Back to the Wells, Part 2:
The Island of Dr. Moreau
by Matthew R. Bradley
I can perhaps be forgiven if I replaced my beloved boyhood Berkley Highland edition of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) with the 1996 Signet tie-in to that year’s screen version starring Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer. That was out of loyalty to one of my idols, John Frankenheimer, who had been hired—not for the first time—to replace the original director of the film, sadly considered a train-wreck both on- and off-camera. But like several of his others, Paul Lehr’s Berkley cover remains etched in my brain, with its virtually all-red palette; desolate, mountain-backed landscape; burning sun above a nearly naked, bearded man in the foreground; and figures, some with tails, glimpsed behind him.
An introduction presents the novel as a narrative by private gentleman Edward Prendick, found among his papers and published, unsubstantiated, by his nephew and heir, Charles Edward Prendick. Presumed drowned after “the Lady Vain was lost by collision with a derelict when about the latitude 1º s. and longitude 107º e. [on February 1, 1887, he] was picked up [11 months later] in latitude 5º3′ s. and longitude 101º e in a small open boat… [supposedly from] the missing schooner Ipecacuanha,” captained by drunken John Davis. In the dinghy for eight days, he had been alone since a struggle during which an unnamed seaman and fellow passenger Helmar, having drawn lots for cannibalism, fell overboard.
Picked up by Davis, en route to Hawaii, Edward tells Montgomery—to be landed on the nameless island where he lives—that he “had taken to natural history as a relief from the dullness of my comfortable independence.” An “outcast from civilization [who] lost my head for ten minutes” 11 years ago, the medico is returning from Africa with a menagerie (dogs, llama, puma, rabbits) and misshapen attendant M’ling, hazed by captain and crew. Having run afoul of Davis, Edward is dumped with Montgomery and a white-haired man who meets him with a trio of “strange, brutish-looking fellows”; on their arrival, some of the rabbits are released to “Increase and multiply,” replenishing the island’s meat supply.
Told that his uninvited guest “had spent some years at the Royal College of Science and had done some research in biology under Huxley,” the white-haired man says, “We are biologists here. This is a biological station—of a sort,” where they see a ship about once a year. Overhearing his secretive host’s name, Edward recalls the “Moreau Horrors” of a decade past, as the “prominent and masterful physiologist…was simply howled out of the country [for] wantonly cruel” experiments in vivisection. While Montgomery evades his questions about M’ling’s furry, pointed ears and other odd attributes, Edward hears cries of pain from the puma, emanating from the locked enclosure nearby and lasting for hours.
Walking in the forest, Edward sees a “grotesque, half-bestial creature” on all fours, clad in bluish cloth, drink from a stream, and finds a rabbit with its head torn off; in a glade, three porcine humanoids gibber rhythmically with the refrain of “Aloola” or “Baloola.” Using a stone to fell the Leopard Man pursuing him through the forest, he finally makes his way back to the house, where Montgomery gives him a sedative, but no explanations. The next day, the cries of pain are clearly human, yet when Edward flings open the door that Montgomery had forgotten to relock, he sees only “something bound painfully upon a framework, scarred, red, and bandaged” before Moreau hurls him back inside his room.
Fleeing in fear of ending up as “a lost soul, a beast…after torture [and] the most hideous degradation it was possible to conceive,” he is led by an apelike Beast Man to the others, and taught the Law. “Not to [go on all Fours/suck up Drink/eat Flesh nor Fish/claw Bark of Trees/chase other Men]; that is the Law. Are we not Men?”; the chanting also deifies Moreau: “His [is/are] the [House of Pain/Hand that makes/Hand that wounds/Hand that heals/lightning-flash/deep salt sea/stars in the sky].” The Sayer of the Law notes, “None escape…the punishments of those who break [it],” whereupon Montgomery and Moreau appear, pursuing and cornering Edward on the beach, his fate presumably unspeakable…
They drop their revolvers, and he agrees to return to the house for Moreau’s explanation, which contradicts his assumptions about being rendered bestial; “that vivisected human being” he saw was the puma, one of the “humanized animals…carven and wrought into new shapes.” Deeming Edward’s focus on the pain he inflicts “the mark of the beast,” he says, “I am a religious man…I fancy I have seen more of the ways of this world’s Maker than you—for I have sought His laws, in my way, all my life…” Joined by Montgomery and six Kanakas—who later deserted, taking his yacht—he has devoted almost 11 years to “the study of the plasticity of living forms,” untroubled by ethics or his early failures.
But “the stubborn beast flesh grows, day by day, back again…I mean to do better things still. I mean to conquer that,” and his trouble with hands and claws, intelligence, and the emotions. Turned out when “the beast begins to creep back,” they gravitate toward huts built by the Kanakas, living “a kind of travesty of humanity,” governed by the Law, even marrying; “I have some hope of that puma; I have worked hard at her head and brain…” The 60+ surviving Beast People “had certain Fixed Ideas implanted by Moreau in their minds,” forestalling a violent uprising, but are constantly breaking the Law that “battled in their minds with the deep-seated, ever rebellious cravings of their animal natures.”
