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THE ISLAND OF LOST SOULS
Rating: 
USA. 1932.
Director – Erle C. Kenton, Screenplay – Philip Wylie & Waldemar Young, Based on the Novel The Island of Dr Moreau by H.G. Wells, Photography (b&w) – Karl Struss, Special Effects – Gordon Jennings, Makeup – Wally Westmore, Art Direction – Hans Dreier. Production Company – Paramount.
Cast:
Charles Laughton (Dr Moreau), Richard Arlen (Edward Parker), Kathleen Burke (Lota), Arthur Hohl (Dr Montgomery), Leila Hyams (Ruth Thomas), Paul Hurst (Captain Donahue), Bela Lugosi (The Sayer of the Law), Stanley Fields (Captain Davies), Tetsu Komai (M’Ling), Hans Steinke (Ouran)
Plot: Edward Parker is picked up by the freighter Covena after being shipwrecked at sea. But following a fight with its captain he is dumped aboard the launch of Dr Moreau. Moreau welcomes Parker to his island. But Parker soon discovers that Moreau is conducting vivisection experiments in order to turn animals into human beings. And then Parker finds that Lota, the native girl that Moreau is trying to push him toward, is really a transformed panther and that Moreau wants to keep him there to conduct an experiment in mating her with a human.
The Island of Lost Souls was the first of three screen adaptations of H.G. Wells’s novel The Island of Dr Moreau (1896). It has since been remade twice – as the dull The Island of Dr Moreau (1977) featuring Michael York as the castaway and Burt Lancaster as Dr Moreau, and the underrated The Island of Dr Moreau (1996) featuring David Thewlis as the castaway and Marlon Brando as the good doctor. There have also been at least two uncredited adaptations – The Island of Terror (1913) and the Philippino-shot Terror is a Man (1959).
It was one of only a handful of adaptations of his work that H.G. Wells saw within his lifetime and he was reportedly not happy with the results. The film certainly adds many elements to the story, most notably the characters of Moreau’s burned-out assistant Montgomery and the Panther Girl, the woman that Moreau tries to make the hero mate with with him unaware that she is a beast person too. (Both of these characters have been retained by subsequent film adaptations). The hero here also gets a fiancee who in the latter half of the film turns up on the island. But most of the rest of the film is quite faithful to the Wells story, thanks to a literate script by Philip Wylie, the sf author who also co-wrote the book that became When Worlds Collide (1951) as well as the film adaptation of Wells’s The Invisible Man (1933). Certainly it is far more faithful to the source text than the adaptations of Frankenstein (1931) and Dracula (1931) that had been conducted by Universal the preceding year. However you can see what it is that had Wells upset – he wrote the tale as a Frankensteinian take on the Garden of Eden myth, one where the creations take revenge on their flawed creator. While Lost Souls doesn’t change this in any way, what it does is to play it as a horror film, one where there is a quite startlingly lascivious undertow and a number of sexually taboo overtones. Wells’s considerations aside, this is an approach that actually makes it work the best of all the story’s adaptations so far.
It is well directed by Erle C. Kenton, not really known as a director of subtlety. The rest of Kenton’s work is a nondescript series of B crime melodramas – his two other genre works were the passably routine Universal monster bashes, House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945). Kenton however does quite a good job here, being especially good at making the studio sets look like a suitably heated tropical island. The makeups on the Beast Men are only so-so – The Beast Men rarely have distinctive personalities they way they do in the other versions, rather they are just an aggregate body of animal creatures that Kenton quite effectively keeps sinisterly lurking in the shadows. There is also an undeniable sexual element to the film. Kathleen Burke gives a performance that balances between naïve innocence, exoticism and sultry sensuality. There’s a fine subtle scene where she and Richard Arlen meet beside a pool, partially shot reflected in the water, with she coming onto him and then revealing her claws, before he suddenly realizes she is one of Moreau’s animals too. There are directly sexual references with Moreau noting that he wants to mate her with a human just to see what happens. For an era that refused to even show a married couple inhabiting the same bed, the suggestions of bestiality are startling – no wonder the film was banned in the UK until the 1960s.
There is also much that forced on the film due to the time was made, which has undeniable effect – there is no musical score for example (a result of the film being made in the early few years of the sound era). Further both the book and this film were written before the discovery of DNA – thus Dr Moreau is a vivisectionist creating his hybrids through surgery, as opposed to both remakes where he is cleaned up and made into a genetic engineer. The idea of him being a surgeon, creating hybrids through brute force, is something that gives the lab scenes a much nastier edge. And as a result the ending where the creations turn and vivisect Moreau has an incredible shock sting to it that neither remake managed.
The Moreau role is played by Charles Laughton. Laughton was a classic actor who played great character roles like Nero in The Sign of the Cross (1932), Henry VIII in The Private Life of Henry VII (1933), Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), the title roles in Rembrandt (1936) and I, Claudius (1937) and was the definitive Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939). He also directed the excellent psycho-thriller The Night of the Hunter (1954). Laughton gives a great performance – in tubby build with Mephistophelean beard, he is alternately arrogant and assured at the same time as he is fascinatingly charismatic. If you compare Laughton’s performance to Colin Clive in Frankenstein (1931), there seems a world of difference – where Clive’s mad scientist seemed craven and the whole film pitched at a level of overwrought melodrama, Moreau’s scientist and the film seem realistic and without melodrama.
In fact with Laughton’s performance and the torrid tropical setting, the film takes on undeniable colonial slave owner overtones – outfitted in pith helmet and wielding a whip against the Beast Men, Laughton really seems more akin to one of the white plantation owner in the likes of Mandingo (1975) and Drum (1976) than to Clive’s Frankenstein. In this sense The Island of Lost Souls taps into many themes that ran through 1930s/40s horror/sf cinema. Most overtly there is the fear, begun with Frankenstein, that science was defying divine provenance and opening up a Pandora’s Box that would unleash socially devastating forces. More importantly is the preoccupation with the borderlines of civilization. Serials perpetually colonized Africa, Asia, the Old West, underground and outer space as realms of exotic adventure. There was a sense that there were definite parameters beyond which civilization no longer applied. This was the era of The Depression where a substantial part of the population had become disenfranchised and been rendered dissolute. The films of the era were filled with wish fulfillment fantasies such as Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) and Lost Horizon (1937) about people abandoning civilization and finding an alternate paradise in undiscovered worlds in respectively Africa and Asia. Perhaps the most famous variant on the theme was King Kong (1933), which was about the discovery of a great beast that ruled a primal jungle realm who is tragically conquered and brought down by civilization.
Both King Kong and The Island of Lost Souls tap into sexual themes. For both films the island beyond the borderlines of civilization harbors animal primitivism, which in both cases is equated with sexuality. Kong represents rampaging desire for a blonde girl. There’s a similar scene here of the animal sexuality threatening civilized people with its unruly passions – of the Panther Girl trying to tempt the hero to mate with her. And upon the blonde fiancee’s arrival on the island a Beast Man peers in the window at her as she goes to go to bed and then tries to break into the room. The Beast creatures here clearly represent raw, primal sexuality untamed by civilization while she is held up as a paragon of unattainable desirability. Of course the film naturally climaxes with the island and the creations of super science burning in flames, the forces of bestial sexuality destroyed and the hero and heroine in each other’s arms – in other words the status quo of civilized reason and tamed passions having been restored.
Copyright Richard Scheib 2001
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