A mad doctor and his hunchbacked assistant labor over their unholy experiments in an abandoned mountaintop castle during a fierce electrical storm. Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein'? No, it's a W. Somerset Maugham story, filmed by Rex Ingram five years before the Boris Karloff classic, which in many ways it clearly anticipated. The film was one of the earliest horror dramas, and some of the unlikely but sensational plot twists (involving mesmerism, a virgin sacrifice, and a hallucinogenic trip to Hell) outraged polite audiences of its day. Most of the grisly details were artfully implied rather than overtly shown, making the film, in retrospect, superior to much of the broad melodrama surviving the silent age. Natural performances and realistic settings (Paris and Southern France) keep the colorful story from straining the limits of credibility, while the last minute rescue adds a satisfying (and, for the mad doctor, fatal) kick.
Review of The Magician
