to others, perhaps a dream.

With this written intro, set to soothing music, The Soul of the Monster begins, only to startle us with a montage of newspaper headlines informing us that famous surgeon Dr. George Winson (George Macready) is dying. This is followed by three little scenes of characters musing about the “cock-eyed” world which allows such a selfless, philanthropic man, who’d often operate on patients for free, to die. (We never learn what he’s dying from.)

At Winson’s death bed, grieving Ann Winson (Jeanne Bates) curses fate: “Monsters live, saints die.” She then attacks devout Dr. Vance (originally written as a Catholic priest):

“You and your good words and your fancy faith. Prayers are cheap — why didn’t they work? Because there’s nothing behind them, there’s never been anything behind them. Someone put them down so stupid fools like you would have something to cling to.”

“Ann, you must have faith. This present world isn’t everything. We can’t just live for the presents day alone. There are other facets to life, beautiful sides, spiritual.”

“No. You’re wrong. We’re put here to enjoy this life, and — we can’t be happy here, nothing else matters. (…)”

“Ann, you’re turning your back on God.”

“Yes, I am! Because I want my husband to live!”

With the camera now shooting through a fireplace, Ann desperately pleads: “There is another power! Whoever you are — wherever you are — I beg of you, save him!”

Seguing into a montage of fire, curtains, clouds and Winson turning in his bed, Ann’s echo-y voice repeating that she’s ready to call upon the power of good or evil, we see a woman walking in the nightly streets, tilted camera angles and strange occurrences around her indicating no good. Even when a car seems to have ran over her by accident, she simply keeps on walking without batting an eye. The woman is Lilyan Gregg (Rose Hobart). The film never really spells it out, but she’s clearly a representative of evil forces, as is implied when she enters the Winsons’ house:

Lilyan: “I was told to come here.”

Ann: “Who are you?”

Lilyan: “Does it make any difference?”

Acting like a haughty businesswoman and claiming to be able to help Winson, she locks herself up with him for several hours (the others just let her enter the dying man’s bedroom, patiently waiting outside). And whatever she did seems to have helped: Winson lives.

Thus ends the first reel of The Soul of a Monster, and it’s a lulu. Not only does it deftly set up a theme — in itself not something we could expect it to do — , it is a pretty big theme, too, and strong meat for a 1944 “B” horror movie. It must have resonated deeply with a wartime audience and might well be the noble reason for some of the more obvious problems with the film’s script: Religion was a subject to be treated with reverence, and preferably from a distance. (The Breen Office’s correspondence of the time keeps warning producers: Don’t mention a denomination by name, don’t joke about priests, don’t let characters make the sign of the cross, replace the word “God” with “Heaven” etc.) While clearly not up to the subtlety of a Lewton production, it still looks like a film to be taken seriously.

Alas, from now on it’s downhill — rapidly. We next see Winson tending to the garden, and the devil’s emissary helps, raking leaves. Wait, what? It quickly becomes clear that the revived Winson is no longer quite himself: He kills his dog and, later, causes the death of a colleague, he enjoys Liszt’s Devil Sonata, stalks Vance with an ice pick, and when you prick him, he doesn’t bleed.

All this is shot with some style, but also rather heavy-handed. A lengthy attempt at a Lewton “walk” includes some moody vignettes with various bit players, as well as a Lewton “bus” borrowed from The Leopard Man, but as an attempt at suspense, it falls completely flat. Worse, there is so much spiritual talk that screenwriter Edward Dein (who had provided additional dialogue for The Leopard Man) either must have wanted to make a devout point (however, it seems unclear exactly what that point could have been, unless is was “don’t be evil”), or he felt that “deep” conversations were a necessary part of the highbrow Lewton formula, and simply wasn’t up to the task.

Footnote: Dein’s card in the main titles is framed oddly — perhaps indicating that a second writer’s name was removed at the last minute?

Indeed, for a film clearly trying to follow in Lewton’s footsteps, The Soul of a Monster is oddly clueless about what made the original films work. If Lewton ever saw it, he must have cringed not only at the botched attempts at creating suspense and dread, but also, and perhaps especially, at the film’s simplistic good/evil mythology,which it fails to think though anyway: We are to assume that Winson made some devilish pact with Gregg, but from all we are told about the saintly doctor, this would be quite out of character for him. And anyway, it’s Ann who called upon the powers of darkness, not Winson.

The promised discourse between faith and skepticism never forms and likely couldn’t have anyway, given the restrictions of the period — but even so, the film’s view on spirituality seem carefully, almost anxiously foggy… and in the end, the whole story is revealed as what is usually described a dream, though Tim Selson, in his book Phantom Ladies, makes an interesting case that it’s Ann’s “own internal dialogue while on vigil,” with Gregg serving as Ann’s evil double.

Even from a supernatural point of view, the plot is a single gaping hole. Just what is it that Winson does become? He doesn’t bleed and has no pulse beat, which technically makes him an undead. But the whole point of the Faustian scheme is, of course, that Winson is not dead. So what does Gregg want from him, apart from random acts of earthly meanness, and who/what exactly is she, anyway? Columbia seemed to have settled on calling her, less than illuminatingly, a “strange woman”, perhaps feeling that a portrayal of a real devil or demon in human form would have come off as ludicrous. At times, she seems able to communicate with Winson telepathically, yet they keep meeting in person like mundane conspirators, leading elliptical conversations. Curiously, the film never drops any hint that their relationship might go beyond the matter-of-fact business of being evil. And ironically, all these complaints would be moot if only the film had been less ambitious… or more effective.

