- Director: Joseph H. Lewis
- Writers: Al Martin
- Stars: Una Merkel, Lionel Atwill, Nat Pendleton
- Run time: 1 Hour, 1 Minute
- Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/35LBZTJ
The Mad Doctor of Market Street (1942)
Synopsis
Dr. Ralph Benson has his research lab right there on Market Street. Saunders goes in, and the doctor says he’s anxious to proceed. He’s been doing animal testing, but now he wants to try it on a human. He’s been putting them into suspended animation and curing diseases after reanimating them. He offers Saunders a thousand dollars to submit to being suspended.
Mrs. Saunders brings the police. They break down the door and find Mr. Saunders on the table, apparently dead. Dr. Benson has gone out through the window. Benson is a pseudo-scientist, not a real doctor after all. The are calling him “The Mad Doctor of Market Street.” Meanwhile, Benson has shaved and is now on a cruise ship headed to New Zealand under the name Graham.
Graham observes the Wentworth women, Aunt and Niece, dancing at the ball. The police know Benson is on board, but they think they’ll track him down. Graham hits the policeman over the head and throws him overboard, but the deck hand sees it happen. They stop and search, but never find a body.
The deck hand is making a pain of himself to Patricia Wentworth. Aunt Margaret goes over and tells her friend, Mr. Graham, everything she’s overheard, unaware that he’s the killer, of course. That night, there’s a fire in the hold, and some guy runs into the ballroom, screaming “The ship s burning!” Not surprisingly, things soon get chaotic as everyone jumps in a lifeboat and evacuates.
We get a quick montage of rescue ships and radio antennas, and the next thing we see is that it’s morning on a tropical island. The Wentworths, Dr. Graham, the obnoxious deckhand, and a few others have landed there.
The “savage natives” don’t like white people and capture the whole group. The chief’s wife has died, but Graham says he can bring her back to life. When they realize “Graham” is a doctor, they understand that he’s really the fugitive, Dr. Benson.
Benson/Graham does manage to resuscitate the chief’s wife, saving all the white people’s lives in the process. He plans to continue his experiments to bring back the dead, and he tells the others that no one is going to be allowed to leave the island.
The natives ask Graham if he wants a wife, and he says no, he doesn’t have time. Then he changes his mind, and he says he wants a “white wife.” Patricia decides to cooperate, in order to turn the tables on Graham.
Graham wants to practice raising the dead, and he kills the captain, planning to use him for a trial subject. Patricia agrees to marry Graham in order to save the captain. The men finally turn the natives against Graham, and they insist that he bring the man back from the dead. Graham does as they insist. Finally, they find a dead native man that Graham can’t bring back to life, and then things get hot for Graham very quickly.
Commentary
This was Lionel Atwill’s last big role. Not long after this, he was involved in a sex scandal and died of cancer just a few years later. He was in five of the eight Frankenstein films, more than Karloff or anybody else.
I noticed early on that whenever something exciting was about to happen, they used the same soundtrack used for the main theme in the Wolf Man film.
The films isn’t especially bad exactly, but it doesn’t know what it wants to be. It starts out with a little science-fiction, quickly turns into a police procedural, has a bit of comedy, then it turns to exotic adventure film, and eventually steers toward the horror genre eventually.