Edward Parker has just survived a horrible shipwreck, but before he can be
reunited with his fiancée, he is left on an uncharted island run by the demented
scientist, Dr. Moreau. Placated with false promises of safe travel off the island,
Moreau keeps Parker captive and tells a mysterious woman named Lota to seduce
him. However, Parker quickly uncovers Moreau's secret, that the deformed
natives of the island are actually the end products of Moreau's terrifying
experiments in transforming animals into humans.
Horrified, Parker realizes that Lota, too, is one of Moreau's monstrosities, and that Moreau
means to use him for his own twisted purposes. Meanwhile, his fiancée mounts a
rescue, unaware of the terror that awaits her on Moreau's Island.
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Thank you in advance. With that out of the way, let's get back to the topic at hand.
In 1915, the United States Supreme Court came to a unanimous decision that motion
pictures were not protected by the First Amendment,
that freedom of speech did not extend to film. Over a decade later, as sound
became more universally adopted by Hollywood, concerns were raised about the
deleterious effects movies--especially those with sound--could have on the youth
of America. In 1929, Martin Quigley, with the assistance of Jesuit priest Daniel A.
Lord, formulated a set of standards for the entire motion picture industry and
submitted it to the studios with the enthusiastic support of the president of
the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, William H. Hays.
These standards would come to be known as the Hays Code, designed to avoid the
looming threat of Supreme Court-approved government censorship.
However, with studios making money off of salacious movies that dared to contain
morally compromised protagonists, heavy sexual innuendo, violence, infidelity, and
more, many chose to ignore the Hays Code, recognizing that it didn't have any kind
of enforcement mechanism built into it. After the stock market crash of October
1929, it didn't take Hollywood long to figure out that audiences had become
more receptive to cynicism, moral ambiguity, anti-establishment attitudes,
and horror, all things that would have been difficult to convey through the
strict guidelines of the Code. in 1931, Universal Studios released two of the
most influential horror films of all time--Frankenstein and Dracula--and
Paramount Pictures, having had its own successes in horror with films like
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, were keen to push the envelope as far as they possibly
could. Thus, producers at Paramount spent
$15,000 to secure the rights to adapt H.G. Wells' macabre novel,
The Island of Dr. Moreau. Over eleven different writers worked on various
drafts of the project, which was retitled Island of Lost Souls, with final credit
ultimately going to Waldemar Young, grandson of Brigham Young, and
Philip Wylie, the future co-writer of When Worlds Collide.
To play Dr. Moreau, Paramount brought in the London stage actor, Charles Laughton,
a newcomer to Hollywood with only a couple of minor roles to his credit.
Laughton had been successful in his home country and had even performed in a trio of silent
short films that were written specifically for his wife Elsa Lanchester by none other
than H.G. Wells. Laughton plays Dr. Moreau as a full-on sadist, and his performance
is absolutely mesmerizing, a highlight of the film. He wasn't terribly expensive at
the time, and as a bonus, he already knew how to use a whip.
For the hero of the piece, Edward Parker, they hired the veteran World War I pilot, Richard Arlen.
Arlen began his career with Paramount by crashing his motorcycle on the studio
lot and breaking his leg. A director took pity on him and gave him a starter
contract, either out of the goodness of his heart or out of a desire to prevent
a potential lawsuit, depending on who you ask.
His breakout performance was in 1927's Wings, in which he plays a pilot, and he
would go on to have a long acting career that lasted until his death in the
mid-70's. The actress Leila Hyams plays Parker's
fiancée Ruth. Hyams was the daughter of vaudeville comedians who had parlayed a
modeling career into a brief but memorable stint in Hollywood. She is best
known today for three notoriously controversial pre-Code films:
Island of Lost Souls, Freaks, and Red-Headed Woman.
The most publicized casting decision
fell on the character of the Panther Woman, Lota. Paramount organized a
nationwide search, with over 60,000 contestants ultimately vying for the
role, until they finally settled on the complete unknown Chicago native,
Kathleen Burke. According to Paramount, she was a dental assistant at the time,
though there is some dispute about that. Island of Lost Souls would make her
famous, but after a few years of struggling with typecasting and the
Hollywood lifestyle, Burke quit acting in 1938.
One of the last roles cast was that
of the Sayer of the Law, the leader of Moreau's band of creature creations.
Bela Lugosi, famous for his stage and film performances as Dracula, had squandered
nearly all of his Hollywood earnings to date and was facing bankruptcy, and so he
agreed to do the film for a paltry 875 dollars, though he would make
considerably more by working more days than he was initially scheduled for.
He reportedly also took the role in order to prove he could
perform under heavy make-up, as he had recently lost the role of Frankenstein
to his longtime rival, Boris Karloff.
For the smaller roles, there's the
underappreciated Japanese-American actor, Tetsu Komai, as Moreau's faithful dog-man, M'ling,
a pair of professional wrestlers--Harry "Ali Baba" Ekizian and Hans "The German Oak" Steinke,
As the beast men, Gola and Ouron, respectively--
and Arthur Hohl, as Moreau's assistant, Montgomery, who
actually turns hero in this version of the story.
Paramount hired proficient studio director Erle C. Kenton to direct,
and the prolific German architect, Hans Dreier as art director.
