5 & 6
“The leading surgeon in Genoa. The greatest authority on the human brain – until I told them something about their own brain. Then they said I was mad. Look at me – am I mad?”
Best remembered for their bodice-ripping period melodramas and their Will Hay comedies, Gainsborough Pictures tried their hand at horror with 1936’s
The Man Who Changed His Mind (aka
The Man Who Lived Again), and amazingly managed to turn out something much better and certainly more enjoyable than the rather better known run of mad scientist films star Boris Karloff would go on to make at Columbia Pictures. He’s another scientist who wants his work to benefit humanity only for the experts to laugh at him and his backer to try to take away and destroy his work, sending him off the deep end as he turns his invention to darker purposes. And handily enough his invention is a device that can transfer the thought content from the brain of one living creature to another, and it’s time to try it on something other than chimps…
It’s a stock situation, but it’s rather wonderfully realised thanks to solid direction from Robert Stevenson in the days before he became Disney’s go-to director and a surprisingly witty screenplay by L. du Garde Peach, John L. Balderston and Sidney Gilliat that packs a surprising amount into little over an hour’s running time and has a lot of fun with the clichés. Rather than the kindly paternal type he more commonly played, Karloff’s a more temperamental, seedy figure here, a cigarette lit from a Bunsen burner constantly between his lips while crippled patient-cum-assistant Donald Calthrop spits vitriol from the sidelines (
“Most of me is dead. The rest of me is damned. Laurience manages to keep the residue alive. Why is his own affair.”). With his diseased body and his perverted mind Calthrop forms a wonderful double-act of sorts with Frank Cellier’s pompous newspaper publisher and fair-weather benefactor, and each manages to steal at least half the movie, the first half belonging to Calthrop (
“I don’t mind dying, but to be accused of journalism..!”) and the second to the increasingly entertaining Cellier. Naturally there’s a pair of young lovers caught up in it all in the form of John Loder as the publisher’s son and Anna Lee as Karloff’s assistant, to whom he offers eternal youth and eternal loveliness, while a young (well, younger) Cecil Parker has a small supporting role as well. Working equally well as a mad scientist horror movie and a witty satire not just of the genre but of the PR game as well, it’s delightfully entertaining throughout, and Strawberry Media’s extras-free UK PAL DVD offers a surprisingly good transfer that we'll probably never see a Blu of. An unexpected joy.
“I would hardly describe
this as fun, Lestrade.”
A Study in Terror was Sherlock Holmes’ first big screen encounter with Jack the Ripper – they would lock horns again a couple of decades later in the much better
Murder by Decree – but its one that adds up to rather less than the talents involved would lead you to suspect. Coming from exploitation producer Herman Cohen (yes, him again), he of such gems as
I Was a Teenage Werewolf and
Konga, the biggest surprise is that it isn’t called
I Was a Teenage Consulting Detective (it was, however, bizarrely sold as a Batman-style comicbook caper Stateside -
[Show spoiler]
). It’s a surprisingly elegant production which plays down most of the potential for cheap thrills (though it does hype up the murders with trailer-friendly lines like
“You’ll never see anything like it this side of Hell”) and looks like it’s had a more than its fairly modest £160,000 budget spent on it, not least due to some gorgeously rich Eastmancolour photography that exploits the various studio backlots and standing sets economically pressed into service. It’s less concerned with historical accuracy or offering a solution that stands up to much scrutiny and it’s not exactly a taxing mystery, more of a watchable programmer.
John Neville was a fine actor but is a strangely anonymous Holmes on first acquaintance, though his performance grows on you with subsequent viewings (he would be much closer in spirit in his guest starring role as a Joseph Bell-like doctor in ITV's
The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes a few years later) while Donald Houston makes an easily pleased Watson, overdoing the delighted hero-worshipping schoolboy act at times. The supporting cast fare rather better: John Fraser as a likeable aristocrat, Robert Morley as a properly corpulent Mycroft Holmes, Barbara Windsor, Adrienne Corri and Edina Ronay as ladies of the night, Cecil Parker as the Prime Minister, while two actors from
Murder by Decree also appear, Frank Finlay making a decent job of Inspector Lestrade as he would in the later film, and Anthony Quayle as a charitable East End doctor (with a young Judi Dench as his daughter). There's also the odd tongue-in-cheek touch in the script: just as John Cutts would later name a character Frau Reichenbach in
Sherlock Holmes in New York so he could include the stage direction `Reichenbach falls,' here Peter Carsten's composed thug is called Max Steiner.
James Hill’s direction has its moments of imagination, particularly a murder in a horse trough shown from the submerged victim’s point of view, there’s a neat bit of deduction involving a medical bag and the makeup department provide Holmes with one good disguise. Ultimately it’s nothing special, but there are certainly worse non-canon Holmes movies out there.
Where the UK DVD is a disappointing fullframe transfer, the Australian PAL DVD and the NTSC manufactured on demand DVD-R from Sony offer the film in its original widescreen ratio, while Odeon's region-free Blu-ray release offers an excellent widescreen transfer with the original trailer.
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