Film review: The Body Snatcher (1945)

There are certain actors who became pigeon-holed as "horror" actors, but who always elevate whatever they're in, and in a just world would be more appreciated for their screen presence.  Vincent Price is one, of course, Peter Cushing another, but towering above all must be Boris Karloff.  His performance in the first two Frankensteins is positively heart-breaking, and an off-note could so easily have dissolved them into camp (as followed pretty much immediately he gave up playing The Monster).  And yet he could also play truly sleazy evil, as he does in the (frankly bonkers) The Black Cat, and this one.  

This is another Val Lewton production, but is directed by Robert Wise, who would later go on to direct West Side Story and The Sound of Music!  It's based on a Robert Louis Stevenson story, set in the just-post-Burke and Hare Edinburgh.  In fact, Karloff's character is supposed to have gone on trial at the same time as those two, and covered up for the other main character of this film, Dr. "Toddy" MacFarlane, played suavely and compellingly by Henry Daniell, an actor I'd not heard of previously, but whose work I will now seek out (although I must have seen him play Moriarty to Basil Rathbone's Holmes when BBC2 used to run those old films on Thursday nights).  MacFarlane runs a school attended by our putative protagonist (who sounds like the lone American of the cast, even though he wears a tam o'shanter and seems to be attempting a brogue) Donald Fettes, who alternates between quitting the school in disgust because it relies on corpses provided nefariously by Karloff's slimy Gray, and helping acquire them (he's not got the stiffest of spines, ironically, seeing as spine surgery on an adorable little girl with a pretty young mother is a subplot).  This one has the usual great Lewton extreme shadows, and Karloff is wonderfully sinister and Daniells appropriately tortured by the hooks that Gray has in him, and there are a couple of outright shocking moments (including the freshly killed corpse of Bela Lugosi (yes, he's in it too, just like The Black Cat, only in a very small role and looking very old) floating up to the surface in a big vat of water) as well as Karloff killing a cute little dog with a shovel) but it's not a first-rank Lewton (no shame in that - that's a very high bar), although the ending is a bit of a corker.