Dead Men Walk (1943)

Director: Sam Newfield                                Writer: Fred Myton
Film Score: Leo Erdody                               Cinematography: Jack Greenhalgh
Starring: George Zucco, Dwight Frye, Mary Carlisle and Nedrick Young

This is an odd little vampire film. Sure, almost everything made by PRC is pretty bad. Cheap sets, inferior actors and stock music make for pretty dismal watching. But Dead Men Walk seems different somehow. It’s kind of like the movie Ed Wood always wanted to make but didn’t have the talent for. It begins with a disembodied head superimposed over a burning book of vampire lore, the head explaining that man cannot possibly know about what he refuses to believe. It’s corny, but in a way Wood would have approved of. Things don’t really get rolling until the funeral, when George Zucco looks into the coffin at his evil twin. That’s right, the dual role is a real showcase for Zucco, though he does make a weird looking vampire.

Dwight Frye is his usual henchman, going by the name of Zolarr in this one. He is responsible for guarding evil Zucco’s grave during the daytime. When the evil Zucco confronts his brother the good Zucco can’t believe what he’s seen, so much so that he ignores the threat against his niece’s life. And even when she begins losing blood through the two small wounds to the throat, nobody even suggests it could be the work of a vampire. It’s a strange script, but almost admirable in a way. Fred Myton, who wrote dozens of low-budget screenplays takes as his premise that vampirism would, literally, not be believed. In that way it is actually far more realistic than most vampire films, it’s just bizarre to watch no one even suggesting the obvious.

In terms of the technical difficulties with the picture there is the lighting during the night scenes. Perhaps it was the print, but in most of them the actors wind up with a dark shadow over their faces that clearly seems like a mistake. And the music is very ill matched with the visuals, as though Leo Erdody’s stock music was simply grafted onto the picture, which in all likelihood was the case. When Dwight Frye is first moving the coffin into the graveyard a highly inappropriately comic music is used. And there are other examples as well. Other than Zucco and Frye, as well as the solid Hal Price, the rest of the cast is hopelessly bad. Mary Carlisle and Nedrick Young are uniformly wooden, and Fern Emmett, who looks a bit like Margaret Hamilton, has terrible delivery of her lines. The one aspect of the film that is particularly well done is the production design, as the sets are fairly realistic. There is also some confident use of special effects that are surprisingly effective.

Though a few of the set ups for Zucco’s vampire attacks are lifted directly from the original Dracula, Zucco himself doesn’t really pull it off. Bald and old, he has little of the evil menace of Lugosi. Still, his dual performance is impressive. Dwight Frye, on the other hand, seems to be going through the motions as yet another hunchbacked helper. The ending of the picture also seems vaguely reminiscent of Son of Dracula. Ultimately this is another case of having to begin any praise with, “given the obvious limitations of the production.” Yes, it’s a bad film, but there is also something intrinsically good about. Unlike a lot of reviews that call it unwatchable, and most poverty row films are, I disagree. It is infinitely watchable, even given its lowly pedigree. Dead Men Walk has a very subtle undercurrent of artistry that gives the viewer a genuine idea what these films were actually trying to achieve, and as long as expectations are set firmly in the lower end of the spectrum it can be a rewarding experience.