The Return of Doctor X (Vincent Sherman, 1939)

A sequel in name only to 1932's Doctor X (both films have newspaper reporter characters, murders, and mad scientists named Dr. Xavier but are otherwise different stories about different people), The Return of Doctor X is infamous for its supposed miscasting of Humphrey Bogart a few years before he became a huge A-list movie star. Bogart didn't want the part but was under contract with Warner Brothers and couldn't turn it down. The behind-the-scenes legend is that the WB studio execs thought Bogart was getting a little too high and mighty and wanted to slap him back down by forcing him into an unsuitable role. (The execs were soon to lose this leverage after The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca.) I have no idea if this is an apocryphal story or the truth, but whatever the facts, the conventional wisdom says that The Return of Doctor X contains one of Bogart's worst performances within a movie that isn't much better. I say the conventional wisdom can pound sand. It's no masterpiece, but it's much better than its reputation.

I'll admit that Bogart is a little miscast, but he's genuinely creepy and takes the part seriously, even though he didn't want it and never appeared in another horror film. The film itself is a solid, well-paced b-movie with likable characters and funny, zippy dialogue, and it gets the job done in just over an hour. It's a lot thinner than the decade's major horror masterpieces, but it has a lot more personality and substance than it's generally credited with possessing.

The movie begins with New York City newspaper reporter Walter Garrett (Wayne Morris) (frequently referred to as "Wichita" by his colleagues in honor/derision of his hometown) setting up an interview with theater actress Angela Merrova (Lya Lys) in a nearby hotel. When Walter arrives at the hotel, he finds Angela dead, drained of blood, with a deep stab wound in her chest. Like a true journalist, he calls his paper first to get the scoop and then calls the police.

When homicide detectives arrive, the body has mysteriously disappeared, angering head detective Roy Kincaid (Charles C. Wilson), who thinks Walter's pulling a hoax. (I love his sarcastic parting line to Walter after they search the hotel room: "See ya later, braintrust.")  Angela surprisingly arrives at the police station a few days later pale but alive and ready to sue. Walter is fired by the exasperated editor-in-chief (Joseph Crehan).

Meanwhile, Walter's good friend, young doctor Michael Rhodes (Dennis Morgan) is preparing to assist hematologist and head surgeon Francis Flegg (John Litel) with an emergency blood transfusion, but their donor never shows up. A nurse with the same blood type, Joan Vance (Rosemary Lane), volunteers her services in place of the absent donor, and the transfusion is rescued. Michael hits on Joan after the procedure, which is highly unprofessional but it's 1939 so everybody's into it.

Walter visits Michael to tell him his wild story when the news hits that the absentee donor has been murdered. Michael is called in to be the medical examiner, and Walter tags along. The donor has the same blood drainage and stab wound that the mysteriously alive Angela did. Michael takes some blood samples of crime scene blood stains and is shocked to discover that not only do they not match the victim or a potential perpetrator, they don't even appear to be human or animal. He takes the strange blood to Dr. Flegg's apartment for his opinion and is greeted by Dr. Flegg's assistant, Marshall Quesne (Humphrey Bogart), a pale weirdo holding a rabbit who probably has a mysterious past (Quesne, not the rabbit, though now that I think about it, where the hell did that rabbit come from?). Flegg and Quesne act suspiciously. Much weirdness ensues.

This is all a reasonably pleasant time, professionally delivered. I especially enjoyed the dynamic between Walter, a boyishly unflappable Midwestern transplant who acquired his New York journalist street smarts without losing his heartland folksiness, and the unnamed editor, a constantly beleaguered East Coast hard-ass who gives Walter the exasperated business with colorful insults like "you cornfed wizard!" and "you Wichita Frankenstein!" Good stuff. Why don't people like this movie? Is it an Ishtar situation, where the majority of the naysayers haven't even seen it? Is it because Bogart hated it?

Vincent Sherman, an actor turned screenwriter turned journeyman filmmaker, acquits himself nicely in his first film as director. Nothing in the filmmaking tells you who Sherman is, but it's skillfully and competently dispatched. Sherman was one of those Hollywood directors for hire who got the job done efficiently and professionally but was never going to be a Hitchcock or a Hawks or a Ford. This is most obvious in 1957 noir The Garment Jungle, when creative and personal clashes between director Robert Aldrich and star Lee J. Cobb grew so intense that Cobb got Aldrich fired and replaced with Sherman midway through shooting. The obvious differences between the scenes shot by Aldrich, a director with a powerfully eye-catching visual style, and the more conventional scenes shot by Sherman make the movie a fascinatingly contradictory experience.

Bogart thought Boris Karloff or Bela Lugosi should have played Quesne, and he was probably right, but he's too hard on himself and the movie. He seems visibly uncomfortable in the role, but I can't entirely dismiss the performance. Bogart's awkwardness creates an onscreen tension that humanizes the character and makes him even creepier. Lugosi and Karloff are so right for a part like this that they're almost too right. Bogart is a strange choice that makes the movie stranger, and I'm a proponent of the strange. 

 

Deadly Obsession (Jenõ Hódi, 1988)

Despite its generic title, Deadly Obsession is an oddball little psycho-killer movie with a unique feel and lots of personality. The acting is hit and miss in an endearing way, and the driven young man directing it has a pretty unique life story. It's not a great movie, but it's likable, strange, funny, and charming, and a couple scenes deliver on the menace and suspense.

