For those hording toilet paper

The Walking Dead (1936)

The Walking Dead may not be a “prestige” Karloff picture, but it has one of my favorite performances by the actor. It is one of those roles that allowed Karloff to summon a lot of emotional responses, from despair to silent rage. What I really love about the film’s plot is that Karloff doesn’t necessarily kill anyone. Their own guilt ultimately “persuades” them to their demises. All Karloff’s framed, convicted, executed, and revived John Ulmann does is approach them with a question as to why they sent him to the chair for the murder of a judge. A racketeer (part of a “league of racketeers”) is sent to prison and to assure that his entourage won’t follow him, a rotten district attorney (part of this league of crooks) sets up a recently released (and down on his luck) convict, humbled and in desperate need of employment to get back on his feet, for the killing of the judge. A couple (engaged to married…eventually), who work for a reputed scientist researching how to re-animate life after death, see that Ulmann was framed but are afraid to come forward…they eventually do, but their decision is bad timing because he’s executed in the chair before being pardoned. So the three scientists work to right the wrongs of the criminal justice system by bringing Ulmann back from the dead. It’s a success and the racketeers are concerned that he will eventually seek revenge.

Michael Curtiz has made some great films. He’s quite versatile, too. While his horror films, quite honestly, pale in comparison to perhaps Casablanca and Mildred Pierce, the color Lionel Atwill/Faye Wray films, like Mysteries of the Wax Museum and Doctor X, provide some ghoulish delights (and sluggish paces). The Walking Dead kind of balances itself between science fiction and the later Val Lewton films, where science corrects a wrong the court failed to make right, and this allows those who were responsible to contemplate their part in sending an innocent man to his death. While he does confront them, the racketeers often “walk into death”. The shooter of the judge falls over a chair and the gun goes off killing himself in the process. Another racketeer backs into an oncoming train. A third victim strokes and falls out an apartment window. While the remaining two seem to put away Karloff, a careless drive in the pouring rain around dangerous curves puts them to rest.

Technically, Karloff never lays a hand on any of his enemies, which strays from the norm in regards to movies where he atones for sins against him. All he really has to do is look at them, because his gaze casts a scourge to their very soul. A small part of the plot has Edmund Gwenn as the elder scientist wanting desperately to know if there was an afterlife while Karloff was dead, and at the very moment he was about to get a possible answer, he was denied it. The film also makes a statement that the justice system is flawed and can be fooled. Ulmann’s wrongful execution proves that. Karloff seems to represent a type of messenger of death.

Karloff, to me, is an actor known both for that florid, smooth delivery and conveying a lot while saying little. Frankenstein & The Walking Dead give Karloff precious few lines, but he didn’t need them. The anguish in his eyes and face, the way his body seemed to serve as punishment in the way he walked and moved thanks to a rough return from the dead (he was electrocuted, so that obviously takes its toll), and bearing the burden of how he’s ended up in such a situation.

Not to let a chance to mimic Frankenstein go to waste, there’s a lab with all the props you come to expect, including bolts lighting up all over the place (even coming dangerous close to the scientists attempting to revive Karloff) and  Karloff laying on a table just like the Monster, complete with Gwenn announcing, “He’s alive.” Karloff, which made me smile a bit, has a gray streak in his hair (I was thinking of the Bride) after being brought back to life.

There’s a great scene where Karloff is playing the piano (his Ulmann loves music) and you see the teary-eyed agony. He had to endure prison, unemployment upon release, a false benevolence that leads to his framing, a trial that led to his wrongful imprisonment (a crooked lawyer that did him no favors), suffering the death row wait, electrocuted in the chair, spending a brief time dead, revived, the rehabilitation that causes momentary amnesia, knowing that those responsible for all the pain are living large, and having to recuperate in a body that is basic recovering human wreckage. He’s Au Hasard Balthazar.