Hosted By Christina Wehner & Silver Screenings

This is a Blogathon I just couldn’t resist, aside from the nifty idea, I always love the opportunity to cover one of my favorite actors… the great Boris Karloff. Corridors of Blood is a fine example of how Karloff’s benevolent charisma always manages to create a sympathetic ‘monster’ either virtual or psychologically. He appeared in several films as the altruistic scientist seeking and working toward the ultimate good, only to inadvertently create a creeping chaos unraveling in a most horrific way.

Speaking for myself and I am assured a gazillion other fans, even at his most nefarious, we never fail to align ourselves with most of Karloff’s characters, perhaps with the exception of the sadistic Mord in Tower of London (1939) and the maniacal Master George Sims in Bedlam (1946). But, for most of his performances, including his poignant portrayal of Mary Shelley’s eternally replicated monster, we began to see the depth of Karloff’s craft. It’s an art form in and of itself to be able to manifest personae that can be simultaneously benevolent and menacing, accessible and yet frightening- the ultimate anti-hero… (Vincent Price has that awesome quality as well). It is this gift that makes Karloff so beloved and so compelling to watch over and over again!

Thanks once again to Christina Wehner and Ruth from Silver Screenings for coming up with a fantastic topic and allowing me to come out and play!

From Boris Karloff More Than a Monster: The Authorized Biography by Stephen Jacobs ” The scriptwriters had the insane scientist transplant brains, hearts, lungs and other vital organs. The cycle ended when they ran out of parts of anatomy that could be photographed decently.” Boris Karloff (1962)

CORRIDORS OF BLOOD (1958)

Produced by John Croydon, and directed by Robert Day, The Haunted Strangler and Corridors of Blood were shot back to back and released both in 1958.

Directed by Robert Day (First Man into Space 1959, SHE 1965, slew of superior tv movies such as, The House on Green Apple Road 1970, Ritual of Evil 1970, In Broad Daylight 1971, The Initiation of Sarah 1978 and television dramas: The Streets of San Francisco, The Name of the Game, Circle of Fear, Police Story, McCloud, The Sixth Sense, The Bold Ones, Bracken’s World, & Ironside.)

Corridors of Blood stars Boris Karloff  as the kindly Dr. Thomas Bolton, Francis Matthews as Jonathan Bolton,  Betta St. John as Jonathan’s girlfriend Susan, a standout performance by Christopher Lee as Resurrection Joe, a surly and imposing agent of death!

Adrienne Corri (Doctor Zhivago 1965, A Clockwork Orange 1971, Vampire Circus 1972, Madhouse 1974) as Rachel : “Some day you’ll wiggle that bottom of yours just once too often.” speaking to Yvonne Romain (Circus of Horror 1960, Curse of the Werewolf 1961, Night Creatures 1962), as Rosa. Carl Bernard as Ned, the Crow and Francis De Wolff as Black Ben –all dwellers of The Seven Dials.

Buxton Orr  (Fiend Without A Face 1958, First Man Into Space 1959, Suddenly, Last Summer 1959, Doctor Bloods Coffin 1961 and The Snake Woman 1961) is responsible for the music– a dark and threatening score that underlies some of the more disturbing scenes. Cinematographer Geoffrey Faithfull, (Village of the Damned 1960, Murder She Said 1961, Panic 1963) has done a marvelous job of creating a shadowing world lit with menacing ambiance.

Absent is the traditional monster terrorizing the villagers in the picture, it is more centered around the doctor/scientist who is at the heart of the narrative and his scholarly & personal struggle to find answers hidden in the world of science and medicine. The film opens with the inhabitants of The Seven Dial’s tavern hearing the bell ringer summon the doctor to surgery. The whole effect is very reminiscent of a darkly melancholy Lewtonesque panorama. Once the bell peels throughout the town, even the butcher stops his very aptly to the scene, hacking away at the meat on his table in order to follow to hospital and the operating theater. The camera close up on the door might as well say ‘welcome to hell.’

From Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film by Peter Hutchings

“the working-class patient functions as the object for the scientist’s often very painful experiments; this in turn might be read as enacting a suspicion and fear of the notion of the nurturing Welfare State, which, as our earlier analysis of The Quartermass Experiment has demonstrated, was apparent in many areas of British cinema in 1950s. The differences between the two films are quite striking , however. Corridors of Blood was (like Grip of the Strangler) shot in black and white and strives for a realism which rarely concerned Hammer. The operations—done without anesthetic  in Corridors of Blood are painfully authentic; the image of Karloff frantically trying to conduct the operation as quickly as possible stands poles apart from Cushing’s cool relish of his surgical skills in the Frankenstein cycle.”
“The Karloff figure in both of Day’s films is a man crushed by the world in which he lives and works.”

