Horror movies were out of fashion in 1936, but director Michael Curtiz must have missed the memo. His Boris Karloff scare show The Walking Dead was scheduled as a quickie assignment to fill time for the busy director between more prestigious pictures with Fredric March and Errol Flynn. According to Curtiz biographer Alan K. Rode, Curtiz never tossed off any movie. He gave The Walking Dead his full attention, concentrating on enough details to push the shooting schedule several days over the 18 alotted by Jack Warner.
Horror pictures became a tough row to hoe after the enforcement of the Production Code. The Censors’ Sunday School mindset rejected most morbid themes and most anything mixing sex and death. England rejected some horror imports outright. A picture like Edgar Ulmer’s The Black Cat, which doted on sadism, suicide and necrophilia, was simply out of the question. Post- Code horrors ran for cover behind Edgar Allan Poe (The Raven) or comedy ( The Bride of Frankenstein). Yet Boris Karloff still carried big-star clout, so a few horror pictures were made in ’35 and ’36. Columbia’s gothic thriller The Black Room gave Karloff dual characters to play. Universal’s The Invisible Ray pitted him once again opposite Bela Lugosi.
Even the ‘discerning’ New York film critics recognized the moody The Walking Dead as quality goods. The hybrid plot constructs a gangster vengeance storyline, interrupted by a horror-inflected sub-theme. Framed by vicious racketeers Nolan and Loder (Ricardo Cortez & Barton MacLane), the ex-con John Ellman (Boris Karloff) is quickly convicted and executed for a murder he didn’t commit. But the research scientist Dr. Beaumont (Edmund Gwenn) claims Ellman’s body and restores its life functions via a breakthrough medical procedure. The achievement ought to be revolutionary in impact, but Beaumont fixates more on his own spiritual enlightenment. He’s intent on getting Ellman to describe his experience while dead … to divulge secrets from beyond the grave.
A ‘haunted’ gangster picture.
The hybrid storyline intentionally blurs the film’s genre identity. Director Curtiz handles the gangster aspect in the familiar snappy Warners’ style. Ricardo Cortez’s lawyer plays cynical games in the courtroom, and Joe Sawyer plays a confident hit man named Trigger. Curtiz and cameraman Hal Mohr put equal effort into the spooky content, using filtered close-ups of Karloff, electric displays in Dr. Beaumont’s Mad Lab, and splashing Germanic shadows across walls.
The spook factor climbs as the undead Ellman unaccountably materializes in locked rooms, like a ghost. The good news is that Karloff’s ‘uncanny’ performance is not upstaged by the gangsters’ wisecracks. A creature hovering between two worlds, Ellman is less a monster than a morbid, accusing presence. As in a short story or movie parable about corpses that refuse to die, the slow-moving phantom Ellman eventually migrates to a rain-soaked cemetery, as if drawn to death.
His body crippled by the Electric Chair, Ellman lumbers about as might an impaired zombie. To give his face an even more cadaverous appearance, Karloff removed a dental bridge and sucked in his right cheek. He used that trick to play Frankenstein’s monster, and reprised it twenty years later for the English film The Haunted Strangler. This horror creation does speak, taking advantage of Karloff’s talent. Ellman makes every statement count. Ellman asks each villain, “Why did you have me killed?”
The ‘A’ unit production has little in common with the 1940s horror efforts of Poverty Row studios like Monogram and PRC, that all but chloroformed the acting career of Bela Lugosi. Curtiz and Hal Mohr stage Ellman’s scenes with great skill — Karloff keeps appearing out of nowhere, to scare the wits out of his next victim. An appropriate ambiguity is maintained, too. The Walking Dead never decides if Ellman is a literal zombie or a Tell-Tale Heart manifestation of guilt.
Karloff is of course superb; the other leads deliver characteristically efficient Curtiz performances. Second-billed Ricardo Cortez is perfect as a verminous mouthpiece for the mobsters, a smiling liar and conspiratorial murderer. As a pair of youthful lab assistants that want to marry, Marguerite Churchill and Warren Hull are the story’s weak link. The script too-quickly forgives the couple for refusing to testify at Ellman’s murder trial. During his brief visit to the Afterlife, the resurrected Ellman learned that we was framed, and exactly who did the framing; so we wonder why he’s so forgiving of the couple that condemned him by omission.
