The law, part two

All due respect to Christine Smallwood, whose work I had nev­er encountered before read­ing her book­let essay for the new and essen­tial Criterion Collection edi­tion of Erle C. Kenton’s 1932 Island of Lost Souls, but her approach to the mater­i­al at hand strikes me as a trifle…tentative. 

I can­’t com­pletely hold her at fault for stat­ing, more or less at the out­set, that Island of Lost Souls “no longer has the power to shock.” We do, after all, live in a world of Hostels and Saws and Human Centipedes and one Saló, blah blah blah blah blah. But I don’t know. Bestiality films have yet to go main­stream, and this pic­ture’s plot, such as it is, hinges in part on a scheme to get a human guy to mate with an, ahem, “Panther Woman,” that is, a woman who’s actu­ally some­how been sur­gic­ally trans­posed into woman­hood from pan­t­her­dom, not, as in cer­tain Cat Peoples, a woman who shifts back and forth between feline and human forms depend­ing on wheth­er or not she’s had sex. So, you know, that’s kind of shock­ing, when you both­er to think about it. Smallwood back­tracks a bit and finds her­self on more sol­id ground a little fur­ther into the piece: “[…]there is some­thing strik­ing and unusu­ally fresh about Island of Lost Souls’ sad­ism. We’ve seen and heard a lot of gross and weird stuff on-screen in the past eighty years, but I’m not sure any of it is sig­ni­fic­antly weirder or gross­er than this.” True, that, and holy crap, the movie really is almost 80 years old, isn’t it? One reas­on its freak­ishly bizarre con­tent still registers as strongly as it does is that it’s got a real old-school ethos—call it Pre-Code, call it B‑picture—in that the 70-minute pic­ture throws you into its out­ré fray almost right off the bat: Boy gets res­cued from sunken ship, boy unwisely picks fight with drunk­en cap­tain, cap­tain drops boy off on island ruled by mad sci­ent­ist caught up in lun­at­ic exper­i­ments to make men from anim­als, and trouble ensues. It cer­tainly helps that the boy is stol­id and con­ven­tion­ally macho Richard Arlen, whose mode has­n’t dated as much as that of the likes of the some­what more del­ic­ate David Manners, who starred in some some­what sim­il­arly bizarre ’30s hor­rors (okay, one, Ulmer’s The Black Cat; but he was also in more stand­ard clas­sic hor­ror fare, you know, Dracula and The Mummy).

What makes the film indelible from that point on is the entirely con­vin­cing “atmo­sphere of total per­di­tion” (Robert Benayoun’s immor­tal phrase) in which it is steeped. Witness the white-suited Moreau (a cun­ning per­form­ance by Charles Laughton that’s also, for the most part, one of his most oddly under­stated) pre­vail­ing over these beast-men with an eth­os he has no actu­al stock in (and that’s appar­ently lif­ted from some Kipling), said eth­os being repeated by a stentori­an author­ity fig­ure with an inex­plic­able Hungarian accent. The afore­men­tioned allur­ing “Panther Woman” (Kathleen Burke), ideal in every par­tic­u­lar, except for her killer instinct and, of course, the trouble­some “beast flesh” that ever “comes creep­ing back.” Is this the first film in which the nat­ives are described as “rest­less tonight?” In any event, when future cinephiles of my gen­er­a­tion were first exposed to this once-banned pic­ture on late-night or even early after­noon tele­vi­sion, the feel­ing was that we were enter­ing a dif­fer­ent world, not one boldly and ima­gin­at­ively dan­ger­ous like the one in King Kong, but one con­sid­er­ably creepi­er and sli­mi­er, a world that could con­ceiv­ably change and cor­rupt us. 

That was the feel­ing. After bask­ing in that world again via the won­der­ful Criterion Blu-ray of the film, I looked for crit­ic­al but­tresses for the feel­ing and was a little sur­prised not to find much of use in my lib­rary. Trusty Carlos Clarens, in his sem­in­al An Illustrated History of Horror and Science Fiction Films, more or less shrugs off the film, insist­ing that it “sel­dom con­vinces” before allow­ing that it “nev­er bores.” I am hard-pressed to find a ref­er­ence to the film at all in my sim­il­arly trusty antho­logy of sur­real­ist film cri­ti­cism, the Paul-Hammond-edited The Shadow and its Shadow, which col­lects the also-seminal Benayoun essay “Zaroff, or, The Prosperities of Vice” from which the afore­men­tioned phrase ori­gin­ated. (Erle C. Kenton is also excluded from the list of recom­men­ded dir­ect­ors in “Some Surrealist Advice,” a rather paro­chi­al over­sight giv­en the acci­dent­ally sur­real 1945 House of Dracula, but what are you going to do?) Where was I going to find a print con­frère on this vital issue? Well, of course, in my old friend Michael Weldon’s quite-unfortunately-out-of-print Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, which entry on Island reads, in part, “It was banned in England for years. H.G. Wells, who wrote the nov­el it was based on, con­demned it as being vul­gar. It’s also prob­ably the best hor­ror film ever made.” Is it only on view­ers of my own gen­er­a­tion that the film has such a grip? Weldon’s pal and Cleveland music scene con­tem­por­ary David Thomas, at the time known as Crocus Behemoth (among oth­er things) evoked the Lost Souls in the Pere Ubu song “Heart of Darkness.” Around the same time, closer to Akron, Devo was incor­por­at­ing the Sayer of the Law’s refrain “Are we not men?” into its mord­antly com­ic music­al the­ory of de-evolution. We laugh noe, but it’s worth recall­ing that a large part of the impetus for Devo’s form­a­tion was the Kent State mas­sacre. The unwit­ting ambi­val­ence with which the film views both the beast-men and their creator/authority fig­ure is, I think, anoth­er large com­pon­ent of its queasy power, a com­pon­ent that was not as read­ily vis­ible to Clarens and Ado Kyrou or Robert Benayoun as it might have been to an American kid grow­ing up in the ’60s. I don’t, by any stretch of the ima­gin­a­tion, intend to reduce Lost Souls to some sort of soci­olo­gic­al tract avant le lettre. But in cer­tain con­texts you don’t need to stretch all that much to make cer­tain con­nec­tion. In any event, I am delighted to be revis­it­ing the film (have I men­tioned enough how splen­did the Criterion edi­tion it?) and am slightly curi­ous to see what kind of recep­tion it eli­cits from the cool and badass of today. Or not.