“Distinguishing features of 1950s Hammer Horror.These non-Hammer films -Blood of the Vampire, Flesh and the Fiends, Corridors of Blood and Grip of the Strangler (The Haunted Strangler)—certainly deal with issues that are also handled by Hammer: for example, the questionable authority represented by the figure of the scientist (in a nuclear age that saw the formation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament)  and the cruelty implicit in the medical objectification of the patient. But the stress laid by these productions on failure and defeat, especially in Corridors of Blood, immediately sets them apart from a more robust and assertive Hammer Horror.”

The Seven Dials, scenes are as Jonathon Rigby so aptly remarks not only captures the ‘back-alley squalor’ of the Seven Dials district but cites Tom Weaver’s impression in his meeting with Richard Gordon that the film is very “Dickensian” Rigby also describes beautifully the mood of the atmosphere… “in a grimy chiaroscuro and peopled with unwashed grotesques like Ned, the Crow.” A peg legged miscreant played by Carl Bernard. The Art Direction by Anthony Masters, (The Story of Esther Costello 1957, The Day the Earth Caught Fire 1961, 2001, A Space Odyssey 1968, Papillon 1973) adds another layer to the film with it’s lavish quality that confronts the dark and seamy side of life. Utilizing the MGM Studios in London, the crew had access to the studio’s incredible resource of their wardrobe department. thus, Corridors of Blood also features superb as well as authentic period costuming, in the time when medicine was grasping at discovery, cures and new techniques in the surgical arena.

Richard Gordon, he talks a bit about Corridors of Blood with Tom Weaver who asks Gordon about the wide of the mark film title that suggests more gore than historical drama. “Corridors’ lurid title and ad campaign added up to audience disappointment in the film when people got a movie about anesthesia.”

He had this to say about the film’s hybrid quality of being a medical melodrama mixed with elements of the horror picture. “I think the problem with Corridors of Blood is that it’s really a hybrid film which isn’t one thing or the other…{…}… It’s not enough of a horror film like , lets say The Haunted Strangler, and yet it’s too much of a horror film to be regarded as a picture dealing seriously with surgery and with the medical profession in that era. To my mind the finished film falls in the middle, and I wasn’t too happy with the way it turned out. But I thought that Karloff gave an extraordinarily good and convincing performance in it”

From English Gothic a Century of English Gothic by Jonathan Rigby-“For Grip of the Strangler, Richard Gordon’s deal with Boris Karloff’s agency, MCA had included ‘an option on a second film to be exercised within a certain period of time – subject to Karloff’s availability naturally.” (quoted in Tom Johnson Grip of the Strangler/Corridors of Blood in Midnight Marquee actors series Boris Karloff 1996)

Rigby goes on to talk about Gordon’s plans for a ‘lavish’ production, costume piece/horror that would be a widescreen film called Dracula’s Revenge (because we needed another one of those!), but things were happening over at Bray Studios, and The Doctor at Seven Dials started production at MGM Borehamwood in May of 1958 using Robert Day as Director of the picture. What’s unfortunate because of mismanagement at MGM the film was not released until September 1962, using the more inciting & compelling title of Corridors of Blood to feed the audiences who craved more provocative exploitation tags & narratives. To prove this thirst for catchy titles, the film was released in the US along side the wholly inferior Werewolf in a Girls Dormitory.

“It’s surgical horrors must have seemed no more than business as usual , but for it’s time, it is remarkably graphic. And it’s made all the more disturbing by the uneasy mixture of exploitative detail with a surprisingly serious, semi-historical account of the discover of anesthesia.”

In this story it deals with Dr Bolton’s quest to find the right anesthetic to relieve the patient of pain during invasive surgeries. Bolton is dedicated at all costs to take away the suffering of his patients.

Encyclopedia Edited by Phil Hardy “As such, it is an extremely puritanical spectacle in which sadism substitutes for sex, repressing the complex unconscious links between them. In Freda’s move, or in Mario Bava’s Sei Donne per L’Assassino (1964) , the links between sexuality, sadism and cinematic representation are the very subject of the films, enmeshing viewers in an oneiric delirium.”

