The movie opens with a bus crashing into a transmission tower after sliding off the road during a terrible rainstorm. Everyone onboard is electrocuted, but one passenger, Dan McCormick (Lon Chaney Jr.), miraculously survives. Dan is a carny grifter who performs as Dynamo Dan the Electric Man, doing an act he describes as consisting of "yokel shockers" to "fool the peasants." Most of the act is a staged performance, but he does use real electricity for part of it. After reading about the accident, doctor and scientific researcher John Lawrence (Samuel S. Hinds) visits Dan in the hospital and leaves his card. Dr. Lawrence suspects that Dan has built up an immunity to electrical shock after years of working with electricity, hence his surviving the accident, and wants to conduct more research.
A now-unemployed Dan visits Dr. Lawrence's mansion/research laboratory after his release from the hospital. The mansion's occupants also include Dr. Lawrence's niece June (Black Friday's Anne Nagel), cook/butler/servant Wong (Chester Gan, referred to in the closing credits as "Chinese Boy" despite having a character name and being 33 years of age at the time), Corky the dog (playing himself), and Dr. Lawrence's scientific research partner Dr. Paul Rigas (Lionel Atwill). (A newspaper reporter played by Frank Albertson also becomes an important character.)
Dynamo Dan's nice-guy demeanor immediately endears him to Dr. Lawrence, June, and especially Corky, and he agrees to temporarily move in for room, board, meals, and salary as a research subject for Drs. Lawrence and Rigas. He will be administered low-level doses of electricity, and the doctors will study his blood samples, reflexes, etc. The fact that Dr. Rigas dreams of creating a race of electrified supermen is a source of conflict between the two researchers, but Dr. Lawrence is not as alarmed by it as he should be, especially considering the research they're working on with Dan.
While Dr. Lawrence is out of town at a convention, Dr. Rigas amps up the juice and administers far more electricity to Dan than is ethically kosher. The easygoing nice guy who loved playing with Corky and chatting with June is now a shell of a man, withdrawn, listless, and depressed, and hooked on the electricity like a junkie. Not only is he addicted to the juice, he's also now under the command and control of Dr. Rigas. After the final treatment, Dan is lit up like a Christmas tree, an electrified halo of light surrounding his entire body. It looks crazy as hell. Dr. Rigas gives him a rubber suit to conserve the electricity, which looks even crazier.
When Dr. Lawrence returns from the conference and sees what's happened to Dan, he's not too happy, though, to be honest, he should've seen this coming. You can't let a guy who wants to create an army of electrified supermen live in your mansion and work in your lab, no matter how tight of bros you are. When Dr. Rigas realizes he's never going to convince his colleague that this electrified superman biz is a major breakthrough in the electrified sciences, he decides to set Dan loose on Dr. Lawrence. It doesn't end well for anybody, and Dan ends up on Death Row. You can guess what happens when they put him in the electric chair. We're talking an electrified rampage, eventually leading back to Dr. Rigas.
Perhaps the funniest part of the movie is the lack of mention of Dan's glowing electrified body halo when a sea of reporters, prison employees, and detectives call their various bosses. They just mention that Dan's on the loose and is at such-and-such location. NO ONE, and I mean ABSOLUTELY NO ONE, thinks to say, "The guy you're looking for is glowing and electrified." I'd be leading with that shit. It's like if Godzilla were loose and wearing a Hawaiian shirt, and I called the authorities and told them some dude in a Hawaiian shirt is trashing the town without ever mentioning that he's a giant fucking lizard.
Besides the novelty of a glowing Lon Chaney Jr., Man Made Monster is a typical hubris-of-man mad scientist movie that hits the usual beats, but it's skillfully photographed and edited, the narrative is concise and entertaining, and the cast is solid (including the dog). The bond between Dan and Corky the dog is also delivered with more pathos and less cutesiness than you'd expect. The Rigas and Dan roles were originally intended for Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, respectively, but I'm actually a little relieved it didn't happen, despite my Lugosi and Karloff fandom. We'd seen both men in these kinds of roles multiple times by 1941, and though Chaney is a far less exciting actor than Karloff, he makes a better everyman (and probably looks a lot more natural playing with a dog), and I'm always happy to see Lionel Atwill.
Director George Waggner (who must have been so irritated by people leaving out the second "g" in his last name that he insisted on being credited as "George waGGner" for a few years in the late '30s and for a longer period in the mid-'50s to late '60s) may not have set the world on fire with Man Made Monster (it wasn't a flop but wasn't a big hit, either), but it paved the way for his most famous film (also starring Lon Chaney Jr.), The Wolf Man, later that year.
Waggner was a born-and-raised New Yorker and WWI veteran who dropped out of college and moved to Hollywood to try to make it as an actor in the silent era. He landed a handful of roles but decided he liked being on the other side of the screen better and spent the remainder of his career as a screenwriter, director, and songwriter of musical numbers in a time when even the non-musical features frequently included an original song or two. Though The Wolf Man is his best-known movie, he specialized in westerns and spent the last decade of his career directing television, with Code 3, 77 Sunset Strip, and the Adam West Batman being his most frequent employers.
No comments:
Post a Comment