ISLAND OF LOST SOULS
(1932)
Although H.G Wells disapproved of it, this is a remarkably fine adaptation of his novel The Island of Doctor Moreau. Karl Struss's cinematography is magnificent and the film boasts a superb performance by Charles Laughton as the fiendish, whipcracking scientist whose experiments in surgical grafting between humans and animals have produced a pathetic series of bestial mutants, kept under hypnotic control by regular assemblies devoted to a liturgical chanting of the master's 'Law' (With Lugosi as his beast-man foreman, 'sayer of the law').
Although less suave than Count Zaroff of The Most Dangerous Game (1932) - in spite of his Mephistophelean goatee, Laughton's Moreau looks sweaty and rumpled compared to the impeccable Zaroff - Moreau is his blood brother in the mind. Moreau's equivalent to Zaroff's cool intellectual sadism, again suffusing the film with a perverted eroticism, is his plot to have Arlen mate with Burke - the beautiful woman he has created from a panther but who is already reverting - just to see what the results of cross-breeding will be. Interesting, though, Island of Lost Souls anticipates King Kong (1933) in its embodiment of the underground spirit of revolt, a spirit extremely timely in its appeal to victims of the Depression years, who not only resented their material deprivations but were all too willing to blame a system which appeared to thrive on an arbitrary suspension of the individual's inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. The delirious final revolt here, with the master dragged away to the 'House of Pain' in which he created his subservient brutes, echoes the wilder excesses of the French Revolution.
Presumably because of its vivisection aspects, the film was banned in Britain until 1958. Lost somewhere among the beast-men are Randolph Scott and Alan Ladd. First filmed in France in 1913 in a thinly disguised version as L'Ile d'Epouvante, the Wells novel was remade as Terror is a Man (1959), and as The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977)