586 Island of Lost Souls

[Tom Hagen]

I was half joking when I originally suggested that they involve Devo with this release, but I am pretty excited that they're actually doing it.

[lubitsch]

Yeah, Ruggles is on Amazon as a media on demand thing.The Merry Widow is likewise out, if you count the fucking Warner Archive as a DVD.

But that's the Stroheim version not the Lubitsch. I overlooked the Vault Ruggles but as for the popularity I just counted the number of imdb votes, Cavalcade might be a curio today but it's still a film that is spoken of like Broadway Melody thanks to the Oscar win. Popularity doesn't equal quality.
Monsieur Lange was released in UK on DVD, popularitywise there isn't much of a difference, La Chienne however commands interest for Michel Simon, its ties to the Lang version and to film noir and finally being the first major Renoir sound film (or arguably the first major Renoir). I guess there are chances that we'll finally see these films via Criterion. Less so for the US films, I'm afraid.

[Titus]

But that's the Stroheim version not the Lubitsch.

There's a Spanish DVD available for the Lubitsch.

[Tolmides]

I guess there are chances that we'll finally see these films via Criterion. Less so for the US films, I'm afraid.

I've still got my fingers crossed that WB has done too much work restoring the three Show Boats to not release them - eventually.

Cavalcade is an exclusive in one of those enormous studio box sets (Fox has form, they released two Cantor musicals as exclusives in a $400 musical pack).

[tojoed]

There's a French proper DVD of "Ruggles".

[Finch]

Which is inferior to the Universal DVD-R though.

Back on topic: was anything cut at a time from Lost Souls? Criterion advertises the "uncut" theatrical version.

[Roger Ryan]

Given that this film was initially released prior to censorship enforcement by the Hays Office, I would imagine it must have had scenes trimmed on subsequent reissues. Although I was unable to find any specific mention of material cut, the film definitely has moments as intense as Frankenstein's monster throwing the little girl into the lake or Kong chewing on some natives (moments later censored...and thankfully restored for DVD). Apparently, the vivisection scenes were considered so distasteful that ISLAND OF LOST SOULS remained unreleased in England until the late 50s.

[colinr0380]

I remembered that the horror magazine Shivers (issue 25 and 26) ran a nice two part article on all of the various versions of Island of Dr Moreau in the run up to the release of the ill-fated 1996 version. Presumably some of the material that follows is going to get covered in Mank's commentary. The following extract was written by Jonathan Rigby and I hope it will be OK to quote the parts relating to Island of Lost Souls here:

Moreau himself first appeared in 1932. Despite its glamorous and sophisticated output, Paramount was close to bankruptcy, so Waldemar Young and Phillip Wylie were assigned to adapt Wells's novel - recrhristened Island of Lost Souls - with an eye to its most expoitable 'box office' ingredients, inventing new ones if necessary. (Wylie was a science fiction writer himself, incidentally; one of his books, which was later filmed, had the somewhat Wellsian title When Worlds Collide). Wylie and Young's chief innovation was a hefty injection of sex, centred on a love contest for the affections of the hero (here called Edward Parker, the adaptors fighting shy of the curious name 'Prendick').

Parker's blonde fiancee from the mainland was played by Leila Hyams, who had recently starred in Freaks, but in order to cast the role of dark and sultry Lota, Paramount decided to mount a nationwide 'Panther Woman' contest which very quickly grabbed headlines across the country. Out of some 60,000 entrants the finalists were Lonna Andre, Kathleen Burke, Gail Patrick and Verna Hillie, and on 29th September Paramount's panel - which included Cecil B. DeMille, Ernst Lubitsch and Rouben Mamoulian - awarded the role to Kathleen Burke.

Burke, who had turned 19 some three weeks earlier, was a fashion model and radio actress in Chicago. To emphasise the fairy-tale nature of the contest, however, Paramount put it about that she was a dentist's assistant. The filming was an uncomfortable experience for her; her skimpy costume was ill-adapted to the icy jungle set and her photographer boyfriend, Glen Rardin, made a nuisance of himself at the studio. The former footballer tried at one point to beat up the diminuitive director Erle C. Kenton, and was summarily ordered back to Chicago by studio executives.

