(Director: an uncredited Tod Browning. Screenplay by Garrett Fort, Guy Endore and Eric von Stroheim based on Tod Browning’s story, which is based on Abraham Merritt’s 1932 novel Burn, Witch, Burn!.)
Review
Two Devil’s Island prisoners—Marcel, a scientist concerned with human overpopulation (played by Henry B.Walthall), and Paul Lavond (Lionel Barrymore, MARK OF THE VAMPIRE, 1935), a now-hateful man wrongly convicted of theft and murder—escape. They make their way to Marcel’s house where Marcel’s wife, Malita (Rafaela Ottiano) has been continuing her husband’s experiments to shrink people to doll size to reduce consumption of the world’s resources. After a tired, wounded Marcel dies, Paul, with Malita’s help, begins using Marcel and Malita’s experimental science to get revenge on those who put him set him up seventeen years prior—he does this by returning to Paris and dressing up as an old woman who sells the criminal, shrunken dolls out of a shop. Paul now goes by the name Madame Madeline.
Paul also reconnects (as an old woman) with his beloved adult and life-beleaguered daughter, Lorraine Lavond (Maureen O’Sullivan, THE THIN MAN, 1932), making him question his murderous goals.
DEVIL-DOLL is a great hour-and-eighteen-minute revenge flick, with its tight script, good FX and atmosphere, strong acting (Barymore, Ottiano, etc.) and waste-no-time pacing. I love that a lot is left to the imagination, that there is no visible blood spilled, making it more effective. Beyond that, there’s not a lot to say about DEVIL-DOLL that hasn’t been said before, except that it’s one of my favorite living manikin-based horror films.
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