Synopsis: Mob attorney Nolan (Ricardo Cortez) is dead certain he’s got Judge Shaw (Joe King) scared — so scared that he’s sure to acquit Nolan’s underworld client. But to his surprise, Judge Shaw doesn’t knuckle under, and the man is sentenced to ten years at Sing Sing.
For the mob, this is intolerable. Shaw has to be taken care of, or future mob threats won’t carry any weight. The trouble is, any action against Shaw will implicate Nolan and his associates.
A solution is found in one John Ellman (Boris Karloff) a quiet man who’s just finished a stretch in prison, thanks to Judge Shaw. Mob fixer Loder (Barton MacLane) arranges for Trigger (Joe Sawyer) to bump into Ellman, strike up a conversation, and offer him a job. Posing as a private detective, Trigger tells Ellman that Shaw’s wife, suspicious of an affair, has hired him to shadow the judge. He wants Ellman to stake out Shaw’s house and take notes on his comings and goings.
This, of course, establishes Ellman’s presence outside the judge’s house for several successive nights. And on the last night Ellman returns to his car to find a body lying in the back seat — that of Judge Shaw. But as luck would have it, a young couple — Nancy (Marguerite Churchill) and Jimmy (Warren Hull) are passing by and witness the shady characters planting the body in Ellman’s car.
Soon Ellman is on trial for Shaw’s murder — and just to make sure he’s convicted, Nolan himself is representing the unlucky ex-con.
Nancy and Jimmy debate whether to get involved in the case, knowing that the reach of the mob is quite long. In the end they decide to come forward with what they know — but it’s too late, and Ellman is executed for the crime.
But the young couple’s employer Dr. Beaumont (Edmund Gwenn) himself steps forward with a radical suggestion: with the experimental technique Beaumont has developed, Ellman can be brought back to life….
Comments: Boris Karloff’s stint at Warner Brothers was originally supposed to include The Return of Dr. X. But Karloff had fulfilled his contract and left the studio long before that one got made, and his role instead went to a woefully miscast (and famously unhappy) Humphrey Bogart. One of the films Karloff did make at the studio was this interesting little gangster / horror hybrid. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it makes good use of its star, who cut his teeth in these sort of underworld roles before hitting it big in James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931).
Watching it again I was reminded of the old E.C. horror comics, which often featured stories of some hapless schmo who suffers a cruel death by nasty types and then metes out revenge from beyond the grave. Ellman’s punishments aren’t as ironic as those dreamed up by E.C., of course, and none of it has E.C.’s pronounced mean streak, but it kind of has the same vibe. Each of the hoods gets a visit from Ellman, who shuffles morosely forward. The murderers, desperate to get away, stumble out in front of moving trains, or fall out open windows, or accidentally shoot themselves while trying desperately trying to unholster their weapons. I’m not sure if it’s even meant as humor, but there is something grimly amusing about it. Cinema in the 1930s wasn’t known for a lot of dark humor, but this seems to have it.
Ricardo Cortez is pitch perfect as the smooth-talking mob lawyer Nolan, and Barton MacLain and Joe Sawyer are agreeably rough around the edges as hoods. I’ll watch anything Marguerite Churchill is in, and Edmund Gwenn makes sure that his slightly-befuddled-but-good-hearted character meter is dialed up to 11.
The Leech Woman
Synopsis: Endocrinologist Dr. Paul Talbot (Phillip Terry) is seeking a way to help women retain their beauty and youthful appearance. His wife June (Colleen Gray) shows up at his lab, and it is clear their relationship is not a healthy one. She is embittered and resentful; Paul no longer pays attention to her because she is ten years older than he is, and her beauty has faded. She is now a broken woman and an alcoholic, and she is painfully needy. She wants Paul’s love but now knows she’ll never have it, and has come to tell him she will grant the divorce he has long been asking for.
From the reception area June calls family lawyer Neil Foster (Grant Williams) and arranges to meet with him to begin drawing up the divorce papers. Moments later she is confronted by a wizened old woman named Malla (Estelle Helmsley) who tells her she has seen June in her “dreams of blood”. She says Paul will die and in so doing, will provide June with new life. Frightened by the old woman’s words, June leaves.
