In the book Junk Film: Why Bad Movies Matter, Katharine Coldiron explains how hard-to-follow logic in some bad films makes them tiring to watch. I almost fell asleep watching 1944’s The Lady and The Monster, and I believe it was because of that. Here is a cheapo horror film which pairs a Frankenstein type plot with a crime thriller better suited for a noir. We don’t even learn why we’re following that subplot until we’re in the final third, long after I stopped caring about the proceedings.
In what I will call movie A, Erich von Stroheim is a scientist, of the mad sort, who is determined to keep a brain alive. At the beginning of the film, his most recent test subject is a monkey with tuberculosis he bought off an organ grinder. But the recovery of a body from a prop plane crash provides the opportunity to try to preserve a human brain. It will turn out the pilot was a wealthy Howard Hughes type named Donovan.
In parallel to this is movie B, where Richard Arlen, as von Stroheim’s assistant, has been possessed by Donovan’s brain. Donovan is hell-bent on getting released from prison a kid who is on death row for murder. It is Donovan’s connection to that kid which is withheld from the audience for so long. I felt the failure to share that pertinent information is a huge failure of the picture; however, in the interest of not spoiling anything, I won’t disclose that connection here.
In a weird middle ground between what I feel are two distinct parallel storylines is yet a third partial plot thread. Helen Vinson, as Donovan’s widow, and Sidney Blackmer, as the family lawyer, hound von Stroheim and Arlen about the final moments of the dead pilot’s life, especially any potential last words he might have had. The scientists are honest when they say he didn’t have any such words in real life, but his floating brain in the tank becomes a real Chatty Cathy once he takes hold of Arlen.
I have yet to mention the lead actress, Vera Hruba Ralston, because she is weirdly close to nonexistent in her own film. Then again, she hardly has much presence when she is on the screen. She’s the daughter of von Stroheim’s now deceased partner, as well as Arlen’s love interest and occasional assistant in the lab. Ralston was a Czech import who did not speak English and learned her lines for early films like this phonetically. What is peculiar is either nobody coached her on set or possibly she wouldn’t take direction. As she was married to the head of the studio of Republic Pictures, which made this film, it could have been either possibility. What is deeply weird is how wooden she is, even in physical movements. There’s a truly bizarre moment where she takes a few deeply awkward steps to a column and reaches out to it as if she’s a robot reaching a line in its programming that said TOUCH PILLAR. When delivering dialogue, she seems to randomly cycle through expressions in hopes she might accidentally hit the right emotional beat for the syllable she happens to be on at any given time.
Her curious manhandling of the English language seems to have infected others. Until I saw this film, I didn’t know a particularly terrifying looking surgical tool (like a combination saw and garrote) was called a Gigli saw. But I turned on the subtitles and rewatched a bit where Arlen asks for what sounds like a “giggly saw”. Now, that sounds like something truly disturbing, and I recommend one be used as a weapon in the next movie with a killer clown in it. But I suspect it is actually pronounced “zhee-lee”, if I learned anything from that horrible Ben Afleck and Jennifer Lopez, which I didn’t.
Yet another curious aspect of the film is it distinctly has a feel of gothic horror hanging over the proceedings, yet it takes place in Arizona. There’s even the mandatory gothic castle, except it has a Spanish tile roof. Y’know, it’s one of those American desert gothic horror films we’ve all seen so often as to become tired of (*cough*).
Lady and the Monster is batshit crazy enough that it should be enthralling. Instead, it is so pointlessly confusing that it becomes a chore to watch. Those who were glued to the film throughout its runtime aren’t even rewarded for doing so. A quick and tidy narrative exposition dump in the final minute doesn’t even bother to tell us what happened to the kid on death row.
Dir: George Sherman
Starring Vera Hruba Ralston, Erich von Stroheim, Richard Arlen
Watched as part of Kino Lorber’s Republic Pictures Horror Collection blu-ray box set