More on the Mad

The same day I saw Joker I also watched 1946's Bedlam, part of the legendary series of horror movies produced by Val Lewton. Far from the heights of Cat People or Isle of the Dead, Bedlam stars Boris Karloff as the master of London's infamous Bethelem Asylum, or Bedlam, and, honestly, it can only just barely be called a horror film, being much more of a simplistic political polemic. Dealing as it does with issues of mental illness and economic class disparity, it served as a fascinating companion viewing to Joker. The cinematography and production design of Bedlam is marvellously detailed and as evocatively gloomy as Lewton's previous films and Karloff gives a great performance but Joker offers the more complex take on the same issues.

The film centres on Lewton regular Anna Lee as Nell Bowen, a "protege" of a wealthy man named Mortimer (Billy House). It's hinted that she used to be a street performer and now Mortimer keeps her in his household and retinue for her entertaining wit--she denies several times the suggestion there's anything more to their relationship than that but I assumed they were having sex. Mortimer provides funding for Bedlam in exchange for Karloff's character, Sims, keeping his enemies under lock and key.

Sims gives Nell a tour of the asylum, explaining with sinister obsequiousness how the mad are really animals, applying analogous animals to several examples, from the pigs who wallow in their own filth, to the tiger (a violent man kept in a cage), and to the dove, as Sims calls one beautiful, expressionless, and mute young woman (Joan Newton). It's hinted as strongly as a 1946 movie can hint that Sims rapes her routinely.

The film is based on William Hogarth's wonderful "Rake's Progress" series of paintings and there are many nice details of mid-18th century England. There are street merchants advertising wares with improvised songs; the aristocrats at their lavish dinners are shown with the same decadent heedlessness of the cartoonish characters from Hogarth. Even the liberal Whig leader, John Wilkes (Leyland Hodgson), is shown laughing at one of these dinners though ultimately he proves to be a straight forwardly good character.

It's the simplicity of the film's argument that made Joker work so much better in comparison. When Nell is eventually locked up for trying to force reforms for the asylum, she finds each and every inmate is really a kind and decent person who wouldn't dream of hurting her. Even when Sims locks her in with the "tiger", the big fellow ends up being as gentle as a kitten. As though if just one of these people laid a hand on her it would invalidate the argument for reforms in mental healthcare. That's the genius of Joker--not every victim of injustice is a hero or a secretly upstanding citizen, though sometimes it's that injustice that exacerbates their problems.

A Murder Somewhere in the Shuffle

The powerful owner of a shipping company is murdered and only the legendary Mr. Wong can solve the mystery in 1940's Doomed to Die. Part of a series of B movies in which Boris Karloff played the famous Chinese detective, it's a cheap production and a peculiar--and amusing--mixture of hard nosed dialogue and almost childlike flippancy.

I wonder if Karloff accepted the role because he jumped at the chance to play a hero for once. He thankfully uses his own accent--in fact there's not much to establish him as Chinese except his eyes are taped back. The sixth film in the series which directly followed this one that same year featured an actually Asian actor in the role, Keye Luke, but, according to Wikipedia, film exhibitors lost interest in further pictures without Boris Karloff. Karloff is good in the role though it mainly consists of him being calm and insightful.

Most of what's delightful about the film is the banter between a doofus police captain named Bill Street (Grand Withers) and a reporter named Bobbie Logan (Marjorie Reynolds). Bobbie's friends with the daughter of the murder victim who's also the fiancee of the prime suspect. In one of the many examples of the film's tone deafness regarding the emotional toll of human mortality, Bobbie ecstatically tells the other woman, when Mr. Wong takes the case, she has "nothing to worry about!"

That prime suspect I mentioned, by the way, played by someone named William Stelling, does have a bit of an accent--a weird one I can't place. He pronounces the "Chin" in "Chinatown" like the chin at the bottom of the human face.

Anyway, the dialogue often builds momentum to a kind of rapid fire, highly suggestive callousness. In one slightly bizarre scene when Bobbie and Bill are exploring a dark and empty house, Wong suddenly emerges from a trap door, accidentally knocking Bobbie over and knocking her unconscious--Wong and Bill glance at her and then just move along as Bill tells Wong about the corpse he and Bobbie found. When the two men are examining the body more closely, Bobbie catches up with them:

BOBBIE: What do you mean, leaving me downstairs unconscious?!

