Republic Pictures Horror Collection

Republic Pictures Horror Collection
Blu-ray
Kino Lorber
1944 – 1946
Starring Erich von Stroheim, Richard Arlen, Tom Powers
Written by Dane Lussier, John K. Butler
Photographed by John Alton, William Bradford
Directed by George Sherman, John English

Founded by Herbert J. Yates in 1935, Republic Pictures was the Frankenstein monster of movie studios, pieced together from moribund entities like Monogram Pictures, Mascot Pictures, and small shops like Australia’s Invincible Pictures. Those studios had been hammered by the Great Depression yet they remained enticing to a man with merger on his mind. And it didn’t hurt that these same studios—with their predilection for cheap cowboy films and cheaper monster movies—fit Yates’s prudent approach to the movie business and his own bottom line.

Though the studio occasionally financed films like John Ford’s The Quiet Man, Republic would forever be known as the cowboy factory, even though the studio’s rare forays into the supernatural have their own quirky, homegrown appeal. Kino Lorber plays devil’s advocate for those bottom of the bill shockers with the Republic Pictures Horror Collection, a Blu-ray set featuring four of the studio’s bargain-basement spookshows. As to the merits of the movies themselves, two out of four ain’t bad.

One of the great multi-taskers in the entertainment business, wunderkind Curt Siodmak had little idea that he was creating a franchise when he conceived of Donovan’s Brain in 1942. The story of a telepathic entity with limitless power, the book’s unholy marriage of science and the occult inspired several interpretations, including a 1944 radio broadcast starring Orson Welles (Republic would finance Welles’s Macbeth in 1948). Siodmak himself would add to the mythology with two sequels, 1968’s Hauser’s Memory, and Gabriel’s Body, written in 1991 by the then 89 year-old writer.

Siodmak’s story was filmed three times over the coming decades, beginning with Republic’s The Lady and the Monster starring Richard Arlen, Vera Hrubá Ralston, and Eric von Stroheim as Franz Mueller, a chrome-domed medico fixated on the human mind. Mueller dreams of an autonomous, imperishable life form; a thinking organism that will live forever, even if it means keeping this new species in a jar on his desk.

Arlen and Ralston play Patrick Cory and Janice Farrell, Mueller’s assistants. The two are romantically inclined, much to the chagrin of the lonely Mueller whose interest in Janice extends beyond her talent for lab work—it’s a queasy love triangle, and with a new lodger in the lab, it threatens to become a quadrangle.

That newcomer is the brain that once belonged to W.H. Donovan, a celebrated financier whose tyrannical impulses live on thanks to Mueller’s obsessive experimentation. No longer imprisoned by Donovan’s earthbound skull, the brain’s power expands beyond its glass cubicle to exert Svengali-like control over humans. It takes possession of Cory’s mind and body, the flesh, blood, and muscle that Donovan needs to settle his many scores. Meanwhile Janice is left to fend off the an increasingly fervent Dr. Mueller. 

The typical Republic release was a brisk affair of an hour or less but The Lady and the Monster is an epic, clocking in at 86 minutes. Director George Sherman might have been better off with just 60 minutes—the film staggers out of the gate (a long nightclub sequence doesn’t help) but the pace accelerates as Donovan’s omniscient presence takes hold.

As Mueller’s robotized assistant, Arlen gives a steely, almost solemn performance while von Stroheim is relatively restrained as the lovesick crackpot—like Donovan’s brain, von Stroheim was known for his own brand of megalomania, and this story of mind control and murder fits the actor like a steel glove.

In 1944 the public knew Vera Ralston as an Olympic figure skater. As an actor, she’s a great figure skater—if she stumbled as much on the ice as she did in front of the camera, her film career might never have happened. In 1952 Yates left his wife for Ralston and spent the rest of his days as Vera’s most ardent advocate, but movie audiences remained unmoved by her Olympian figure and pretty face.

More proof that a pretty face isn’t everything: character actor Tom Powers had a face that could stop a clock but it jumpstarted more than a few movies, including 1944’s The Phantom Speaks. Powers plays the granite-jawed Harvey Bogardus whose flinty profile would match his heart if he had one. Implacable, merciless, the man is a stone-cold killer with an executioner’s blasé attitude toward a condemned man. Now Bogardus faces his own hangman for the murder of a stranger who merely looked at Harvey’s wife the wrong way. But before Bogardus pays the piper he’s expecting company, a “psychic scientist” named Paul Renwick.

Renwick is overly intrigued by communication with the afterlife and he’s looking for a man with a will so strong he might prove immortal. The eternally angry Bogardus fits the bill so this odd couple makes a pact—after Harvey’s execution his spirit will return to terra firma using Renwick’s metaphysical roadmap. What Renwick didn’t expect was that Bogardus’s malignant life-force would claim another victim: Renwick himself, now the vehicle for Bogardus’s revenge.

The Phantom Speaks is yet another variation on Donovan’s Brain but in many ways it’s more compelling than The Lady and the Monster. Powers is genuinely unnerving, a noir version of Anton Chigurh. And as the soft-spoken Renwick, Stanley Ridges’s transformation from bookworm to terminator is almost as spooky (the actor had practice, he endured the same metamorphosis in 1941’s Black Friday). John English, an editor and director with a raft of serials and westerns on his resume, uses his basic but efficient skill set to make his point and move on, the perfect gameplan for a movie about a calculating killing machine.

The Catman of Paris (← click here for review) is calculating as well, a shameless matinee mash-up of six-gun action and gothic thrills—the director was Lesley Selander who helmed close to a hundred cowboy films for Universal and Republic. When released in 1946, Catman went out on a double bill with an equally toothless thriller, but they made for a killer marquee: The Catman of Paris and Valley of the Zombies.

By 1945 former matinee idol Ian Keith was one weird-looking dude. It’s no wonder director Philip Ford gave him a surplus of bug-eyed close-ups in Valley of the Zombies, because nothing else in this horror-comedy is remotely affecting. It’s Republic’s take on one of Universal’s light-hearted murder mysteries but Robert Livingston and Adrian Booth are not Dick Foran and Peggy Moran.

Livingstone and Booth are doctor and nurse respectively but they act more like slumming vaudeville actors with a bad joke for every occasion. And they have a lot to “joke” about; the blood supply in their laboratory has mysteriously dwindled over the weeks, a phenomenon traced to Ormand Murks, a living-dead man played by Keith. He needs more plasma and, surprise, he’ll kill anyone in his way.

The lazy script could use a transfusion too, and with Republic’s fabled penny-pinching undermining every shot, Valley of the Zombies (there’s no valley or zombies in this movie) is tedious even at 56 minutes.

Good or bad, all the films look swell in Kino’s new Blu ray set. Along with the new 4K scans of the films themselves,  there are commentaries from Tim Lucas for The Phantom Speaks and Valley of the Zombies, and a commentary on The Lady and the Monster from Stephen Bissette. David Del Valle and Miles Hunter do the honors for The Catman of Paris along with a second commentary for Zombies. As an extra-added attraction, Tim and Stephen share an on-camera chat about The Lady and the Monster. Rounding out the package is a generous selection of trailers from Republic productions.