THE BODY SNATCHER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 411, 9 May 1947, Page 12

THE BODY SNATCHER

(RKO-Radio)

L®r me be honest; it was not only a clinical interest in horror films and their audiences which took me to this programme and made me

endute the meeting of Frankie and Wolfie ("Dr. Frankenstein’s Monster, I presume"). It was also the prospect of seeing another of those brilliant essays in the macabre produced by .Val Lewton and his associates. This is as good as anything they have given us; and I am sure it is not simply the contrast with the two films that preceded it which prompts my enthusiasm. The Body Snatcher is not only a first-rate thriller; it is also good cinema-and that audience whose reaction to the earlier film I have just described paid it the tribute of recognising immediately its superior quality and settling down to quiet and sustained appreciation. The Body Snatcher has been developed from the short story by Robert

Louis Stevenson. Like all Val Lewton productions, it has a literary quality seldom encountered in even the best Hollywood films and virtually unknown in shockers. Who else but Val Lewton would cap what is probably the most hair-raising fimale in movie history with a Greek quotation-and do it without seeming precious? The setting is Edinburgh, the date 1831, and the story concerns the brilliant but haunted head of a medical school (Henry Daniell), his promising young pupil (Russell Wade), and their grisly dealings with a "resurrectionist" (Boris Karloff) who does not stop at murder if he finds it difficult to supply the school with a corpse for dissection by the more orthodox (though of course still unpopular) method of grave-robbery. This theme is, obviously, a parallel with Burke and Hare; yet though reference is frequently made in the film to that notorious pair, the producer does not go out of his way to explain who they were: he pays his audience the compliment of assuming that they will know already. The atmosphere in which the ghastly chronicle develops is so well sustained, so exact in its detail, that the story, one feels, is true of both period and place; and that it is true also of human nature. Even the loathsome bodysnatcher himself seems a very real per-son---at least while the picture lasts; and the tortured Dr, Macfarlane certainly does. Henry Daniell’s performance is a masterly dissection of a complex personality, repellent yet fascinating. . This sincere and enlightened treatment means, maturally, that The Body Snatcher is much more leisurely in its narrative and less obviously melodramatic than the average shocker; but the sudden nasty jolts are there in sufficient quantity, and they arrive all the more} shockingly for being comparatively un-expected-and also for being so perfectly timed. The snort of a horse, the sound of a. girl singer’s voice cut short in a gasp, a glimpse of a head under brine in the dissecting-room, that last awful climax-these and other incidents produce that authentic grue, that creeping of the flesh, which all true exponents of horror in literature and the drama strive for but so rarely achieve.