The Black Sleep (United Artists, 1956). Cast Lunch Break
The Black Sleep (1956)
dai.ly/x14wrtw Full Feature on Daily motion
England, 1872. The night before he is to be hanged for a murder he did not commit, young Dr. Gordon Ramsey is visited in his cell by his old mentor, eminent surgeon Sir Joel Cadmund. Cadmund offers to see that Ramsey gets a proper burial and gives him a sleeping powder to get him through the night, which Ramsey takes, unaware it is really an East Indian drug, "nind andhera" ("the black sleep"), which induces a deathlike state of anesthesia. Pronounced dead in his cell, he is turned over to Cadmund, who promptly revives him and takes him to his home in a remote abbey. Cadmund explains he believes Ramsey is innocent and needs his talents to help him in an project, which he is reluctant to immediately discuss further. In fact, Cadmund's wife lies in a coma from a deep-seated brain tumor, and he is attempting to find a safe surgical route to its site by experimenting on the brains of others, whom Ramsey comes to learn are alive during the process, anesthetized by the "black sleep", and are taken to a hidden recovery room in the abbey from which few emerge, though they still live...
- Written by Rich Wannen
Old-fashioned as it is, however, The Black Sleep still gets the job done at least as well as most of the movies to which it hearkens back. Most notably, it crystallized a vague sense I’ve had for some time now that it’s too bad Rathbone got pigeonholed so early on as Sherlock Holmes. He had a commanding elegance about him akin to that later displayed by Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, and which nobody else on the 30’s and 40’s horror scene could match. Lionel Atwill and John Carradine came close on occasion, but Atwill was always a little too foppish and Carradine a little too homespun to play the depraved Old World nobleman with Rathbone’s authority; neither of them would have been up to the challenge of Tower of London’s Richard III, for example. As Joe Cadman, Rathbone simultaneously prefigures the Cushing Frankenstein, and hints at all the brilliant mad movie scientists that might have been if only Rathbone hadn’t been so busy chasing Nazi agents all over the English moors during the years of the second Hollywood horror boom. He might even have injected some unwonted class into a Monogram or PRC production! The rest of the cast doesn’t quite match up to the top-billed star, but most of those who are required to do any actual acting (which is to say, not Tor Johnson, Bela Lugosi, or Lon Chaney Jr.) acquit themselves respectably well. Another thing The Black Sleep does right is to incorporate a bit of defensible real-world science into the mad variety more familiar from movies of its type. Much of the film’s horror stems from the certainty that attempting such delicate neurological investigations with the clumsy and invasive techniques of the late 19th century really would produce monstrous derangement's of brain function, even if these specific symptoms (John Carradine’s character is convinced that he’s Bohemond of Taranto— the hell?) are not always especially plausible. Finally, Udo the Gypsy, who in most horror films of this era would be nothing but a comic relief character, is portrayed in much too sinister a light to become as irritating as one might anticipate. His clowning creates more unease than anything else, for it is plainly but a cover for a complete absence of conscience. All in all, The Black Sleep represents a commendable effort to bring some seriousness of purpose back into the gothic mad scientist movie, which had grown silly enough on its own over the years that it hadn’t really needed Abbott and Costello to poke fun at it.
The Black Sleep (United Artists, 1956). Cast Lunch Break
The Black Sleep (1956)
dai.ly/x14wrtw Full Feature on Daily motion
England, 1872. The night before he is to be hanged for a murder he did not commit, young Dr. Gordon Ramsey is visited in his cell by his old mentor, eminent surgeon Sir Joel Cadmund. Cadmund offers to see that Ramsey gets a proper burial and gives him a sleeping powder to get him through the night, which Ramsey takes, unaware it is really an East Indian drug, "nind andhera" ("the black sleep"), which induces a deathlike state of anesthesia. Pronounced dead in his cell, he is turned over to Cadmund, who promptly revives him and takes him to his home in a remote abbey. Cadmund explains he believes Ramsey is innocent and needs his talents to help him in an project, which he is reluctant to immediately discuss further. In fact, Cadmund's wife lies in a coma from a deep-seated brain tumor, and he is attempting to find a safe surgical route to its site by experimenting on the brains of others, whom Ramsey comes to learn are alive during the process, anesthetized by the "black sleep", and are taken to a hidden recovery room in the abbey from which few emerge, though they still live...
- Written by Rich Wannen
Old-fashioned as it is, however, The Black Sleep still gets the job done at least as well as most of the movies to which it hearkens back. Most notably, it crystallized a vague sense I’ve had for some time now that it’s too bad Rathbone got pigeonholed so early on as Sherlock Holmes. He had a commanding elegance about him akin to that later displayed by Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, and which nobody else on the 30’s and 40’s horror scene could match. Lionel Atwill and John Carradine came close on occasion, but Atwill was always a little too foppish and Carradine a little too homespun to play the depraved Old World nobleman with Rathbone’s authority; neither of them would have been up to the challenge of Tower of London’s Richard III, for example. As Joe Cadman, Rathbone simultaneously prefigures the Cushing Frankenstein, and hints at all the brilliant mad movie scientists that might have been if only Rathbone hadn’t been so busy chasing Nazi agents all over the English moors during the years of the second Hollywood horror boom. He might even have injected some unwonted class into a Monogram or PRC production! The rest of the cast doesn’t quite match up to the top-billed star, but most of those who are required to do any actual acting (which is to say, not Tor Johnson, Bela Lugosi, or Lon Chaney Jr.) acquit themselves respectably well. Another thing The Black Sleep does right is to incorporate a bit of defensible real-world science into the mad variety more familiar from movies of its type. Much of the film’s horror stems from the certainty that attempting such delicate neurological investigations with the clumsy and invasive techniques of the late 19th century really would produce monstrous derangement's of brain function, even if these specific symptoms (John Carradine’s character is convinced that he’s Bohemond of Taranto— the hell?) are not always especially plausible. Finally, Udo the Gypsy, who in most horror films of this era would be nothing but a comic relief character, is portrayed in much too sinister a light to become as irritating as one might anticipate. His clowning creates more unease than anything else, for it is plainly but a cover for a complete absence of conscience. All in all, The Black Sleep represents a commendable effort to bring some seriousness of purpose back into the gothic mad scientist movie, which had grown silly enough on its own over the years that it hadn’t really needed Abbott and Costello to poke fun at it.