Director: Christy Cabanne
Writer: Walter Abbott
From: Pure Terror
Watch: archive.org
A woman arrives at the morgue and narrates, for the audience, the story of how she was murdered.
A brief studio cheapie that’s most notable for being the only color film to star Bela Lugosi. While it’s better than a lot of the Ed Wood movies he did later, it’s still pretty disappointing. There’s a real sense that the movie was banking on his reputation as being a horror icon to do the work of selling the movie.
The film is set up as a giant flashback. Laura, our narrator, has been murdered, but they don’t know precisely how. Then her voice arrives on the soundtrack telling us her story. Only Laura’s voice-over never adds anything to the movie, never provides any foreshadowing, never even gives us a sense of her character by having her describe things that are happening in the flashback. In fact, Laura’s not in the movie much at all. We see more of her lying dead as the movie fades back to her than we do in the movie itself.
Anyway, we cut from her on the table to her being examined by her father-in-law, Dr. Van Ee. He’s trying to put a blindfold on her, but she panics and tells him to stop. She accuses him of conspiring with her husband to force her into a divorce. They’d be happy if she left, but take forever to explain why. She leaves as another patient arrives—a woman seemingly trying to blackmail the doctor with knowledge that only a person he presumed dead would have. The doc kicks her out and then Lugosi, the doctor’s cousin, arrives. They used to run a racket together as touring illusionists and Lugosi is the person presumed dead. He’s not there for blackmail, though, just to rest for the night.
So much for that mystery.
Really Lugsoi’s there to play up the red herring of the doctor being in some way villainous or to be his own red herring. Meanwhile, Laura is in her room and gets sent a mask in the mail that makes her scream. Through details we learn from other characters, we can put together that Laura used to be part of a double-act at The Green Room. Lugosi remembers her and says, to no one, “The Green Man may get you yet.” Things escalate in the house with more people arriving, the maid being hypnotized to feign death, and then everyone goes into the parlor to find Laura hypnotized to perform her act from before.
During the war, Laura betrayed her partner—her then husband—to the Nazis and sent him a green blindfold for his execution. She wanted him to know she’d betrayed him. She did it, not for the money, but to be free of him and his control over her despite him being “good.” The movie’s really invested in you not being that bothered by her murder. She takes off the blindfold, sees a mask coming at her from the window, and dies of a heart attack. The husband is caught in the yard disguised as the woman who came to see the doctor earlier and we fade back to the coroner’s office where he says she was “scared to death.” THE END
It’s pretty stupid. Normally I’d find something like this charming, but it’s just throwing everything into a pot and making nothing from it. The doctor’s past and all his strange behavior, including lying about being attacked, comes to nothing. The house is full of secret passages for no reason. Lugosi has a deaf-mute little person working as his assistant because...creepy? Plus there’s a bumbling private security officer in love with the maid and a reporter who shows up for no reason with his ditzy assistant. Even the son, the man who wants a divorce, vanishes from the movie for the majority. The reason he wants the divorce, by the way, is that he married Laura the night he met her on a drunken bet.
The worst thing the movie does is make the killer someone you couldn’t possibly know. The woman who seemed to be blackmailing the doctor at the beginning was actually a character never named or described until the final scene, in disguise (so you wouldn’t know the person you didn’t know).
This is not as bad as some of the other flicks I’ve watched, it’s certainly not offensive, but it’s strangely bad. Like the decision to cut back to Laura in the morgue all the time. The cuts dissolve to her lying still and then immediately dissolve back to the movie, sometimes the same scene. Plus they’re almost never scenes that she’s in. She’s telling a story of all the things she didn’t witness.
The movie is almost, but not quite, compellingly bad, and I recommend it on those terms. It’s not fun on its own and I wouldn’t recommend it to watch ironically, but if you have friends and want to laugh at something, this movie is so consistently wrong-footed that you’d have a good time. It’s in the public domain and there are several copies available on archive.org. I’ve linked to the MPEG-2 version, because that’s what I do.
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