The Dead Walk — and accuse!  One of the best non-classic horror films of the ’30s is a polished production: Michael Curtiz and cameraman Hal Mohr give star Boris Karloff a spooky spotlight for a macabre tale of justice from beyond the grave. Karloff is brilliant as an executed convict resurrected by science, who becomes an avenging angel against the crooks that framed him. The glossy new video remaster is sourced from the film’s original nitrate — and looks it.

The Walking Dead
Blu-ray
Warner Archive Collection
1936 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 66 min. / Street Date October 29, 2024 / Available at MovieZyng / 21.99
Starring: Boris Karloff, Ricardo Cortez, Edmund Gwenn, Marguerite Churchill, Warren Hull, Barton MacLane, Henry O’Neill, Joseph King, Addison Richards, Paul Harvey, Robert Strange, Joseph Sawyer, Eddie Acuff.
Cinematography: Hal Mohr
Art Director: Hugh Reticker
Costumes: Orry-Kelly
Film Editor: Thomas Pratt
Original Music: Bernhard Kaun
Dialogue director: Irving Rapper
Screenplay by Ewart Adamson, Peter Milne, Robert Andrews, Lillie Hayward story by Adamson, Joseph Fields
Executive Producer Hal Wallis
Produced by Louis F. Edelman
Directed by Michael Curtiz

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 that the Production Code office passed The Walking Dead because no scenes threatened innocent people with torture. No sex angle is involved. Ellman’s vengeance is directed at known criminal murderers, and 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 even 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 show is 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:

The happy news is that Broadway success revived Karloff’s career and demonstrated his versatility, leading to twenty more 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, who illogically returns to life to menace his gangland enemies, an implacable, unstoppable force.

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.

The Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray of The Walking Dead benefits greatly from a careful digital restoration. We can see where the extra days in the shooting schedule went — Hal Mohr’s camerawork and dramatic lighting are given full rein, highlighting Karloff’s sensitive performance. The expressive visuals are the effect of fine artistry backed by studio resources.

We are told that an improved B&W film stock was introduced in late 1935, that could be duplicated with finer grain and better contrast. Made just a year after  The Bride of Frankenstein, this picture and Tod Browning’s  The Devil Doll look much more modern. Much of the last reel plays out in the near-darkness of a cemetery in the pouring rain. Everything registers clearly in this new remaster.

The audio track also makes a good impact. We never ask why the unemployed Ellman doesn’t exploit his brilliant musical talent. He plays classical piano, which figures as a theraputic aid for his back-from-the-dead ‘recovery.’  The very good music score is by Bernhard Kaun, who is mostly noted for uncredited orchestrations. For Dr. Beaumont’s Mad Lab resurrection of John Ellman, Kaun’s music picks up an insistent beat, for a few moments reminding us of the weird tone of Franz Waxman’s score for The Bride of Frankenstein.

The disc carries two audio commentaries, which is not a bad idea for a show barely over an hour long. In a commentary from 2009, Greg Mank goes deep into the film’s production history, detailing a long list of no-no content nixed by the Production Code office before filming began. It’s no wonder that horror films became scarce — what producer needed the aggravation of such official resistance?

In his new commentary Alan K. Rode begins by applauding the HD remaster, scanned from the film’s original nitrate negative. Alan goes into deep detail on actor bios, covering scores of familiar faces with unfamiliar names. He has a cogent story to tell for every personality mentioned. He has the full story of the real-life ‘medical quackery’ inspiration for both Walking Dead and the later Decoy: a researcher by the name of  Robert E. Cornish  conducted unsavory, ghoulish experiments to bring people back to life, misusing a synthetic drug called methylene blue.

The Leva Filmworks’ 2012 documentary Michael Curtiz: The Greatest Director You Never Heard Of was made for Turner Broadcasting. Its stellar round-up of interview spokespeople lauds the director’s career. The film clips are great, backed by accolades from the likes of Steven Spielberg and William Friedkin.

An unrestored original trailer is present; also featured are two restored-to-HD Technicolor cartoons by Friz Freleng. The WAC chose 1936 titles that might have been screened with the main feature, 88 years ago. No cat comes back from the dead in Friz Freleng’s The Cat Came Back, a poignant tale of mouse survival in rough political times.  In Let it Be Me a Bing Crosby-like crooning rooster takes an innocent country hen for a ride to the city. The IMDB is essential to find out more about many Warners cartoons: on these ‘Blue Ribbon’ reissues, revised main titles billboard producer Leon Schlesinger but omit all other creative credits.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Walking Dead
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary by Greg Mank
Audio commentary by Alan K. Rode
TV documentary Michael Curtiz: The Greatest Director You’ve Never Heard Of
Cartoon The Cat Came Back
Cartoon Let It Be Me
Original Trailer.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: November 20, 2024
(7232walk)

Final product for this review was provided free by The Warner Archive Collection.

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