The Body Snatcher

Robert Wise—director of the two best Broadway-on-celluloid adaptations in human history—attempts and achieves the improbable here: he sets a Robert Louis Stevenson short story about literal skullduggery in a world as inclined toward the music hiding in midair as a space written by Rodgers, Hammerstein, or Sondheim. To be sure, that music doesn’t chime as readily as if it were being plucked down by a Maria found in one of those sublime adaptations, but the terroir of The Body Snatcher’s Scotland reveals itself amenable (if not overly hospitable) to a sweet melody. Here, it comes courtesy of a street singer (Donna Lee), whose spectral a cappella busking of “When Ye Gang Awa, Jamie” suggests that even in a blackly backlot world whose streets and psyches are cracked by a preponderance of wars and oily industry, a moral line is legible. This most literal structural chorus provides a crack of light on Stevenson via Wise’s pallid corpse and conscience-wringing, all until she too (spoiler, for those souls hopeful enough to think a shred of grace might escape these cameras’ shadow-making) becomes a victim, a cadaver, a thing to be snatched.

In 1931 Edinburgh, doctor-in-training Donald Fettes (Russell Wade) finds himself the unlikely mentee to Dr. Wolfe MacFarlane (Henry Daniell, playing the self-made, self-piteous dandy with Byronic aplomb). Fettes’s Pollyanna optimism rubs off on the brooding senior doctor, who breaks his rule about not engaging in surgery—he has a medical academy to run!—and commits risky, radical surgery on a prostrate paraplegic girl (Sharyn Moffett). Fettes’s ascendence as a medical professional is stymied when, as per his employ under MacFarlane, he receives a shipment of cadavers destined to go under the knives of MacFarlane’s trainees. Where do these plenteous, suspiciously fresh cadavers materialize from, and why is their wolfish Charon literally Boris Karloff, in one of his most charmingly disarming roles as Cabman John Gray? Wise and cinematographer Robert De Grasse write the answer in Gray’s face like an Ozzy lyric, a strained kiss-off you see coming from go: “You children of today are children of the grave.”

Like the astutest filmmakers working with the Marx Brothers, Wise redirects Philip MacDonald and Val Lewton’s script away from any focus on Fettes or the aspartame sweetness of sick children. The Body Snatcher pits Karloff and Daniell in a veritable duet of modulated vocal delivery and facial contortion, the former’s near-unnatural lank rendered skeletal by the film’s eternal night, the latter’s prissy pomp playing like a rotten violin at a funeral. Brought in on contract by RKO to increase box office, Bela Lugosi shows up in the small role of Joseph, a mere house servant who nonetheless gets to trade barbs with Karloff’s Gray amid these trademark shadows. After seven previous pairings, The Body Snatcher would be the last time Karloff and Lugosi shared a celluloid frame. As a ’40s film about the ’30s, its campy nihilism serves as a kind of self-elegy for a certain type of storytelling, and also as a preview of all the compromises filmmakers and humans would see themselves engaged in as modernity marched on. “You may be the devil,” Karloff’s face in Lewton’s pulp shadows suggests, “or you may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.”