Rent The Raven (1935)

Spoilers follow ... - The Raven review by NP

Bela Lugosi, second billed, plays Doctor Vollin, a genius surgeon, accomplished musician and devotee of Edgar Allan Poe. He seems to be held in high esteem, is charming and talented. However, when he’s wearing his surgeon’s mask, the camera focusses on those sinister eyes, and we really don’t know quite what is going on inside the old scoundrel’s head.

He seems besotted with Jean Thatcher (Irene Ware), whose life he has just saved in a delicate operation. And yet she is promised to ultra-suave, moustachioed Jerry (Lester Matthews – fresh from playing a similarly disapproving, debonair gent in ‘Werewolf of London’ earlier that year). We then meet Bateman (Boris Karloff), bearded and shadier than a factory full of umbrellas. Every movement, stance and rolling of the eyes tells us Bateman is a villain through and through, and here he is on Vollin’s doorstep, asking the surgeon to ‘change his face’. Bateman has had a lifetime of rebuttal; “Maybe if a man is ugly, he does ugly things.” Karloff, billed first, is not well cast here. His lisping English lilt doesn’t convince when given lines like “I don’t want to do bad things no more.” There was always a studio-managed rivalry between him and Lugosi, but here, Lugosi’s theatricals are far more impressive.

Vollin does as he is asked and changes Bateman’s face, but the result is a grotesque deformity. Bateman is promised another new face if he accedes to Vollin’s villainous wishes – which begin with Bateman assuming the role of unsightly butler for a dinner party Vollin is hosting. Being such a fan of Poe, it’s not entirely surprising Vollin has a torture room filled with devices taken from Poe’s tales, chiefly ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’. Vollin doesn’t just torture people, he takes time to describe exactly the agonies his victims are facing, with Bateman as his henchman.

If this were released today, it would surely fall under the category of ‘torture porn’. Seen that way, ‘The Raven’ was ahead of its time; possibly this proved to be its downfall. Following disappointing returns and heavy criticism, it hastened the premature ending of horror film production (the feint hearts of the UK critics fuelled this too), at least until 1939, when ‘Son of Frankenstein’ proved there was still an audience for the macabre.

To say that Lugosi fails to resist the temptation to go wonderfully over the top towards the film’s close is an understatement, whereas Karloff’s villain becomes a Monster-esque misunderstood, maligned good guy - and too quickly after the villains have received their just desserts, ‘The Raven’ comes to an end with a briskly light-hearted ending.

Outrageous, but glorying in its outrageousness, this is not Universal’s best horror, but possibly it is their best vehicle for Lugosi, who owns every scene he is in. Were it not for the gleeful ham on display, the subject matter could have been deeply unsettling. The censors and critics who were appalled by Vollin’s vow to be "the sanest man who ever lived" took it all far too seriously, with dire consequences for Lugosi and horror films in general.

Old Dark House Party - The Raven review by Count Otto Black

Amazingly, two feature films were based (very loosely indeed) on Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven", in which absolutely nothing happens other than a man moping about his deceased girlfriend, and a bird flying in through his window, causing him to mope even more. This is the earlier of the two, and bears no resemblance at all to Roger Corman's fantastical comedy about rival magicians, except that Boris Karloff's in both of them.

Karloff isn't particularly good here. He's obviously trying to channel the Frankenstein monster - at one point when he's angry he snarls just like it - but his makeup this time round is somewhat less impressive, consisting as it does of a bit of latex on one side of his face and a woefully unconvincing false eye. And his peculiar but very English lisp, which sounded fine when he was playing well-meaning scientists whose experiments got out of hand, is completely wrong for an uneducated American hoodlum, though for most of the film he talks through a half-paralyzed mouth, and sounds much the same as he did in "The Bride Of Frankenstein", only not as effective.

Bela Lugosi, despite being second-billed, has far more to do, and does it far better, though he's a frightful ham, and there are moments when he pauses in an odd way between lines as if either he's reading from a cue-card or he's still having a bit of trouble with the English language. But you're never in any doubt that he's completely nuts, even though the last part of the movie requires him to be several orders of magnitude more bonkers than he was to begin with, and it's worth the price of admission just to watch Bela go crazier than a snake's armpit.

The plot of course makes no sense whatsoever. It's true that Lugosi's actions aren't meant to be remotely logical, and his basement torture chamber is justified by his Poe obsession, but why would he have all that other stuff built into his house? It's also very much a film of its time. Nothing the least bit horrible is actually shown, other than Karloff's supposedly terrifying makeup job, and the tortures Bela inflicts on his victims are of a kind where the torture consists mostly of knowing something awful is going to happen to you and being unable to escape, so I think that 15 certificate must have been awarded a very long time ago. Several characters exist for no reason other to try (and fail) to make us laugh, as if we need comic relief padding in a movie not quite an hour long. And the heroine has very little to do except scream, and, inevitably, be kind to the ugly guy, with predictable results. Though it's interesting that the "hero" is ultimately no more use in a crisis than she is, and accomplishes nothing at all.

It's old, it's creaky, and there's no acting you could honestly say was good in a conventional sense, but it's lovable in its own daft retro way. And Bela's a hoot!