Year of Release: 1958
Director: Robert Day
Stars: Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, Betta St, John, Finlay Currie, Adrienne Corri, Francis De Wolff
I had the opportunity to sit down and watch the American release of this gem of a film on DVD New year's Eve, and I have to say the title is very misleading. It implies that the film is a horror movie, and it's really a thriller and drama rolled into one. Boris Karloff plays Doctor Thomas Bolton, a doctor in the early 1840s looking for a way to anesthetize patients so that they may avoid feeling the pain of 19th Century surgery.
After failing to produce a working anesthetic in the form of nitrous oxide (laughing) gas, he turns to an opium-based vapor he thinks will do the trick. The only problem is, he insists on testing his formula out on himself, resulting in his inevitable addiction. As he deteriorates further into the hell of opium dependence, his ordinarily steady hands begin to falter, and he ends up suspended from practice.
Bolton finds himself roped into becoming the dupe of a gang of murderers who suffocate their drunken victims at the local tavern, and then sell the bodies to the local medical university. But they need a doctor's signature to confirm that the victims died of other, mundane causes. This is where Bolton's addiction comes in handy, because they realize he will now willingly go along with their plans so he can obtain the chemical components he requires to continue his experiments.
I have to say that this film surprised me. Karloff evokes sympathy as a doctor driven by empathy for his suffering patients to find a way to ease the pain of surgery. In the 1840s, anesthesia was not yet in common use, and patients had to be strapped down and held in place as the doctors cut into their bodies. When Bolton meets a man whose infected leg he'd had to cut off, sitting in shock at the tavern, his horror at realizing that the poor fellow had been unceremoniously dumped out onto the street in that state of shock can almost be felt through the screen. It is no surprise, then, that Bolton chooses to experiment on himself rather than put one of his patients through any risk of injury or death through his experimentations. It is this very empathy, however, that leads to Bolton's opium addiction. Wandering the streets in a stupor is how he comes to find his way to the tavern, to be taken advantage of by the gang of murderers.
Christopher Lee gives a creepy supporting performance as murdering cutthroat Resurrection Joe, who does the dirty work of killing for his co-conspirators: the tavern owner and his wife. His high-born accent doesn't quite convince us that his character is a low-born cockney thug, however, but Lee being who he is manages to make it work -- evoking a seedy-looking killer who is clearly very intelligent despite his appearance.
Another aspect of the movie cannot help but be viewed as political commentary on 19th Century health care, for Bolton's horror at finding the amputee's catatonic form at the tavern is driven as much by the realization that the hospital dumped the poor wretch on the street after sawing off his leg, as it is by the failure to properly medicate him. Considering the year in which this film was released, and given Michael Moore's excellent documentary revelations in his movie SiCKO, I got the distinct feeling that the story was meant on some level to help promote the then-young National Health Service in some fashion. Maybe I'm just reading more into the movie than is really there, but that's my theory and I'm sticking with it.
All in all, Corridors of Blood works because of its tight direction and solid storytelling. Not that there aren't some flaws; the romance between Bolton's son and his niece -- who works as the elder doctor's house maid, doesn't seem to be all that necessary to the plot given that it isn't developed. And a running subplot involving Joe's attempt to force himself upon a tavern girl is similarly included to strip all possible sympathy for Lee's character when he finally gets his, but is ultimately dropped without further development. One wonders why the writers bothered with these subplots at all. Nevertheless, the final product is an enjoyable thriller worth watching.
Finishing up, I should note that the American DVD version contains omitted extended scenes deemed too violent for Hollywood's censors at the time, along with scans of letters from the board explaining the cuts. The sequences' exclusion really doesn't hurt the film, but it's nice to see what was left out (only a couple of minutes' worth) as well as the thinking that went into the censors' decision.