Edmund Gwenn is always effective; after twenty years in pictures he was just a few years away from becoming a very familiar character actor. His doctor Beaumont is a younger, less sentimentalized version of the entomolgist of Them! His demand that Ellman blab all about the Afterlife is not endearing.
Bringing executed men back to life was a frequent theme in ’40s horror picturess, running neck and neck with that even more creative Mad Doctor pastime, mix ‘n’ match Brain Transplants. It wandered into other genres as well. Ten years later Stanley Rubin dropped the idea into his story for the oddball noir Decoy. From a short story by Ben Hecht, the macabre idea of reviving a corpse became a weird sidebar story in Norman Jewison’s Chicago memoir Gaily, Gaily (1969).
Oh, you’re going to nothing me to death!
We theorize several reasons for why the Production Code office passed The Walking Dead. No scenes threatened innocent people with torture. No sex angle is involved. Ellman’s vengeance is directed at known criminal murderers. The violence is strangely passive: Ellman effectively ‘inspires’ the deaths of those that did him wrong. Michael Curtiz’s direction is so slick, viewers don’t notice that Karloff doesn’t actually kill anybody. — God is concocting incredibly convenient accidents. — The show is censor-proof, with no objectionable material to complain about.
The writers are careful to lower the curtain with a nod to pro-Church sentiment, to assuage the Code censors. A faux-religious ending tableau settles on a stone angel in the cemetery. Edmund Gwenn wanted Ellman to give him a daily-planner rundown on the Afterlife, but all he gets is a Bible quote: Our God is a jealous God. Karloff goes out with a few inspirational lines, finishing the first phase of his Hollywood career with dignity.
Despite its gangland trappings, The Walking Dead looks much more modern than the same year’s The Invisible Ray, which indulges in mad labs, astronomical wizardry and a death ray suitable for a Flash Gordon serial. Warners didn’t invest in the outlandish sets and visual effects seen in Curtiz’s earlier horror pix in Technicolor, Doctor X and Mystery of the Wax Museum.
But Michael Curtiz cared enough to see that Dr. Beaumont’s medical lab was stocked with crackling electrical apparatus, plus something special. The ‘artificial heart’ that helps revive John Ellman is fashioned after the Lindbergh Heart, an invention that the famed aviator was trying to develop in the early 1930s. The real-life experimental device is also mentioned by name in the dialogue.
The horror genre then went dark for two years, picking up in 1939 when Universal attempted to re-boot its classic Frankenstein franchise. The second phase of Karloff’s Hollywood career would include a number of less prestigious roles, albeit always with star billing. The theme of vengeance from beyond the grave was repeated several times in a series of Columbia program pictures, starring Karloff as variously wronged mad doctors. They range from tragic innocents to unfeeling maniacs. One of our favorite dialogue lines arises in The Man with Nine Lives, in which Karloff’s incredibly guilty mad Doctor Kravaal is caught red-handed with several corpses. Kravaal grumbles bitterly:
“You call EVERYTHING murder, don’t you?”
The happy news is that Broadway success revived Karloff’s career and demonstrated his versatility, leading to twenty more years of highly active work in film, radio, TV, and recordings for children. When he made horror films, it must have been because he liked to work.
Same story, different treatment entirely.
Thirty years later, a thematic-structural remake of The Walking Dead arrived in the form of a high-gloss gangster tale with New-Waveish trimmings: John Boorman’s 1967 crime revenge saga Point Blank. It is identical in structure and similar in execution to the Michael Curtiz film, substituting spacey Alain Resnais visuals for gothic trimmings. The parallels pop out in relief. Just like Karloff’s John Ellman, Lee Marvin’s crook ‘Walker’ is a fallible mortal presumed dead, an implacable, unstoppable force who illogically returns to life to menace his gangland enemies.
One after another, all of Walker’s foes are killed, yet each dies without his direct assistance. It’s never explained how Marvin’s Walker survived a mob rubout in the first place. When his revenge is complete, Walker seems to dissolve into another dimension. The inference is that he indeed did die in the film’s opening, that he carried out his vengeance as some kind of post-modern existentialist phantom spirit.
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