The Body Snatcher (1945)
Director Robert Wise had just come off a job that would put him in infamy forever--he edited re Orson Welles's second film without his permission, then went and reshot the ending.
But he was a young hire ready to do what the studios asked of him, and you might guess, somehow, that he learned from the best, en absentia, by studying Welles so thoroughly. Here, a couple years later, he is directing his third film, and his third Val Lewton film. Lewton was a B-movie producer with ambition and vision, and he pulled of a whole slew of really tight, great films on low budgets, partly by grabbing talent when it was young. And cheap.
Boris Karloff was cheap, too, fourteen years after Frankenstein, and he is given a role where he can really act. And he reminds everyone he can act with the best of them. It's a great performance, as the title character. Bela Lugosi is in the credits large but has a small role, and a declining one (see "Ed Wood" for a dramatization of that decline). With music by Roy Webb, and B-movie steady Robert De Grasse behind the camera (he later shot "Born to Kill"), Wise pulls together a really first rate movie. Of course Robert Louis Stevenson's story is a terrific starting point, a kind of real version of Frankenstein, with doctors as half mad scientists cutting up corpses on the sly.
Director Robert Wise had just come off a job that would put him in infamy forever--he edited re Orson Welles's second film without his permission, then went and reshot the ending.
But he was a young hire ready to do what the studios asked of him, and you might guess, somehow, that he learned from the best, en absentia, by studying Welles so thoroughly. Here, a couple years later, he is directing his third film, and his third Val Lewton film. Lewton was a B-movie producer with ambition and vision, and he pulled of a whole slew of really tight, great films on low budgets, partly by grabbing talent when it was young. And cheap.
Boris Karloff was cheap, too, fourteen years after Frankenstein, and he is given a role where he can really act. And he reminds everyone he can act with the best of them. It's a great performance, as the title character. Bela Lugosi is in the credits large but has a small role, and a declining one (see "Ed Wood" for a dramatization of that decline). With music by Roy Webb, and B-movie steady Robert De Grasse behind the camera (he later shot "Born to Kill"), Wise pulls together a really first rate movie. Of course Robert Louis Stevenson's story is a terrific starting point, a kind of real version of Frankenstein, with doctors as half mad scientists cutting up corpses on the sly.