Review: The Mad Doctor (1941)
Thanks to Lolita at Lolita’s Classics I am now the proud owner of The Mad Doctor. And a few days ago I watched it for the first time. So, here’s what I think of it…. It’s a very strange film indeed. Imagine it’s 1940 and a director working inside the Hollywood studio system goes insane and decides to try and intercut the B-thriller he’s making with a European arthouse study of disturbed psychology with a gay/straight “love triangle” in the middle of it, and the studio, not only lets him do it but ships the resulting chimera into the movie houses without anyone seeming to notice. What you’d get would be something very like THE MAD DOCTOR It’s actually two completely different films spliced together. One standard issue 40s “thriller”… …one bizarrely taboo-busting psychological study… John Howard and pretty much everyone else is in the first of these; Basil Rathbone and Martin Kosleck are in the taboo-buster, and playing it to the hilt, while luckless Ellen Drew has to be in both, and try to …