Long ago, in a distant galaxy, Hollywood’s superhero movies were as modest as the comic books or radio shows that spawned them, using special effects that now feel homespun to conjure fantasies with the artless quality of folk tales.
“Chandu the Magician” (1932), adapted from a popular nightly radio broadcast of the same name, is one such film. Reissued on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber, it concerns the adventures of the benign adventurer Frank Chandler (Edmund Lowe), who having studied the “mystic arts” and learned the “secrets of the Yogi,” is now known as Chandu. When a crystal ball reveals the world-conquering ambitions of the nihilistic madman Roxor (Bela Lugosi), based in Egypt, Chandu trades his turban for a pith helmet and then a burnoose, traveling from India to North Africa to confront the fiend.
Chandu is an indefatigable escape artist with the power to cloud men’s minds. He can induce hallucinations so that some subjects imagine they are scolded by tiny replicas of themselves and others believe that their guns have turned into snakes. With such an occult hero, “Chandu the Magician” anticipates “Doctor Strange,” the coming movie based on the Marvel character. But as a stout defender of Western values, and with his easy mastery of third-world civilizations, Chandu is a forerunner of Indiana Jones.
Directed with breathless panache by Marcel Varnel and William Cameron Menzies, the movie is a 71-minute fun house of mad scientists, comic camels, proto-TV transmissions, “death ray” machines, secret passages and slave markets. A glamorous princess (Irene Ware) is on hand as rescue bait, but the most glorious attraction is Mr. Lugosi, resplendent in black tights and a matching turban. The actor’s lunatic conviction is an ode to megalomania as he gloats, chortles and rants, expressing his desire to “be greater than any pharaoh!”
“Chandu” is founded on pure irrationality and the primacy of the visual. Atmosphere transcends logic; Mr. Lugosi’s pronouncements notwithstanding, music is more important than dialogue. While Mr. Varnel, a French-born former actor, specialized in comedies, Mr. Menzies (1896-1957) was arguably Hollywood’s premier art director. It almost seems as if the sets he designed for the lavish silent version of “The Thief of Bagdad” with Douglas Fairbanks are being recycled here; he also managed to contrive dolly shots through the movie’s miniatures to remarkably fluid effect. (“Chandu” was shot by James Wong Howe, another virtuoso.)
Although providing the basis for a subsequent serial with Mr. Lugosi upgraded to the title role, “Chandu” was not a B-movie. It opened in New York at the Roxy, one of the largest and most opulent of Broadway movie palaces, and was accompanied by a live stage show that, according to the New York Times review, featured “an effective arrangement of Kol Nidre,” the Yom Kippur prayer, performed by the vaudeville vocalist William Robyn and a large chorus. Would that it had been included as an extra in the reissue.
“Chandu the Magician” is also an example of what the British critic Raymond Durgnat once called “the wedding of poetry and pulp.” A darker instance would be the 1940 B-movie “Stranger on the Third Floor” (available on DVD from Warner Archive).
Like “Chandu,” “Stranger on the Third Floor” is a fantastic tale given authority by its sets, special effects and production design. And it is also animated by the presence of a Hungarian-born actor blessed, or cursed, with an unforgettable voice — in this case Peter Lorre, playing a version of the deranged serial killer that made him an international star in Fritz Lang’s “M” (1931).
“Stranger” was the first feature directed by Boris Ingster, a former associate of Sergei Eisenstein (and later a producer on the 1960s spy series “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”), from a screenplay by the Hungarian writer Frank Partos that is thought to have been reworked by the novelist Nathanael West, who was killed in a car crash several months after the movie opened.
A notably grim affair, “Stranger” is redolent of urban paranoia and permeated with a sense of free-floating guilt. The legal system is a sham; the media is cynical. An ambitious young reporter (John McGuire) stumbles across one murder, his testimony dooming a hapless ex-convict (Elisha Cook Jr., the quintessential desperate little man) and is subsequently accused himself of another killing. The movie’s centerpiece is a lengthy nightmare in which the reporter imagines his interrogation, trial and execution.
“Stranger” is as experimental as any movie made in Hollywood between F. W. Murnau’s silent “Sunrise” (1927) and “Citizen Kane,” which, released a year later than “Stranger,” was also produced by RKO. (Van Nest Polglase designed the sets for both films.) The studio evidently recognized this, promoting “Stranger” for its “eccentric camera work” and “light-and-shadow effects.”
The ploy backfired. Variety thought “Stranger” to be “too arty for average audiences.” Other critics found the movie pretentious and confused. A box-office failure, “Stranger” was rediscovered on TV by young American cinephiles, who saw it as a precursor to “Kane” and the original film noir. (Had it been released a year or two earlier and combined its look with a “Chandu” premise, “Stranger” could have been a template for the Batman comic book.)
Given the left-wing politics and/or refugee status of many involved in its creation, “Stranger” has also been interpreted as an anti-Nazi parable and criticism of American xenophobia — the same year that it was released, a clip of Mr. Lorre’s performance in “M” was incorporated in the most loathsome of Germany’s anti-Semitic propaganda films, “The Eternal Jew.”
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DEMENTIA 13 Now restored on Blu-ray, Francis Ford Coppola’s first feature was a 1963 horror cheapie produced by Roger Corman and, in its tale of a murderous family with a guilty secret, was markedly influenced by Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” (The Film Detective)
THE STUDENT OF PRAGUE Released in 1913, “The Student of Prague” may have been the first example of the fantastic cinema that would become a trademark of German silent cinema. This scholarly two-disc edition includes two reconstructions of the original, as well as the shorter English export version. Subtitles are available, and the discs are coded for all regions. (Filmmuseum)
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Article Courtesy – The Newyork Times