1942’s The Mad Doctor of Market Street is a curious little B-movie, and part of that is due to the title, as the film spends very little time at that location.  Mad scientist Lionel Atwill believes he can resuscitate dead people and, surprise!, it turns out he can’t.  The widow of the man who was his latest test subject brings the police, who nearly apprehend him.

The doctor flees on a luxury liner while using an alias, never to return to Market Street.  Soon, a fire breaks out on the ship and he and others in the same lifeboat end up in a place where there are no streets, period, as they find themselves on a tropical island I assume is uncharted.

This is one loopy film, and roughly the first half hour will hit you like Nat Pendleton’s boxer, who is another of the lifeboat passengers.  Alas, the film will eventually settle into a groove for the second half, where it becomes a more pedestrian affair, as Atwill establishes a tyrannical rule over the island after resurrecting the grateful natives’ queen.

The others stranded on the isle include ship captain John Eldredge, deck steward Hardie Albright, and Claire Dodd and Una Merkel a niece and aunt, respectively.  The captain is surprisingly cowardly, leaving Albright and Pendleton to do most of the fighting, especially after Atwill decides to force Dodd to marry him.

This film is only a minute over the hour mark, making for a brisk runtime for even a low-budget programmer like this.  Typical of this fare, sets were reused from other productions, and I had the nagging suspicion the script was quickly whipped up to incorporate whichever resources were readily available at the time.

Something felt off about this picture from even the very first shot, where we see a door that says “Professor of Research” on it.  That seems to be redundant, and I wondered if the professor’s students would be “Students of Education”.  When we see Atwill, he is trying to convince his human guinea pig to let him kill him, and he ends sentences with the word “man” more than I have heard anybody use in a film before the 1950’s.

That offness is amplified on the cruise ship, where the crew know the killer is on board but can’t seem to determine which of the passengers he is.  I was curious how difficult that could be, though I assume it was easier to impersonate somebody before the time when photos could be transmitted.

Of the ship, we see little more than a bit of deck, which is where Albright sees Atwill knock a private eye unconscious and dump him overboard.  We mostly see what’s happening in the ballroom, where some guy barges in to announce there’s a man overboard.  This room is where our other characters are established, focusing especially on the rapport between Merkel and Doddi, with the daffy aunt dropping such odd quips as, “Next time I have a niece, she’s going to be younger than me.”  That scans as clever but doesn’t seem so much on closer inspection.

As I mentioned earlier, the ship catches fire, and that same guy from before, who was yelling somebody went overboard, is now giving the alarm for this.  I guess this guy is the ship equivalent of a town crier, so I’m going to call him the ship’s crier. 

Anywho, lifeboards, tropical isle, etc.  I was amused all Atwill does to bring the dead tribal queen back to life is a shot of adrenaline and a whiff of smelling salts.  How I wish the natives had smelling salts themselves and if they had just tried that first.  Now the survivors have to deal with a murderer who can order around the island inhabitants to turn his fellow survivors into subjects for his experiments, such as keeping a dead Albright in a cave for three days before resurrecting him.  I wondered if this was meant to be a parallel to the death of Christ.

That might be reading a bit more into The Mad Doctor of Market Street than is warranted by the film.  I was initially kept off my guard and wondering where it was going, when it jumped from one locale to another early on.  Alas, it doesn’t maintain that momentum, becoming a bit predictable and dull in the back half.  Still, it has dialogue that is above average for a little b-picture like this.  Consider this exchange between Pendleton and Merkel: “If I was there, I would have torn him apart”  “That wouldn’t have done any good.  He’d just put himself together again.”  Now, wouldn’t that be something interesting to see.

Dir: Joseph H. Lewis

Starring Una Merkel, Lionel Atwill, Nat Pendleton, Claire Dodd

Watched as part of Shout Factory’s blu-ray set Universal Horror Collection Volume 2