The Criterion Collection

Erle C. Kenton’s monumentally creepy pre-Code adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, 1932’s Island of Lost Souls, remains a high-water mark of old-time Hollywood depravity. In it, a classically blockheaded leading man (Richard Arlen) finds himself shipwrecked and nearly led astray by a scantily clad cat-woman (the nineteen-year-old Kathleen Burke, a Hollywood neophyte with extraordinary orbs), a creation of one of the most memorably sado-effeminate villains the screen has ever known: Charles Laughton’s cheerfully moony and hopelessly amoral mad vivisectionist Moreau. A short, surging symphony of horror-film shocks, sexed-up subhumans, and pseudo-science malarkey, Island of Lost Souls continues to echo through the corridors of modern pop culture like the screams of the never-forgotten damned. And so in tribute, having been seduced by certain images of the film’s captives and godforsaken creatures, as well as of its creators, we present them to you, and continue to track the transmigrations of all these now lost but forever luminous souls.

Erle Cauthorn Kenton (1896–1980) was the kind of Hollywood director Preston Sturges was born to lampoon. A Keystone Kop promoted to two-reeler director by Keystone Studios boss Mack Sennett, Kenton—who directed, on average, three features a year from 1930 to 1950—had been working in movies, at every conceivable job, for a decade before they had sound. During Island of Lost Souls’ production, he occasionally dressed in Moreau’s white suit and cracked a little whip. Seen here, Kenton looks rather dashing; in full-face portraits, he resembles a cherubic Teddy Roosevelt. He even played Roosevelt, under his own direction, in 1936’s End of the Trail. His pre-Code career is legendary and stylish, from 1929’s Barbara Stanwyck sex-sation Mexicali Rose to 1934’s body-berserk Search for Beauty. And he made a few films in the thirties and forties that you’ve probably seen, if you’re of a certain generation and were weaned on late-night TV (W. C. Fields’s You’re Telling Me!, Abbot and Costello’s Pardon My Sarong, House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula), plus many more you’ve never heard of but with titles too good to be true—as when 1937’s She Asked For It is followed by 1938’s The Lady Objects.

Familiar to American audiences of the time as the emperor Nero in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross, Charles Laughton (1899–1962) had been in Hollywood only a year when he worked on Lost Souls, but he was making the most of his time there, appearing in six features in twelve months, including notable roles in the submarine thriller Devil and the Deep and James Whale’s masterful horror-satire The Old Dark House. Laughton apparently thought little of the Lost Souls script, and still less of its director, complaining bitterly about his travails during the shoot (surrounded by seasick big-game animals in their cages, the actor forever after swore off visiting zoos), but his myriad admirers now revere his performance in the film—alternately devious and giddy, and filled with grins and giggles and the tart, precise stings of a whip’s lash—as among the actor’s very best.

Richard Arlen (1900–1976) was born Sylvanus Richard Van Mattimore in St. Paul, Minnesota, became a pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War I, and at the age of twenty-five, crashed his way into Hollywood stardom—literally. While working as a delivery boy, Arlen smashed his motorcycle into Paramount’s studio gate and managed to parlay his injuries into work as an extra, and eventually into starring roles. He worked recurrently for man’s man auteur William A. Wellman, costarring in Wellman’s 1927 winner of the first Oscar ever given for best picture, the fighting aces action/romance Wings, and for Josef von Sternberg in 1929’s Thunderbolt. Arlen stepped in to replace the already announced Randolph Scott (who was busy in half a dozen westerns that year) as Island of Lost Souls’ shipwrecked leading man.

“The stubborn beast flesh creeping back”: Kathleen Burke (1913–1980), the Indiana girl chosen from a heat swell of 60,000 contestants nationwide to become Paramount’s Panther Woman, embodied every ungodly nuance and erotic implication of those words. Feral, feline, frightened, and aroused, Lota—named for the giant lotus in the pond next to which her nascent sexuality reaches a mature and husky purr—bats her Betty Boop eyes and brings out the beast in men with the ease of a Polynesian bar girl. Forget Fay Wray: Burke could have dropped King Kong to his knees. Her career was brief, and finished entirely before the thirties were over, but is well worth investigating further: her turn as notorious party animal Lionel Atwill’s duplicitous wife in 1933’s Murders in the Zoo—where she ends, quite shockingly, as live gator bait—is especially flavorsome. Watch for her also, however fleetingly, in Dorothy Arzner’s “women’s film” touchstone Craig’s Wife (1936).

The pure white counterpoint to Island of Lost Souls’ morally black beast-world, Leila Hyams is the film’s vision of innocence. And yet, check out her quite distinctive fingernails in this remarkable publicity shot—and then remember them when you see Lota the Panther Woman’s claws, the moment she begins kissing Richard Arlen and her “beast flesh” comes creeping back. How quickly day shades into night. Hyams (1905–1977) began appearing on vaudeville stages with her parents while still a child; she’s said to have later turned down the role of Jane taken up by Maureen O’Sullivan in a few of the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films. Today we mainly remember her as Venus, one of the “normal” members of Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), though Hyams was an extremely versatile actor and gifted comedienne who appeared in more than fifty films between 1924 and 1935, and was directed by such old-school Hollywood avatars as Leo McCarey and Mervyn Leroy.

