Vincent Sherman's The Return of Dr. X
(1939) was meant to be nothing more than an affordable sequel to
Warners' earlier two-strip Technicolor shocker Dr.
X (1932), starring Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray. Most notable for
its rare casting of rising star Humphrey Bogart as a literal dead man
walking, this odd little B-picture capped a fascinating decade for
American horror films, in which grim situations, graveyard humor and
psychologically and physiologically damaged characters were
routine – an approach that was softened considerably in the next decade,
as Universal's monster rallies made fright films less complicated
and less interesting.

The Return Dr. X
originated with an original story, "The Doctor's Secret,"
by British writer William J. Makin. Warners purchased the piece for a
small sum and set actor turned writer/director Crane Wilbur to the task
of adapting it for the big screen. (Wilbur's stage play The
Monster had been adapted in 1925 by Roland West as a vehicle
for monster maker Lon Chaney.) Initially, Warners had big plans for the
project, dreaming up another Technicolor extravaganza with
Frankenstein (1931) star Boris Karloff as a
groundbreaking/taboo shattering man of science brought back to life by
another surgeon, to be played by Dracula (1931) star
Bela Lugosi, who realizes he has created a monster. By the time cameras
rolled in May of 1939, budgetary concerns had favored a standard
black-and-white presentation and nixed the Karloff-Lugosi reteaming in
favor of more affordable actors, while Crane Wilbur's adaptation had
been rewritten by Lee Katz.

As in Dr. X, the sequel
concerns a series of ghastly murders occurring within the heart of
modern New York City, with ace reporter Walt Garrett (Brother
Rat's Wayne Morris) and physician Mike Rhodes (Dennis
Morgan, later of Kitty Foyle) tracking a killer whose
victims share a rare blood type. Discovering the lifeless corpse of
stage actress Angela Merrova (Lya Lys, then the girlfriend of director
Anatole Litvak), the headline hungry Walt phones in the lead… only to
be disgraced the next day when Merrova appears in his paper's city
room to demand a retraction. Walt and Mike eventually deduce that
Merrova was in fact murdered but returned to a semblance of
life by hematologist Dr. Flegg (a monocled John Litel, with a demonic
beard that recalls Bela Lugosi's White Zombie
voodoo master Murder Legendre ), creator of a type of synthetic
blood, who confesses that Merrova was not his first experiment. Earlier,
Flegg had resurrected Maurice Xavier, a brilliant but wrong-headed
surgeon executed in the electric chair for conducting illegal and
inhumane experiments on children.

According to
biographer Richard Gehman, Warners contract player Humphrey Bogart was
none too happy about this assignment but soldiered through the
production (in flammable make-up!), giving the part of the eponymous mad
scientist his professional all. Sporting a Bride of Frankenstein
streak of white hair, a pronounced limp and a withered left
hand, Xavier's damaged body habitus recalls that of Duke Mantee, the
convict character Bogart had played in The Petrified Forest
(1936), whose hands continued to hang in front of him as if
still in handcuffs. Xavier is an remarkably disgusting character, and
not only because of clammy, pallid skin that makes him look like "a
piece of white marble… like something dead." Xavier's crime
is revealed to have been starving children to death in an abandoned
hunter's shack in the New Jersey Meadowlands, a plot point that
rings all too true in this age of endless sexual predators and high
profile child kidnappings. It's amazing that the censors allowed
this disturbing backstory and that Bogart (no stranger to refusing
assignments), risked career suicide to play it. Of course, The
Return of Dr. X did Bogart no harm in the long run. Within two
years he was playing Sam Spade in John Huston's The Maltese
Falcon (1941) and in three starring in Casablanca
(1942) alongside Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains.

Its climax a
batty mixture of Gothic horror tropes (a swampland shack surrounded by
lifeless trees with gnarled, twisted trunks and a screaming heroine in
Rosemary Lane) and gunplay more suited to a Warners gangster picture,
The Return of Dr. X carried forward a morbid streak
that had been in evidence in American horror films since Dracula
broke box office records nearly two decades earlier.
Bogart's Xavier (who cuddles a white rabbit, presumably for its
warmth!) is a bona fide "wrong'un" in the tradition of
Dracula's fly-eating Renfield, Boris Karloff's
necrophiliac architect in The Black Cat (1934), Peter
Lorre's Mad Love (1935) headcase Dr. Gogol and
Sandor, the creepy manservant of Dracula's Daughter
(1935) played so memorably by Irving Pichel; his physical
infirmities also recall the disfigured characters of Dr.
X and Mystery of the Wax Museum (1932),
The Raven (1935), Mad Love (1935),
Son of Frankenstein (1939) and
The Face Behind the Mask (1941), as well as
the medical mishaps of
Frankenstein and Island of Lost Souls
(1932).

Most of these creatures are not
monsters by nature so much as nurture (or the lack thereof), creatures
created by circumstance, societal others existing along the fringes of
civilization, bastard children locked in society's attic.
Life-taking, blood-drinking, flesh-eating, corpse-loving, grave-robbing
and profaning God by tampering with the forces of life and death -this
was the shock syllabus of American horror between world wars. After the
attack on Pearl Harbor and America's entry into World War II in
1941, dark themes and funereal motifs were largely left behind as the
nation struggled to remain upbeat. Horror films of the 1940s (most of
them sequels to 30s hits) were bigger, brighter, cleaner and easier to
laugh off on the walk home. It was truly the end of an era… but it had
sure been one hell of a decade.