The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1958)

82 Minutes, Black & White, USA, 1958 (held from general release for censorship reasons until 1962)

Written By: Rex Carlton & Joseph Green

Directed By: Joseph Green

Dramatis Personae:

Jason Evers is Doctor Bill Cortner, brilliant surgeon, visionary, and Mad Scientist in training.

Virginia Leith is Jan Compton, Bill’s fiancé and unwitting subject of his experiments.

Leslie Daniels is Kurt, Bill’s one-armed lab assistant, Igor to his Frankenstein.

Adele Lamont is Doris Powell, disfigured and embittered model.

Bruce Brighton is Doctor Cortner, Bill’s father and chief of surgery.

Eddie Carmel is The Closet Monster, one of Bill’s failed experiments, which remains hidden for most of the movie until its triumphant reveal in the movie’s fiery climax.

Commentary:

Ah, the Mad Scientist movie. Perhaps no theme is more enduring in science fiction than Science Gone Horribly Wrong ™. Nothing captures the viewer’s imagination more readily than the notion of Science, a discipline devoted to understanding and improving our world, twisted to serve the whims of a madman. What is it about this trope that so fascinates us? Why do we as an audience so easily accept the notion of the Mad Scientist? Perhaps we are simply intimidated by intellect. Perhaps we see that knowledge is power, and power can corrupt. Perhaps, as a species, humans prefer to leave well enough alone, and any great change in how things are done fills us with distrust. It’s easy to suspect the motives of a strange man in a white coat who says he has a better way. As a consequence, the best Mad Scientists are sympathetic creatures, driven to Mad Science by forces beyond their control. Engineers frustrated with bureaucracy. Doctors hell-bent for leather to save human life. Intellectuals disgusted with the stupidity of the human race in general. How many times has a Mad Scientist uttered something to the effect of, “They laughed at me? The fools! I’ll show them!” We both love and loathe the Mad Scientist, because he is, in a sense, our own creation. If only we were a little more patient, a little more sympathetic, a little less STUPID, maybe he wouldn’t be trying to take over the world.

Then you have someone like Bill Cortner from The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, who is a different animal altogether. A brilliant surgeon, known for unorthodox techniques and outlandish theories, he certainly has the makings of a Mad Scientist. But there’s something altogether unsympathetic about this man…as we shall see.

We meet Bill Cortner in surgery, part of a team headed by his father working on an accident victim. The elder Doctor Cortner is unable to save the man, so Bill steps in to try one of his new techniques. Using some shaky medical science involving direct stimulation of heart and brain, Bill manages to bring the clinically-dead patient back from the grave. Bill’s father applauds his success, but makes it clear he doesn’t approve of his son’s disregard for proper procedure. Bill rather smugly points out that, even though what he did wasn’t exactly by the book, it worked, and he just saved a life his father couldn’t. The elder Cortner admonishes his son, pointing out that body parts have gone missing from the amputation ward, and telling Bill that he knows about his secret lab at their family country house. His father doesn’t know what Bill’s doing up there – and he doesn’t really WANT to know – but he warns him against too much ambition and disregard for medical ethics.

But Bill has no time for serious argument, as he and his perky fiancé Jan are getting out of town for the weekend. They are about to disembark, when Bill gets a message. A man named Kurt called for him, telling him that there is an emergency at the lab. Bill drags Jan along on a brief detour up to the Cortner family country house. Unfortunately, Bill’s impatience and concern cause him to drive recklessly, and he wrecks the car on a sharp turn (good one, Bill). Bill is thrown clear with only some minor injury…but Jan is not so lucky. As he staggers back to the wreck, Bill is horrified by what he sees (all we see is Jan’s spasming hand), bundles SOMETHING up in his jacket, and hoofs it to his secret lab.

