This black and white, psychological horror flick has got to be in contention for one of the slimiest movies ever made. Everything about it -- from the studio-bound setting to the characters -- is depressingly filthy. You want the plot? Okay. You have your surgical gloves on? Walter Huston is paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair. His spine was broken eighteen years ago by a miscreant named Whitehall, who then ran off with Huston's wife and impregnated her.
Huston makes a living by pretending to be a chief shaman of a tribe in the Congo. The, er, "natives" bring him ivory tusks. In return Huston dons a mask and performs parlor tricks for them, swallowing a bit of fire, releasing birds from an empty tea pot, that sort of thing. He must do pretty well in the ivory business because he's managed to put Whitehall's daughter through a convent school. We see Virginia Bruce all virginal, naive, pristine, and dolled up in white. And when she graduates, Huston has her kidnapped, brought to him, and thoroughly debauched. She's now dressed in rags, her hair is a stringy mess, she's a lush, and she appears to have been the victim of a Hell's Angel's gang bang. She crawls around on her knees, begging for booze, and the snarling, scarred, skanky Huston is enjoying every second of his revenge. He chomps his cigar, sneers, rubs his revolting palms together with glee. What a performance.
Enter the young doctor, but not the heroic young doctor one might expect, in an immaculate white suit and panama hat. No, this is Conrad Nagel, and his life is as fetid as anyone else's. He drinks a lot too, but his chief problem is his addiction to something that sounds like BingBang root. Nagel can't walk. He shambles and slithers from side to side. At one point, as he's passing out, he splays his fingers across his chin, sticks out his tongue, rolls his eyes roofward, and for a moment, you think you're watching one of the Three Stooges.
He eventually sobers up and assesses the situation, recovering his moral bearings, and begins to resemble the heroic jungle doctor we've come to expect in movies like this. His attraction for Virginia Bruce grows, and as it does, it seems to improve her appearance. It washes her face, removes the dark shadows from around her eyes, and even combs her hair. Nagel operates on Huston's spine, too, just to relieve the pain. And what an operation it is. The doc prepares for the procedure by wiping his hands with an oily rag and rolling up his shirt sleeves. Forget the surgical scrub, the sterile field. Forget the anesthetic too. Huston endures the cutting without even a belt of booze or a nibble of BingBang.
Only one thing is missing to make Huston's plans for revenge complete. He tricks Whitehall, the man who ran off with Huston's wife, into coming to this isolated kingdom in the African jungle. Once Huston has the man in his grips, he introduces him to Virginia Bruce, delighting in her "debasement" and "degradation." Ha ha.
But Whitehall, unsympathetic character to be sure, tells Huston something that causes him to realize what a rude lump of foul deformity he's become. I kind of lost the narrative thread for a few minutes but it's clear that Whitehall is shot to death by a native on Huston's orders, and that Huston then sacrifices his own life to give the doc and his girl friend a chance to escape. A good magician never reveals his tricks.
That last-minute epiphany of Huston's cannot save the movie from being a caricature of the worst in human nature for 95 percent of its running time. It's a movie about sadists, weaklings, morons, mysophiliacs, barbarians, and victims, living in a sea of unspeakable filth. See it. You might enjoy it. But wear safety goggles.
Huston makes a living by pretending to be a chief shaman of a tribe in the Congo. The, er, "natives" bring him ivory tusks. In return Huston dons a mask and performs parlor tricks for them, swallowing a bit of fire, releasing birds from an empty tea pot, that sort of thing. He must do pretty well in the ivory business because he's managed to put Whitehall's daughter through a convent school. We see Virginia Bruce all virginal, naive, pristine, and dolled up in white. And when she graduates, Huston has her kidnapped, brought to him, and thoroughly debauched. She's now dressed in rags, her hair is a stringy mess, she's a lush, and she appears to have been the victim of a Hell's Angel's gang bang. She crawls around on her knees, begging for booze, and the snarling, scarred, skanky Huston is enjoying every second of his revenge. He chomps his cigar, sneers, rubs his revolting palms together with glee. What a performance.
Enter the young doctor, but not the heroic young doctor one might expect, in an immaculate white suit and panama hat. No, this is Conrad Nagel, and his life is as fetid as anyone else's. He drinks a lot too, but his chief problem is his addiction to something that sounds like BingBang root. Nagel can't walk. He shambles and slithers from side to side. At one point, as he's passing out, he splays his fingers across his chin, sticks out his tongue, rolls his eyes roofward, and for a moment, you think you're watching one of the Three Stooges.
He eventually sobers up and assesses the situation, recovering his moral bearings, and begins to resemble the heroic jungle doctor we've come to expect in movies like this. His attraction for Virginia Bruce grows, and as it does, it seems to improve her appearance. It washes her face, removes the dark shadows from around her eyes, and even combs her hair. Nagel operates on Huston's spine, too, just to relieve the pain. And what an operation it is. The doc prepares for the procedure by wiping his hands with an oily rag and rolling up his shirt sleeves. Forget the surgical scrub, the sterile field. Forget the anesthetic too. Huston endures the cutting without even a belt of booze or a nibble of BingBang.
Only one thing is missing to make Huston's plans for revenge complete. He tricks Whitehall, the man who ran off with Huston's wife, into coming to this isolated kingdom in the African jungle. Once Huston has the man in his grips, he introduces him to Virginia Bruce, delighting in her "debasement" and "degradation." Ha ha.
But Whitehall, unsympathetic character to be sure, tells Huston something that causes him to realize what a rude lump of foul deformity he's become. I kind of lost the narrative thread for a few minutes but it's clear that Whitehall is shot to death by a native on Huston's orders, and that Huston then sacrifices his own life to give the doc and his girl friend a chance to escape. A good magician never reveals his tricks.
That last-minute epiphany of Huston's cannot save the movie from being a caricature of the worst in human nature for 95 percent of its running time. It's a movie about sadists, weaklings, morons, mysophiliacs, barbarians, and victims, living in a sea of unspeakable filth. See it. You might enjoy it. But wear safety goggles.