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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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."