The Alternative title was Doctor from Seven Dials but MGM were against it, for fear that audiences would not make the connection to the area around London.

Initially, I had paired the two films together The Haunted Strangler & Corridors of Blood, I later learned that both films were in fact shot back to back by the Croydon-Day-Karloff team. I decided not to cover The Haunted Strangler however there is an odd paranormal-scientific phenomena, Karloff plays a journalist and not a scientist who inadvertently is taken over by the soul of the Hay Market Strangler. The Haunted Strangler was paired with another Croydon production Fiend Without A Face double bill. So perhaps I’ll save that tremendous post for another day!

The films were actually lensed with more gore than what wound up on screen. Perhaps foretelling the style that was to come from directors like Jess Franco’s hyper-sexual and perverse The Awful Dr. Orloff (1962) and Riccardo Freda’s The Horrible Dr Hitchcock (1962) with it’s fixation/fetish for necrophilia while both horrors dealt with surgical stages, Corridors of Blood is a straight forward horror picture which employs the use of the medical arena to showcase surgical procedures and human suffering. There are uncomfortable moments that are intensely suggestive of the gruesome conditions of surgical procedures, with unsanitary conditions, lack of full knowledge of the anatomy therefor testing on stolen human remains. What makes us feel that we’re truly witnessing the gore is how the spectacle in the operation theater suggests body mutilation on a grand scale.

Corridors of Blood (1958)   opens during the 1840s before the emergence of anesthesia, the film starts with a strait-forward and frank amputation of the ‘lower extremity of a femur.‘ The stage is set with an old woman prepping the operating table by scattering sawdust. This is done to catch the blood that will pool and collect. Dr. Blount (Frank Pettingell) is callous as he asserts that “You can’t have operations without screams… pain and the knife are inseparable.”

Boris Karloff our altruistic man of science Dr. Bolton who is working on a drug that can be used as an anesthetic as he goes on a mission to prove Blount wrong! We Bolton performing a surgery that demonstrates how pain and the knife can be inseparable, but things go horrifyingly wrong and Dr. Bolton is ultimately dismissed from service at the hospital.

But this becomes a chaotic journey while researching the answers for the poor doctor (Boris was 70 at the time) as he is seen reacting like a drug addict who is testing the laughing gas on himself, overdosing at times hallucinating until it ultimately kills him. In fact, Bolton having become addicted to the drug has terrible reactions, lucid nightmares and the jitters. The conceited and overbearing Dr Blount bathed in patient/victims’ blood keeps reiterating his mantra about pain and the knife going together… Our kindly and dedicated Dr. Bolton who continues to inhale his own concoction, realizes that his passion has also thrown his own life into a tizzy as he realizes, “My whole being is stimulated.”

A lot of us clubbing it in the 80s felt that way Boris/Dr. Bolton! But he truly is unstoppable to find a technique that will aide surgical subjects in a painless operation, who need not suffer under someone like Blount’s inevitably torturous knife.

Watching Karloff’s performance as he seeks this compassionate advancement in medical science is believable as it is hard to watch as he places himself in a difficult position of going up against his Medical peers…

6

Bolton gets involved with the cut-throat opportunists in the criminal underworld he falls in with working behind the scenes at The Seven Dials who are exploiting the poor and suffering denizens who are at the mercy of their power. Shut out of the hospital, his demonstrations a failure, he continues to seek the formula for an anesthetic. Taken in by these cut throats, he delves deeper into madness, drug addiction, forced to steal chemicals, signs death notices for people who have been Burked (a nickname based on the infamous murderer who killed his victims in order to sell their bodies to science for prophet.)

Bolton falls in with this cabal of criminals led by sycophantic psychopathic innkeeper Black Ben (Francis De Wolff) and his grave-robbing henchmen Resurrection Joe played with the sinister disagreeableness of a reptilian brained killer with a cockney accent by Christopher Lee, who is the film’s true Boogeyman. Of course the pair use Boltons addiction to drugs in order to blackmail him into signing phony death certificates. These lovely murderers are first killing their lodgers then selling their bodies on the black market to desperate anatomists who need fresh bodies to study medicine. Essentially it’s a different visit with the historical events surrounding the murderous pair of Burke and Hare. Adrienne Corri is the beautiful but cold-hearted barmaid Rachel who has no conscience. Rosa is a girl flirting with trouble, ultimately Resurrection Joe tries to violently attack her, she should have listened when Rachel tells her, “Some day you’ll wiggle that bottom of yours just once too often.”

from: A Year of Fear: “We were looking for another subject for Karloff”, recounted executive producer Richard Gordon of the film’s genesis, “and {producer} John Croyden came up with the original story idea for Corridors of Blood. A woman named Jean Scott Rogers wrote the screenplay. Her idea was to make a very serious picture about surgery in the days before anesthetics, which of course wouldn’t have made a very commercial picture. So we tried to inject horror and melodramatic elements into it.” –Senn used quotes from Interviews with B Science Fiction and Horror Movie Makers, by Tom Weaver.