Responses to Burke's feline performance were mixed. "The extra billing given Kathleen Burke as Lota, Panther Woman, is strictly for the marquee", Variety maintained. "Girl is too much like a girl to even suggest transformation from a beast. Her part is little more than a White Cargo bit". "Never having encountered a Panther Woman", retorted the New York Herald Tribune, "I cannot say how accurate Miss Kathleen Burke's impersonation is, but it must be said for her portrayal of the wistful half-woman that it possesses a certain bewildered, sad-eyed quality which manages to be rather touching."

Though a tragic figure, Lota is at the heart of Young and Wylie's most audacious and most deliriously offensive twist on Wells's evolutionary theme. Moreau's masterpiece, in Gregory Manks' phrase, "looks like a 1932 hooker all dressed up for a 'John' with a South Seas fetish", and is intended by her creator as a mate for the strapping young hero. The whole film is predicated on this startlingly sleazy premise and for the role of the new-look lascivious Moreau, bulging with barely-concealed perversions, Paramount couldn't possibly have made a beter choice than the British import, Charles Laughton.

Scarborough born Laughton, only six years out of RADA, had come to Hollywood earlier in the year after a string of dazzling performances on the London stage - most of them dazzlingly unpleasant. One in particular - the title role in Hugh Walpole's sadistic shocker A Man with Red Hair - seems to have been a precursor of his sweetly reasonable but deeply twisted Moreau. "His entrance", wrote Theatre World, "is like the first whiff of poison gas we were once familiar with . A thing so evil and malignant that it can paralyse one's power to combat it by its apparent harmlessness". The Observer was more succinct, "A very gargoyle of obscene desires". It was for this play too, that Laughton had perfected his expertise - reprised later for Moreau - with a bullwhip, practising for hours under the arches of Charing Cross somewhat to the revulsion of his mercurial wife, Elsa Lanchester.

[For Moreau] Laughton borrowed a doctor's appearance, notably his achor-shaped goatee, from an innocuous optician whom he'd visited while suffering from a minor eye infection, and about whom he had made mental notes while perusing his eye chart.

Laughton found the whole experience of filming Island of Lost Souls utterly loathsome. An animal lover, he was revolted by the vivisection details and nauseated by the unit's choppy steamer trip to Catalina Island, off the California coast. A host of caged animals were on board, whining and vomiting incessantly. When the beast-men extras were required to run past the bars and prod them, a tiger lashed out and tore one man's arm from its socket. Surrounded aboard ship by animals and in the studio by Wally Westmore's hirsute make-up creations, Laughton developed a hair phobia, even claiming to have found hair in his food. Elsa Lanchester reported that her husband never visited a zoo again.

Laughton was also disconcerted by his director Kenton, whom he considered a martinet and who insisted on demonstrating everything for the actors while dressed in a white suit and hat similar to Moreau's. He even presumed to show Laughton how to use the whip. Kenton had begun as a comic with Mack Sennett's troupe and would later direct vehicles for WC Fields and Abbott and Costello, as well as three entries in Universal's 1940s horror cycle. Before entering films he had been an animal exhibitor in vaudeville, so he was presumably unfazed by the animal-infested sea voyage. In fact, he and the cinematographer Karl Struss were thrilled when the ship was enveloped in thick fog and began impromptu filming there and then.

For Bela Lugosi, who played the small but striking role of The Sayer of the Law, the film must have been a chastening experience. Earlier in the year had had appeared in two 'poverty-row' productions, White Zombie and Chandu the Magician, as well as starring at Hollywood's Carthay Circle Theater in the play Murdered Alive, one of a number of sources for the Warner Brothers thriller Mystery of the Wax Museum. Now, barely a year after his refusal of the role of Frankenstein's monster on account of the heavy makeup involved, he found it expedient to submit to playing the leader of the Beast Men from under a face-full of fur. He's still unmistakeably Bela Lugosi, however; his over-ripe vocal technique actually benefits the role, and is even weirdly moving when he wails "His is the House of Pa-a-a-in!"

Among the other Beast Men were future stars Alan Ladd, Randolph Scott and Buster Crabbe. Wally Westmore's creatures are by turns comical, pitiful and menacing, and the climactic scene in which they drag their whip-cracking white-suited oppressor to an appalling death in his own 'House of Pain' is nightmarishly unpleasant. It must also have had curious resonances for Depression-era audiences. The shot in which, at a sign from Lugosi, they smash Moreau's instrument cases, and taloned hands reach hungrily for the glimmering scalpels within, is not easily forgotten.

