Censored and edited to death and long thought “lost” in its original form, “The Body Snatcher” is a 1945 horror tale that retains its ability to chill you to the bone.
Produced by horror impressario Val Lewton (“Cat People”), directed by Robert Wise (“The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “The Sound of Music”) and co-starring horror icons Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, it was well worth restoring — with British censor snips recovered. And so it was.
Experienced today, Karloff’s ghoulish grin and cocky self-assurance in the title role is a wonder to behold. He towers over the picture and indeed over Lugosi, by this stage in his career reduced to smaller roles playing on his “name” value. Karloff was always the more formidable actor.
What stands out for its era is “Body Snatcher’s” pitilessness. The deaths staged off-camera retain their power to shock. And Karloff revels in it all, a cabman retained as “specimen” procurer in the name of medical science, with Cabman Gray all-too-willing to take shortcuts when the need arises.
It’s based on a Robert Louis Stevenson story, “The Body Snatcher” which was inspired by the true story of a couple of murderous medical corpse creators. The fact that something exactly like this really happened thanks to killers Burke and Hare, and Dr. Robert Knox, who bought the bodies for his Edinburgh anatomy classes, so rattled the wartime British censors that all reference to them in the film was cut out.
That’s been restored. But one of the film’s most sinister inventions was never lopped out. Producer Lewton, an uncredited co-screenwriter, insured that the true story/legend of Greyfriar’s Bobby (renamed here) was folded-in, with the faithful dog’s dead master another “fresh” corpse for Cabman Gray to acquire, by hook or by crook.
Set in a VERY convincing facsimile of “Old Edinburgh” on RKO backlots (the old “Hunchback of Notre Dame” sets) at RKO’s Encino Ranch, thanks to art directors Albert S. D’Agostino And Walter E. Keller, the story follows efforts by Dr. Wolfe MacFarlane (Henry Daniell of “The Great Dictator,” “The Philadelphia Story”) to acquire the necessory bodies for dissection to teach the next generation of doctors.
“Stupid and unjust laws” stand in the way of “medicine,” “science” and progress, he blusters. So he’s got a long-running arrangement with Cabman Gray to get what he needs, not just bodies of the indigent or of dead criminals, but of respectable folk.
The vexing case of a paralyzed child (Sharyn Moffett) tests Dr. MacFarlane, nagged into taking on the necessary surgery by his moral and innocent student Fettes (Russell Wade). Fettes doesn’t know how many corpses it will take to practice and study for this procedure. And he doesn’t want to know where they came from.
When he starts to question where the bodies come from, Dr. MacFarlane presents implausibly innocent scenarios, telling him “Believe it or not, you’d best ACT like you believe you do!”
Fettes has met and been assigned the task of paying Gray, who lives rather well for a cabman, kept in his cups by his after-hours body-snatching. Gray is cocky to the point of arrogance, taking Dr. MacFarlane down to size with the mere remembrance of his nickname, “Toddy.”
Gray has something on the doctor, and by extension his new assistant. But the doctor’s manservant Joseph (Lugosi) hears all, and skulking around, sees much. He’s got something on Gray, too.
As the bodies that Gray “could not have gotten fairly” add up, Fettes grows horrified at what’s going on and the threat implicit in his suspicions endangers him as well as the innocent victims procured by Gray.
Donna Lee plays a beautiful street pauper, singing a Scottish lament (“When Ye Gang Awa, Jamie”), who turns-up often enough that we fear the worst.
The gloom of of it all contributes to that. Lewton assured the Wise and Director of Photography Robert De Grasse bathed ancient Edinburgh in shadows, adding to the menace.
This is widely regarded as one of Karloff’s greatest performances, and he so turns on the charm in his malevolent locutions that we can hear the narrator of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” in his sweet-talk to the little paralyzed girl he introduces to his horse. Even in his dealings with the doctor, he seems almost sympathetic.
“Being poor I have had to do much that I did not want to do. But so long as the great Dr McFarlane comes to my whistle, that long am I a man. If I have not that then I have nothing. Then I am only a cabman and a grave robber. You’ll never get rid of me, Toddy.”
It was Karloff’s last teaming (of eight collaborations) with Lugosi.
“The Body Snatcher” is a veritable primer on Golden Age Hollywood horror, a reminder that Universal didn’t have the market cornered on epic frights, and that you don’t need anything supernatural to scare viewers’ socks off. A creepy setting, a proper, plummy-voiced villain and murders in the name of “progress” will get the dirty job done.
Rating: TV-14, violence
Cast: Boris Karloff, Henry Daniell, Edith Atwater, Russell Wade, Paula Corday, Donna Lee, Sharyn Moffett and Bela Lugosi
Credits: Directed by Robert Wise, scripted by Philip MacDonald and Val Lewton, based on a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson. An RKO release on Tubi, Youtube, etc.
Running time: 1:19
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