Quote of the day:

Fear is incomplete knowledge.
—Agatha Christie

Boris Karloff probably gave his best performance of all time in the 1945 movie The Body Snatcher.

It was based on a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson, which you can find in Project Gutenberg’s Tales and Fantasies. The story was so short that the script had to expand on it, so the Stevenson story only makes its appearance in the final ten minutes of the movie, but the expansion allowed for the development of the character of John Gray, which was the role that Karloff ended up playing.

Stevenson’s story was inspired by real life events of 1828 when William Burke and William Hare sold corpses to Robert Knox for dissection at his anatomy lectures. Except Burke and Hare were soon killing lodgers when it became difficult to rob graves, murdering a total of sixteen persons before their deeds were discovered. They made the mistake of killing a local woman.

In the movie Donald Fettes, a young assistant of Dr. Wolfe MacFarlane, becomes upset on learning that John Gray is robbing graves in order to supply them with bodies for dissection. But Fettes wants the doctor to perform a life saving operation on a young girl, and the doctor will need a cadaver to study the spine.

So Fettes pays a late night call on John Gray and asks him to get another corpse. Gray insists that the authorities have clamped down and it’s now too difficult to rob the graves as he had been. It might take a while. Fettes pleads with him to hurry. And Gray forms an idea.

Here are two short scenes from the movie. The first is the scene with Dr. MacFarlane, Fettes, and John Gray in the pub, and the second is the scene where Fettes asks Gray to find another body, followed by Gray’s putting his idea into action. Notice that his action takes place out of view of the camera, but the sound leaves the viewer in no doubt as to what has happened. This scene produced quite an effect on the audience when the movie was released.

Also, notice that as the wagon drives away, you can only see the head and shoulders of Karloff’s character atop the wagon from the rear. It could have been a stand-in or a stunt man driving that wagon, but Karloff insisted on doing the scene himself, despite the fact that he was not in the best of health and it was a chilly evening. That’s how committed he was to his craft.

Russell Wade, who played Fettes, was a long-time extra in Hollywood before he finally got a break, but apparently he didn’t find fame all it was cracked up to be, or perhaps he wasn’t satisfied with the roles he was receiving, because after a few short years, he left the film industry and became a businessman.

Henry Daniell was only third billed as Dr. MacFarlane because Basil Rathbone, who had a very small part in the picture, was contractually promised second billing after Karloff, but this was probably the largest and best role that Daniell, a reliable character actor, ever played. You may recall him as that mad doctor in the opening scene of “The Cheaters” from Thriller that I wrote about the other week.

Ten year old Sharyn Moffett, like many child actors, didn’t have much of a career. Perhaps her stage mother had pushed her into it (“Sing out, Louise!”) or perhaps she wasn’t as cute when she matured, or maybe she had no real talent for acting. In any case after a few more children’s roles she retired from the business in 1951. She was the longest surviving cast member, having died in 2021 at the age of 85.

Director Robert Wise, probably better known for his later films such as West Side Story and The Sound of Music, had been an editor on Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. Having observed the best, he jumped at the chance to direct a feature when one was offered to him, so he took over The Curse of the Cat People when the original director was taking too long and running up production costs. The Body Snatcher was his third directorial effort. By happenstance as I was preparing this post The Moya View gave a retrospective look at Wise’s The Sound of Music.

The film was controversial in its day. The Catholic so-called  “Legion of Decency” rated it “B”, calling it “morally objectionable in part” due to “excessive gruesomeness”. Well, you know what I think of the Catholic Church! That they ever had the gall to try to ordain what was and was not “moral” or “decent” is absurd. 

The film was produced and was largely the brainchild of Val Lewton, who was known for horror films that a) dealt more in psychological horror than the monsters that Universal was famous for, and b) could bring in his productions in 18 days and on a shoestring budget, which was why RKO hired him after Orson Welles bankrupted the studio with his lavish productions that lost money. Lewton’s films cost next to nothing and always made a tidy profit. The Body Snatcher was able to reuse the sets previously created for The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

The Blu-ray contains an excellent black and white print of the movie along with an informative audio commentary by Director Robert Wise and Writer/Film Historian Steve Haberman, a documentary on Val Lewton, and a 12-minute appreciation of the movie by Gregory William Mank.

 

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