The Dark Eyes of London (1939)

Prior to the Hammer age, Britain did not produce many horror films. It was a genre frowned on both by censors and producers, and during the war years was actively discouraged – it was felt that there were enough horrors to face in real life. With the exception of the vigorously outrageous Tod Slaughter’s series of lurid romps, few films explored the morbid, filmmakers preferring the murder mystery and wartime thriller when they wanted to examine the dark side of human nature. All the odder, then, that The Dark Eyes of London was made in the UK in 1939.

Or perhaps not. Alongside Slaughter – whose films were very much based around his theatrical melodramas – the main exception to Britain’s unofficial fatwa against the horror story on film was the work of Edgar Wallace. Wallace was hugely popular in the first half of the 20th Century (and beyond), and while his novels were primarily crime dramas, there was a dark edge to much of his writing that – at least when filmed – often blurred the line between thriller and horror. At a time when the horror film was still seen primarily as the fantastical and supernatural, his psychological thrillers probably slipped past the beady eyes of the censor, meaning that films like The Terror – essentially a body count psycho horror story – could be produced even as American-made horror films were being censored or banned.

While Boris Karloff had already returned to the home country in 1933 to star in The Ghoul, this was Bela Lugosi’s first film outside America since he’d reached fame as Dracula. By 1939, his career was already somewhat on the slide – his ego and awkwardness, not to mention his rather old-fashioned acting style would see a fall from the big leagues of Universal towards the less respectable world of Monogram and Republic Pictures – but he was, nevertheless, a name that audiences would recognise. His presence here turns this film from a dark crime thriller into a horror film, and unsurprisingly, the US release made the connection even clearer, retitling the film The Human Monster. This is one of a handful of films to receive the infamous ‘H’ (for Horrific) certificates from the BBFC (thrillingly, the BBFC certification card appears at the start of the new Blu-ray edition).

Lugosi is Dr Orloff – yes, Dr Orloff, the name that Wallace fan Jess Franco would use in his breakthrough movie The Awful Dr Orloff and its various sequels and spin-offs over the years – an insurance salesman whose clients have the unfortunate habit of turning up drowned. While he is presented as a charitable man, willing to help out clients who are in financial difficulties, our suspicions are aroused because, well, he’s Bela Lugosi – and that usually means that he’ll be a bad egg. So it is – Orloff is involved in some sort of nefarious insurance fraud scheme that brings him into contact with a master forger, just extradited from America, and this connection, in turn, alerts police inspector Larry Holt (played with square-jawed intensity by Hugh Williams) and American Lieutenant Patrick O’Reilly (Edmon Ryan), who has come over on some sort of training exchange (but whose role in the film is really just to help sell it to American audiences).

Orloff is a patron of the Dearborn Home for the Blind, the sort of place that you won’t find today – here, blind men are given menial tasks to perform in an effort to make them useful to society once again. One of these tasks – at least for the hulking Jake (Wilfred Walter) – is helping Orloff bump off his clients in a secret room at the back of the institute, unknown to everyone else. As the police close in (thanks to some impressive forensics work), Orloff vanishes. In search of more evidence against him, Larry persuades Diane (Greta Gynt), the daughter of his latest victim, to take a job at the Home as secretary to its kindly owner Dearborn, hoping that she might uncover proof of his crimes and a clue to his whereabouts – but as anyone who has ever read a Wallace story or seen one of the many film adaptations will have already guessed, Dearborn is actually Orloff in disguise – his voice dubbed by O.B. Clarence just to throw audiences off the scent – and he sends Jake out to finish off Diane…

While essentially a crime film more than a horror story – Orloff’s motives for murder are, after all, strictly financial – the production is given a gothic luridness by director Walter Summers that removes it from the other British Wallace movies, most notably the series of films made in the 1960s that were very much straight-ahead crime dramas for the most part. Summers was a journeyman director – though he had previously made the last British silent film of note, another horror film called Chamber of Horrors – but he brings a real verve to this, keeping the comic relief that sometimes overwhelms films of the era under control and adding a sense of creepiness and unease to the story. The character of Jake is a classic horror movie henchman, large and brutish, and the film is – for the time – unexpectedly grim on occasion, with the dead bodies looking genuinely unsettling.

Lugosi is on good form, though some of his long, drawn-out sentences and intense stares into the camera are perhaps overdone – I think even the dopiest copper might have had his suspicions alerted by this sort of behaviour. But this is amongst his best films, one that still holds up surprisingly well today. It’s great to see it getting the remastered Blu-ray treatment and for anyone unfamiliar with Lugosi, Wallace or 1930s horror in general, this is as good a place as any to start.

The Dark Eyes of London will be released by Network on 11th October 2021. For more details, please click here.