Interviews with Science Fiction and Horror Movie Makers by Tom Weaver is a staple in my book library, so here’s a few more interview items of interest about the back story to Corridors of Blood.

One of the more interesting questions Richard Gordon was asked by Weaver, was which of the two films did Karloff prefer, The Haunted Strangler or Corridors of Blood?

“He much preferred Strangler. He was also unhappy about the mix in Corridors of Blood, and in fact that was where a lot of the real problems between him and John Croyden arose (earlier in the interview he mentions that Karloff and Croyden had a falling out). Karloff blamed Croydon , but it wasn’t Croydon’s fault; if it was anybody’s fault it was MGM’s, because they said ‘You’ve got to put more lurid stuff into it and you’ve got to build up the scenes in Black Ben’s Den in the Seven Dials.’- kind of create a little sex element, with the girls dancing and all of that. Of course that had nothing to do with the story, and it took away from the seriousness of the picture. Karloff was very disappointed with that-we all were! But when you’re making a picture for a major company and they’re financing it, they call the shots. The picture didn’t turn out the way any of us would have liked, and it also wasn’t as successful as any of us would have liked. We had a very hard time getting it properly distributed.”  

Since MGM didn’t know how to market the picture, it delayed it’s U.S. release and as Gordon tells Weaver it “sort of languished”  Corridors finally got released when a new unit was set up headed by Fred Schwartz who put the film together with the Italian import Werewolf in a Girl’s Dormitory as the second feature. As Gordon relates it, “it was a disaster.”

When Bolton is at the Tavern he remarks miserably about the conditions, there are close ups on a little street urchin sleeping and his filthy legs and mud covered feet, “This place must breed a hundred fevers.” Actor Francis De Wolff  who plays the treacherous Black Ben replies, “You’re right there Doctor… I furnished it cheap when they pulled down the old small-pox hospital.”

Using Bolton to line their pockets and supply drugs, also making him an unwitting accomplice to murder by being tricked into signing false death notices, Resurrection Joe and Black Ben so sadistic and maniacal in their plot to make money, leaving the suffocation pillows of their freshly smothered faces. So addicted to the drugs himself, Bolton eventually breaks into the apothecary to steal the chemicals he needs to get his fix. He is shadowed by Ned, the Crow and eventually Resurrection Joe who murders a police officer while Bolton is stealing drugs! There is just no way out for Dr. Bolton, who only wanted to help end the suffering of humanity at the mercy of a surgeons scalpel, in the end he himself suffers for his good intentions.

Joe forces Bolton to assist him in breaking into the hospital dispensary in order to steal drugs, drugs that Bolton also needs to further his experiments with anesthesia. 

Perhaps next to Karloff’s incredibly sympathetic foray into the altruistic scientist who breaks passed the laws of nature and man, is the truly menacing persona that Christopher Lee brings to life in Resurrection Joe, a formidable macabre  character, scarred face and darkly threatening presence.

Usually I don’t give away the endings of films, but in this case, I wouldn’t be ruining anything, due to the moody cinematography, interesting narrative and in particular the fabulous characterizations. It’s all brought to a climax as ‘The Peelers’ basically the local constabulary headed by Nigel Green as Inspector Donovan raids the Seven Dials, tavern, leading to Black Ben being chased to the rooftops where fate deals out his punishment as he falls to his death, impaled on a set of railings. That’s always a nice touch! In the end, Dr. Bolton is dying from a stab wound, as he says his last words to his son Johathan, “Prove what I’ve failed to prove-that pain and the knife can be separated.”

SPECIAL MENTION OF A FEW OTHER KIND-HEARTED KARLOFFIAN MEN OF SCIENCE…

THE MAN THEY COULD NOT HANG (1939)

BEFORE I HANG (1940)

THE DEVIL COMMANDS (1941)

May the knife and the pain never touch your precious heart! –Your EverLovin’ MonsterGirl saying be well my friends!