The Raven (1935)
Directed by Lew Landers

Film Review

Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, two of Universal Pictures' biggest stars after their name-making appearances in Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931), were brought together on screen for the first time in Edgar Ulmer's The Black Cat (1934).  This film, a grim satanic thriller with some memorable visuals, was such a success that the studio could not resist bringing the two horror icons back for a re-match.  The Raven, another gruesome romp supposedly inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, was the only occasion on which Lugosi got to play the main character, although Karloff still received top billing, as he did on each of the films in which the two actors appeared together.  To say that Lugosi makes the most of this opportunity is putting it mildly.  Famously resentful of Karloff's greater popularity, he almost wipes the floor with him.  No wonder Karloff disliked the film.

Once again, Karloff gets to pay the disfigured monster, complete with one dead eye set in a face half-paralysed in an evil lour. with Lugosi giving the archetypal mad scientist role a good run for its money, helped along by the gruesome imagination of one Edgar Allan Poe.  Both actors overplay the melodrama shamelessly and yet their characters are frighteningly real.  Lugosi's descent into murderous insanity is explicable (all men of genius apparently go off the rails when they fail to get the object of their desire), and Karloff's tortured humanity prevents him from being just a run-of-the-mill monster.  As a death-obsessed Lugosi busily indulges in his sadistic fantasies, finally putting to use the horrific torture instruments he has been knocking up in his spare time for the past umpteen years, Karloff is visibly racked by internal conflict, the yearning to look like Rudolph Valentino at war with a natural impulse not to see a pretty young thing crushed to death by a raving lunatic as her dear papa lies on a stone slab waiting to be sliced in two.

Unusually even for a Universal horror offering, the tone of The Raven is relentlessly morbid, lightened only occasionally by some slightly incongruous comic interludes and a smidgen of unintentional humour.  It could hardly be more different from Roger Corman's 1963 film of the same title, an outright comedy that sees Karloff hamming things up outrageously in the company of two other horror stalwarts, Vincent Price and Peter Lorre.  Neither film has much to do with Poe's famous poem, although Universal's film does at least capture its distinctive graveyard aura, in spite of the slightly overdone Grand Guignol theatrics.

In common with most of Universal's horror films of this era, there are some striking visuals, the highpoint being a truly nightmarish scene in which Lugosi howls with demonic laughter after inflicting his cruel disfigurement on Karloff.  Unable to bear the sight of the multiple mirrors that surround him in Lugosi's operating theatre, Karloff shoots wildly at his own reflection, shattering the glass in what looks suspiciously like the inspiration for the much vaunted 'hall of mirrors' sequence in Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai (1947).

Far from being the runaway success that Universal had hoped for The Raven proved to be something of a box office disappointment.  Evidently, its graphic depiction of torture and disfigurement was too much for the sensibilities of a mid-1930s American audience and it even resulted in a short-lived ban on horror films in England.  After some spectacular successes, it looked as if Universal's run of horror films had suddenly lost its appeal and there was, after this overzealous foray into the murderously macabre, a noticeable attempt by Universal and its competitor studios to lighten their horror movies.  The first golden age of horror in American cinema was at an end, but Universal's association with the genre was far from over.

Film Synopsis

Dr Richard Vollin is a brilliant surgeon who has retired so that he may concentrate on his private research.  Reluctantly, he is persuaded by Judge Thatcher to perform a life-saving operation on his daughter Jean, who has just been badly injured in a car accident.  Fully recovered, Jean becomes a close friend of Vollin, who confides in her his fascination with the author Edgar Allan Poe.  So enamoured of Poe is he that the surgeon has constructed copies of the torture devices described in his works, including a working replica of the pit and the pendulum.  Judge Thatcher is appalled when he learns that Vollin is infatuated with his daughter and insists that the affair must end so that Jean can marry her fiancé, Jerry Halden.  Vollin is enraged and sees an opportunity for revenge when Edmond Bateman, a criminal on the run from the police, shows up on his doorstep and begs him to perform an operation that will alter his face.  Instead of improving Bateman's appearance Vollin transforms him into a hideously deformed monster and insists that he will only give Bateman the face he wishes if he agrees to help him in his revenge against the Thatchers.  Jean accepts Vollin's invitation to a dinner party at his house, totally oblivious to the terrors that the night has in store for her...