M’ling lives in “a small kennel [inside] the enclosure…the most human-looking of all…a complex trophy of Moreau’s horrible skill, a bear, tainted with dog and ox,” loyal to and trained in domestic duties by Montgomery, who is dismayed when he and Edward find a gnawed rabbit. “Some carnivore of yours has remembered its old habits,” raising fears of “the inevitable suggestions” of tasting blood, so Moreau insists on making an example of the presumed culprit, the Leopard Man, calling the Beast People with “a huge cowherd’s horn.” Reminded that a lawbreaker “goes back to the House of Pain,” he bolts, but as the terrified creature is encircled by both men and Beast Folk, Edward mercifully shoots him.
Weeks later, catastrophe strikes: pulling her fetters from the wall, the puma escapes into the wood, breaking Edward’s arm; with Montgomery and M’ling, he fights off aggressive Beast Men as they seek Moreau, who did not return from the pursuit. Told he is dead, the quick-thinking Edward says he watches from above and “has changed his body,” the old one found with its head battered in by the fetters and the mutilated puma nearby. Laying it on a pile of brushwood, they “put an end to all we found living” in the lab, but during a drunken “bank holiday,” Montgomery burns the boats, ending any hope of escape, while amid a riot that claims him and M’ling, Edward upsets a lamp, incinerating the enclosure.
Alone with the Beast Men, Edward asserts control, invoking the Law; arms himself with revolvers, hatchets, and whip; orders the bodies, including the Sayer of the Law, cast into the sea; drives off the Hyena-Swine, who had also tasted blood; and establishes an uneasy 10-month peace amid the huts of the rest, a Dog Man his inseparable ally. The inevitable reversion leaves their huts loathsome, so he builds “a hovel of boughs” in the enclosure’s ruins, but the Hyena-Swine kills the Dog Man and is in turn shot. At last, a boat with two rotting bodies—one apparently Davis—floats ashore, and after gathering what provisions he can, Edward drifts for three days until “a brig from Apia to San Francisco” finds him.
A vice president of the H.G. Wells Society and the author of an update, Moreau’s Other Island (aka An Island Called Moreau, 1980), Brian W. Aldiss writes in his afterword that Wells “followed his great teacher, Thomas Huxley, in his devotion to the fresh truths and insights that evolution was bringing to human affairs….We were up from the apes, not down from the angels. We carried in our anatomies proof of the ancestral beast….[The] island stands as a model for the world and Moreau himself as a model for God the cruel experimental scientist.” Unsurprisingly, the novel—which Wells later called “an exercise in youthful blasphemy”—was controversial, yet its notoriety helped make it a best-seller.
The first and decidedly best screen version, Island of Lost Souls (1932), was made before Wells adapted his own work into Things to Come (1936) and The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1937). Erle C. Kenton directed the rare foray into the genre by Paramount and, later, Universal’s Golden Age horror films The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), House of Frankenstein (1944), and House of Dracula (1945). Displaying his diversity, he worked with W.C. Fields in You’re Telling Me! (1934) and Universal’s other cash cows, Abbott and Costello, in Pardon My Sarong, Who Done It? (both 1942), and It Ain’t Hay (1943), although replaced by Charles Lamont on Hit the Ice (1943) after problems with Costello.
Among those reportedly laboring on the long-gestating screenplay were Joseph Moncure March; Cyril Hume of Forbidden Planet (1956), also a mainstay of the Tarzan series; and Garrett Fort, whose seminal contribution to the Universal cycle includes early, uncredited work on the Wells adaptation The Invisible Man (1933). The eventual script credit went to Waldemar Young—a frequent collaborator with Lon Chaney and Tod Browning (e.g., London After Midnight, 1927)—and Philip Wylie, the co-author (with Edwin Balmer) of the novel When Worlds Collide (1933). George Pal produced the 1951 screen version, as he would the Wells-based The War of the Worlds (1953) and The Time Machine (1960).
Charles Laughton, who had made his Hollywood debut opposite Boris Karloff in James Whale’s The Old Dark House (1932) for Universal, dominates the film as totally as his character of Moreau does his creations. He went on to earn an Oscar for The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), plus nominations for Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and Witness for the Prosecution (1957); star in perhaps the definitive version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939); and direct one extraordinary film, The Night of the Hunter (1955). Cast as Edward Parker (né Prendick), Richard Arlen had a key genre role as the hero of The Lady and the Monster (1944), the first adaptation of Curt Siodmak’s Donovan’s Brain (1942).
Bankrupt after Universal—for whom he re-created his defining stage role in Browning’s Dracula (1931), which Fort co-wrote—terminated his contract, Bela Lugosi is the Sayer of the Law; Wally Westmore’s makeup was, ironically, perhaps as heavy as the one that made him reject Whale’s Frankenstein (1931). Selected in a nationwide contest among 60,000 entrants, fashion model Kathleen Burke played Lota, the Panther Woman, a new character developed by Fort and Wylie. Renamed, she is a fixture in the Burt Lancaster (1977) and Brando remakes, plus The Twilight People (1972), which—like Terror Is a Man (1959)—was an uncredited Filipino-American version produced by Eddie Romero.
