Prior to the Hammer Horror film era, Britain did not produce many horror films. It was a genre that was frowned upon by both film censors and producers, and during the war years, horror films were actively discouraged in terms of production and importation – it was felt that there were enough horrors to face in real life and the idea that these films might provide some level of escapism for audiences was lost on the establishment. With the exception of the vigorously outrageous Tod Slaughter’s series of lip-smacking crime movies, few films explored the morbid, with filmmakers preferring the murder mystery and the wartime thriller when they wanted to examine the dark side of human nature. All the odder, then, that Dark Eyes of London was produced in 1939.
Or perhaps not. Alongside Slaughter – whose films were very much based around his theatrical melodramas and could be passed off as lurid costume crime dramas more than horror stories – the main exception to Britain’s unofficial fatwa against the horror story on film was the work of Edgar Wallace. Wallace was hugely popular in the first half of the 20th century (and beyond), and while his novels were primarily crime stories, there was often a dark edge to much of his writing that – at least when filmed with the right mindset– often blurred the line between thriller and horror. At a time when the horror film was still seen primarily as the fantastical and supernatural, his psychological thrillers probably slipped past the beady eyes of the censor, meaning that films like The Terror – which is essentially a body count psycho horror story, albeit closer to The Cat and the Canary than Friday 13th – could be produced even as American-made horror films were being censored or banned.
The Dark Eyes of London, based on a Wallace story from 1924, slips more overtly into the horror genre by virtue of its star, Bela Lugosi, a name synonymous with the genre even though his career was already on the slide by this point. While British-born Boris Karloff had already returned to his home country in 1933 to star in The Ghoul, this was Lugosi’s first film outside America since he reached fame as Dracula in 1931. By 1939, his career was already on the slide – his ego and awkwardness, not to mention his rather old-fashioned acting style had seen a fall from the big leagues of Universal to the less respectable world of Monogram and Republic Pictures – but Bela Lugosi was, nevertheless, a name that audiences would recognise, and as years went by, he would return to the UK for theatrical tours of Dracula and a career-low appearance in Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire – those who think that his work with Ed Wood was the final humiliation clearly haven’t sat through this film.
His presence and performance in The Dark Eyes of London turns the film from a dark crime thriller into a horror film, and unsurprisingly, the US release made the connection even clearer, retitling the film The Human Monster. Significantly, this is one of a handful of films to receive the infamous ‘H’ (for Horrific) certificates from the BBFC (thrillingly, the BBFC certification card appears at the start of the Blu-ray edition, a treat now denied us as the censors insist that old certificates are removed from video copies, presumably because they sometimes reveal that a previous rating was less restrictive than a modern one).
Lugosi is Dr Orloff – yes, Dr Orloff, the name that Wallace fan Jess Franco would later use in his 1962 breakthrough movie The Awful Dr Orloff and its various sequels and spin-offs over the years – an insurance salesman whose clients have the unfortunate habit of turning up drowned. While he is presented as a charitable man, willing to help out clients who are in financial difficulties, our suspicions are aroused because, well, he’s Bela Lugosi – and that usually means that he’ll be a bad egg. So it is – Orloff is involved in some sort of nefarious insurance fraud scheme that brings him into contact with a master forger, recently extradited from America, and this connection in turn alerts police inspector Larry Holt (played with square-jawed intensity by Hugh Williams) and American Lieutenant Patrick O’Reilly (Edmon Ryan), who has supposedly come over on some sort of training exchange but whose role in the film is really just to help sell it to American audiences. Then, as now, there was the belief that American audiences won’t watch a film without at least one character with a familiar accent. Has there ever been any evidence to back this theory up or is it a sign of the xenophobic nature of US film distributors?
Orloff is a patron of the Dearborn Home for the Blind, the sort of place that you won’t find today – here, blind men are given menial tasks to perform in an effort to make them useful to society once again, and so is more workhouse than care home, where the blind are a cross between prisoner and mental inmate. One of the more niche tasks – at least for the hulking Jake (Wilfred Walter) – is helping Orloff bump off his clients in a secret room at the back of the institute, unknown to everyone else. A transferable skill, no doubt. As the police close in (thanks to some impressive forensics work), Orloff vanishes. In search of more evidence against him, Larry persuades Diane (Greta Gynt), the daughter of his latest victim, to take a job at the Home as secretary to its kindly owner Dearborn, hoping that she might uncover evidence – but as anyone who has ever read a Wallace story or seen one of the many film adaptations will have already guessed, Dearborn is actually Orloff in disguise – his voice dubbed by O.B. Clarence just to throw audiences off the scent – and he sends Jake out to finish off Diane…
While essentially a crime film more than a horror story – Orloff’s motives for murder are, after all, strictly financial – the film is given a gothic luridness by director Walter Summers that removes it from the other British Wallace films, most notably the series of films made in the 1960s that were very much straight-ahead crime dramas for the most part. Instead, this is very much in the style of the German Wallace films that ran through the 1960s and became increasingly outrageous as time went on. Summers was a little more than a journeyman director – though he had previously made the last British silent film of note, another horror film called Chamber of Horrors – but he brings a real verve to this, keeping the comic relief that sometimes overwhelms similar films of the era under control and adding a sense of creepiness and unease to the story. The character of Jake is a classic horror movie henchman, large and brutish, and the film is – for the time – unexpectedly grim at times, with the dead bodies looking genuinely unsettling. Made at a time when the American horror film was becoming glossier and less brutal, The Dark Eyes of London feels gritty and authentically nasty.
Lugosi – an actor who tended to be as good or bad as the material demanded – is on good form here, though some of his long, drawn-out sentences and stares into the camera are perhaps overdone – I think even the dopiest copper might have had his suspicions alerted by this sort of behaviour. It’s classic Lugosi. but he might have had a better career if directors had pulled him back from the theatrics a bit. There is a good actor in Lugosi but he’s most allowed to get away with pulling his usual ‘sinister’ schtick and I don’t think that it was to the benefit of his career in the end. But this is one of his better films, one that still holds up surprisingly well today. For anyone unfamiliar with Lugosi, Wallace or 1930s horror in general, this is as good a place as any to start.
DAVID FLINT
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