The Devil Doll (1936)
Directed by Tod Browning

Film Review

Tod Browning's place is film history was assured when he directed Universal Pictures' Dracula (1931), a landmark in the horror genre that brought us cinema's most convincing vampire (Bela Lugosi) and spearheaded a phenomenally successful run of expressionistic horror films from Universal and its rival studios.  As important as this film undoubtedly is, it is far from being Browning's most accomplished work.  Far more interesting is his subsequent Freaks (1932), a film that was resoundingly condemned in its day for deriving entertainment value from human deformity, but even this is a minor work compared with the great films that Browning routinely turned out in the silent era, notably his collaborations with Lon Chaney Senior, including The Unknown (1927)
and West of Zanzibar (1928).  His reputation badly damaged by the failure of Freaks, Browning went on to make another notable horror film Mark of the Vampire (1935), which he followed with possibly the weirdest film of his career - The Devil Doll.

Any film that has Lionel Barrymore dragged up as a bent old woman for most of its duration (assisted by a creepy female hunchback with a Bride of Frankenstein hair-do) cannot be described as anything but weird. And the fact that Barrymore so evidently relishes the part, so that he ends up looking like Old Mother Riley's evil twin sister with a penchant for cross-dressing and shrinking people, makes watching this deranged conflation of black comedy and horror-tinged thriller an experience that you are unlikely ever to forget.  The B-movie plot - yet another variation on the mad-scientist theme - was snatched from a 1932 novel by Abraham Merritt entitled Burn Witch Burn!, but very little of Marritt's story made it to the screen as Browning threw himself into yet another opportunity to indulge his love of the macabre and sadistic.  Improbably, Browning roped Erich von Stroheim into working on the script, just before the failed Austrian director gave up on Hollywood and headed off to France to resume his career as an actor, lending his formidable presence to such memorable films as Jean Renoir's La Grande illusion (1937) and Christian-Jaques's Les Disparus de Saint-Agil (1938).  Any collaboration between Tod Browning and von Stroheim has to be worth the money - it's about as likely as a pact between Hitler and Stalin.

Strongly influenced by German expressionism, Tod Browning was an incredibly talented film stylist with a natural flair for using lighting and camera positioning to create the kind of oppressive, doom-laden atmosphere that cannot fail to send rivulets of fear down the spine of any spectator.  His films may be trashy if judged solely by their crass, exploitation content but they are visually compelling, stylish and some of the most beautifully crafted in Hollywood at the time.  The Devil Doll is hardly an exception.  Admittedly the films does have its shortcomings - some pretty ropey dialogue and a soppy ending that reeks of low-grade schmaltz - but it does what so many similar genre films of this era failed to do, which is to achieve a completely satisfying blend of chills, intrigue, humour and romance. It even has a cute dance number.

Lionel Barrymore's adept gender-swapping makes him a far more frightening and interesting Jekyll and Hyde character than his younger brother John ever was in John S. Robertson's 1920 adaptation of Robert L. Stevenson's famous story, and no matter how 'accidentally' funny he appears when he is playing the harmless old dear (his audition piece no doubt for Arsenic and Old Lace), he always carries an aura of contained malevolence. Indeed, so persuasive is Barrymore's performance that you'll never look at an old woman again afterwards without seeing something utterly sinister beneath the genteel lace-capped exterior.

The film's other pièce de résistance (an apt phrase given that almost all the action takes place in Paris and has the central character adopting an outlandish disguise to evade capture from the French police) are its special effects, which were exceptional at the time and still hold up remarkably well to this day.  Cleverly constructed sets with enlarged props and skilful use of matting techniques are enough to convince us that Lionel Barrymore does indeed have the power to shrink people to the size of ten-inch dolls and get them to do his bidding, in a way that is both hilarious and terrifying.  Twenty years on, the much-vaunted effects in The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) are only a marginal improvement on what we find here.  Tod Browning made one further film after this - a fairly routine murder mystery Miracles for Sale (1939) - so Devil-Doll is his horror-fantasy swansong, one of the strangest and most entertaining films he put his name to.

Film Synopsis

After spending seventeen years in an island prison for crimes he did not commit, disgraced banker Paul Lavond escapes with fellow convict Marcel and takes refuge at the latter's house.  Here Paul learns that Marcel and his wife Malita have been carrying out secret experiments to miniaturise living creatures, with the aim of solving the greatest challenge facing mankind:  the scarcity of food and other natural resources.  Using a process that can shrink atoms, Marcel is able to reduce human beings to one sixth of their present size, but with the unfortunate side-effect of robbing them of their autonomy.  Marcel's shrunken guinea pigs have no mind of their own and only move according to his will, like living dolls.

When Marcel dies suddenly, Malita persuades Paul that he should take his place and help her to fulfil her husband's fantastic dream.  Immediately Paul sees an opportunity to take revenge against those vile associates of his who had him wrongly arrested for fraud and murder.  Returning to Paris, Paul disguises himself as an old woman, Madame Mandilip, and opens a workshop to manufacture toys that include his human dolls.  As the police scour the city for the escaped fugitive, the former banker makes ready to put into operation his merciless plan of revenge, assisted by his deadly living dolls...