by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The night before last Charles and I had watched a Mystery
Science Theatre 3000 version of a movie
that I’d long been curious about: The Brute Man, a 1946 oddball from Universal designed to be the
third in their series starring Rondo Hatton, real-life victim of acromegaly (a
glandular disorder, often triggered by environmental factors — in Hatton’s
case, a poison gas attack while he was serving in the U.S. Army in World War I
— that causes the face to become distorted and the extremities to swell) who
had been making movies off and on since 1930, generally in minor roles, making
a decent living but not achieving anything resembling stardom until 1944, when
Universal decided to sign him and bill him as a horror star whose scary
appearance was how he actually looked and not a Jack P. Pierce makeup job. They
introduced his character, “The Creeper,” in the 1944 film Sherlock
Holmes and the Pearl of Death with Basil
Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, a loose adaptation of “The Six Napoleons” in which
Hatton played the killer (described in the original story as a man with a
particularly hideous face), and then they created two starring vehicles for
him, House of Horrors and The
Brute Man. Alas, before either of these
films could be released Hatton died of the long-term effects of his disease on
February 2, 1946, and while Universal went ahead with the planned release of House
of Horrors on March 29, they sat on The
Brute Man and ultimately dumped it on the
low-budget PRC studio, which bought the rights from Universal and released it
on October 1. There were several reasons for this: Universal had taken heat
from critics and industry people alike for the exploitation of Hatton’s
real-life deformity, his death had only made the idea of making money off him
seem even sicker, and Universal was in the process of merging with the boutique
company International Pictures and wanted to upgrade its image and get rid of
“B” pictures altogether.
The irony is that, though House of Horrors was actually quite a good little movie for the genre and the time (Hatton played “The Creeper” — his real
name, if any, we never learn — and he’s not a homicidal maniac but a retard,
sort of like Lennie in Of Mice and Men, who doesn’t know his own strength and who approaches women for sex,
then kills them when they scream at the sight of him; he ends up taken in and
manipulated by a crazy artist, played by the marvelous Martin Kosleck, who has
the Creeper murder his art-critic enemies), The Brute Man was a total piece of tripe even though it reunited
most of the same creative personnel from House of Horrors, including director [a boy named] Jean Yarbrough and
writers Dwight V. Babcock (story) and George Bricker (script), this time with
M. Coates Webster assisting on the latter. Basically it’s just Rondo Hatton
wandering around Universal’s fog-drenched sets killing people, seemingly
randomly at first, though eventually a dramatic design emerges: Hatton’s
“Creeper” is really Hal Moffet, former college football star and romantic rival
of his dorm roommate, Clifford Scott (Tom Neal), for Virginia Rogers (Jan
Wiley). When Virginia goes on a date with Hal, Clifford gets his revenge by
deliberately slipping Hal wrong answers on a chemistry exam — and when the
professor calls Hal out on it in front of the class, he responds by hanging out
in the lab, mixing up a batch of chemicals and hurling them across the room —
thereby creating a toxic gas which messes up his appearance and changes him
from actor Fred Coby, who played Hal pre-transformation, to Rondo Hatton.
Along
the way he meets a number of women, including a blind piano teacher, Helen
Paige (Jane Adams), who befriends him since she can’t see how ugly he is … just
like the old hermit befriended the Monster in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (a scene used in Universal’s second film in the
cycle, The Bride of Frankenstein) and
the blind girl Dea befriended the facially contorted Gwynplaine in Victor
Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs — also
filmed by Universal (in 1928 as a silent with Mary Philbin and Conrad Veidt —
and it’s a pity they didn’t remake it with sound in the early 1930’s since it
would have been a superb vehicle for the co-stars of The Mummy, Boris Karloff and Zita Johann). Hal learns that his
girlfriend (whom he refuses to let touch her, lest she feel his face and sense his ugliness even though she can’t see him) needs
several thousand dollars for a super-operation to enable her to see (a ripoff
not only of Magnificent Obsession
but Chaplin’s City Lights!), so
he decides to add robbery to his crime list and get her the money that way —
only, at the finish of a movie that even though it comes in at less than an
hour in length still seems draggy
by the time it creeps (pardon the pun) to its end, he’s shot down by the police
(who until the final scene have been so clueless Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops
look like Dirty Harry by comparison) after Helen entraps him, for which she’s
rewarded with a pro bono
operation and the restoration (at least we presume it’s a restoration, though we’re never told in so
many words whether she ever could see) of her sight.
It’s a singularly
pointless movie, lacking even the flashes of pathos in Hatton’s House
of Horrors characterization and also
lacking much romance or humor to leaven the (supposedly) scary stuff. The Mystery
Science Theatre 3000 people had a good time
with it (including a reference to Gene Hackman, who played the blind hermit in
Mel Brooks’ parody Young Frankenstein) but they had an even better time with the short they showed in front
of it, a 1948 industrial film called The Chicken of Tomorrow (which itself sounds like a bad horror spoof!)
produced by a New York-based studio for something called the Sales Promotion
Division of the Texas Company. What was most interesting about this movie was
that it was made just on the cusp of the poultry industry’s switch from
free-range to mass-production methods — quite a few of the chickens in this
movie wander around yards under their own power even though they’re hatched in
rows of egg racks in incubators and then live most of their chickhoods inside
rows of tiny industrial-style cages. Aside from that, it was as dementedly
silly as only an industrial film can be to people who don’t participate in its
industry.