Once there, Bill meets with Kurt, a former surgeon with a withered and useless left arm, and immediately preps the lab. Once the procedure is complete, the reveal is made: Jan was decapitated in the car crash, and Bill will now use his experimental serum to keep her severed head alive. Of course, this is only a temporary measure; her head cannot be kept alive indefinitely in the fluid-filled pan he improvised for her…which means Bill has to somehow get her a new body. Before Bill has a chance to contemplate the implication of this, Kurt shows him the reason he called: one of their early experiments has turned violent, and Kurt has locked it in a closet on the other side of the lab. Bill takes one look inside the room, and disgustedly orders Kurt to keep it locked up. Then he heads out into the night.

While Bill is out doing distasteful things, Jan regains consciousness in the lab. Understandably traumatized by the experience, she grows to hate Bill for what he’s done to her. She and Kurt chat on and off while Bill is gone, with Kurt explaining how he’s been helping Bill with his experiments in the hopes of regaining use of his left arm and becoming a surgeon again. Jan also realizes something: somehow the supercharged serum mixture Bill used to preserve her head has given her extrasensory perception. She seems to be able to sense what Bill is doing…and she is able to communicate with the thing in the closet. Filled with hatred for Bill and self-loathing for what she has become, Jan conspires with the Closet Monster to take her revenge.

There’s almost always an undercurrent of anti-intellectualism found in the typical Mad Scientist movie. There’s this unspoken notion that the very IDEA of doing something different or revolutionary is evil, and therefore the person doing it is evil, and therefore deserves to die at the hands of the monster he creates. And while that’s certainly present here, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die takes it to a darker extreme. Bill Cortner is something worse than your typical Mad Scientist, and nowhere is this more evident than his solution to the problem of getting Jan a new body. He immediately starts cruising the seedy parts of town, heading to a strip club looking for a performer that won’t be missed. Now, I’m willing to accept the possibility that this is as much a case of sub-par writing as anything else (boobies are, after all, one of the primary ingredients of a horror movie, along with blood and gore), but what’s disturbing is the SUDDENNESS of it. Bill doesn’t agonize over it. Doesn’t equivocate. Doesn’t feel remorse. He goes from Victor Frankenstein to Jack the Ripper in maybe twenty seconds of screen time. It’s already been established that Bill is arrogant, smug, and disrespectful of the medical establishment, but it’s quite a leap from that to potential serial killer. This is not a Mad Scientist in the traditional sense. This is not a good-intentioned person who’s lost his moral compass; this man has no morals whatsoever.

The scenes of Bill cruising the neighborhood looking for a victim are quite icky to watch, as are his flirtations with a stripper wherein he subtly checks the circumference of her throat for compatibility with Jan’s head. But no scene is more distasteful as the one where he finally chooses his victim. An artist’s model named Doris Powell, her body flawless except for a disfiguring scar an ex-boyfriend left on her cheek (how convenient for a guy who just happens to have a spare face lying around). Doris’s experience with men has made her bitter and reclusive, but Bill manages to convince her to trust him. After all, he’s a handsome, respectable doctor, who just happens to specialize in reconstructive surgery. If you didn’t hate this man before, watching him prey on the trust of a damaged young woman will definitely have you rooting for the Closet Monster.

Jan doesn’t fare much better in the morality department. Her transition from devoted fiancé to vengeful demon happens very quickly. Granted, she’s had a very traumatic experience (which is to say, she’s a FRIGGING HEAD IN A PAN!), but her desire for revenge comes on just as fast as Bill’s capacity to murder. Kurt, of course, has something to say about that (Kurt just can’t keep his mouth shut, you see, which costs him big time before the movie is over). In one of his overblown monologues, he speculates that perhaps the mind and the body were never meant to be separated; when the brain and the flesh are severed, whither the soul? Possibly Jan’s quick transition from victim to avenger is a result of her soul being ripped from her body; perhaps she, like Bill, has had her moral compass removed. Honestly, that would have been a fascinating idea to explore, but the movie didn’t go there. The idea was introduced, then never addressed again.

