Tod Browning should have been on top of the world after the enormous financial success of his Dracula (1931) temporarily changed the horror film from seamy sideshow attraction to mainstream blockbuster material. And yet that film, both aesthetically, as a seriously uneven work, and chronologically, in his career, marked the commencement of a declining period of waywardness for the director. Browning had been forced to cast stage star Béla Lugosi in the title role after his long-time collaborator Lon Chaney Snr died of cancer, leaving him without his favourite actor who could handle almost anything Browning could throw at him, a significant tool in the hands of a director fascinated by teeming strangeness and the humanity within the grotesque, and vice versa. He used the clout Dracula gave him nonetheless to make his masterpiece, Freaks (1932), but his bankability, as we would say today, took years to recover from the furious reception to that much-banned film. He finally signed on with MGM and found a kind of replacement for Chaney in the form of Lionel Barrymore. But Browning’s over-heated, twisted imagination was never going to sit comfortably with Louis B. Mayer’s house style of polished, pseudo-classy entertainment, and the two most prominent films he made for MGM, Mark of the Vampire (1935) and The Devil-Doll, are noticeably semi-domesticated and diffuse. As Browning’s dedication to cinema was waning steadily after a career dotted with alcoholism and losses of inspiration, The Devil-Doll was to prove his second-last film. Nonetheless it is an absorbing and damnably odd mix of genres and stylistic impulses.
Officially based on the novel Burn, Witch, Burn! by the near-mythical fantastic scribe Abraham Merritt, but also infused with Browning’s own short story “The Witch of Timbuctoo”, the film’s screenwriting credits inspire a double-take: two of the three credited screenwriters are Guy Endore and Erich Von Stroheim, partly explaining the peculiarly continental feel of the material, as well as its uncommon emotional and conceptual seriousness. The Devil-Doll commences with several story flourishes that recur again and again in the period’s pulp fiction, most notably the piquant touch of the prisoner escaping from French Guiana’s Devil’s Island , and the programme of revenge facilitated by a pseudo-scientific gimmick. Here, there’s actually two men escaping from the penal colony, being Marcel (Henry Walthall) and Paul Lavond (Barrymore), both of whom have driving causes to flee their jungle prison and return to the world. Marcel is an obsessed scientist, and his wife Malita (Rafaela Ottiano) has set up a laboratory within the steaming Guianan rain forest, waiting for his emergence. Marcel and Malita suggest Pierre and Marie Curie turned into creepy sociopaths in having stumbled down a different path of scientific discovery. They’ve been collaborating on a project to shrink living creatures to a far smaller size in order that the world’s food resources will be less overburdened. Unfortunately all of their experimental animal subjects have so far been reduced to inert, doll-like organisms, still living but mindless and responding only to the concerted will of another.
Lavond, a former banking tycoon, has escaped with Marcel to visit vengeance upon three men. He gets to observe as Marcel plunges madly back into his labours, using the crippled housekeeper Malita had hired, Lachna (Grace Ford) as a subject; he seems at first to succeed in reducing her size and restoring not only her mind, but her physical capacities, but as he tries to shrink her further, he ends up with only the same old doll, and induces a fatal heart attack in himself to boot. Malita, desperate to continue the project, asks Lavond to aid her. Together they travel to Paris
The basic story, then, is The Count of Monte Cristo by way of Frankenstein, filled with potential for a lucid insanity that never really hits full-throttle. Fragments of beautiful weirdness still dot The Devil-Doll’s running time, from the sight of the nearly-naked Lachna in the first stage of her reduction, lolling in ecstatic physical completeness for the first time, to Malita entertaining herself by having the shrunken Radin and Lachna dance a jig, only for Lachna to take a tumble off the table-top, stirring Lavond’s enraged distress. The scenes of the dolls’ adventures, particularly a lengthy set-piece in the film’s middle as Lachna, given to Coulvet’s daughter as a present, eerily extricates herself from the sleeping girl’s arm, climbs a colossal bureau to steal jewellery, then traversing the bed filled by the sleeping Coulvet and his wife with tiny knife in hand, are brilliantly done on all levels, a real triumph for Browning and designer Cedric Gibbons. There’s a vein of humanistic empathy in both Lavond and the film, lifting it well clear of the usual mad scientist sadism. Lavond is a complex character, determined to prosecute his retribution but feeling empathy for the shrunken creatures, and tortured by his desire to visit and make peace with his daughter Lorraine
Browning’s love of toying with signifiers of normality and gender surfaces in the sight of Barrymore playing drag, even when stripped of his disguising wig, spending whole scenes still with earrings dangling, and the whole characterisation fits in neatly with Browning’s interest in performance and façade, acts within acts. Hints of folie-a-deux and masochism, too, to the odd, fanatical relationship of Marcel and Malita, who finds a childish delight in making her “dolls” dance but explodes in pyromaniac rage when she learns Lavond wants to destroy all of her husband’s labours. There’s a bracing flavour of a very black intelligence in sights like the miniaturised Radin trussed up in a bow, hanging on a Christmas tree, as the nastiest possible present. The intrinsically phobic notion of the mundane yet strangely human-like objects like dolls proving to in fact be animate and capable of committing murder and mayhem, anticipates later, famous variations such as Dan Curtis and Richard Matheson’s Trilogy of Terror (1975) and Child’s Play (1987), and there’s an undercurrent in the portrayal of the villains’ fancy haute-bourgeois homes becoming infested with barely detectable manifestations and reactions to their own villainy that feels acutely satiric. The unexpected density of the drama, thanks to the odd mix of high-level collaborators, helps make The Devil-Doll surprising, but also proves a double-edged sword. Whilst Browning’s controlling ingenuity is evident throughout, the whole project feels drained of urgency and darkness. The desire to keep Lavond as an essentially empathetic and heroic figure and also a merciless engine of extra-curricular punishment of wrongdoers doesn’t fit well either with the new Production Code rules or the overly-polished MGM style, which renders the necessary sense of infernal intensity minimised.
The right key of hysterical perversity is best achieved by Ottiano, who offers an inspired turn as a feminine grotesque, sporting a Sontag-esque white streak in her wildly thatched hair, limps about on a crutch and makes angular body movements, alternating a kind of frantic enthusiasm and desperate wrath. Barrymore on the other hand is terrific but constrained by the peculiarities of his role, forced to rein in his character’s galvanising rage and diabolical wit, but it’s still a brilliantly sustained performance, both technically and emotionally. He pulls off Lavond’s masquerade with such simple stagecraft that the overtly unlikely conceit seems perfectly convincing. Browning throws the viewer into the story with characteristic eccentricity, commencing with a glaring spotlight shining into the camera, which then slides aside to face down the barrel of a machine gun, and he then cuts to almost random shots of padding, booted legs and tracking dogs stalking the jungle night, before finally zeroing in on the two escapees. Some of his fascinating first-person tracking shots also dot the proceedings. But the lighting and the camera angles possess little gothic style, apart from brief snatches in the swampy opening, and in spite of the deeply weird material and storyline, the whole thing feels less like a cinefantastique excursion than an oddly embroidered melodrama. This problem is exacerbated by the way there’s no vital connection between the subplot of Lavond and his daughter and the rest of the film. The real story even wraps up ten minutes before the film is over, leaving the rest for some sentimentally appealing stuff of Lavond pretending to be a prison friend of Lorraine’s father, punishing himself by writing himself out of her life forever whilst again play-acting, but still delivering a jolt of uplift, as if we’d somehow stumbled into the more familiar kind of MGM family weepie, and the tonal indecision should be infuriating. Yet it makes for a strangely affecting end.
