"It is through error that man tries and rises. It is through tragedy he learns. All the roads of learning begin in darkness and go out into the light."
The eighth, and final, feature-length movie to feature the great Boris Karloff ([23 Nov 1887 – 2 Feb 1969] of The Mummy [1932], The Ghoul [1933], House of Frankenstein [1944], The Terror [1963], Mad Monster Party [1967] and so much more) and the great Bela Lugosi ([20 Oct 1882 – 16 Aug 1956] of Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla [1952], Scared to Death [1946], One Body Too Many [1944], The Corpse Vanishes [1942], Black Dragons [1942], Island of Lost Souls [1932] and so much more) together on the silver screen,* The Body Snatcher is, simply put, another fine horror film produced Val Lewton (7 May 1904 – 14 Mar 1951) during his short but productive period as a producer at RKO. Lewton was appointed head producer of B films at RKO in 1942 and, by his departure in 1946, he had released some eleven such films, only two of which — Mademoiselle Fifi (1944 / full film) and Youth Runs Wild (1944 / trailer) — fall completely outside the realm of "horror". The Body Snatcher is one of his final triad of films at RKO prior to his being let go, and was followed by The Isle of Dead (1945 / trailer) and Bedlam (1946); all three atmospheric films feature Boris Karloff as the headlining star.
* The other seven are: Edgar G Ulmer's early classic The Black Cat (1934 / faux trailer), Karl Freund's Gift of Gab (1934 / full movie), which almost doesn't count as their (separate and short) appearances are (seriously) a joke (scene), The Raven (1935 / trailer), The Invisible Ray (1936 / trailer), Son of Frankenstein (1939 / trailer), You'll Find Out (1940 / trailer), and Black Friday (1940 / trailer).
The Body Snatcher:
Based loosely on a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson (3 Nov 1850 – 3 Dec 1894) originally published in 1884, the script to The Body Snatcher was written by Philip MacDonald (5 Nov 1901 — 10 Dec 1980)* and "Carlos Keith", otherwise known as Val Lewton. Wisely enough, they kept the story's original setting and time, delivering a leisurely paced narrative punctuated by well-timed moments of unpleasantness and/or horror.
A tidy little period piece, The Body Snatcher takes the character names of Stevenson's tale but liberally changes many aspects of the story, adding a time-padding character or two — like the maid (and secret wife) Meg Camden (Edith Atwater [22 Apr 1911 – 14 Mar 1986] of Strait-Jacket [1964 / trailer] and Die Sister, Die! [1978 / trailer]), a sympathetic woman whose primary function is to explain things we need to know or play Cassandra — and even an entire new secondary subplot, that of pretty widow Mrs. Marsh (Rita Corday [20 Oct 1920 – 23 Nov 1992] of The Black Castle [1952 / full movie] and her paraplegic daughter Georgina (Sharyn Moffett [12 Sept 1936 – 23 Dec 2021]). They come to Edinburgh in the hope that Dr. Wolfe "Toddy" MacFarlane (Henry Daniell [5 March 1894 – 31 October 1963] of From the Earth to the Moon [1958 / trailer] and The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake [1959 / trailer]) might be able to help Georgina, and though Dr. MacFarlane says he would be able to, the rather stiff and supercilious doctor refuses to do so, on the grounds that his activities as an instructor are more important than helping the little girl.
This, actually, is one of the diffuse reasons the young Donald Fettes (Russell Wade [21 Jun 1917 – 9 Dec 2006] of The Ghost Ship [1943 / scene] and the rather pointless A Game of Death [1945 / full movie]) inexplicably remains as MacFarlane's assistant long after he knows he should leave. Fettes learns rather early on that MacFarlane procures the corpses for his anatomy classes from the coachman cum body snatcher John Gray (Karloff), and is soon enough irrefutably confronted by the fact that Gray is not above killing for a body. But despite Fettes' oft-verbalized intentions to quit his position and the school, he never really manages to do so – indeed, towards the end of the film, he even assists MacFarlane in snatching a buried body.
The Body Snatcher opens with a few stock footage shots to establish the location of Edinburgh (don't look too closely, or you might notice a few truly modern automobiles for 1831), and for the most part the interior scenes and the exterior sets (the latter left over from RKO's The Hunchback of Notre Dame [1939 / trailer]) do a decent job for conveying if not Edinburgh than at least Europe. (The notable exception here, of course, are the scenes set on a noticeably painted and fake set; the low budget of the film is never so obvious as in those moments.) Considering that the whole narrative is set in Edinburgh, however, the movie features surprisingly few Scottish accents — one, to be exact: that of the aged, grieving mother Fettes meets in the cemetery, but then, she was played by a real Scot, the seldom-credited character actress Mary Gordon (16 May 1882 – 23 August 1963), a woman best known as Mrs. Hudson, the landlady and housekeeper to Universal's Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films.
