I'll admit it: I've got an affection for this somewhat silly film. O.K., so the title is a cheat -- it's not a sequel to the 1932 "Doctor X" (a genuinely chilling movie with excellent starring performances by Lionel Atwill, Preston Foster and Fay Wray) -- and some of the so-called "comedy" involving Wayne Morris is pretty dispensable. There's also Lya Lys, who looks positively spectral even before the script says she is and who holds a sheer scarf in front of her face as if thinking, "Well, this worked for Dietrich
" On the positive side, though, is Humphrey Bogart. Yes, his face looks like someone plastered it with cottage cheese, his hair looks like he got it done at the Bride of Frankenstein Salon and the role would have been far better suited for Boris Karloff (who'd already played a similar part for Warners in a much better film, "The Walking Dead," three years earlier), but Bogart acquits himself well like the true professional he was and makes us believe in the character's suffering as well as his unscrupulousness. It's not much of a role, but Bogart plays it well enough to prove his readiness for bigger and better things and director Vincent Sherman, though hamstrung by a script that gives him too few opportunities for Gothic atmosphere (only the cemetery sequence even LOOKS like a horror film), also shows his capability for the more important films he got later. I even like the rather clever concept of the plot (though the blending of the Dracula and Frankenstein myths had been done better in Majestic's "The Vampire Bat" six years earlier) and the good-heartedness of the overall attempt by a Warners "B" team to graft a few sci-fi monster elements onto one of their typical newspaper comedies and call it a horror movie.
Review of The Return of Doctor X
