Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!
I spend a little time each month researching where I can find movies on my various lists. A lot of the really early movies are harder to find. Services like NetFlix and Amazon Prime, and even the free film libraries like Tubi and Pluto don’t have a lot of the weirder films pre-1940. I discovered that The Dark Eyes of London was playing on Tubi and I figured I’d give it a watch. Then I couldn’t find it; I didn’t realize that it had also been released under the more prurient but far less evocative name The Human Monster.
The original title is a much more interesting one, because in this case, the “dark eyes” refer to a collection of men who are blind. We’re not going to start here, though; we’re going to start with the recovery of a drowned body in the Thames. There’s been a rash of such bodies we learn, and the police seem to be unable to find any leads because, well, this is a movie. Finally, someone comes up with the brilliant idea of seeing who held the insurance policies on those corpses, and it turns out that all of them were insured by a guy named Dr. Orloff (Bela Lugosi), who runs a very small insurance business and who spends most of his time on charity work with the blind. It just so happens that this home for the blind is right along the Thames, because of course it is.
