"You Can't Have Operations Without Screams."

CORRIDORS OF BLOOD (1958)
Directed by Robert Day
STARRING:
Boris Karloff – Dr. Thomas Bolton
Betta St. John – Susan
Finlay Currie – Superintendent Matheson
Francis Matthews – Jonathan Bolton
Adrienne Corri – Rachel
Francis De Wolff – Black Ben
Christopher Lee – Resurrection Joe

Karloff was two decades beyond his years of glory when cast as the nitrous oxide huffing surgeon, Dr. Thomas Bolton, in Corridors of Blood. His reputation hadn’t suffered much, exactly; rather his courtly elocution and quietly black menace seemed an uncomfortable fit in the decade of Brooding Brando and Elvis the Pelvis. He had been doing a bunch of fine television work, meet Abbot and Costello in film, and was generally living the life of an aging professional actor throughout the Atomic Age. He had not suffered the professional deterioration (and chronic drug addiction) that so haunted and tragically ruined his nemesis/horror-brother, Bela Lugosi. With Karloff, his glory years were so consistently drenched in celluloid wonder, little beyond the complete physical collapse and professional desperation that so defined “poor Bela” (Karloff’s phrase) could ever knock his bust of the pedestal. No, he was doing just fine, thank you very much for asking, young man.

How glorious was Karloff’s resume? For fans of horror, well, don’t get them started. In a five year span in the early 1930s he starred in Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, The Mask of Fu Manchu, The Mummy, The Ghoul, The Black Cat, Bride of Frankenstein, The Raven, The Black Room, and The Invisible Ray. Get the picture? Hell, I could have stopped the list at Frankenstein and we’d still be discussing an immortal.


Karloff still had plenty of juice left a decade later when nearly-forgotten-but recently-resurrected genius, Val Lewton, tapped him for the films that (briefly) saved RKO after Citizen Kane belly flopped and nearly ruined the studio: The Body Snatcher (my personal favorite Karloff performance), Isle of the Dead, and Bedlam.

Unlike Poor Bela, Karloff aged very well. Even by the late 1950s, his striking bone structure and mane of regal, white hair still made for a hell of a close up. At 71 years of age, he still moved like a man capable of digging (or uncovering) a good sized grave. So, when executive producer, Richard Gordon, approached Boris Karloff to appear in Corridors of Blood, he wasn’t walking a pale cadaver out of a rented house, blinking into the sunlight, ala Ed Wood and Lugosi (PS to Lugosi fans, I will give him his full due soon. Hold tight). Still, it did give Karloff a chance to step up a bit from Bud Abbott and the 20-inch screen of Studio One. And so, to the movie:

Corridors of Blood tells the story of 19th century surgeon, Dr. Thomas Bolton, whose obsession with anesthesia leads to his eventual addiction to nitrous oxide (laughing gas) and professional ruin. The early scenes establish Bolton as a highly respected professional, much esteemed and admired for his speed and precision with the knife (understandably, speed was essential in surgery before the advent of anesthesia, particularly for amputations). Along with his work at the hospital, Bolton also does a fair share of charity work, running a free dispenser in the horrid slums of the Seven Dials area of East London.

Bolton is haunted by the agony he brings his patients, who often don’t survive the ordeal of an amputation, or go mad if they do survive. He is much ridiculed for not only his work with the gutter urchins of the Seven Dials, but also for his ridiculous ideas about painless surgery; his “chemical experiments.” “Pain and the knife are inseparable,” say his snuff-sniffing colleagues as though it were a divine decree.

Ironically, it is the good doctor’s noble efforts on all counts that lead to his ruination: His quest to relieve his patients of their pain leads to obsessive experimentation and eventually his complete addiction to laughing gas; and it is his contact with the baser elements of the Seven Dials that allows him tragic means to support his addictions. Eventually, professionally ruined, Bolton slides into the slime of the Seven Dials, and with local kingpin Black Ben (Francis De Wolff) and his henchman, the cadaverous grave-robber, Resurrection Joe (Christopher Lee). Ben and Joe have a startup business, a very lucrative one, of supplying freshly murdered bodies to the doctors at the nearby teaching hospital (the same doctors that harrumph into their sleeves about Bolton’s work with the poor). Their victims are the lost, drunken, or homeless souls that wonder into Black Ben’s lodging house/criminal headquarters. Bolton supplies Ben with a legal certificate of death, signed nice a proper, and Ben supplies Bolton with a place to flop and the chemicals he needs to produce his formula.

