6th of 7 Michael Curtiz (after The Adventures of Robin Hood, Mildred Pierce, Casablanca, Night and Day and Mystery of the Wax Museum, before The Walking Dead)

It's Thesis Time Again!

What interests me about Doctor X is not the vivid Technicolour cinematography, the presence of Fay Wray or the goofy plot, but how it engages with then-current notions of disability, eugenics and the fallacies of science. Doctor X isn't about a mad scientist- it's about a whole house of mad scientists, all under suspicion of committing a bizarre series of cannibalistic murders. The titular Doctor is the ringleader, conducting an experiment to find out who this murderer is. Inspired by his theories about traumatic memories, he decides to re-stage the crimes while he and his fellow scientists are hooked up to what is effectively an early polygraph machine. The first time this happens, however, it's a complete failure, resulting in the death of one of the scientists. The film's general attitude towards Xavier and his scientific leanings is one of deep skepticism. While his theory about motive does seem to be accurate, his attempts to trap the killer are doomed to failure due to his hubris. It's only thanks to the street smarts of Lee Tracy, reporter and wiseguy, that the killer is actually caught. Good old-fashioned pluck beats the egghead science.

Indeed, the scientists are all coded as dangerous or deceitful, either through their physical appearance, their field of research or both. At least two of them are interested in cannibalism, the ultimate taboo and a sign of their disconnect from 'normal' society, while three quarters of them have some form of physical disability; one has lost a hand, the other an eye. One is psychosomatically confined to a wheelchair. The one who is not disabled appears to have an unnatural sexual fascination with sadism. In every way, then, these scientists are not to be trusted. The eventual serial killer is an interesting exercise in eugenics too. At the film's climax, they explicitly state that they were interested in 'making a crippled world whole!', thereby linking their scientific work (which involves studying the bodies of the cannibalised in Africa) to disability. Yet the film undercuts this by not only emphasising the callous origins of his revolutionary synthetic flesh but subtly suggesting that he is motivated by some perverse attraction to the moon. Watching the full moon appear, our killer makes an animalistic snarling noise and retreats to a room to cover himself in his synthetic flesh, an object he treats with a disturbing reverence. The film's most unsettling moments are where the lines between the authentic and the synthetic are blurred- the wax sculptures of the Moon Killer's victims, the methodical application of the synthetic flesh. Scored only by the sounds of machinery and lit by the nauseating flesh tones of two-strip Technicolour, these moments play with the uncanny to flesh-crawling effect, and are undoubtedly the high moments of what is quite an uneven film.

It does feel like Lee Tracy and Lionel Atwill in particular are existing in entirely separate universes, linked only occasionally by the presence of Fay Wray as one's love interest and one's daughter. They're both great, but it feels very odd to have them in the same location but only once or twice interacting. You find such a tactic in Mystery of the Wax Museum (another Curtiz horror film from the era) which is to 'cut', in the drug parlance, the gruesome horror with comedy to make it more palatable, though it goes further back to films like The Cat and the Canary. Lee Tracy is a lot funnier than I remembered, especially his Dry Bones skit, but it does take out some of the wind in the sails of Xavier's experiments and their deeply unsettling quality. Of the three horrors Curtiz made, I'd say this is the weakest, though i'll be reviewing the other two fairly soon for my work. It looks gorgeous and has real menace, but it just doesn't gel. Still, recommended from me.

If you're interested, I'm linking an article from a blog I'm a huge fan of talking about the film. They're excellent on Pre-Code cinema, and have a great index system for finding out about films from the era you may not have heard of. Check it out! (http://pre-code.com/doctor-x-1932-review-lee-tracy-fay-wray/)

Curtiz in Order

1. Mildred Pierce
2. The Adventures of Robin Hood
3. The Walking Dead
4. Mystery of the Wax Museum
5. Doctor X.
6. Casablanca
7. Night and Day