The Island of Lost Souls

A while back I read H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau, It has made into a movie several times, but the best, so the consensus goes, is 1932's The Island of Lost Souls, featuring Charles Laughton giving a dapper, bemused, and creepy performance as the mad doctor who turns animals into humans.

Wells hated the film, but it is well made, directed by Erle C. Kenton. The plot structure is similar to the book: a shipwrecked seaman (Richard Arlen) is picked up by a boat carrying many exotic animals. The surly drunken captain tosses him off the boat at the titular island, where he meets the doctor, dressed nattily in an ice cream suit. He slowly learns that the natives, who are brutish and hairy, are animals that have been turned into men through Moreau's process, which involves vivisection (Wells wrote the book as an anti-vivisection tract).

The main difference between the film and the book is that the script, written by Philip Wylie, has added two females to give it sex appeal. And since it was pre-code, it's a bit more naughty than normal. Kathleen Burke stars as Lota, a panther turned into a girl. Moreau gets the idea that Lota, his greatest creation, may mate with Arlen. Burke slinks around in a jungle bikini, looking pretty damn good for a 1932 film. Also in the film is Leila Hyams, as Arlen's fiancee, who hires a boat captain to come rescue him, but when Moreau sees her he instructs one of his beast men to rape her.

Bela Lugosi also is in the film, as the leader of the beast men, his face covered in fur (ironically, he turned down the role of Frankenstein's monster because he didn't want his face obscured by makeup).

The themes of Wells' work are here, mostly the encroachment of man into God's work. Moreau, at one point, asks Arlen if he knows what it feels like to be God. He has kept the beast men in line with the "law," which states that no one shall eat men, spill blood, or walk on all fours. But when Moreau instructs one of his beast men to kill someone, the beasts realize that the law is not inflexible. In the book, Moreau dies fairly early on, but here his death is much more horrifying, as the beasts give him some of his own medicine.

The Island of Lost Souls also has a number of cultural touchstones, some of them from Wells' book, some not. The "House of Pain," is the place where the animals are operated on. Part of the law involves the beasts chanting, "Are we not men?" which Devo borrowed. And it's where the phrase "the natives are restless tonight" originates, as the beast men howl in the distance. The film was banned in Britain for years because of the depiction of cruelty to animals.

Perhaps the greatest accomplishment in the film is the makeup design by Wallie Westmore. On the Criterion DVD I viewed, there's an extra with famed makeup designer Rick Baker marveling over it, as it was in the days before foam rubber. The amount of actors needing makeup number in the dozens. Surely some of them used simple masks, but the makeup for the actors receiving closeups, such as Lugosi, was outstanding.

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