Things don’t end well for our doctor, as you might imagine, or for any member of the Seven Dials for that matter; with the wages of sin being paid in particularly gruesome fashion for all concerned. The picture takes a half-hearted stab at the notion of redemption for Dr. Bolton (his son is made to promise to carry on his research into anesthesia – a rather odd last request, all things considered), but the Doctor’s complete and utter fall from grace is the real story. Consider this: Bolton is not killed outright, he lingers long enough for his son to travel by carriage to his side, as he lays dying in Black Ben’s shithole in the Seven Dials. That is, Bolton is not taken “home” to die in the comfortable surroundings of his family and loved ones. No. He is not given that dignity. He already is home, lying in the corruption and filth of the Dials. In the truest sense, he has lost his soul.

As a fascinating side bit of trivia, Corridors of Blood turns out to be a biopic, sort of. Events in the movie mirror the life of 19th century dentist, Horace Wells, who was professionally humiliated after a demonstration using chloroform as an anesthetic ended in a patient yelping in pain. He was driven out of the medical community, becoming a door-to-for salesman, albeit one horribly addicted to chloroform. His addiction eventually broke him completely, leaving him deranged and penniless. He was committed to the Tombs Prisons in New York after throwing acid on a prostitute, eventually committing suicide once he came to his senses. In a final bit of dark poetry, he committed suicide by slitting an artery in his leg - after administering chloroform to himself to avoid the pain.

Okay, to the good stuff.

The Good Stuff, Part I: Karloff, Karloff, Karloff

No one did Mad Scientist quite like Karloff. Other notable madmen in lab coats, like Lionel Atwill (Doctor X, The Vampire Bat) or George Zucco (The Mad Monster, Dr. Renault’s Secret) took tremendous pains to accentual the rampaging ego of their roles, bringing the madness to full and glorious flower; and their characters were normally the declared villain of the photoplay. With a Karloff madman (The Invisible Ray, Black Friday, Before I Hang) the viewer was always given a very sympathetic loon. A great deal of this quality was the result of the actor’s natural warmth (I dare you to try to find a single personal remembrance of Karloff that does not include the word “gentleman”), but much also was Karloff’s tremendous skill at presenting a character of many colors.

In Corridors, Karloff gives his Dr. Bolton an intense humanity. His concern and shame over the torment he causes is patients is sincere and deeply felt, as is the concern he feels for the destitute of the Seven Dials, where he operates his free clinic. He is, indeed, a good and kind man – until he is told he is wrong, or a concerned loved one suggests, just suggests, mind you, that perhaps he should get some sleep or even, maybe, stop huffing quite so much laughing gas. Then our good and kind doctor swells instantly with a furious, self-righteous injury and pride; his entire body lurching forward and eyes flashing. When his beloved niece, Susan (Betta St. John), in an effort to bring our overly concerned doc out of his doldrums at the evening dinner table, reminds him that he is the finest surgeon in the hospital, he nearly takes her head off.

“Oh,” he says, “What is a surgeon? How do you judge his work? It’s to cure, isn’t it?” His voice has gone to a very edgy place, his expression one of contempt and anger as he glares at his niece. Jonathan (Francis Matthews) who has begun the conversation by suggesting his father is working too hard, goes a step further and suggests that perhaps his father should abandon his experiments, that they have wasted his time. This is a step too far, it turns out.

“How dare you say I am wasting my time!” snaps Dr. Bolton, shouting now, suddenly leaning forward like an animal showing teeth. And just like that, Bolton is no longer sitting at an evening meal with loved ones; he is now seated at an interrogation with enemies, enemies determined to destroy his work.

