The Face of Marble (1946)
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 12 minutes of runtime, rated 5.0 by 283 cinematizens.
Genre: Horror.
Verdict: Straight.
In a cliff side mansion on the sea with his wife and faithful associate attended by a black Stereotype and mumbling Housekeeper, Dr John Carradine strives to reanimate the dead! Originality is not in the air. Their lab is the usual high school science room with cathodes, knobs, capacitors, switches, and such. These two should order some real gear from the Innovations catalogue.
They proceed slowly until one day the sea washes up a dead fisherman, whom they carry up to the lab, slap on the table, wire him up, and zap! It works! He rises and takes one step, and collapses into a heap of….. Carrara marble. Gobbledegook explanation follows.
Having felt the power of giving life, Carradine wants to try again. But where to get a stiff? He looks around. No, not wife to whom he seems devoted despite the fact that she spends her little screen time sitting on the lap of faithful Associate even while he is standing up. Carradine does not seem to notice this fact. Near sighted I guess. Meanwhile, scowling Housekeeper incants voodoo nonsense which seems to be aimed at procuring Associate for Wife. Nor does Carradine consider the Housekeeper or Stereotype for stiffness.
The plot thickens when Associate’s own Misses appears. Both Wife and Housekeeper go all voodoo in response. Carradine does not seem to notice any of the chanting. Deaf as well as near sighted it would seem.
Then Doctor Professor Carradine decides to stiffen the faithful Great Dane, Brutus, for his next experiment. The SPCA has his number; I know because I ratted him out. Before the SPCA can get to him, Carradine reanimates Brutus who is barking mad at missing dinners from now on, but as he is on a ghost diet he can walk through walls. This is the money shot of the film and it is accordingly repeated three or four times. It is certainly nicely done.
Meanwhile, Wife finds out that Carradine murdered her pet dog, and she is pretty mad, too. The ghost dog howls off camera and Carradine and Associate pretend not to hear it. Both are now deaf.
Off and on, local Plod comes around wondering how a marble fisherman washed up.
A ruckus follows and somehow (I forget how) Wife dies. ‘No problem,’ says Carradine, slaps her on the table, wires her up, and zap. By this time Associate wishes he was in another movie and tries to leave but he is too deep with SPCA to pull out now.
Spoiler!
If you have followed the story so far, well,….sympathies.
Reanimated Wife is manipulated by Housekeeper on behalf of the SPCA to kill Carradine. She does. Since she is now spectral there are no fingerprints. Plod fastens onto Associate. Somehow or other it ends. One has to admire the straight-faces of the actors as they regurgitate the lines of this gibberish. It reminds me of those McKinsey management briefings.
Carradine was a slave to the Pasadena stage company he founded and worked himself relentlessly into his dotage to pour money into it. He played many a good scientist and many a bad one. In the post-World War II world he came to embody the good and bad of science. Here he is not mad or bad but dedicated, hard-working, diligent, and, worst of all, humourless.