Poor J. Carroll Naish in Dr. Renault's Secret, Harry Lachman, 1942. Look at that mug.
I always loved the B-picture innovation of revealing the film's "secret" not though a flashback but via a character paging through a scrapbook. Not just a cost-cutting move, but a post-modernist one!
I only just got around to revisiting this oddity, a fondness for which once functioned as a sort of Masonic handshake for eccentric horror buffs. It's part of the fabulous Fox Horror Classics Volume 2 box that came out last fall, which also includes the immortal Chandu the Magician. Watching Secret, one is struck by the straight face that director Lachman maintains while navigating the picture's myriad absurdities, among the least of which is Arthur Shields, full-on Dublin accent and all, playing the chief inspector of a provincial French town. As bonkers as it gets, the film retains a certain B integrity, delivering action and atmospherics with both commitment and brisk efficiency. The aggregate effect is quite…peculiar.
But again: look at that mug.
Like Shields, Naish was Irish, too. Although I think that was the one ethnicity he never played in a long career of “ethnics”.
Of course, to baby-boomer, Creature-Features monster kids, Naish’s two bookend performances were as the hunchback in “House of Frankenstein,” and, more than 25 years later, the mad doctor in “Dracula Vs. Frankenstein.”
But actually, my fave on that Fox set was “Dragonwyck.” Gorgeous photography, good score and a Gothic setting for that most peculiar Fox-studio team, Gene Tierney and Vincent Price. (Not to mention the appearance of “Colossal Man” Glenn Langan, as the forgettable hero.)
The much-underrated Harry Lachman, like his contemporary Roy William Neill, directed some very stylish B movies and has been unjustly forgotten.
I’d never heard of this…but that’s why I read this blog. Added to the queue!