Accents and Russell Wade's rather flaccid and shallow portrayal of Fettes aside, however, The Body Snatchers is a well-acted movie. Henry Daniell makes a convincing Dr. MacFarlane, giving him layers that make the character far more than just a self-important, upper-class blowhard; while the viewer might be put off by his attitude and arguments, his sincerity of cause often shines through and that does make him a tad more sympathetic than he deserves to be. Bela Lugosi, despite his secondary position on the film posters and prominence in the film's trailer, has probably around five or six minutes screen time at best as Joseph, the somewhat simple-minded janitor of Dr. MacFarlane's school. Skulking around the school hardly takes acting chops, but he holds himself well during the important scene at Gray's home and is subsequently the focus of one of the film's shock scenes.
Bela Lugosi's Dead
by Bauhaus:
As for Boris Karloff, well, in The Body Snatcher he truly delivers a tour-de-force performance as John Gray. When introduced, he is all smarm and convincingly child-friendly as he delivers Mrs. Marsh and Georgina to the doctor's door, but the split-second change in facial expression that occurs when Meg Camden opens the door and gives him an icy look already does wonders in revealing what he actually is as a person: an erudite and smiling but cold and merciless killer, and a vengeful narcissist consumed by hate — and intelligent, not only enough to know that he is all that, but capable of seeing into people for what they are, as he ably proves during his aggressive verbal takedown of Dr. MacFarlane at the local inn. Gray is scary, and not the type of man you would want to have to have dealings with, and it is somehow believable that were it possible to reach from the darkness of death to get revenge, he would be one to do so. Whether he actually does so, however, is more or less left to the viewer to decide.
Like most Lewton productions, most of the horror and menace found in The Body Snatcher is subdued or inferred or situational, but the film does get a bit more physical than typical of Lewton during the two fight scenes and then definitely tosses all restraint out the window during the final scene in a horse-drawn coach. A truly memorable scene that is more than just a nod to the original short story, though in this film the resolution turns more towards the psychological (and the concept of one's own inner demons) than Stevenson's original tale, the resolution of which sits squarely in the supernatural. Despite whatever changes, however, the resolution as found in the movie is nevertheless visually horrific and chilling — who can watch the movement of the corpse's arms without cringing? — and it is easy to see how that scene (among others) caused subsequent censorship problems. In England, in fact, they pretty much cut the crux of that climactic coach scene out, which surely rendered the film a head-scratcher.
Lewton made a wise decision when he handed the directorial duties to future four-time Oscar winner Robert Wise (10 Sept 1914 – 14 Sept 2005), who by then had already proven his directorial capabilities at RKO when he took over the directorial duties of The Curse of the Cat People (1944 / trailer) and subsequently made Lewton's only RKO flop, Mademoiselle Fifi (1944).* Aside from the good performance he elicits from his cast, he also gives the "action" scenes a sense of urgency and violence, and also manages to deliver a few truly beautifully tragic and terrible scenes of subtle horror, the best of which involves the blind, singing street beggar (Donna Lee [17 Jan 1930 – 3 Apr 2011], whose limited roughly five-film career of uncredited parts began with RKO's A Face in the Fog [1936 / full movie] and ended with Bedlam [1946]) walking into the darkness of a narrow passage with Gray's horse and buggy following soon behind. One sees nothing, but darkness and sudden silence hits harder than anything that might have been shown.
* He went on to make two film faves of a wasted life, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951 / trailer) and The Haunting (1963 / trailer), and has a filmic oeuvre that spans from the divisive forgotten like Born to Kill (1947 / full movie) to the divisive famous like The Sound of Music (1965 / trailer).
Fans of yesteryear's horror cannot go wrong with The Body Snatcher: it is an enthralling, well-made horror film that keeps you watching from the start until the end, ably assisted by some great direction and a fantastic Boris Karloff. And that is what makes it a good movie for anyone with a penchant for older films — but face it, if the only kind of horror films you like are first cousins to, say, Freddy or Jason or Michael Myers films, then you should give this class act a wide berth.
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