Jenõ Hódi, a Hungarian movie lover from Budapest, moved to New York City to get his master's degree in film from Columbia University. While still a student, he hustled and scraped together financing from a South African-based movie producer for a feature film he'd cowritten with two classmates. The resulting movie, shot on the campus of and primarily cast with students from Columbia, made history as the first feature film to be released by a Columbia student who was still attending school. Though it went straight to video in the United States and West Germany, Deadly Obsession got a theatrical release in most of Europe and in South Africa. After graduation, Hódi moved to Los Angeles and directed several low-budget action movies, including American Kickboxer 2, before moving back to Budapest and creating another history-making first, Hungary's first film school. Hódi continues to run the film school and helps produce its students' films. He also just finished his first feature in years, Skating on the Razor's Edge, a war-based anthology drama with stories set in World War II and the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Back to the beginning of his career. Deadly Obsession takes place on the campus of Gotham College, a barely fictionalized version of Columbia. Campus janitor John Doe (the amazingly named Joe Paradise) spends his time running experiments on rats and getting angrier and angrier about his station in life compared to the rich-kid students he cleans up after. He's also mad about the college's recent deals with a mega-corporation and its squashing of anti-corporate student protests. I have to say, other than the rat experiment hobby, I'm on his side here. He loses me with the next part of his plan. He will poison one of each product made by the corporation unless the president of the school gives him one million dollars. To show that he's serious, he has already poisoned one item on the campus, a carton of chocolate ice cream located in the convenience store of the student apartment high-rise where he works.

The president, despite his anger at being interrupted on his private phone number while he's showering in his swanky pad, takes the guy seriously and sends the cops to the convenience store to remove the chocolate ice cream. Unfortunately, student and apartment resident Denise (future filmmaker Darnell Martin (I Like It Like That, Cadillac Records, many TV shows), in one of her only acting roles) has already purchased and taken two bites of the ice cream before making the bizarre but life-saving choice to set the rest of the ice cream bowl down and take a shower. Who showers mid-bowl of ice cream? Denise (and her body double for the breast shots) does, that's who. This is important to the story because '80s horror films are required to have a nude scene every thirty minutes. While in the shower, she begins choking up blood and falls to the floor.

John Doe, who has been surreptitiously following the action since secretly poisoning the ice cream, sneaks into Denise's apartment to watch the poison do its work. He's shocked to find her still alive, and she gets a hazy look at him. Before he can do anything about it, undercover cop Dino Andretti (Jeffrey R. Iorio), bursts in to save Denise, and John Doe has to 23 skidoo back to the boiler room. Dino is a cocky young detective who greatly irritates his partner Lt. Walsh (Martin Haber), a frequently exasperated veteran of the force who's constantly applying decongestant nasal spray. Something tells me these guys are going to develop a grudging respect for each other before the movie ends.

After a brief hospitalization, Denise is escorted back to her apartment by Walsh, who warns her not to mention the poisoning to anyone so they can keep their investigation secret. She has to tell her roommate and best friend Pamela (Monica Breckenridge) that it was run-of-the-mill food poisoning. She also has to lie to explain the presence of Dino, who is keeping watch over Denise until John Doe is found. He plays the part of an uncharacteristic rebound one-night-stand who won't leave, but Pamela is not quite buying it.

We know Dino's a good guy from the exciting opening scene that otherwise has nothing to do with our story. As a character-and-atmosphere-are-a-million-times-more-important-than-plot guy (even though I do plot synopses on this blog because I think describing horror plots is a good time), I'm a huge proponent of scenes that reveal character but otherwise have nothing to do with plot mechanics.  Anyway, we like Dino from the beginning, but he's a bit much when he has to stay in Denise's apartment. He relentlessly hits on her, goes through her underwear, and uses Pamela's towel and drops the towel to expose himself when Pamela calls him out on it. Unprofessional, Dino! Denise and Pamela are unflappable and give as good as Dino gets. Pamela even gives him a solid small-penis zinger. This behavior made me like Dino a lot less, but when Denise asks for some privacy, Dino says, "Sure thing, babe," and puts on a pair of novelty oversized sunglasses he somehow had been carrying around in his back pocket the entire time, which made me like him again. Aw, Dino, I can't stay mad at you. Something tells me Dino and Denise are going to develop a grudging respect and attraction for each other before the movie ends.

The rest of the movie plays out as a solidly suspenseful cat-and-mouse chase between the unhinged John Doe hellbent on murdering his only witness and Denise, Pamela, and Dino. The extended scene in the campus gym at night is especially memorable and involves the swimming pool, the basketball court, the weight room, and the locker room, as well as multiple bathrooms, offices, lockers, and supply rooms. For a cast and crew with not much experience beyond student films, the results are pretty impressive.

Using the Columbia University campus as the film's sole location, other than a few shots of nearby streets, gives Deadly Obsession a much different look and feel than most New York movies. The student apartment building is lived-in and atmospheric, and it has a dreamlike mixture of specificity and anonymity that makes it seem like the events in the film could be happening anywhere and nowhere. Most of the bits with the apartment's goofball front desk/security guy are funny (except for one ultra-hacky racist joke), and Joe Paradise gives a memorably nutty performance as John Doe. It's so wild that his acting career consists of only this movie, a Darnell Martin-directed movie, and an episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent. Joe Paradise, if that is your real name, where are you?

I'm not sure how much Deadly Obsession would interest the casual moviegoer, but if you're a fan of independent, low-budget, DIY genre flicks, b-movies, and '80s horror, I think this one is worth your time. It's eccentric and scrappy and has a sense of humor. It looks and feels like it was made by people. Most movies of the 21st century don't.