The Devil-Doll (1936)

Sadly Over-hyped

Admirable film.

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Paul Lavond (Lionel Barrymore) escapes from prison after being framed for a crime he did not commit. He soon discovers an experiment with little people, the Devil-Doll of the title. The Devil-Doll becomes key to Lavond's revenge to those who framed him as well having to resort to cross dressing with his disguise as an old woman. Quite amusing seeing Barrymore as an old woman and the movie is well paced as Lavond sought his revenge. The Devil-Dolls were certainly creepy as they were about to strike their targets. However I am not really satisfied with the end and the way Lavond left things off with his daughter Lorraine (Maureen O'Sullivan).

This was one of the last few "classic horror films" of the 30s that I had not yet seen, so I was looking forward to viewing what I hoped would be another golden era fright flick. This was especially true as I am a big fan of Tod Browning's work and would consider most of his films to be among from favorites. Sadly, I was pretty disappointed in the movie overall and became another reminder of why other studios just weren't able to compete with Universal in this time period.The movie starts off promising. Two convicts escape from jail and retreat to a home in the swamp owned by one of the men. Here, his wife has been continuing the scientific experiments that he'd begun before his imprisonment. The idea was to miniaturize people so that we would consume less resources, therefore making it one of the first earth conscious movies I can remember. The other convict is played by Lionel Barrymore, who is bent on revenge against the three men who set him up on false charges to steal his fortune. When the scientist dies his wife is determined to finish his research and enlists Barrymore who sees this as an opportunity to enact his revenge, so off to Paris they go to fulfill the master plan.My biggest issue with the movie starts with the character played by Barrymore. The police are searching for him and assume he's returned to Paris, so he is forced to go incognito. This involves him dressing in drag and taking on the false identity of an old matron. As the main character, who takes up the majority of the screen time, Barrymore is exceedingly annoying in this role. The false female falsetto he employs is grating to listen to for an entire movie and rather than being any kind of effective villain to carry the thriller, the viewer ends up longing for any scene that won't involve this caricature. Those scenes are just as dull, though. This movie is much longer than the standard horror film of the time and suffers for it. There is far too much padding and most of it involves a trite story about Barrymore's estranged daughter and his attempts to reconcile the life he's left for her. We, also, get a standard cliché romance between his daughter and her beau, Toto, a cab driver who's trying to make a better life for them. The end result is far too much run time playing out plots that needed to be trimmed out and not nearly enough time devoted to the revenge plot that should have been the central premise.The actual revenge involves Barrymore utilizing these miniature people to carry out his plots as he tries to prove his innocence and bring down his enemies. We've all seen plenty of horror movies that use miniature people or dolls to chilling effect. There is something naturally unsettling about seeing something like a doll being used as a force of evil. Here, though, there is very little scary about them. Instead they are more used as little sneaks to steal things or prick people with miniature knives. This is far from something like the doll in TRILOGY OF TERROR or CAT'S EYE.I will give a lot of credit for the special effects used to create the mini people and animals. They must have been mind-blowing to an audience at the time and still hold up fairly well, despite being able to see some cracks in the design during certain scenes when it doesn't translate as well.There was a great idea in here somewhere that probably could have been pulled off much more effectively were the script to utilize Barrymore more in his IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE villain persona and far less as an annoying cross-dresser.

Although much has been said about Barrymore in drag, there can be too much of a good thing. The performance is outstanding but on screen so much, with that irritating but realistic cackling voice and hunchback, it comes dangerously close to a detrimental domination and detraction from the bizarre, that is the backbone of the film. The film as a whole has so much more interesting and odd characters, horror, and sci-fi elements, and just plain creepiness that it comes off as an excellent example of the the depression era 1930's proliferation of pictures that are completely removed from the everyday. It is a supernatural stew. The magical and the mystical, the supernatural and dementia, are all in view with believable special effects and a suspenseful script.The Director's lovely obsession with the dark side and physical and psychological abnormalities are an obvious, predominantly personalized vision that was his greatest asset and his greatest liability. Always on or beyond the cutting edge his movies are seen today with more respect and serious consideration than this renaissance man received while he was creating his work of the weird and wonderful.

MGM's THE DEVIL-DOLL (1936) is a campy sci-fi/horror classic. Perfect for those late-night curiosity viewings. The movie is preposterous, but elevated by impressive 1930s special effects along the lines of those in BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935).THE DEVIL-DOLL tells the story of a man bent on revenge who gets mixed up in the outlandish schemes of a mad scientist. Hiding from the police, the man (a prison escapee) uses the mad scientist's strange experiments in his systematic plan to destroy those men who did him wrong.It seems the scientist had developed a technique that would shrink living things to one-sixth their normal size. Once shrunken, however, the subject lay paralyzed until willed to do something by the strong mental power of an outsider. The scientist had hoped to shrink everyone in the world to make the food supply last longer, but having miniature mind-control zombies has its uses, too.Oscar-winner Lionel Barrymore stars and spends much of the film in his disguise as an old woman. (I'm being totally serious.) The wonderful Rafaela Ottiano plays the crazed wife of the scientist, devoted to his twisted vision. Ottiano seemed to know what kind of movie she was making, going all-out in her performance. Maureen O'Sullivan plays Barrymore's daughter, with Frank Lawton as her taxi driver boyfriend. Among the rest of the cast, it's good to see Robert Greig play something other than a butler.The B-level cast does a good job with the B-level material, but the most impressive part of THE DEVIL-DOLL is the special visual effects. Creating the effect of miniaturized people required composite shots with an eye on camera angles and perspective. (Mixed, it seems, with some huge-furniture sequences.) A modern eye can often find the seams, but this kind of stuff is hard to do and I believe they did it as well as anybody could in 1936.The story, with its attempted father-daughter redemption arc, is just ridiculous. Barrymore is hardly a hero in this one. Nor is he even a nice guy. There's no one to root for, really. This is the kind of movie to pop in some late night and just enjoy with a bucket of popcorn and the company of your choice. A campy horror classic for anyone curious to see Lionel Barrymore dress in drag. Not one of the high points of Barrymore's career.