The Criterion Collection

We recently announced that the long unavailable 1932 horror classic Island of Lost Souls is coming to the Criterion Collection, just in time for Halloween. Chief among the film’s pleasures—which also include groundbreaking monster makeup effects and a hirsute Bela Lugosi—is the central performance by Charles Laughton. As the mad Dr. Moreau, conducting grotesque experiments fusing man and animal, Laughton is delectable in his repugnancy, as much a self-righteous dandy as a serious scientist, taking foul delight in his pursuits. The performance is also noteworthy for providing an early glimpse of the English actor: he made Island of Lost Souls during a brief stint in Hollywood, one year before his Oscar-winning role in Alexander Korda’s British production The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) would bring him as much respect as he had received for his lauded earlier stage work.

Laughton’s offbeat grandeur in that regal role secured him a place in the movie pantheon, but just as impressive is the actor’s less widely seen role in a later collaboration with Korda, the vivid, emotional Rembrandt (1936), available from Criterion alongside Henry VIII in our Eclipse set Alexander Korda’s Private Lives. Though the making of the film was tumultuous—the temperamental and neurotic Laughton refused to act in the film unless his wife, Elsa Lanchester, was also cast, and during production, he constantly threatened to quit—the result is lyrical and sophisticated, and the actor’s performance is one of his most subdued and nuanced. The aesthete Laughton was particularly galvanized by the opportunity to play the legendary Dutch painter, and he threw himself into the part, doing meticulous research, buying prints of the artist’s work, and traveling to Holland in anticipation.

Rather than a conventional biopic, Rembrandt is a delicate portrait of the loneliness of artistic struggle, which Laughton conveys with crushing intimacy. Though Rembrandt van Rijn enjoyed early success, his art was not always embraced when he was alive, as depicted in the following scene, in which he must defend his latest—and so far, largest—painting, The Night Watch, which meets with derision upon its unveiling.