The lead cinematographer was Karl Struss, famous
for winning the first-ever Academy Award for Cinematography with F.W. Murnau's
Sunrise, and his work is especially good in Island of Lost Souls, where his
dramatic use of light and shadow is pretty extraordinary,
along with his perfect placement of the rare but occasional instances of actors
staring directly at the camera.
However, the unsung hero of the crew is
undoubtedly Wally Westmore, responsible for all of the film's incredible make-up effects.
This was only Westmore's second film, and he did it all without
the benefit of foam latex, which wouldn't be used in make-up for another few years.
Liquid latex wasn't in common use either, but Westmore was one of the first to
adopt it, using it extensively both in Island of Lost Souls and his only
previous credit, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
The film was shot in five weeks on a budget of $300,000,
with one of the weeks dedicated to location shooting in and around
the island of Catalina, where a natural fog offered an atmosphere you couldn't buy.
With the exception of one of the beastmen extras getting his arm
nearly torn out of its socket by a live tiger on set, the shoot reportedly went smoothly.
Island of Lost Souls released in December of 1932, after months of
extensive marketing. It was considered a box office success and did relatively
well critically, with even the worst reviews admitting it had a haunting
atmosphere and a fantastic performance by Charles Laughton.
However, its fame quickly transformed into infamy. Rumors abound that audience
members were throwing up in theater aisles and walking out in repulsion,
though a lot of that could easily be the exaggeration of enthusiastic Paramount publicists.
Still, the film was banned in at least eleven different countries,
including Great Britain, where H.G. Wells himself denounced the film as a terrible
adaptation of his work. It was also heavily edited in several markets and in
multiple states in the U.S., and it would take decades for the full cut of the
film to be widely available. There were many different scenes that frequently
got the axe, scenes involving torture, implied bestiality, and the threat of
rape, but one line in particular was seen as far too blasphemous for audiences:
"Mr. Parker, do you know what it means to feel like God?"
I've come across at least a dozen different
interpretations of the film's meaning, which include a horror twist on
Shakespeare's The Tempest, a blasphemous retelling of the Garden of Eden story
with Dr. Moreau standing in as both creator and Satan, a commentary on
American slavery, as seen by how the colonially-dressed and arrogantly
superior Moreau casually mistreats his creations, and even an exploitative
reflection of the widespread racist of miscegenation.
These can be fun ways to look at it, but I don't think the film strays too far from
Wells' original themes of medical ethics, animal rights, and the cruelty of Victorian-era classism.
What all versions of the story boil down to, though, is the same
underlying question: What, if anything, really separates a man from a beast?
The film nearly disappeared into obscurity before resurging in the 70's and 80's as a
cult classic, acquiring new generations of dedicated fans.
It found prominent inspiration on the music scene, where it inspired pop greats
like Devo, Van Halen, Blondie and House of Pain. Though not quite as famous as its
exploitative cousin, Freaks--or the Universal Monster Movies--Island of Lost Souls
remains one of Hollywood's most influential and essential horror films from the era.
There have been two Hollywood remakes--the underappreciated
1977 version with Michael York and Burt Lancaster, and the wonderfully bizarre
1996 movie with Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer--but even though I think both of
those are worth watching for various reasons,
neither holds up against the classic. For my money--and regardless of what Wells
himself thought--Island of Lost Souls is the best adaptation of his novel.
As for the Hays Code, it would eventually become the law of Hollywood only two years
after Island of Lost Souls hit theaters, with the Production Code Administration
(or PCA) created in order to force movies to get a seal of approval before distribution.
While neither the Code nor the PCA had the actual force of law behind them,
they maintained an industry-wide stranglehold over American films for several decades.
It wasn't until the 1960's, after the Supreme Court
reversed its 1915 decision and concluded that motion pictures actually do enjoy
the protections of the First Amendment, that enforcement of the Hays Code began
collapsing. It was eventually replaced with the MPAA rating system currently used by Hollywood.
Island of Lost Souls, then, exists in that brief window between the
the adoption of sound and the enforcement of the Hays Code
known to film historians as the pre-Code Hollywood era, where filmmakers
could get away with shocking audiences in ways they wouldn't be able to do
again for many years. It is a daring and exceptional work of visceral horror that
should stand proudly beside its famous contemporaries, a boundary-pushing film
whose true influence took a while to be known but is undeniably felt today.
And that's all for this episode, my fellow Earthlings. What do you think: did the
Hays Code stifle creativity, or was it an important step in the maturation of
Hollywood that prevented the far more damning interference of government
censors? Let me know in the comments. While you're there, don't forget to like
and subscribe, if you haven't already. If you'd like to show your support even
more, consider becoming a Patron to get early access to new videos, vote on
future topics, get the occasional bonus video, and more. You can also check out my
website--at emagill.com--where you can find written reviews of several sci-fi
classics in both film and literature, including a review of H.G. Wells'
original novel, the Island of Dr. Moreau, and all three of its Hollywood film
adaptations. I'm not done with pre-Code H.G. Wells adaptations, though, so be sure
to check back next time for an in-depth look at a monster you can't actually see.
Until then, this is the Unapologetic Geek, telling you to never be ashamed of what
you love... as long as you're not hurting anybody.
"Oh, it take a long time and infinite patience to make them talk.
Someday, I'll create a woman, and it will be easier."