THE MYSTERIOUS DOCTOR
US, 1943, 57 minutes, Black-and-white.
John Loder, Eleanor Parker, Bruce Lester, Lester Matthews, Matt Willis.
Directed by Ben Stolloff.
The Mysterious Doctor is a brief programmer from Warner Brothers, a contribution to the war propaganda effort in 1943.
It echoes such films as Jamaica Inn, set in Cornwall, a mysterious smuggling setting, a mining town where there has been death in the mines and the superstitious locals have created this image of a headless ghost which walks the Moors and fear of it prevents the miners going back to work.
The film opens with a stranger on a walking tour, a doctor, who is welcomed into the village by the local inebriate and gossip, is given accommodation, and finds out about the village and the superstitions from a driver in a cart who gives him a lift. The local Lord who is concerned about his village also arives at the inn for a drink. But soon there is news of a murder and the doctor is under suspicion. Those who are versed in the ways of this kind of film will immediately suspect the aristocrat and will not be incorrect.
Men go to the mine to search, wearing gas masks because of the poison gas allegedly in the mine. The audience sees the innkeeper, who wears a mask because of his disfigured face in a mine explosion, being killed. However, a man wearing the mask reappears and acts as the innkeeper – eventually revealed as the doctor who is conducting investigations into the mine.
There is an emotional scene when the children mock a local man with mental disabilities. Heis rescued by the Innkeeper’s daughter, a typical feisty performance from Eleanor Parker in one of her earliest roles. She urges him to look after the doctor and when the doctor is assumed dead, he is under suspicion and locked up. The young military officer, in love with the innkeeper’s daughter, of course, is very severe in his judgement about the retarded man. The young woman defence him at all costs.
There is a swift build-up to a climax, the discovery of a secret passage from the mine into the Lord’s home, a confrontation with him as he shoots the retarded man who still has enough energy to rescue the young woman and contribute to the downfall of the Lord. The aristocrat is given an explanation that his ancestors came from Germany at the time of George I, established the village and the mine, and with the outbreak of the war, he is still loyal to his German ancestors and German patriotism.
This does mean that there is quite a lot of action in the brief running time, memories of the look and the action of other films set in Cornwall, British superstitions, the role of the mines, the aristocracy and their duplicity – with patriotism and a touch of romance.
