THE DARK EYES OF LONDON (1939)
In which an alarming number of drowning victims are fished out of the Thames, all of them insured for surprisingly large amounts of money, in spite of being effectively alone in the world…
The trail of carnage leads from the Greenwich Insurance Company, headed by disgraced former medical man Dr Feodor Orloff, to a home for destitute blind men run by the dedicated Mr Dearborn, who is blind himself.
Throw in one victim’s beautiful daughter, a dumb and blind violinist, a jovial forger, a wisecracking Chicago cop, a hulking, disfigured henchman, a drowning pool and a square-jawed London detective, and we have a story whose moral seems to be never send the police to do a homicidal maniac’s job…
Observation: In England, insurance fraud is a bigger deal than multiple murder.
#1 by Ronald on November 28, 2011 - 7:56 am
Quote
Fun, but why no screencaps?
#2 by The Rev. on November 28, 2011 - 8:38 am
Quote
Either she just recently put them up, or you’re having trouble with your computer. I saw the screencaps just fine.
#3 by lyzard on November 28, 2011 - 3:17 pm
Quote
The screencaps are there; what’s missing is the smartarsery, which this avoided by the skin of Jake’s teeth.
#4 by RogerBW on November 28, 2011 - 9:38 am
Quote
I get the feeling that this may have started as a relatively straight police film, and the filmmakers were then told to horror it up a bit (or whatever the equivalent term was in 1939)…
#5 by lyzard on November 28, 2011 - 3:16 pm
Quote
I don’t know – my experience of Wallace isn’t as extensive as it should be, but this seems to me fairly classic stuff – except for the Chicago cop, who is an obvious tack-on for US audiences.
Anyone here seen Dead Eyes? – how different are they?
#6 by kbegg on November 28, 2011 - 7:22 pm
Quote
They are pretty similar. The monstrous blind killer looks more like Tor Johnson, however.
#7 by Jen S on November 28, 2011 - 2:15 pm
Quote
Woot Woot! Liz review!
Ah, back in the days when murdering the weakest members of society in order to collect insurance premiums was safely in the realm of fiction…
#8 by Luke Blanchard on November 29, 2011 - 5:41 am
Quote
Roger makes an interesting point. Much of the movie’s horror character comes from its visuals – Jake’s appearance, for example – and these mightn’t reflect the approach of the book. The film also resembles such films as Horrors of the Black Museum and Circus of Horrors in that its villain is a serial killer and the story follows him as he commits some of his murders, but the book mightn’t be written as an open mystery. Another of the film’s horror movie elements is its suggestion that Lugosi has hypnotic powers, but again, that mightn’t be from the book.
I found an e-copy of the novel at Project Gutenberg Australia. I don’t know if it’s in the public domain in the US. It begins as a murder mystery story. Holt, on holiday, is called back to London to investigate the discovery of the body in the Thames. The female lead is Diana Ward, who has just become his secretary. She says she was formerly “a nurse for two years in a blind asylum”. Grogan is also known as Flash Fred and is introduced in the first chapter. I’ll post on how closely the book resembles the movie when I’ve finished it.
#9 by Braineater on November 29, 2011 - 1:00 pm
Quote
Wait until you get to the villain’s secret hobby. It’s a howler.
#10 by Luke Blanchard on November 30, 2011 - 9:40 am
Quote
The book is indeed written as a mystery thriller. In it, the “Dark Eyes” is the name of the criminal gang. Jake is brutal, large and extremely strong, but human, of ordinary intelligence, and blind. He crushes light bulbs when attacking people a couple of times.
That the villains are serial killers only becomes apparent towards the climax. Holt misses some obvious opportunities. Diana solves the mystery faster than Holt, and extricates herself from great danger twice, but is rescued by Holt at the climax.
The equivalent of the Orloff character is named Judd. He is avuncular, and doesn’t have Orloff’s motivation of embitterment. He is also – SPOILER WARNING – not the same person as Dearborn, although Dearborn is a sighted person who pretends to be blind. (By the way, the movie’s big reveal did surprise me. It may have helped that I watched it at a small size.) Diana – SPOILER WARNING – is Stuart’s daughter, but doesn’t initially know this.
Rather than a forger, Grogan/Fred is a blackmailer who has been blackmailing Judd. However, forgery does play a role in the story.
The victims are killed – SPOILER WARNING – by being drowned in a special room, before being dumped in the Thames. The alternative method used in the film, involving the use of straitjackets, is one of the film’s chilling touches, so kudus to the scriptwriters for that. The concept that the asylum overlooks the Thames, and the Thames mud death at the climax, are also unique to the movie.
Judd and Dearborn each have a strange obsession, and the murders are committed partly to finance Dearborn’s. Braineater’s allusion to this made discovering his motivation more fun for me. (Thanks, B.)
#11 by Braineater on November 30, 2011 - 6:40 pm
Quote
The movie’s method of drowning the victims is much more practical than Wallace’s, which is a little absurd. But you have to wonder why Orloff didn’t pump up Thames water to do his dirty work… he might not have been detected so easily if he had.
And I get a kick out of imagining what Dearborn actually said to Diana in that final confrontation. I imagine it started, “We are all interested in the future…”