His entire sense of himself has become twined with his experiments into anesthetics. As go his experiments, so goes his mental well being. He cannot be mistaken, and he can never stop. “I can’t rest until I find a way to rid surgery of such horrors,” he says, and that is the flat truth. He cannot rest, his mind has become trapped in his obsession, long before his body has become trapped in physical addiction. He. Must. Be. Right. Bolton’s ego demands it and can live with nothing less. Any suggestion to the contrary becomes an attack. It is this sense of the superior self that makes Dr. Bolton just as mad as Lugosi’s Dr. Vornoff, creating his race of atomic supermen in a seedy basement in Bride of the Monster. Only an actor of Karloff’s range and towering skill could create such contradictions in a character - could so subtly conceal the raw flesh of a madman within the attire of a saint.

And Dr. Bolton certainly sees himself as a superior man, his actions justified over the concerns of common men. Think not? Consider: As Bolton lays dying, does he express any regret over the killings and murders he has justified by his forged death certificates? Does he hope for forgiveness for the murders he has presided over, caused in fact, in his quest for his chemicals? Nope. Doesn’t even occur to him. What he does do, with his dying breath, is to demand a promise from his son to continue his “work.” The same work, mind, that has caused an untold web of pain and death for those around him, driven him to addiction, disgrace and madness; and finally killed him. You know what, Dad? I think I’ll take a pass. I’d rather marry my hot cousin, Susan, and live a life of safety, luxury, and privilege; if it’s all the same to you.

The Good Stuff, Part II: The Operating Theater of Blood

Fans were a bit shocked by the blood in this film in 1958 and they still are today. In other words, the gore has held up. According to the linear notes in the excellent Criterion Collection release, written by producer John Croydon, a great deal of research went into Corridors so that the operating theater would be authentic. It is certainly that and then some (Croydon also mentions that the film received an X rating from the British Board of Film – no one under 16 admitted). Even today, in the age of endless Saw sequels, the stark, matter-of-record realism of the operating theater in Corridors delivers a firm body blow.

In the opening scene, a large steeple bell is being rung, its tone heard throughout London, eliciting an odd, somber response from all who hear it. We see in a beautifully edited sequence different men hearing it, their work paused for a moment in grim attention: a large barkeep, sweating, demands silence from his patrons so he can listen. In the respectful, sudden pause, he kisses a barmaid (somehow it is obvious this is his wife, and that they run the place together), tosses his apron on the bar and leaves. A butcher, slicing apart some skinless carcass, listens for a moment to the toll as if hearing a hateful summons. He thrusts his knife into the butcher block and leaves without a word. A huge, hulking brute, bare-chested and covered in soot and sweat, shoveling coal into a furnace in some stygian basement, straightens and listens, his expression blank. He matter-of-factly closes the hinged door of the furnace, slips on his shirt, and climbs the basement stairs up toward the street. The camera moves to a large, official building, and the men, in their size and rough demeanor, dwarf the building’s refined appointments as they enter. They are awarded an odd, ceremonial respect by the uniformed doormen and guards of the building despite being so utterly and completely working class. We sense some ritual whereby these large men, seemingly so out of place in this professional architecture, are briefly welcome. The bell stops tolling. We see Karloff dressing in a rather aged, worn topcoat, a bit too big for him, attended by others (we learn from Croydon’s notes that surgeons of the period often dressed in used topcoats, stiff with gore from previous operations, so as not to bloody their good clothes). “They’re ready for you now, sir,” says a uniform, sticking his head briefly into the room. We then are treated to an overhead shot of a 19th century operating theater, with rows of young students in stadium seating and a hospital maid throwing handfuls of sawdust over the floor around the operating table.

It suddenly becomes clear what these large men, these brutish working men of responsibility, have been summoned for: They are here to strap down the patients of surgery with leather bindings, spotted with black, dried blood; hold them down with their strength during the inevitable contortions of agony as legs and arms fall to the floor. They are the only men in London strong enough of arm and stomach to fulfill this duty, and they are called with a bell - like worshipers to some horrible church. Indeed they seem to be dealing with a sacrifice as they busy themselves strapping down a patient, a supplicant glistening and bug-eyed with sweat and terror.

“For your information, gentlemen,” says Dr. Bolton, cinching off circulation to a leg by a leather tourniquet, “this is a straightforward amputation of the lower extremity of the femur.” He probes the bare and damaged leg with his fingers, feeling for the joint of bone underneath the soft layer of flesh. “And to you students I again emphasize the absolute necessity for speed.”