Malla then goes to meet with Paul. She tells him that she is over 150 years old, and has been kept alive by a powder derived from a particular plant that only grows in a certain region of Africa. Her supply of the powder has almost run out, but she allows Paul to test a small sample of it.
Paul discovers that the powder is a powerful hormone that can retard the aging process, and is desperate to know where Malla found it. Malla says that she will show him, but in return he must pay for her passage back to to her village in Africa.
Back at home, June meets with Neil and they discuss how to divide up the property. But Paul returns home elated, and tells June he doesn’t want a divorce, but instead wants to take her to Africa and look for the secret plant extract that Malla told him about. June is overwhelmed with relief, and agrees.
On the expedition they sign up guide Bertram (John van Dreelan) to lead them to the village of Malla’s people. But June is despondent when Paul reveals that the only reason her brought her was so that she could be the test subject for Malla’s fountain of youth.
Paul, June and Bertram are taken captive be Malla’s people. Once there, Malla allows them to witness a strange ceremony: she selects a man of her tribe and kills him by stabbing him through the base of the skull with a strange ring with a stinger attached, piercing the pineal gland. By combining the fluid of the gland with the powder, she creates a concoction that makes her young again.
Malla offers June the opportunity to do the same. Offered a selection of men in the village to provide her with the fluid needed to restore her youth, June suddenly turns and selects Paul as her victim.
After Paul is killed, June drinks the potion and finds herself young and beautiful. She and Bertram find they must escape from the village in order to go home. But June quickly discovers that the effects of the drug are only temporary, and she must find a regular supply of victims if she wants to stay young….
Comments: This dumb Universal programmer is one of several fountain-of-youth melodramas that were hitting theaters around the same time. It was a distinctly unimportant project, released on the bottom of a double-bill with Hammer’s The Brides of Dracula. While unquestionably of B-picture quality, The Leech Woman is at least moderately entertaining, and as a bonus — by accident, really — it plays with a couple of interesting ideas.
In The Leech Woman, midcentury America is depicted as a materially wealthy but morally bankrupt society fixated on appearances, where women are granted enormous power and status exclusively for their physical beauty. When that beauty inevitably fades, the women become social outcasts — despised and pitied by the very men who once eagerly competed for their affections.
Once the film establishes this dystopian social structure, it is easy to appreciate beauty as little more than a commodity that June will do anything to regain — even if she has to kill for it.
The moment she recaptures her youthful appearance, June immediately weaponizes it, pretending to be her own (fictitious) niece in order to seduce family attorney Neil (Grant Williams). She chooses him even though he is engaged to the lovely Sally (Gloria Talbott); and she chooses him even though there’s nothing to indicate that she was particularly attracted to him before.
Neil’s main selling point is that he’s close at hand, and June is in a hurry. Her transformations to a youthful self — each transformation costing a man’s life — are fleeting, and each time she ages again she becomes increasingly decrepit.
But before we condemn June for a futile chase after that which time has inexorably claimed, let’s not forget Neil Foster, who goes out of his way to earn our contempt. Grant Williams was the perfect choice to play the weak and duplicitous Neil; he’s good-looking in an insubstantial way, and he doesn’t look like someone who would ever hit another man in anger, or take a risk in order to change the trajectory of his life.
But he looks like someone who’d be willingly led around by the nose by June, in her persona as beautiful young niece Terry. She tries to lead him upstairs to her bedroom and he is only too eager to comply, ignoring Sally, who is impatiently honking the car horn from out in the driveway. He’s only thwarted in his quest for an impromptu nooner by Sally bursting into the house and Terry unexpectedly transforming into an old crone and hiding in the next room.
Neil isn’t the only jerk in the movie; in fact nearly everyone we meet is contemptible in one way or another. Paul is emotionally abusive, June is shallow, Bertram is greedy and superficial. The only people who come away looking relatively decent are Malla and Sally. Malla is well-played by Estelle Helmsley, who seems to have started her screen career late but who made her relatively few roles count. Sally was played by Gloria Talbott, who starred in the unlucky bride in I Married a Monster From Outer Space.
The Horror Incorporated Project 
