THE MAN WHO RECLAIMED HIS HEAD (1934)

Eager to follow Claude Rains’ successful debut in THE INVISIBLE MAN/’33 with more comic-tinged horror (and with him seen as well as heard), Universal Pictures opted for a B’way flop with a juicy title he’d recently done. But there’s little horror & less comedy in this pacifist tract about Rains crusading anti-war essayist and expedient newspaper publisher Lionel Atwill who sidles up to both the Military Industrial Complex and Rains’ wife Joan Bennett in an attempt to manipulate Rains into taking a pro-war/pro-munitions position. (Perhaps the play resonated better in 1932 when it opened than 1934, after Hitler had come to power.) Structured much like it’s near namesake, THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, it opens with Rains’ broken man bringing a valise with a certain ‘reclaimed’ object to the office of an old acquaintance. Then, the whole sad story told in flashback under Edward Ludwig’s utilitarian direction. The first act hangs together, even with Rains ghastly daughter ‘Baby Jane’ shrieking all her lines, but things get awfully preachy as we go on, briefly coming to life in a grim climax as Rains pulls out a saber to take revenge. Grisly horror left to one’s furtive imagination and Merritt B. Gerstad’s chiaroscuro lighting. Yikes!

DOUBLE-BILL: Between INVISIBLE and RECLAIMED, Rains made one of those terribly uneven, but interesting Ben Hecht/Charles MacArthur artsy indies, one of the better ones, CRIME WITHOUT PASSION/’34, with Rains as a lawyer more guilty than his clients.