The film premiered at New York City's Rialto Theater on 11th January 1933. Paramount's ad campaign for its 'surging rhapsody of terror' was suitably rabid: 'He took them from his mad menagerie...Nights were horrible with the screams of tortured beasts...From his House of Pain they came re-made...Pig-men...Wolf-women...Thoughtful Human Apes and his masterpiece - the Panther Woman throbbing to the hot flush of love!'.

The New York Herald Tribune was fulsome in its praise for Laughton - "More and more does it seem that Mr Laughton was wasting his time on the stage; that he should have been rescuing motion pictures for us long before this" - and noted that "with most of the Neanderthal extras in Hollywood made up to represent some of Boris Karloff's wilder dreams, the new film at the Rialto has a certain nightmare or, more accurately, hangover quality..."

The New York Times claimed that "There is a suggestion of Frankenstein and also something akin to Emperor Jones about this ghastly affair...Although the attempt to horrify is not accomplished with any marked degree of subtlety, there is no denying that some of the scenes are ingeniously fashioned...". Variety predicted (erroneously as it turned out) that "Paramount will make money with this picture, and so will every exhibitor...While the action is not designed to appeal to other than the credulous, there are undoubtedly some horror sequences which are unrivaled...".

An enthusiastic reception in America was followed, two months later, by the film's passage to Britain....

The ninth item in Film Weekly's 'News Snapshots' section of 31st March 1933 brought sad tidings for British Horror fans: the first screen adaptation of HG Wells novel was to go the way of MGM's Freaks, another victim of the British censor's distate for Horror films. It was also banished from New Zealand and several midwestern states in the USA. Variety had perhaps sounded the warning bell when it observed, back in January, that "Literally the [film's] proper title is Island of Lost Freaks. It is decidedly a freak picture...".

Faced with the censor's complaint that the film's theme was 'against nature', Elsa Lanchester's tart response was "So is Mickey Mouse". The child of radical Marxist parents, she was well acquainted with London's socialist aristocracy. So much so that in 1928 HG Wells - royalty in that circle - had written two silent 'shorts' for her, Bluebottles and Day Dreams in which her husband Charles Laughton had made his first, fleeting film appearances. But five years on, no one was better pleased with the censor's decision than Wells himself, who considered Island of Lost Souls a vulgarisation of his novel, being particularly offended by Laughton's portrait of Moreau.

Thanks to Eros Films, Laughton's performance finally appeared on British screens, with an 'X' certificate, in November 1958. The Monthly Film Bulletin observed that "In spite of its age, it compares favourably with most of the horror films currently issued...Some parts are colourlessly acted, and stock situations creep in, but the impression of a spine chilling and truly 'fantastic' reality remains to stamp this as a first class Horror film."

[dwk]

Tom Weaver had Criterion looking into adding a German silent film adaptation of Island of Dr. Moreau, but, according to this post at the Classic Horror Film Board, it is a no go:

Well, shucks. My idea for an added bit of bonus material on the Criterion didn't work out. I got after them to include as an extra DIE INSEL DER VERSCHOLLENEN, a German silent from the early 1920s; it was shown at a Berlin film festival in 2000, on a triple-bill with ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU and TERROR IS A MAN, and the plot was described as:

"On a South Sea Island, a mysterious doctor's experiments include creating monsters by combining human and animal body parts."

I don't think the movie credits H.G. Wells' novel so I guess it is to Wells' DR. MOREAU what NOSFERATU was to Stoker's DRACULA. Criterion actually delved into it and contacted the German archives, etc., but -- the movie's not owned by anybody, so the only way the German government can allow the print to be released to a home-video company is IF the home-video company gets the permission of the descendants of every single person in the movie.

[skuhn8]

Referring to the above, I'd really like to learn more about German policy on 'films not owned by anybody'. Is there a large body of work that falls into this category and is it really as absurd as it sounds? Is this how they approach what we call 'public domain'?

[lubitsch]

Referring to the above, I'd really like to learn more about German policy on 'films not owned by anybody'. Is there a large body of work that falls into this category and is it really as absurd as it sounds? Is this how they approach what we call 'public domain'?

