The law, part two

All due respect to Christine Smallwood, whose work I had never encountered before reading her booklet essay for the new and essential Criterion Collection edition of Erle C. Kenton's 1932 Island of Lost Souls, but her approach to the material at hand strikes me as a trifle...tentative. 

I can't completely hold her at fault for stating, more or less at the outset, that Island of Lost Souls "no longer has the power to shock." We do, after all, live in a world of Hostels and Saws and Human Centipedes and one Saló, blah blah blah blah blah. But I don't know. Bestiality films have yet to go mainstream, and this picture's plot, such as it is, hinges in part on a scheme to get a human guy to mate with an, ahem, "Panther Woman," that is, a woman who's actually somehow been surgically transposed into womanhood from pantherdom, not, as in certain Cat Peoples, a woman who shifts back and forth between feline and human forms depending on whether or not she's had sex. So, you know, that's kind of shocking, when you bother to think about it. Smallwood backtracks a bit and finds herself on more solid ground a little further into the piece: "[...]there is something striking and unusually fresh about Island of Lost Souls' sadism. We've seen and heard a lot of gross and weird stuff on-screen in the past eighty years, but I'm not sure any of it is significantly weirder or grosser than this." True, that, and holy crap, the movie really is almost 80 years old, isn't it? One reason its freakishly bizarre content still registers as strongly as it does is that it's got a real old-school ethos—call it Pre-Code, call it B-picture—in that the 70-minute picture throws you into its outré fray almost right off the bat: Boy gets rescued from sunken ship, boy unwisely picks fight with drunken captain, captain drops boy off on island ruled by mad scientist caught up in lunatic experiments to make men from animals, and trouble ensues. It certainly helps that the boy is stolid and conventionally macho Richard Arlen, whose mode hasn't dated as much as that of the likes of the somewhat more delicate David Manners, who starred in some somewhat similarly bizarre '30s horrors (okay, one, Ulmer's The Black Cat; but he was also in more standard classic horror fare, you know, Dracula and The Mummy).

What makes the film indelible from that point on is the entirely convincing "atmosphere of total perdition" (Robert Benayoun's immortal phrase) in which it is steeped. Witness the white-suited Moreau (a cunning performance by Charles Laughton that's also, for the most part, one of his most oddly understated) prevailing over these beast-men with an ethos he has no actual stock in (and that's apparently lifted from some Kipling), said ethos being repeated by a stentorian authority figure with an inexplicable Hungarian accent. The aforementioned alluring "Panther Woman" (Kathleen Burke), ideal in every particular, except for her killer instinct and, of course, the troublesome "beast flesh" that ever "comes creeping back." Is this the first film in which the natives are described as "restless tonight?" In any event, when future cinephiles of my generation were first exposed to this once-banned picture on late-night or even early afternoon television, the feeling was that we were entering a different world, not one boldly and imaginatively dangerous like the one in King Kong, but one considerably creepier and slimier, a world that could conceivably change and corrupt us. 

That was the feeling. After basking in that world again via the wonderful Criterion Blu-ray of the film, I looked for critical buttresses for the feeling and was a little surprised not to find much of use in my library. Trusty Carlos Clarens, in his seminal An Illustrated History of Horror and Science Fiction Films, more or less shrugs off the film, insisting that it "seldom convinces" before allowing that it "never bores." I am hard-pressed to find a reference to the film at all in my similarly trusty anthology of surrealist film criticism, the Paul-Hammond-edited The Shadow and its Shadow, which collects the also-seminal Benayoun essay "Zaroff, or, The Prosperities of Vice" from which the aforementioned phrase originated. (Erle C. Kenton is also excluded from the list of recommended directors in "Some Surrealist Advice," a rather parochial oversight given the accidentally surreal 1945 House of Dracula, but what are you going to do?) Where was I going to find a print confrere on this vital issue? Well, of course, in my old friend Michael Weldon's quite-unfortunately-out-of-print Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, which entry on Island reads, in part, "It was banned in England for years. H.G. Wells, who wrote the novel it was based on, condemned it as being vulgar. It's also probably the best horror film ever made." Is it only on viewers of my own generation that the film has such a grip? Weldon's pal and Cleveland music scene contemporary David Thomas, at the time known as Crocus Behemoth (among other things) evoked the Lost Souls in the Pere Ubu song "Heart of Darkness." Around the same time, closer to Akron, Devo was incorporating the Sayer of the Law's refrain "Are we not men?" into its mordantly comic musical theory of de-evolution. We laugh noe, but it's worth recalling that a large part of the impetus for Devo's formation was the Kent State massacre. The unwitting ambivalence with which the film views both the beast-men and their creator/authority figure is, I think, another large component of its queasy power, a component that was not as readily visible to Clarens and Ado Kyrou or Robert Benayoun as it might have been to an American kid growing up in the '60s. I don't, by any stretch of the imagination, intend to reduce Lost Souls to some sort of sociological tract avant le lettre. But in certain contexts you don't need to stretch all that much to make certain connection. In any event, I am delighted to be revisiting the film (have I mentioned enough how splendid the Criterion edition it?) and am slightly curious to see what kind of reception it elicits from the cool and badass of today. Or not. 

