Saturday, July 21, 1973: Maniac (1963) / The Human Monster (1939)

 

Synopsis: Stranded in a small town in southern France after a spat with his lover, painter Jeff Farrell (Kerwin Matthews) decides to stay on at the local inn and sketch the idyllic landscapes of Provence for a while.

Farrell finds himself attracted to 19-year-old Annette, the daughter of Eve Beynat, who owns the inn he’s staying at. Eve skillfully deflects Farrell’s attention away from Annette and toward herself, and the two quickly become lovers.

Farrell wants Eve to come away with him, but she cannot. She can never be free, she says, so long as she is married to her husband Georges, who was committed to an insane asylum four years ago. She explains the event that caused his mental collapse: Annette had been raped by a man in the village. Out of his mind with rage and grief Georges brutally killed the rapist with an acetylene torch.

His insanity, Eve says, was temporary, caused by the attack on his daughter. Even though he is unlikely to ever be released, she visits him there every two weeks. She tells Farrell that Georges will never consent to a divorce but feels she ought to let Georges know that she has found someone else.

But after her next visit to the asylum, Eve returns with a surprising offer from Georges: he will consent to a divorce — if Eve and her new boyfriend help him escape from the asylum. Georges promises to flee to England immediately once he’s free.

Eve reasons that there isn’t a real risk to this. After all, it isn’t as though they’d be releasing a maniac onto the countryside, as Georges’ crime was one of passion. Georges has already hatched a plan to get out, and all the two are required to do is wait for him outside the grounds and get him away in Eve’s car. The escape goes exactly as planned, and Farrell and Eve feel they’ve gotten away with it.

But they learn that on the night of the escape, a hospital guard vanished as well as Georges. The next day, they discover the guard’s body hidden in the trunk of Eve’s car. And from the house late at night, Annette keeps seeing the light of an acetylene torch flickering in the shed in which her father used to work….

Comments: One of Hammer’s black-and-white psychological thrillers from the early 1960s, The Maniac is a crackerjack Jimmy Sangster-penned yarn that begins slowly but which skillfully ratchets up the tension, with plenty of twists and turns along the way. The film’s early conflict is a love triangle: Farrell being pulled between Annette and her mother makes us slightly uncomfortable with what’s happening —  and while we suspect someone is being played, the nature of the con isn’t exactly clear. After Georges’ escape, things happen with dizzying speed, and even to the jaded 21st-century viewer, some of the plot twists are quite unexpected.

As you might expect, some of these twists are less than probable, but it all works for the running time of the film, and even though it takes a while to get going, Maniac is really one of Sangster’s best scripts.

Michael Carraras was not the best director in the Hammer stable but he turns in a good film here — certainly better than the surprisingly inert Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb. The look of the film is a bit unusual for Hammer, as the production departed from the usual sets at Bray and opted for location shooting in the Camargue region of France.

Kerwin Matthews (best known for the role of Sinbad) is convincing enough as Farrell, though he’s always struck me as something of a lightweight. It’s been long rumored that Sangster wrote the role with Peter Cushing in mind; you can imagine how great that would have been. The lovely Nadia Gray is quite spectacular as Eve Beynat, you easily buy into her campaign of seduction. Our old friend George Pastell is quite welcome as the police detective trying to see through the web of lies he’s forced to navigate. Like a lot of the black-and-white Hammer films, this isn’t a movie that’s widely seen these days, but well worth seeking out.

 

The Human Monster

Synopsis: At Scotland Yard, a group of Detectives Inspector are being chewed out by their superior.  Five bodies have been pulled from the Thames in recent months, and while they are clearly meant to look like suicides, no one doubts they are murders.  The Yard is no closer to an arrest than it was at the beginning, and the press is having a field day playing up the ineptitude of the police.  Detective Inspector Larry Holt (Hugh Williams) is told to redouble his efforts to solve the crimes – or else.  He is instructed to take charge of a prisoner who being returned to London from the United States, a career criminal named Fred Grogan (Alexander Field). Grogan is being accompanied by a Chicago police detective named O’Reilly (Edmon Ryan).   Holt’s captain tells him that the Americans want O’Reilly to shadow a British detective in order to learn the methods of the Yard.  “I’ll attach him to you,” the captain tells Holt contemptuously.  “That way he won’t learn anything.”

