Among the wealth of good stuff coming out on DVD today--let me make particular mention of Season Two of Wonder Showzen, Robert Altman's elegiac Prarie Home Companion and the mostly forgotten, somewhat underrated early Eighties Disney feature The Fox And The Hound--by far the most important release is Warner Home Video's Hollywood's Legends Of Horror boxed set.
These are horror movies (or more accurately, thrillers) from the thirties, the golden age of the genre. But these pictures were produced by MGM and Warner Bros., studios that really didn't do this kind of thing. MGM in the thirties mostly stuck to Oscar-baiting prestige pictures, and Warners did brassy musicals and gangster epics. When these studios stepped outside of their comfort zones, things could get...weird.
The two efforts from Warner Bros. included here, Doctor X and the imaginitively titled Return Of Dr. X, at least play to the studio's strengths: Plenty of snappy dialogue, breakneck pacing and great supporting turns by contract players. Doctor X is by far the better picture, shot in two-strip Technicolor and featuring expressionistic sets by Anton Grot, but Return Of... has one great asset: Humphrey Bogart as a skulking henchman, complete with mood hair!
The other pictures in this set come from MGM, a studio that had no concept of how to do this. That inexperience was probably a good thing, since none of these are mired in any kind of formula. Mark Of The Vampire and The Devil Doll unfortunately show the continued decline of the studio's resident weirdo visionairy, Tod Browning: they're well-shot and competently made, but awfully uninspired.
The final two movies in this set are great treats, though. The Mask Of Fu Manchu represents typical thirties "yellow peril" nonsense, and its portrayal of an Asian supervillain with a pathological hatred for white people would be incredibly offensive if the movie wasn't so deliriously entertaining, and if Boris Karloff's performance in the title role wasn't so damn cool.
Finally, the last movie in the set, Mad Love, is frustratingly uneven, with some deeply unnecessary comedy relief, but director Karl Freund creates such a strange, dreamlike atmosphere--even the opening credits are strange--and Peter Lorre is so deeply creepy yet utterly heartbreaking as a scientist who thinks he can force a woman to love him, that it easily ranks as one of the best horror movies of the thirties.
Or any era, come to think of it.
