With an ominous sounding title like "Corridors of Blood", one would expect to see something along those lines, but with only a couple of stabbings, there's not much blood being spilled. In fact, most of the murders occurring in the picture are at the hands of a character called Resurrection Joe (Christopher Lee), who smothers his victims with a pillow. I don't think "Corridors of Deathly Pillows" would have made the cut. Lest you think I'm being a bit facetious, this is actually a very good film with Boris Karloff in the role of Dr. Thomas Bolton, a highly skilled surgeon in 1840 London who agonizes over the fact that operations and amputations inflict so much pain on the patient. In his attempt to formulate a compound that would alleviate this kind of suffering, he experiments with various combinations of nitrous oxide, laudanum and opium, inhaling the gases produced so as to measure the effect it might have on patients in distress. At a certain point however, his medical colleagues call a halt to his efforts following initial failed attempts, forcing him to seek the chemicals he needs via an underworld network of scurrilous characters. In doing so, he's blackmailed into signing death certificates for the victims of Black Ben (Francis De Wolff) and his accomplice Resurrection Joe, who sell the corpses to medical schools for their research.
More so than most films, this one leads me to a number of sidebar comments that I thought have some bearing. Considering the fact that a minor theme of this picture involved procuring corpses illegitimately, I would mention that Boris Karloff took the opposite position of his character here in a 1945 movie titled "The Body Snatcher", one in which he's doing the body snatching as Cabman John Gray. For an early film, it's also very well done and on a par, if not even better than this one. If you're a Karloff fan, you owe it to yourself to watch both.
On a somewhat curious note in the picture - if Jonathan Bolton (Francis Matthews) was Dr. Bolton's son, and the character Susan (Betta St. John) was the doctor's niece, wouldn't that make Jonathan and Susan kissing cousins?
And finally, in an attempt to discover if the figure of Dr. Thomas Bolton was an historical one, I came across a curious example of life imitating art. There was a Dr. Thomas Boulton (note the spelling difference) who was a noted anaesthetist who contributed to the modernising of his specialty at St Bartholomew's Hospital in Great Britain, and was involved in the formation of what became the Royal College of Anaesthetists. He lived from 1925 to 2016, and I wouldn't be surprised if his life work was considered in the making of this movie.
More so than most films, this one leads me to a number of sidebar comments that I thought have some bearing. Considering the fact that a minor theme of this picture involved procuring corpses illegitimately, I would mention that Boris Karloff took the opposite position of his character here in a 1945 movie titled "The Body Snatcher", one in which he's doing the body snatching as Cabman John Gray. For an early film, it's also very well done and on a par, if not even better than this one. If you're a Karloff fan, you owe it to yourself to watch both.
On a somewhat curious note in the picture - if Jonathan Bolton (Francis Matthews) was Dr. Bolton's son, and the character Susan (Betta St. John) was the doctor's niece, wouldn't that make Jonathan and Susan kissing cousins?
And finally, in an attempt to discover if the figure of Dr. Thomas Bolton was an historical one, I came across a curious example of life imitating art. There was a Dr. Thomas Boulton (note the spelling difference) who was a noted anaesthetist who contributed to the modernising of his specialty at St Bartholomew's Hospital in Great Britain, and was involved in the formation of what became the Royal College of Anaesthetists. He lived from 1925 to 2016, and I wouldn't be surprised if his life work was considered in the making of this movie.