Well, here we have quite the farrago: Tod Browning’s penultimate film, Lionel Barrymore in drag, enslavement, telekinesis, paralysis, skin-slicing, an explosion, Christmas, romance, and what’s tantamount to heartwarming horror. And you know what? At no point does 1936’s The Devil-Doll feel overstuffed or half-baked; the thing somehow manages to come together while boosting your holiday spirit.
The movie opens with Barrymore’s Paul Lavond character and his buddy, Emil (Robert Greig) having escaped from prison and now arriving at the country home of Emil to be greeted by his wife Malita (Rafaela Ottiano), who has been waiting for her husband’s return so that they can get back to their business with shrinking everyone in the world down to the size of a doll in order to make sure there’s enough food to go around. Some circular logic there, but no one ever made history by being too cautious.
Paul had been sent up for his stretch by his three cupidinous business partners (one of whom boasts an epic Christmas tree) who framed him for a crime he didn’t commit. Accordingly, he’s going to wish to use these shrunken people for his own ends, but amazingly—or at least improbably—he’s a good, self-sacrificing guy—all the way through the picture. Emil has a heart attack not long after his homecoming, so Paul and Malita travel to Paris together and set up shop as doll makers—you can imagine where they get the dolls—with Paul donning the garb of an old woman so that he can come and go as he pleases, which includes visiting his mother (Lucy Beaumont)—who knows who he is—and his daughter Lorraine (Maureen O’Sullivan), who does not and, additionally, is ashamed of her father, believing him guilty and a source of profound shame.
Barrymore threw himself into the part. It’s surprising how good he is with all of his elderly-lady mannerisms and touches. Lionel Barrymore could be your grandmother—who knew? Sure, there’s some collateral damage—sometimes in order to clear your name, you have to commit some actual crimes—and Malita gets both used and blown up, but there’s a certain improbable sweetness to all of it. Barrymore is seen and heard as the kindly doll maker more often than not—and when he’s using his natural voice, he still wears a dress and sports earrings—and really, Paul just wants his daughter to know he loves her, and does what he can to help her be happy, which means he won’t see her again.
The film represents Browning at his most sensitive. Horror films of this vintage can have a certain arthritic creak to them, but The Devil-Doll is a spry offering. You want everyone to come out okay in the end. That they will is the longest of long shots in a horror movie, but the batting average is pretty high here, considering. Paul is a fatalist, but someone who believes that a person can work with fate in a sort of partnership, up until a given point. Rarely is a character in a horror film so levelheaded and clear-eyed, never mind his transformation from accused criminal to actual criminal (and then some).
The special effects—the various shrunken people being sent off on their missions of murder, terror, and theft—remain impressive now and they must have blown minds at the time. The score is by Franz Waxman, who had come into his own with the previous year’s Bride of Frankenstein, and all of the various parts coalesce with what appears to be ease. We’ve not often discomfited with The Devil-Doll so much as we are pleased and relieved; initially, we wonder when some savage evil will reveal itself, but instead we get this film of yearning, though, again, replete with crimes against nature. There’s horror, but horror that resounds as the cost of doing business—business that one doesn’t wish to do, but must do. Undoubtedly the most uplifting of Christmas horror films in which people die horrible deaths and have ghastly outcomes. 🩸
is the author of eight books, including the story collection, If You [ ]: Fabula, Fantasy, F**kery, Hope, a 33 1/3 volume on Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, Meatheads Say the Realest Things: A Satirical (Short) Novel of the Last Bro, and a book about 1951’s Scrooge as the ultimate horror film. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Daily Beast, Cineaste, Film Comment, Sight and Sound, JazzTimes, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and many other venues. He’s completing a book called And the Skin Was Gone: Essays on Works of Horror Art. His website is colinfleminglit.com, where he maintains the Many Moments More journal, which, at 2.7 million words and counting as of autumn 2023, is the longest sustained work of literature in history.
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