What the Dead Know

Imagine you’re unjustly locked up for second-degree murder. You were just protecting your wife. You don’t know your own strength. It was a freak thing. You’re a musician, an aesthete, soft-spoken, demure by nature, a gentle soul with a shuffling walk and the slight lunge of those ready to topple into the grave. You get out of the pen, you’re womanless, hard-up, turned away from some big shot you were promised would give you a little work. You walk the streets in a beat-up hat and too-short baggy trousers when you meet this guy, friendly as can be. He recognizes you from the papers, remembers your case, knows you got a raw deal. He buys you a coffee, says he’s a PI, offers some work, kid stuff, just watch a house for a while, track the gentleman’s movements. The catch is the gentleman in question is the very judge that sent you up. Seems a little queer, but you can’t be picky. You’re too trusting, or fatalistic, to know when you’re being set up.


That’s the lowdown for John Ellman, the hero of The Walking Dead (1936), and if I’m trying to put you in his raggedy shoes it’s only because he’s embodied by Boris Karloff with such texture and compassion that you can’t help but sympathize—even if you never get the full story about that earlier killing. Ellman takes the fall for a mafia hit and gets the chair—a novelty of the period and much in the press. But somewhere a pair of young lovers who witnessed the crime lose sleep over the fact that they never came to Ellman’s defense. They finally confess, but it’s too late. The news gets to the prison just as Ellman gets the juice. But wait, the lovers are scientists, working for a visionary experimenting with reviving the dead. So Ellman corpse is sent directly to the lab, hooked up to electrodes, and Karloff’s given a major dose of déjà vu, five years after Frankenstein (31). He’s alive, again, remote, as though swallowed by completely by the melancholy that hounded him in his previous life. He doesn’t talk much, so the question lingers: what does he remember of death?

Directed by Michael Curtiz, still far from Casablanca (42) but in excellent form in a flurry of prestige Bs, The Walking Dead is a haunting picture. It’s riddled with artifice and coincidence as our Lazarus begins to quietly enact his wrath, yet it’s endowed with spectral beauty and a deep emotional current thanks mainly to Karloff, as well as an inspired feeling for musical accompaniment—Ellman’s final request is to have a cello player score his death march—and a spare lighting and production design that looks back to German Expressionism and forward to noir. The story also looks forward to The Dead Zone (83), David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about the loneliness that grips those back from the void and carrying secret knowledge.

The Walking Dead is by far the best thing in Warner’s Karloff & Lugosi Horror Classics box, though Zombies on Broadway (45) is also very worthwhile. A horror-comedy that’s mostly comedy, it finds Wally Brown and Alan Carney’s New York talent agents coerced by a showbiz mobster into going down to a Caribbean isle to fetch a genuine zombie. Lured by a leggy American showgirl, they eventually find Bela Lugosi secretly cooking up a zombie formula. He fools them into digging their own graves and spending the night in his castle and, you know, hilarity ensues. It’s actually a fairly entertaining bit of hysterical hokum if you can stomach the crude racial gags, but more importantly for classic horror fans it represents a very weird effort to capitalize on a previous hit. Just like Lugosi’s zombies, my eyes popped out of my head when I recognized not only Sir Lancelot, once again playing a calypso singer serenading newcomers with sweetly forbidding ballads, but also Darby Jones, once again playing a shirtless giant zombie. Both were pivotal to the unforgettable spell of Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie (42), the second film to emerge from producer Val Lewton’s legendary low-budget horror unit at RKO. Their reprisals here are far less distinguished, though at least Jones gets his comeuppance this time around.

Frankenstein 1970 (58) features Karloff as the original mad scientist’s great-great grumpy grandson. In need of funds to buy an atomic reactor so he can make more monsters, he allows a Hollywood film crew to use his castle. The industry satire is all stale cliché, the story is limpid and limited, the monster’s head in wrapped up in so many bandages he looks like Gumby post-surgery. It’s genuinely curious that director Howard Koch chooses to cover most of the scenes in long, unbroken takes and wide shots, though they only make things drag even more. Though it’s got Lugosi, Karloff and Peter Lorre on board, You’ll Find Out (40) seems mainly a showcase for radio personality Kay Kyser and his College of Musical Knowledge. It’s not much of a horror movie, though it did seem really horrible. I had to shut off the TV and run screaming.