In fact, a lot is left unexplained and unexplored. We’re told that Bill used a supercharged version of his super-duper organ preservation fluid to keep Jan’s head alive, and that her limited telepathic powers are a side-effect. But her powers are never clearly defined. She seems to be able to sense what Bill is doing, but it’s never shown with enough consistency to really pin it down as telepathy or something else. She’s also able to communicate with the Closet Monster, but we never know if that’s a power or not. It’s never clear what exactly the Closet Monster IS. Kurt says that it started out as just a bunch of spare parts that was given a life of its own, and has “mutated” somehow since then. It seems to communicate with Jan, which implies it has some kind of intelligence. Can it understand her? Is she actually talking to it? Or is she merely controlling it with her will? We never know. And I’m not even going to speculate on how Jan is able to talk without the benefit of lungs. Makes my head hurt just to think about.

The Brain That Wouldn’t Die goes to darker places than its contemporary Mad Scientist movies go, and it’s hard to know what to make of it. The air of discomfort it gives a modern viewer might well have been unintentional. The fact that there’s a whole mess of gratuitous cheesecake (even a catfight between two buxom strippers for no dramatically evident reason!) lead me to believe that Joseph Green might just have been making a piece of exploitation filmmaking, with plenty of gore and boobies to appeal to the teenage crowd, and not giving much thought to the undertones of it. Stranger things have happened; anti-intellectualism by its very nature does not contemplate itself. The fact that these things are there may just be a reflection of the culture from which the movie sprang, and not necessarily a conscious statement by the filmmaker.

And of course, being an intellectual, I have a tendency to overthink things and see undertones that may not exist. But whatever this movie may or may not be, what it undeniably IS is an entertaining little piece of 1950’s Mad Science, surprisingly strong and dark for its time, and therefore unique. And so it is worth experiencing.

Things To Look For:

- As I said, there’s a great deal of cheesecake to be found here. Not blatant nudity, of course, but plenty of scantily clad female forms. We have strippers, models, and even a beauty contest in the middle of the movie, for no apparent reason except to give Bill more women to ogle (and lest we forget the aforementioned catfight). I have to say, seeing this movie nearly half a century removed, it’s obvious how standards of attractiveness have changed. These ladies are women of substance. Not fat, but fleshy. Hips and breasts and thighs, man. Stuff to hold on to. Nothing like these toothpick girls wandering around these days. They simply don’t build women like this anymore. Kind of sad, really…

- There’s a shocking amount of gore in this film, for a 1950’s movie. Which is probably why it was censored and held from general release for four years. Kurt’s demise at the hands of the Closet Monster is perhaps the best example. It somehow manages to be horrifying and hilarious at the same time, as the Closet Monster rips his arm out of its socket (his good arm, too! The irony!), and Kurt staggers around the cottage for a good three minutes, bleeding all over everything before finally falling down the stairs to his death. It’s perhaps one of the great death scenes in movie history…and the fact that when Bill and Doris show up later and don’t see ANYTHING to arouse suspicion just makes it all the greater. Ah, continuity…

- I love how neat and tidy Bill keeps his secret lab. Not a drop of blood anywhere, not a single one of those missing body parts to be seen, and of course plenty of beakers of multicolored liquids (well, it’s a black and white film, so we must ASSUME they are multicolored liquids). Once again, I may be overthinking things, but it strikes me as perfect for his character. This is a pleasant, tidy little country cottage where Tampering In God’s Domain just happens to go on, and there’s not a single external indication of the horrors to be found. Just like Bill Cortner himself, handsome, brilliant surgeon with his charming confidence and that perfect 1950’s hair. Externally, a quite nice and respectable man…who’s stealing body parts and creating abominations in his basement.

- The Closet Monster was played by former circus freak Eddie Carmel, in his first film role. Much like earlier movie heavy Rondo Hatton, he suffered from acromegaly, a disorder of the pituitary gland which caused him to grow to the height of 7’6”, and also contributed to recurring health problems that led to his untimely death at the age of 36. There’s something poignant about performers like Carmel and Hatton, who chose to make the most of their conditions and parley them into careers in entertainment. It smacks a little of exploitation, but at least these men chose to take control of their own exploitation. I hope wherever they are now, they can rest easy knowing that they scared the crap out of a few little kids.

Date Posted: August 20^th, 2007

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