Yes. Films whose legal status is unclear are referred to as "verwaiste Filme" meaning orphaned films and since european copyright tends to protect the rights of all participants and their heirs, you'd first have to try to clear all rights and find everybody connected with the production. If one person blocks the release for whatever reason, it's goodbye. Naturally you can risk to release the film and hope that nobody ever has the idea to call you and remember his grandfather who was cameraman on the film, but that's obviously a risk few people are willing to take.

a recent tragic example was a DVD edition of the films of Peter Pewas, an unknown but brilliant outsider who only made three features between 1944 and 1956 and some shorts. The set was essentially ready with all three films and a selection of the best shorts until some rights owner appeared who demanded an absolutely fabulous sum of money. There was no way to convince the person and the film was deleted from the set and remains as elusive as it was before.

I know there are attempts to change the situation, but at the moment it's as silly as it sounds. Though being owned by Murnau Stiftung also most often means that there's no release on DVD.

[Tribe]

I wonder if that's why Kino never got around to releasing The Joyless Street, even though they had planned to do so back when they were releasing the bulk of their German silents.

[HerrSchreck]

Hah! Thanks for bringing that up-- nobody believes me when I tell them I actually held the damned thing in my hand in the St Marks Kim's back around the days they released Golem and Diary of a Lost Girl. It came out for about 10 minutes then disappeared.

[Tribe]

Hah! Thanks for bringing that up-- nobody believes me when I tell them I actually held the damned thing in my hand in the St Marks Kim's back around the days they released Golem and Diary of a Lost Girl. It came out for about 10 minutes then disappeared.

I never saw it. I saw it advertised in an insert in one of the Murnau discs...had listed everything Kino had released in terms of German silents at that time and Joyless Street is listed. I never realized any had actually been released.

[Buttery Jeb]

Added to the specs:

The Beginning Was the End: The Complete Truth About De-evolution, a short 1976 film by Devo, featuring the songs “Secret Agent Man” and “Jocko Homo”

More Devo isn't necessarily a bad thing, although I'm sure additional film or H.G. Welles-oriented features would have been more appreciated.

[otis]

Beaver

[knives]

This can't be released soon enough. I know what I'm going to be doing on Halloween.

[MichaelB]

Referring to the above, I'd really like to learn more about German policy on 'films not owned by anybody'. Is there a large body of work that falls into this category and is it really as absurd as it sounds? Is this how they approach what we call 'public domain'?

Yes. Films whose legal status is unclear are referred to as "verwaiste Filme" meaning orphaned films and since european copyright tends to protect the rights of all participants and their heirs, you'd first have to try to clear all rights and find everybody connected with the production. If one person blocks the release for whatever reason, it's goodbye. Naturally you can risk to release the film and hope that nobody ever has the idea to call you and remember his grandfather who was cameraman on the film, but that's obviously a risk few people are willing to take.

This is a major headache for the BFI National Archive, which has lobbied hard for a change to the copyright law allowing the commercial exploitation of genuine "orphan works" where despite all reasonable efforts no-one connected with the production can be tracked down. It looked as though genuine progress was about to be made - but the relevant clause was struck out of the Digital Economy Bill at the last minute, and there's been a change of government since then.

The really frustrating thing is that there's tons of fascinating material sitting in archives that can't be seen, because the archives have to abide by the law. Not least because many of them, including the BFI archive, are government-funded. And it's especially frustrating if there genuinely appears to be no living connection to the films.

[John Edmond]

Stupid question, anybody know if the gorilla suit in Island of Lost Souls is the same suit that's used in Blond Venus? They look remarkably similar, and they are after all both Paramount films from 1932.

[Jonathan S]

I'm curious why Beaver thinks the 1932 Island of Lost Souls is "presumably... in the public domain."
I've never come across a "PD" release of it except the DVD from a tiny UK company - who quickly withdrew it.

[JPJ]

Island of lost souls dvd just shipped from planetaxel.com.

[TechNoir]

I am a little confused. What does Devo have to do with this?

[knives]

Clearly they are not men.

[JPJ]

I am a little confused. What does Devo have to do with this?

I'm not a Devo expert but their first album was called Q:Are we not men?A:We are Devo!.Also The Cramps were influenced by this film,their 1981 album Psychedelic jungle has a track called The natives are restless.(Someone says to Laughton ,the natives are restless tonight sir)

[Jeff]

I'm curious why Beaver thinks the 1932 Island of Lost Souls is "presumably... in the public domain."

I couldn't figure out why that would be presumed either. It's absolutely owned by Universal.