The Body Snatcher 1945) *

Often mentioned after the likes of Cat People & I Walked with a Zombie, Robert Wise’s The Body Snatcher (1945) is my personal favorite of the Val Lewton series. To me, it has one of the best characters and performances of Karloff’s career. What a snake that will do whatever it takes to stay in the life of a professor of anatomy, assistant to Knox, a surgeon notorious for receiving the bodies from heinous murdering graverobbers, Burke and Haire. At any rate, Henry Daniell is tormented by Cabman Gray (Karloff), unable to dismiss him from his life. Gray supplies him bodies from the local Edinburgh cemetery, but this activity will soon be stopped as graves will soon be guarded and cut off. Karloff’s voice and how he creeps about, devious and wretched, and what motivates him; he’s masterful. Daniell is a different kind of evil. He’s the genius, sure, but how he achieves his success, willing to turn a blind eye to the murder that so obviously happens in order for those fresh bodies to show up for study at his home displays him as equally wrong as Gray.

Gray, within his poverty and day-to-day survival, all so humbling, uses his hold over Daniell (concealing Danielle’s name in court during the Burke and Haire trials) as a reason to continue on in life. Cabbie Gray and Dr. MacFarlane, joined by an unholy alliance certain to end in doom. Bela Lugosi’s role is so minuscule and underwhelming, Karloff’s Gray easily disposes of him…in a matter of murder called “Burking”. Smother the mouth and nose with a lot of pressure, Gray slowly takes their breath from them. Lugosi looks so aged and defeated…it breaks my heart. The subplot with Russell Wade, as a new assistant to Daniell, kind of what MacFarlane was to Knox is important in that the film builds to see this fractured and fallen to ruination. No one wants to see this young man winding up as MacFarlane, a tragic victim of association. 

Certainly, the film’s most memorable scene involved a lovely but poor singing girl, working the streets for meager earnings, and her voice going silent after Gray’s wagon passed…this is such an example of the depths Gray will go in order to provide MacFarlane with a body to be studied and dissected. Daniell’s fate is assured when he decides Gray must be gone and that he can just as easily take up graverobbing himself. It will at least provide the means for the assistant to be free from the anchor of guilt certain to drag him into the pit as well. That voice calling to “Toddy”, Karloff’s Cabbie having not left MacFarlane, to the very end his stain of evil remains. The film’s highly melodramatic story arc of the little girl with a possible tumor needing surgery, its repair (coming with the price of the study of bodies supplied by Gray), and her not walking despite Daniell’s insistence she try leads to a minor moment of light in a film full of darkness.