Easy riders and raging farm boys: Robinson and Davis glow as adult lovers in Kid Galahad, Bogart broods beautifully in Invisible Stripes, now on DVD

Nicky Donati (Edward G. Robinson) handles fighters, a vocation that allows him to pull the puppet’s strings with one hand while collecting the take with the other. They pass through cities, living out of hotels, shrugging off the coming and going of small fortunes, Nicky and his partner Fluff (Bette Davis), while Nicky’s beloved mother (Soledad Jiménez) and sister Marie (Jane Bryan) are cloistered in the countryside and the convent respectively, away from the mugs, bon vivants and hangers-on. From Fluff, too. So at the heart of Kid Galahad (1937) is a man with a double life, a more forgiving existence if you need to seriously bend your ethics and still be able to look ma in the eye.

“Did you ever see a bellhop that didn’t want to become a fighter?” Nicky asks, but it’s a rhetorical question. He discovers Ward Guisenberry (Wayne Morris, remarkable in a tricky role) when the kid is sent up by the hotel management to fix drinks for a party that genuinely looks like a gas, with Fluff working the room in a very sexy low-cut dress and Nicky actually getting a haircut from a proper barber in a proper barber’s chair while still holding court, surrounded by mostly plastered guests. Ward is a good-natured hulk from the sticks with an involuntary smile that has the ladies fawning. He just wants to save up to buy a farm, he sheepishly confesses. Nicky sees a perfect mark. Fluff sees an innocent in need of an education, and maybe a little protection from his new mentor. Thereafter dubbed Kid Galahad, Ward will, against Nicky’s plans, become the biggest thing that ever happened to Nicky, punching his way to the championship. He’s also the catalyst that will usher Nicky’s well-ordered life into chaos.

Now on DVD from Warner, Kid Galahad is a truly wonderful picture, directed by Michael Curtiz in elegant traveling shots and a selective use of close-ups in only the most emotionally pointed scenes. The script is credited to Seton I. Miller, and offsets the fairly familiar plot with an intriguing milieu thick with exploitation—the press, the management—and with immensely textured, very adult characters experiencing different kinds of love. A budding romance between Ward and Marie drives the action, but what makes the film so rich are the increasingly desperate Nicky, whom Robinson makes a feast of—and there’s a terrific scene with ma, rolling along in babbling, un-subtitled Italian—and, most especially, Fluff. Davis’ inhabiting of this sort of kept woman, with her sad, helplessly easygoing smiles, is so tender and touching, so knowing. The scene where she tells Nicky it’s time for them to part is underplayed and quietly heart-wrenching. These unmarried, not young lovers have had a good ride, a long history of hustling, bustling and merriment that has finally reached its terminus.

I haven’t mentioned Humphrey Bogart, who plays Turkey, Robinson’s rival, and another in a long line of heavies. Better to emphasize his terrific supporting role in Invisible Stripes (39), also newly on disc from Warner and, while not nearly as good a film, features plenty of interesting elements. We first meet Cliff (George Raft) and Chuck (Bogart) while they share their final shower in Sing Sing. After walking through the prison gates—guarded by a saintly old guy named Peter—they board a train and exchange their plans for their newly emancipated lives. Chuck fantasizes about a gorgeous blonde and the high life, while Cliff says he’s going home to his family and the straight and narrow. Chuck just laughs at this, telling Cliff he’ll never get anywhere because of general prejudice against ex-cons, because he’ll always be wearing those invisible stripes. Cliff’s the hero of the movie, full of good intentions; Chuck’s a gentleman in his way but a cynic—yet, as we’ll eventually see, it’s his worldview the movie agrees with completely.

Through the characters of Cliff’s little brother Tim (William Holden, so young here I didn’t even recognize him, which is to say so young he isn't yet 'William Holden') and his girl Peggy (Bryan), the film emphasizes the self-loathing of the working class and the impossibility to rise above one’s station without the aid of dirty money. Raft was not a good actor, but you could rarely accuse him of overdoing it, and his overriding serenity can just as easily be read as mounting resignation here. With no breaks coming his way and the cops breathing down his neck, Cliff eventually falls back into crime with Chuck and his cohorts—among them a pleasingly sneering Marc Lawrence—telling his folks that he’s selling tractors instead of robbing banks. The movie’s best line comes when Tim meets Chuck, well-heeled and driving a fine car, and asks him if he sells tractors, too. The way Bogart just says “Yeah” in response is a thing of bone-dry comic beauty.

Invisible Stripes seems like its building to a conventional, tidy moral statement, yet, perhaps unintentionally, it finally emerges as an exercise in brute determinism. Indeed, the noblest and wisest character turns out to be Chuck, who may be crooked but at least knows the score, and who’ll finally risk everything to protect his one true friend, right up to the final shootout. And Bogart’s so confident and subtle, measured and cool, playing a character so carefully shaded he’s almost out of place. Surely someone with smarts saw this and realized which one of these tough guys was the real star. It would be only two more years before High Sierra (41) and The Maltese Falcon (41).