The film benefits greatly from the work of cinematographer Karl Struss, an Oscar-winner for F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1929) and nominee for Paramount’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), and location shooting on both California’s Catalina Island and the S.S. Catalina, which fortuitously encountered actual fog, specified in the script. The S.S. Covena picks up the S.O.S. of the Lady Vain—also bound for Apia, where he is to marry Ruth Thomas (Leila Hyams)—and Parker, who has Montgomery (Arthur Hohl) send her a radiogram. Captain Davies (Stanley Fields) drops him with Montgomery and M’ling (Tetsu Komai); although offering passage to Apia, the whip-wielding Moreau has “something in mind.”
He wishes to know if Lota, presented as “a pure Polynesian” and enjoined to secrecy, will be attracted to Parker; she is, but cannot avert his horrifying look into the laboratory, and drawing the wrong conclusions, he tries to flee with Lota. They are stopped by the Beast Men, whom Moreau convenes with a gong, evoking a recitation by the Sayer of the Law, shown in extreme close-up and wringing every drop of agony from, “His is the House of Pain.” Back at the house, with childish glee, Moreau boasts, “Oh, it takes a long time and infinite patience to make them talk. Someday, I’ll create a woman, and it will be easier,” while “some of my less successful experiments” serve as slave labor, generating power.
Moreau asks, “do you know what it means to feel like God?”—almost verbatim the line that the censor insisted be obscured by a clap of thunder in Frankenstein one year earlier. The next day, the schooner in which Montgomery was to convey Parker to Apia is found “mysteriously” wrecked; when the Covena arrives, the American Consul (George Irving) forces Davies to reveal the truth, and has Captain Donahue (Paul Hurst) take Ruth to the island (latitude 15º s. and longitude 170º w., near Tonga, for you cartographers). There’s a priceless moment when Parker, having noticed Lota’s claw-like nails, bursts in saying, “Moreau, you don’t deserve to live!,” to which he urbanely replies, “I beg your pardon?”
After Parker refuses to play the mating game, Moreau laments to Montgomery that he’d been tipped off by “the stubborn beast flesh creeping back,” but he vows, “This time I’ll burn out all of the animal in her…time and monotony will do the rest.” He admits Ruth and Donahue, yet when Parker wishes to leave, he warns that traveling a mile back to the ship through his jungle at night would be dangerous, so they accept his hospitality. Their meal is interrupted by chanting, and Moreau observes, “the natives…are restless tonight,” plying Donahue with drink as Montgomery unusually abstains, but during the night, ape-man Ouran (wrestler Hans Steinke, “The German Oak”) seeks to break into Ruth’s room.
Finally fed up, Montgomery lets Donahue out to summon his crew, hoping to join them, but Moreau sends Ouran to strangle him, sealing his own fate—learning who ordered it, the Sayer proclaims, “Law no more,” and confirms, “He can die,” as does loyal M’ling in his defense, while Lota sacrifices herself to save the escapees from Ouran. The horrific ending (arguably more effective than Well’s anticlimax), as the Beast Men descend upon the screaming Moreau in his own House of Pain, resembles that of Browning’s Freaks (1932); both were released the same year and banned in Britain. Wells dismissed Island as a vulgarization of his work, but today it remains as an undisputed classic of the genre.
Up next: The Invisible Man
Sources/works consulted:
Aldiss, Brian W., afterword to The Island of Dr. Moreau, pp. 207-216.
Baxter, John, Science Fiction in the Cinema: 1895-1970 (The International Film Guide Series; New York: A.S. Barnes, 1970).
Bojarski, Richard, The Films of Bela Lugosi (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1980).
Brosnan, John, Future Tense: The Cinema of Science Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s, 1978).
Clarens, Carlos, An Illustrated History of the Horror Film (New York: Paragon, 1979).
Dello Stritto, Frank, and Andi Brooks, Vampire Over London: Bela Lugosi in Britain (Los Angeles: Cult Movies Press, 2001).
Everson, William K., Classics of the Horror Film (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1974).
Fischer, Dennis, Horror Film Directors, 1931-1990 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1991).
Gunn, James, editor, The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (New York: Viking, 1988).
Hardy, Phil, editor, The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Horror (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1995).
Hardy, Phil, editor, The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1995).
Internet Movie Database (IMDb)
Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb)
Island of Lost Souls, unsigned laserdisc liner notes (Universal City, CA: MCA Home Video, Inc., 1994).
Wells, H.G., The Island of Dr. Moreau (New York: Signet, 1996).
Wikipedia
Online source:
https://archive.org/details/island-of-lost-souls-1932-70-min.-charles-laughton-bela-lugosi-jonzee.