BILL: That's nothing new!

BOBBIE: Noticing the corpse Well, that's Lim Hao, the missing Wentworth servant!

BILL: How do you know?

BOBBIE: Oh, I've seen him lots of times. He killed Wentworth and then committed suicide!

BILL: Sure, stabbed himself in the back. You're still unconscious!

It all feels like a group of 14 year olds playing Cops and Robbers. Doomed to Die is available under the title Mystery at Wentworth Castle on Amazon Prime.

Twitter Sonnet #1220

The wooden surface spoke of forest seas.
Interpret grass bespoke a nothing much.
But then a morsel yet of truth was seized.
As paper crammed behind the captain's hutch.
A crew of pins arrested steals the breath.
In measured ticks the watch at six concludes.
Between the masts and yards prepared a death.
But sails and wind the end at length precludes.
As eyes were placed in shapes befitting screws.
The wobbly box creates a noisy cart.
In painted notes the vessel's wake was blues.
The damp and darkened goal is like the start.
In turbulence the stack of blocks persists.
Or something thinks the world of parts exists.

Jekyll versus Slapstick

For all the issues presented by the Jekyll and Hyde story, can we rely on Abbott and Costello for a solution? No. But 1953's Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is no waste of time though you'd be better off watching Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Their Jekyll and Hyde film is in many ways a less imaginative retread of that 1948 film. It's naturally a more simplistic take on Jekyll and Hyde but Boris Karloff in the role does manage to make it interesting and there are some weird undercurrents in the movie's commentary on women's rights.

The story, set in the Edwardian era, begins with a demonstration from women's suffragettes led by the film's lead female character, Vicky (Helen Westcott). Any thought that the film is putting forth a sincere feminist point of view is quickly dashed when the women segue into a can-can routine.

Like a lot of films featuring well known comedy teams from the period, Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde feels obliged to include a foreground romance between two straight, in the comedic sense, leads. We're introduced to the male lead first, Bruce (Craig Stevens), who remarks off-handedly to an itinerant drunk that he doesn't believe women should get the vote, something that undercuts the sense of sincerity in his efforts to woo Vicky as he pledges his full support for her cause.

Is the film condemning his hypocrisy or is it slyly nodding and winking at the fellas in the audience, essentially telling them how to deceive women? The filmmakers likely didn't want the audience to be sure of the intention, more in the interest of attracting the widest audience possible than for any provoking ambiguity. But it's interesting how this dynamic is paralleled in Jekyll when we meet him.

Played by Boris Karloff, he's for the most part a much more obvious hypocrite in this film than in earlier incarnations. He rationalises murders--saying his first victim had to die because he was an obstacle to his research which would ultimately benefit humankind--and also washes his hands of them, insisting they were committed by Hyde, not Jekyll, even though he takes the potion with the clear motive of knocking off another such obstacle. This might have been just simplistically broad except, in a cab ride with Vicky and Bruce, Karloff really sells a soliloquy on sorting out human nature so there can be peace on Earth. There's a sadness and wistfulness in Karloff's delivery that suggests this was his real dream at one point and he himself doesn't consciously realise how far he's strayed.

He's Vicky's guardian and he becomes angry when she and Bruce begin their romance. We learn that he had cared for her always with the desire to make her his wife eventually. Karloff shows more wisdom as a storyteller than this silly film may require in that he makes his superficial support for their relationship utterly convincing. This has the effect of making the revelation of his true feelings very creepy as well as a possibly unintended but very pointed commentary on patriarchy.

But of course most of the film focuses on a couple of American doofuses trying to earn a living as cops in London. Bud Abbott and Lou Costello play Slim and Tubby, a couple of guys fired from the police force after their poor handling of a brawl that erupts at the suffragette demonstration. There are a series of slapstick routines as they endeavour to capture Hyde in the hopes it'll get them their jobs back. This version of Hyde hearkens back to the wolf monster of the 1912 or 1931 versions, apparently in this case played by a stunt man instead of by Karloff.

In one of the more effective sequences, Tubby, after being injected with Jekyll's formula, turns into a giant mouse, leading to some exquisitely absurd business when he and Slim walk into a pub. They waste no opportunity for "man or mouse" dialogue.

Otherwise, there's a wax museum routine which is basically a repeat of the one in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and not a whole lot to remark on. But it's always nice to see Lou Costello.