Director: Michael Curtiz
Writers: Robert Tasker, Earl Baldwin, George Rosener (uncredited), based on the 1931 play The Terror by Howard W. Comstock and Allen C. Miller
Producers: Hal B. Wallis (uncredited), Darryl F. Zanuck (uncredited)
Cast: Lee Tracy, Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Preston Foster, John Wray, Harry Beresford, Arthur Edmund Carewe, George Rosener, Leila Bennett, Robert Warwick, Willard Robertson, Thomas E. Jackson, Mae Busch, Harry Holman, Tom Dugan
New York City newspaper reporter Lee Taylor (Lee Tracy) is investigating a series of grisly murders that are being committed during nights of the full moon. He discovers that the police have called in Dr. Jerry Xavier (Lionel Atwill), the director of the local surgical research academy, to examine the body of the latest victim. Dr. Xavier concludes that the latest victim, like the others, was strangled, cannibalized, and had a wound to the brain inflicted with a scalpel. Since the scalpel that was used is of a special type only available locally at Xavier’s academy, police conclude that someone at the institute must be the murderer. To avoid bad publicity for his academy, Dr. Xavier makes a deal with the police to conduct an experiment to expose the killer.
The Flashback Fanatic movie review
Doctor X is one of the early two-strip Technicolor process films. The surreal color palette created by the limitations of that motion picture innovation lends a weird atmosphere to this feature. This technical gimmick is almost all the movie seems to be remembered for by many. This is quite unfair as Doctor X was a unique horror film, and it dealt with some edgy material that the Motion Picture Production Code would ban in film production a few years later.
None other than Michael Curtiz directed Doctor X. Yup, the guy that made Casablanca (1942); maybe you’ve heard of it. Curtiz lavishes lots of weird angles, creepy shadows, and stark lighting upon the sets and cast. One year later, Curtiz would direct the lively and contemporary urban fright flick, Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). His third Warner Brothers horror film The Walking Dead (1936) starred the great Boris Karloff.
Speaking of stars, Doctor X boasts the debut horror film performances of two talents that would appear in some of the best of the genre in the '30s. Appropriately, soon-to-be scream queen Fay Wray’s first line is her trademark scream at soon-to-be horror movie reliable Lionel Atwill. Wray and Atwill would also go on to co-star in Mystery of the Wax Museum and The Vampire Bat (1933). Fay Wray achieved immortality as Ann Darrow, the beauty in the beast’s paw in King Kong (1933). Atwill would go on to play everything from mad scientists to red herrings in many more horror and mystery movies. He even starred as the evil mastermind Professor Moriarty opposite Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1942).
In the film’s very first scene, Doctor X establishes an eerie urban atmosphere. The foggy, nighttime, waterfront locale, with a morgue and a brothel on the same street, creates a hard-bitten environment that is mourned by the moans of ship horns. While newspaper reporter Lee Taylor’s scaredy-cat antics are meant to be the comedy relief so endemic to this film era, it also underscores the creepiness of the situation.
What is most striking about this early scene is the casual mingling of our reporter hero Taylor in the whorehouse that he enters to make a call to his office. He is allowed the use of the phone without being a paying customer and sneaks some appreciative glances at a couple of the gals, then heads back outside to go about his business. This is the kind of streetwise camaraderie that was probably pretty typical among the working class in the big city during the hardscrabble times of the Great Depression. Later, there are also characters partaking in liquor, and Taylor makes a few quips about booze and even snags a flask to keep for “medicinal purposes.” Pre-Code films loved to tweak the noses of the temperance crowd during this prohibition era. This was still more of the working class sensibilities of the day that resonated with the audience. These were some of the attitudes that probably led to the stricter enforcement of the film censorship code beginning in 1934. Fortunately, prohibition ended by then, so movie characters weren’t condemned to drinking nothing stronger than soda pop.
There are plenty of other edgy subjects dealt with once we arrive at Dr. Xavier’s surgical academy and are introduced to his staff of fellow doctors. This is one of the wildest aspects of the film; each of Xavier’s colleagues is made to seem as weird and potentially guilty as possible. Atwill’s Dr. Xavier also acts in a suspicious manner. In fact, each of the doctor characters are given the sort of scenes, props, and lighting that make them all seem to be mad scientists. Each of them has a rather convenient background or traumatic experience that seems perfectly appropriate for “the Moon Killer.” This is all very contrived, yet it is still quite a bit of giddy and ghoulish fun.
However, contrivance reaches the breaking point when, as part of an experiment to determine if one of his fellow doctors is the killer, Dr. Xavier has somehow had lifelike wax figures created and brought to his country estate’s lab to put on display. These are all likenesses of the killer’s victims that Xavier hopes will elicit the reaction from the guilty man that his fantastic gizmos will detect. Just how the hell did Xavier have these wax figures created for his spur-of-the-moment experiment to expose the killer, when there is no reason they would have already been made? Perhaps Atwill’s Ivan Igor from Mystery of the Wax Museum was following the Moon Killer murders and made figures of the victims to display in his New York museum? Yeah, that’s it! Then all Xavier had to do was borrow them for his experiment! I’m a friggin’ genius! If I can figure that one out, I ought to be ingenious enough to invent my own synthetic flesh and become a porn star!
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