Rose Hobart remembered that three different endings were shot — surely not the usual procedure on a ‘40ies Columbia “B”. She told Tom Weaver: “I’m awfully sorry they didn’t use the original one. In it, I fall out of a window, get run over, and the cat just gets up and walks away.”

Thalia Bell, writing reviews for Motion Picture Daily (September 7 1944) and Motion Picture Herald (September 9 1944), claimed to have seen the film at Hollywood’s Vogue theatre, but described an ending different from the one extant today (though identical to the advance synopsis as given in the Motion Picture Herald, June 24 1944): After the movie returns to the deathbed scene, Winson persuades his wife not to call upon the powers of evil. Hobart is seen on the street again, but this time, she is killed by a speeding automobile, and Winson dies in peace. A later review in Harrison’s Report (September 16, 1944) gives the familiar ending (“In a violent quarrel with MacReady, Miss Hobart loses her balance and falls through a window to the pavement below” — sadly, no cat in sight).

George Macready’s icy screen persona is put to good use, and Rose Hobart is convincing as whoever she is. On the production side, Burnett Guffey’s noir images look fine enough, and the music (likely stock) is undistinguished, but painless.

Will Jason was an ex-songwriter, often writing in tandem with lyricst Val Burton; one of his best-known compositions today might be “Penthouse Serenade”, as heard in Betty Boop’s Penthouse (1933). This was the first feature he directed after having done chores of shorts; the rest of his directing career seems to have been spent doing obscure “B”s at Columbia before moving into TV.

One might assume that Jason spent less energy on his remaining films than he did on The Soul of a Monster, a film usually written off as a disaster (only Edmund Bansak finds some good in it). While it makes little sense and has long stretches of dullness, there’s clearly some ambition at work, and the weird narrative makes for actually unpredictable moments — it is, in fact, rather maddening to find the film being on the verge of becoming genuinely intriguing several times, only to fall back into meandering. But then, a movie which features musical numbers by both Clarence Muse and Ervin Nyiregyhazi cannot be all bad.

Most critics, though, disagreed:

New York Post: Doubtless the feeblest re-working of the Faustian legend up to Sept. 8, 1944. (…) Pretty soon the doc takes an ice-pick to his old friend, Erik Rolf. This sequence is a honey, being composed of two pairs of legs on the street at night, one pair walking steadily after the other. The suspense is supposed to be unbearable. Actually the length of the walk is exhausting. During it you occasionally wonder if a circular bit of film might not be going around and around like a phonograph record with a broken thread. Later you suspect that the makers of the film forgot what came next. To tell the truth, it might have been better if they had. (…) Such circular purgatory is for those who have grievously sinned against the cinema.

Independent Film Journal: The author of this original screenplay had a rather good preachment premise and did what he could with it for appeal to the horror-intelligencia. It might easily have turned out “good” in this direction, but production and direction willed otherwise. Lack of preparedness prohibited refinement. In its stead was left a strong draggy element that bogs down the proceedings sadly. The final result appeals only slightly to the thinker, and far less to the masses. (…) A rather weak attempt to be nice about spine chilling.

Motion Picture Herald: Good direction by Will Jason and effective camera work by Burnett Guffey make this an unusually interesting melodrama, superior to its class.

The Film Daily: This melodrama, an abortive attempt to scare the audience, will have a hard time getting the customers more than passably interested in what transpires. (…) Under Will Jason’s indifferent direction the cast performs with little credit to itself.

Baltimore Evening Sun: Jungle Woman, at the Mayfair, is just as loony, but at least it doesn’t insult the intelligence by pretending to say something significant and point a moral.

Daily Variety: Although not credited on the screen, stars of The Soul of a Monster are French, Shriner and Urner, manufacturers of footwear. Seldom, if ever, have two pairs of feet been the exclusive target of a camera for so long a time as they pursue each other back and forth across the screen.

Philadelphia Inquirer: A distinctly daffy version of the Faust legend (…) Fancy angles and art lighting don’t help much under the circumstances.

New York Daily News: … the usual crop of felons and hairy fiends has been disposed in favor of an evil genius whose cloven hoof comes neatly encased in size 5 ½ shoe. (….) Unfortunately, there isn’t much excitement or horror in Rialto’s new film, which runs chiefly to a series of wooden posturings intended to express either apprehension, terror or malevolence.

New York Times: This one’s an entry for the all-time looney price! A preposterously foolish film.

Baltimore Sun: Different than the general run of supernatural thrillers (…) a jumbled modernization of the Faustian legend, with a touch of the zombie technique and some devious and dubious sermonizing. It deals in what might be called the higher superstition. (…) Rather than such pretentious exercises in demonology, the synthetic werewolves and stuffed gorillas of the general run of horror quickies are to be preferred.

Walter Winchell: Bogey-man stuff that dies with its ‘boos’ on. It is better described as the sort of film that doesn’t merit a review — just an epitaph.