Meanwhile, insurance agent and London philanthropist Dr. Feodor Orloff (Bela Lugosi) makes a loan to Henry Stuart (Gerald Pring), a formerly well-to-do man who has had a run of bad luck. Orloff suggests that Stuart sign over his life insurance policy to him as collateral, and Stuart agrees. Orloff talks about his charity work at a house for the blind, and he tells Stuart to visit the house the following evening. As he talks to Stuart, he types out a short note on a Braille typewriter, wraps the note around a coin, and throws it out onto the street, where a blind street violinist picks it up and carries it away.

 Later, Holt meets O’Reilly and his prisoner at the railway station, and they head back to Scotland Yard.  Once Grogan is taken away to a holding cell, O’Reilly pulls out a rubber hose and recommends the Chicago way of getting information from a suspect: a good old-fashioned beat down.  But Holt has other plans. A drunk is put in to the cell with Grogan, and Grogan takes a great interest in the newspaper the drunk has in his coat pocket.  Later we learn that the drunk was an undercover policeman placed by Holt.  Grogan found a classified ad in the newspaper that had been meant for him alone — an ad written in a simple code that directed him to Orloff.

The next evening, Stuart turns up at the home for the blind. As he enters, a furtive resident pushes a Braille note into his hand.  Confused, Stuart puts the note into his pocket.   He is greeted by Orloff, who seems shocked when Stuart mentions he has a daughter —  Orloff thought he had no living relations. Stuart’s tour ends abruptly when Orloff leads him to a room where Jake, a Rondo Hatton-esque grotesque, is waiting for him.

Before long Stuart’s body is fished out of the river. On a hunch Holt has the water in the man’s lungs tested; it turns out that Stuart was drowned in tap water, not the muddy water of the Thames. And the Braille note in Stuart’s pocket reads simply “MURDER”.  Based on this, Holt begins to suspect that Dr. Orloff and the home for the blind are involved, somehow, with the crimes….

Comments: The Human Monster is the clunky American title for British thriller The Dark Eyes of London, and while it’s quite harrowing by 1939 standards it’s also a lot of fun, as these Edgar Wallace mysteries tend to be. Bela Lugosi gets a very juicy bad-guy role as Dr. Orloff, a doctor / insurance agent who runs a home for the destitute blind on the side.

Lugosi usually enjoyed top billing at this point in his career, and he was well-paid for his efforts,  but all the same he was often relegated to relatively small or red-herring roles. I’ve always felt this worked against him, making him seem an overvalued commodity by the studios. But 1939 was unquestionably a good year for him.  He not only appeared in this thriller, but got to show off his versatility in Son of Frankenstein, and also had a nice non-genre cameo in Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka, playing a stern Soviet official. Had Lugosi sought out more character parts like the one in Ninotchka his career might have played out somewhat better than it did; but for whatever reason — Lugosi’s preferences, his agent’s lack of foresight, or just bad luck — it wasn’t meant to be.

Lugosi’s Dr. Orloff, of course, is running a racket. He sells life insurance policies to people he knows have no living relatives, arranges for himself to be named the indirect beneficiary of their policies, and then has them killed by his goon Jake at the home for the blind, their bodies dumped out the back of the building into the Thames. This obviously leads to a substantial body count which even Scotland Yard can’t ignore. But as luck would have it the stolid Detective Inspector Holt is on the case, with the American Lt. O’Reilly as his sidekick.

I can’t say I’m overly impressed by Dr. Orloff’s scheme. Since all the people fished out of the Thames had purchased insurance policies from his own office, it isn’t difficult to follow the money back to him. It might be that Orloff always expected that the police would eventually catch on to his plan (after all, he has a yacht anchored on the river and a change of identity all ready to go) but it nevertheless seems to be pretty sloppy work.

In my partial synopsis above I didn’t even get to Diana Stuart, the daughter of unfortunate policyholder Henry Stuart, who is played by Greta Gynt. Gynt is a bit of sunshine in this otherwise morbid tale, and she is both a talented actress and a winning screen presence. Unfortunately for Gynt she never quite hit the big time; when she finally moved to Hollywood in the late 1940s the spark that had set her apart had faded a bit and she wasn’t able to make the kind of impression she makes here.