He is passed a large instrument, a bit indistinct but very large and heavy, and we see the patient’s face which is now simply an open mouth, an open portal; emitting a high screech that seems out of proportion to a man’s ability to make sound. It is a brilliant bit of film-making, near wordless, that brings us completely into the numbing fear that must have existed for 19th century citizenry at mention of the word “surgeon.”

This operating theater, its instruments and people, are covered in blood throughout the film. Surgeons are covered in it up to their elbows, their aprons are splattered with its dark stains, the floors are soaked with it. Doctors are forever wiping their hands, cleaning them in endless bowls of bloody water, changing out of crusty aprons. Outside of the operating theater, the movie is nearly gore free, save a couple quick and static shots at the film’s end. Yet the bloody theater in Corridor is a far more visceral viewing experience that the gore of the imagination ala Saw CCXXVI or any of the other, modern guts-R-us fests. The blood of Corridors is historic. Men and women, those that had the bad fortune to remain conscience, really did watch their feet or legs being lifted off the table - away from them; the toes curling in a spasm of severed nerves. Modern gore is giggly with imagination – the gore of the operating theater, for the unfortunates that needed surgery in the 19th century, required no flights of imagination whatsoever.

The Good Stuff, Part III: Black Ben, Resurrection Joe, and the Seven Dials

“This place must breed a hundred fevers,” says Dr. Bolton, entering Black Ben’s lodging house in the Seven Dials for the first time, recoiling at all the moist, black corners and filth-covered spots of human debris. Black Ben has seduced our charitable physician with a lie, telling him that a lodger has a raging fever and needs immediate care. In truth, Black Ben had Resurrection Joe simply need a death certificate so they can sell the corpse of a murder victim to the doctors at the hospital. It seems the doctors have gone all litigious of late, demanding certificates. So begins Bolton’s descent into cloying pit of madness and depravity represented by Ben’s lodging house and the slums of the Seven Dials.

The Seven Dials was, and is, a real location in East London and was one of the most infamous areas of urban blight in 19th Century England. The western world has never known a poverty so densely packed and wretched as the slums of 19th century England, and this film rubs your face in the squalor. Not a single resident of the Dials is clean or free from the horrible, filthy corruption that runs down the bricks of the buildings, gathers like slime in the gutters of the streets. The city scenes are littered with gatherings of ragged humans around smudge-pot fires, huddled like open sores festering on a diseased body. Black Ben, with his oily beard and obese face, presides over his lodging house like a depraved Falstaff. He has a hail fellow smile and a clap on the back; and a dark, glittering eye for the traveler without friends, perhaps a bit in his cups; whereupon he will signal the black spirit of the Seven Dials, Resurrection Joe, for a soft and gentle escort into the next life, via a pillow over the face.

Much as been written about Christopher Lee as Resurrection Joe, so much so that for some he steals the show. That’s overstating the case a bit (now one, absolutely no one, could ever steal a show from Karloff), but Lee’s work here is absolutely mesmerizing. He is death. With his gentle manners and horrid, velvet voice; he is death come to call. Joe carries a sexualized death in his black eyes, in his gloved hands and the sharp blade of a face. His iron thin frame and top hat belong forever at graveside. He often caresses his drunken, sleeping charges, messages their shoulders with something resembling love, before covering their face with a pillow. “You’ll be alright,” he says, soothing a victim. “Nice and comfortable.” His expression has the blank slack of orgasm, the only emotion he ever demonstrates, at moment of assassination; when pushing a pillow down with all his strength.

“No need to be frightened, Guv’ner,” he says to Bolton near the end, carrying a pillow before him. And for Joe, that makes perfect sense. He hates life, hates all that is alive; hates his own beating, living heart. He simply wants to bring everything to the dark, cold and silent ground where everything is still and deep. Resurrection Joe, the grave robber, loves death so that he digs up the rotten dead, resurrects them briefly for sale, so that they may experience death again. He doesn’t enjoy killing, demonstrates no anger or hatred, ever. His voice never rises above a bass purr. Killing, though, is the only way he can make things dead.

For the Karloff fan (yes, I’m one), this movie is a blissful thing, full of the moments that made us all fans in the first place. For others, well, are there really any others? Who isn’t a Karloff fan? Get it. Love it. WATCH THE TRAILER BELOW. –Radiation Cinema!