A successful supporting player on the stage and in silent films—first in his native Hungary, then Germany, and finally New York—before he ever set foot in Hollywood, Bela Lugosi (1882–1956) had performed in everything from a Broadway comedy-fantasy called The Devil in the Cheese to a Budapest passion play, with Lugosi as Christ. In 1931, the year of his career-defining Dracula for director Tod Browning, Lugosi also appeared opposite Warner Oland in the Charlie Chan mystery The Black Camel; in ’32, in Robert Florey’s reified expressionist masterpiece Murders in the Rue Morgue and the cinéma du Living Dead prototype White Zombie. In each of those films, Lugosi’s look gravitates further from the pale white Transylvanian he could never seem to escape and closer to the bearded, bony-browed goat-man we see here. This was the Sayer of the Law’s original—subsequently abandoned—look, created by makeup artist Wally Westmore and resembling a hornless satyr, or an insectoid variation on The Most Dangerous Game’s Dr. Zaroff, the other morally diminished tropical island kingpin Westmore designed (and went uncredited for) in 1932.

Makeup effects giant Wally Westmore (1906–1973) didn’t get a screen credit on Island of Lost Souls, for which he masterminded a lifetime’s worth of great mutant visages: it was only his third film. But Westmore (one of seven brothers who all made their careers in the film industry) made up for the oversight for much of the rest of his career, as Paramount Studios’ headlining makeup supervisor on scores of famous film noirs (This Gun for Hire, Double Indemnity), nearly every Preston Sturges comedy, and classics as luminous as Vertigo, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Above is the Sayer of the Law as we know him from the finished film. This is the face that Charles Laughton—who developed a legendary follicle phobia while making Island of Lost Souls, convinced at last that there was hair in his food—saw in his bowl of soup.

As the faithful and occasionally off-the-leash dog-man M’Ling, Tetsu Komai (1894–1970, pictured here with Richard Arlen) lends a transparent humanity to his turn as Dr. Moreau’s quasi-canid houseboy—never mind his furry, pointed ears and periodic menacing grrrrs. Komai was born in Japan but most often cast as Chinese servants and shadow lurkers, or the occasional Malay bandit, in seemingly every Hollywood film with China, Chinatown, Shanghai, or dragon in the title made between 1927 and 1940. He appeared in Joseph Cornell’s favorite Rose Hobart film, 1931’s East of Borneo, and was later directed by Henry Hathaway (The Real Glory, 1939), William Wyler (The Letter, 1940), and Delmer Daves (Task Force, 1949).

The apparently indomitable Paul Hurst (1912–1953)—seen here between Leila Hyams and Hans Steinke as Island of Lost Souls’ boozy charter-boat pilot Captain Donahue—appeared in over 300 films in his long career, which began in the days of silent westerns, where he started out as a set painter before graduating to acting. He also became a reliable writer and director of Poverty Row oaters for years to come. You may remember Hurst as the Yankee deserter shot dead by Scarlett O’Hara in 1939’s Gone with the Wind. He also played opposite John Wayne in 1947’s Angel and the Badman, and finished his career in John Ford’s The Sun Shines Bright in 1953, shortly before committing suicide. He had been diagnosed with terminal cancer the previous year.

“Little bald-headed man,” “Bald man in box,” “Bald man getting haircut,” and “Baldy”—these are the descriptive names given by IMDB to several of the entirely peripheral characters Buster Brodie (1885–1948) played on-screen, almost always uncredited, between 1925 and 1947. What justice was there in his finally being credited—as the “Fuzz-faced phantom”—in 1928’s Charley Bowers comedy There It Is? You know Brodie (who scurries through Island of Lost Souls as Moreau’s snuffling “Pig man”), somewhere in the terrified recesses of your childhood memories, as one of the flying monkeys in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz. He also appeared that year in John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, and was directed by—or at least acted on the sets of films signed by—Charlie Chaplin (in 1931’s City Lights) and comic maestro Mitchell Leisen (in 1944’s Lady in the Dark).

“The German Oak,” they called wrestler Hans Steinke (1893–1971, pictured here with Charles Laughton), who had a successful career as a mat man before he came to Hollywood, and a not inconsiderable later-life stint as a golfer after he left. As Dr. Moreau’s dirty-work man-beast Ouran, Steinke casts a long shadow; the swarthy semi-simian is often spotted lurking in shrubbery, grinning for a glimpse of Leila Hyams’s long-legged long pig. Barrel-chested and weighing in at 240 pounds in his prime, Steinke moved one 1920s sportswriter to note that, “believe it or not, he eats a ton of sausages every day. But he is no sausage himself. He stands six and a half feet in the arena and is agile as a panther.” Steinke’s Hollywood career was relatively brief, with Island of Lost Souls a clear high point, though he also appeared as one Count Bulba, part of a circus troupe on the run from the Russian Revolution, in Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s 1935 Once in a Blue Moon, and later as heavies with names like “Tarsus” and “Strangler Martin.”

The five-foot-four-inch Charles Gemora (1903–1961), a native of the Philippines, came to California as a stowaway on a freighter from Manila; he rose to head of Paramount’s makeup lab and was a lifelong colleague of Wally Westmore’s. A costuming, makeup effects, and set design innovator, Gemora worked on the sets for Lon Chaney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera in the 1920s and, after 1928, became the go-to guy for gorillas for the next several decades. Gemora designed and refined his own suits, and wore them himself on-screen, opposite Bela Lugosi (in Murders in the Rue Morgue), the Marx Brothers, Abbot and Costello, and Laurel and Hardy. Seen briefly as a caged gorilla aboard Moreau’s boat in Island of Lost Souls, Gemora also created and played the martian who succumbs to the common cold at the climax of 1953’s The War of the Worlds.

“Are we not men?”