Boris Karloff has come up with a mechanism for transferring the minds, the souls of two beings. His assistants, Anna Lee, and crippled Donald Calthrop -- it's the Ernest Thesiger role -- are of differing opinions whether he should. When the scientists walk out on his lecture, and newspaper magnate Frank Cellier ends his funding and claims his work, he goes a bit barmy, and proceeds to swap the minds of Calthrop and Cellier.
It sounds like a Universal creepy-crawly directed by James Whale. It has all the hallmarks: the dark lighting, the van der graf generators, a macabre sense of humor seasoning the terror and, of course, Karloff.However, it's a British Gaumont picture produced by Michael Balcon and directed by Robert Stevenson. And it's very good.
The movie itself might be a metaphor for Stevenson's career. As a director, he was as far from an auteur as you could get, directing musical comedies and horror in England, serious dramas and family-friendly gimmick flicks for Disney. By the early 1970s he was arguably the most successful director in the world, his pictures having grossed more than those of any other director. In this movie, when the characters' minds are switched, the actors move and speak like the new character. In the same way, when Stevenson's subject or audience or genre switched, so did his style.
Of course, we admire the directors with styles that don't vary, the auteurs, and denigrate the house directors: the Clarence Browns, the William Wylers, the Maurice Elveys, the Robert Stevensons. It feeds our egos to be able to look at a few minutes of a movie and state with confidence who did it. How clever we are, to recognize their cleverness! In truth, though, as much as I admire the films of John Ford and Howard Hawks and Hitchcock and whatever director you may choose to add to the list, I think it's a much clever director who can look at a story and decide what it needs, not reaching into the same bag of tricks, or telling the same story over and over again, but saying "This is a story I want to tell, and how can I best tell it? And never mind if it doesn't look like everything else I've done." That's much more difficult. And, like this movie, more rewarding.
It sounds like a Universal creepy-crawly directed by James Whale. It has all the hallmarks: the dark lighting, the van der graf generators, a macabre sense of humor seasoning the terror and, of course, Karloff.However, it's a British Gaumont picture produced by Michael Balcon and directed by Robert Stevenson. And it's very good.
The movie itself might be a metaphor for Stevenson's career. As a director, he was as far from an auteur as you could get, directing musical comedies and horror in England, serious dramas and family-friendly gimmick flicks for Disney. By the early 1970s he was arguably the most successful director in the world, his pictures having grossed more than those of any other director. In this movie, when the characters' minds are switched, the actors move and speak like the new character. In the same way, when Stevenson's subject or audience or genre switched, so did his style.
Of course, we admire the directors with styles that don't vary, the auteurs, and denigrate the house directors: the Clarence Browns, the William Wylers, the Maurice Elveys, the Robert Stevensons. It feeds our egos to be able to look at a few minutes of a movie and state with confidence who did it. How clever we are, to recognize their cleverness! In truth, though, as much as I admire the films of John Ford and Howard Hawks and Hitchcock and whatever director you may choose to add to the list, I think it's a much clever director who can look at a story and decide what it needs, not reaching into the same bag of tricks, or telling the same story over and over again, but saying "This is a story I want to tell, and how can I best tell it? And never mind if it doesn't look like everything else I've done." That's much more difficult. And, like this movie, more rewarding.