Review
DR RENAULT’S SECRET
Rating:  ½
USA. 1942.
Director – Harry Lachman, Screenplay – William Bruckner & Robert E. Metzler, Photography (b&w) – Virgil Miller, Music – Emil Newman & David Raskin, Art Direction – Richard Day & Nathan Juran. Production Company – 20th Century Fox.
Cast:
John Shepperd (Larry Forbes), J. Carrol Naish (Noel), George Zucco (Dr Robert Renault), Lynne Roberts (Madeline Renault), Mike Mazurki (Rogell), Arthur Shields (Inspector Duval)
Plot: Larry Forbes arrives in a small French town to visit his fiancee Madeline Renault. But while staying at the inn another American is murdered in the room he was originally to be sleeping in. Suspicion is placed on Noel, the manservant of Madeline’s anthropologist father, Dr Robert Renault. And then Larry discovers that Dr Renault has actually surgically altered Noel from an ape into a human.
Dr Renault’s Secret was one of the mad scientist films that came at the height of the great era of mad scientist films. It was actually a remake of an earlier film, The Wizard (1927). The Wizard is lost today, but sounds a truly fascinating artifact, featuring Gustav von Seyffertitz as the scientist Dr Coriolos who grafts a human face onto an ape and sends it to kill those who conedmned his innocent son to the electric chair. This had in turn been based on a lost French short horror film, Balaoo the Demon Baboon (1913), taken from a novel by Gaston (The Phantom of the Opera) Leroux.
Dr Renault is caught halfway between being a 1940s mad scientist film and an Old Dark House thriller. The Old Dark House genre emerged in the 1920s on the stage and later film. It would usually feature a selection of people in a haunted house setting being threatened by a masked madman and would maintain an even balance of comedy and thrills. There’s much of the Old Dark House genre still present in Dr Renault – the constrained setting, the suspect lineup, the investigating inspector, and some cobwebby cliches like hands with daggers appearing from behind hidden doors. In fact when you think about it Dr Renault is really a quite ingenious variation of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), filmed as The Island of Lost Souls (1932), mounted as an Old Dark House film. (The earlier versions had emphasized the simian connection even further and drawn their inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue).
In comparison to many other mad scientist films that were being made around the time, usually by poverty row studios such as PRC, Monogram and Republic, and starring either, Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff or, as here, George Zucco, this is actually quite well made. It is much better budgeted than most of its ilk. And it is directed with a reasonable degree of style, arriving at quite a lavishly mounted mill climax. Zucco is on fine form and there is a surprising degree of sympathy generated for the monster of the show. It all hails in at only 58 minutes running time.
Art director was Nathan Juran, later to emerge as a strong genre director with the likes of 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), among others. Last updated: Wednesday, 03 September 2008
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