The Dark Eyes of London (1939)

Det. Inspector Larry Holt of Scotland Yard (Hugh Williams) is assigned the case of multiple drowning that appeared at first to be suicides. Dr. Feodor Orloff (Bela Lugosi) is an insurance agent and philanthropist who supports a home for destitute blind men. He also is running an insurance scam that involves having blind, hulking, and monstrous looking Jake (Wilfrid Walter) kill people who’ve signed their policies over to him. Orloff slips up when one of his victims has a living daughter, Diana Stuart (Greta Gynt). To keep an eye on her, Orloff gets Stuart a job at the charity home, working under blind Professor Dearborn.

The British The Dark Eyes of London, known as The Human Monster in the States, is one of multiple 1930s films that, based on their plot, should be a straight crime film with a few thriller elements, but was given horror trappings when shot. It was based on a novel by Edgar Wallace who was an extremely popular crime novelist of the time, though I only know him as one of the writers on King Kong.

Holt is the main character and a lot of time is spent with him doing police procedural work. And it’s pretty drab. His interactions with Diana are no better—“Hey, let’s bring some girl along on a manhunt.” And his comedy sidekick is out of place with the tone of the film. So I can understand why they wanted to amp up the horror elements. I’d have gone all out and dropped the inspector character altogether as it is with the horror that things come alive.

The house for the blind is a twisted mad house, with the blind men shuffling about as zombies in bizarrely laid out rooms, all topped with a cinematic scientist’s lab. Lugosi is as charismatic as always, but also brutal, committing acts that wouldn’t have made it past pre-production in the U.S., though the British censors got a little jittery as well. Jake makes for a fine brute, clearly molded on the Frankenstein monster.

This is a cheap film, and it suffers for it, with a majority of the sets looking too simple and a camera that tends to just sit there. But then there wasn’t a lot of even medium budget horror being made in ’39, and Lugosi is worth the time.