Comments

[Shawn Stone]

Great points.

Part of the problem in general is that SOULS was such an outlier for Paramount and Kenton. True, he did those horror films at Universal a decade later, but his best known films from the SOULS period are a W.C. Fields comedy and that unclassifiable, precode excuse to show off healthy young bodies, SEARCH FOR BEAUTY. After Paramount, Kenton went to Columbia and made more comedies and melodramas--the bulk of his work at Paramount, too--before moving on to Universal.

[Stephen Whitty]

Bestiality, sadism, vivisection -- yes, I remember first seeing this on TV's Creature Features at 10 or so and realizing this was not the sort of cozy monster film I was used to, all dry-ice fog and gypsy-woman warnings.

And the climax? The "Freaks" like parade of dog-faced, pig-feeted monsters stalking through the jungle? The storm-the-Bastille takeover of "the House of Pain," the shot of those hairy hands breaking into the cases of medical instruments, and Laughton's final screams?

I'd be shocked by anyone who wasn't still shocked by this film -- and, frankly, a little leery...

[bill]

I'd never seen it before this weekend, and I loved it. Laughton is tremendous, and yes, weirdly (under the circumstances, and given that he's Charles Laughton) understated. The ending, as Stephen notes, is *crazy*. Not that some version of it has never been done since, but that makes it no less crazy in the context of this film from that era.

And the poor comic relief captain...merciless!

[colinr]

It certainly feels as if it has that off-kilter, twisted feel of something like The Most Dangerous Game, although perhaps it is just the island setting and sadistic villain driven by strangely sexual compulsions that suggests the connection.

[Paul Duane]

I am pleased to report that I spent a fair chunk of this weekend in conversation with the extremely knowledgable David Cairns, and that part of this conversation was an eye-opening discussion on the oeuvre of Erle C Kenton. There aren't many cineastes I know who could name, let alone discuss in detail, four ECK movies. I bow to his superior judgment when he says ECK is a subject for further research - I'd earlier rashly said that the auteur theory crumbles when it confronts his work - and I very much want to see his nudie work now.

Oh yeah, by the way - Devo, Pere Ubu, but also these guys:

http://youtu.be/DwQbPgouUYo

How a bunch of Boston Irish chancers coalesced around Island of Lost Souls is a question for the ages.

[David Ehrenstein]

"Island of Lost Souls" has an atmospheric intensity that none of the subsequent adaptations of "The Island of Dr. Moreau" (especially Frankenheimer's sad curtain call of a film starring Brando and Val Kilmer) come near.

Kenton is definitely a "subject for further reasearch" as Sarris would say. But a lot of cret must go to DP Karl Struss. And then there's Laughton -- lolling cross-legged on a dissection table in jodphurs, toying wiht the whip he carries everywhere. "Sheer camp," doesn't being to describe it.
And speaking of "camp" leaven us not forget the late and much-missed Cahr;es Ludlam whose "Bluebeard" is an adaptation of "Island of Lost Souls" in which the mad doctor (who he of course played himself) was undertaking these "experiments" in order to create "A Third Sex."

And as the"Panther Woman"? Who else but Mario Montez of Jack Smith and Andy Warhol fame.

[That Fuzzy Bastard]

Devo, Pere Ubu, House of Pain, *and* Oingo Boingo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRljdzY3dXs

My theory is that it's just super-fun to chant.

[D Cairns]

Erle C Kenton had some mania for the grubby and thrusting. It finds perfect expression, along with so much else, in Island of Lost Souls, but punches through the screen into Search for Beauty also, and this horrible, stupid, glorious thing: http://dcairns.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/fatheads/

[Paul Duane]

Apologies, David - that makes five.

[Andrew Wyatt]

I'm 35. I first encountered this film on VHS as an undergraduate, and while it didn't exactly scare me, but it *creeped me the hell out* real good and left an enduring impression on it. I'm overjoyed that it's finally seeing the light of day again on DVD.