Format: Streaming video from Tubi on Fire!
Sometimes I go into movies knowing nothing about what I’m going to see and what I get is almost beyond description. Doctor X has so many odd things about it that feel like they can’t really be a part of a movie. For instance, this is a film from 1932, and the studio created both color and black-and-white prints; color for the big markets, black-and-white for the small towns (I watched the color version). It’s very clearly a pre-Code film since cannibalism, murder, and hints of prostitution are points of the plot. It also features the wildly under-used Fay Wray in a negligee.
Another odd bit about Doctor X is the name. There actually is a “Doctor X” in the film, and if you thought that he was going to be the bad guy, you’ve been misled. That would be a common assumption—there’s a bunch of films named after the villain and far fewer named after a character who is only kind of the main good guy and kind of the main character. There’s weird science, a weirder monster, a nosy reporter, and did I mention Fay Wray in a nightie?
A series of murders have happened in New York City, all under the same circumstances. The murders happen at night and during the full moon, and the victims are always found partially cannibalized, which is your first clue that this is indeed pre-Code. Into this mix falls Lee Taylor (Lee Tracy), hard-bitten, go-getting reporter, who is looking for the best story he can find on the murder spree.
Where his investigation and that of the police eventually lead is to the person of Doctor Jerry Xavier (Lionel Atwill), whose last name will be pronounced in multiple ways throughout the film. Xavier is initially told that he is wanted for his medical opinion, but the truth is that the police want to investigate his medical academy. Medical examinations of the bodies in the murder spree have revealed that the cuts in the bodies were made with a very specific scalpel that only Xavier’s school uses. Therefore, the thinking goes, the culprit is Xavier, one of his professors, or one of his students.
But the students are on a break, and so Xavier introduces his faculty to the police. All of them will have some suspicious bit of information about them. One is an expert in cannibalism, another studies the effects of the moon on sanity, and a third shows some evidence of sexual perversion. Ultimately, Xavier convinces the police to let him attempt to find the murderer in hopes of avoiding a scandal.
All of this is set-up. Xavier takes his staff and retreats to his beachside estate where he starts to put his staff through some tests to determine the murderer. It’s soon evident that the murderer is there, because the murders (and the cannibalism!) continue. Our intrepid reporter naturally shows up for this as well, and since every film of this era needs a love interest, his love interest will be Xavier’s daughter Joanne (Fay Wray).
The subject matter of Doctor X is bizarre for a movie made 70 years later, but for something that was released in 1932, it’s positively shocking. The film talks openly about people being murdered (at least one of them a prostitute and another a drug addict), mutilated, and cannibalized, the sort of thing that might have made the faint-hearted swoon in the theater. Add to this the fact that Fay Wray spends the last 20 minutes or so in a sheer gown and the film literally ends with a vibrator joke, and you’ve got the kind of film that would make Will Hays rush to shut down the production.
What doesn’t work here is the comedy. Our reporter is set up to be a comedic character more than anything else. In a typical movie, Doctor X would be the bed guy and it would be the reporter who gets to the bottom of the story and solves the case, but that’s not what happens here. Instead, the reporter is ultimately pretty clownish and clearly meant to be what the audience is laughing at between the pre-Code scares and discussions of cannibalism. And it doesn’t work. He's not that funny, and Fay Wray can do a hell of a lot better than him.
Still, Doctor X, either in black-and-white or the old school two-color Technicolor process is too weird to be missed.
Why to watch Doctor X: Cannibalism! Weird science! Fay Wray in a negligee!
Why not to watch: The humor really falls flat.
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