By Hank Reineke

One reality of being too overly genre-focused in our home video collecting is that too often the lines of demarcation blur. This truism surfaces when discussing the brief 1944-1946 “horror” film legacy of Republic Pictures. One might ask how many authentic “horror” films rather than moody “mystery” pics did Republic actually produce during this period? With the understanding my own view is arguable, I’d suggest the studio produced only six horror-chillers that ticked most of the genre’s boxes: The Lady and the Monster (1944), The Vampire’s Ghost (1945), The Phantom Speaks (1945), Woman Who Came Back (1945) The Catman of Paris (1946), and Valley of the Zombies (1946).

Others might disagree and, hey, I’m certainly willing to revise the above list. Truth be told, there’s seemingly no consensus even among experts. In 1999, film historian Tom Weaver examined six Republic titles in his tome Poverty Row Horrors!: Monogram, PRC, and Republic Horror Films of the Forties (MacFarland). A decade and a half later Brian McFadden would publish Republic Horrors: the Serial Studio’s Chillers, the book promising an exclusive study of ten of the studio’s horror-film catalog.

The latter tome is a worthwhile read, though reminds the studio released few outright horror pictures in the 1940s. Of the ten films chosen for examination by McFadden, only six are genuine horrors in the “classic” sense. The remaining four (The Fatal Witness, The Madonna’s Secret, The Girl Who Dared, and London Blackout Murders) are traditional mysteries with a mix of atmospheric fog and general eeriness. (Weaver also includes The Girl Who Dared, so perhaps I’m missing something).

In any case, U.S. collectors wishing to revisit Republic’s catalog of Golden Age horrors have reason to rejoice. Kino Lorber has packaged a Blu-ray quartet of long- neglected films as part of their Republic Pictures Horror Collection. This new two-disc set features approximately two-hundred and seventy-five minutes of vintage monochrome - and occasionally quirky - monster-movie goodness. The four films included are: The Lady and the Monster, The Phantom Speaks, The Catman of Paris and Valley of the Zombies.

Some collectors will find Kino a bit late out of the gate with this release. In summer of 2021 Australia’s Imprint Films published its handsome Silver Screams Cinema set. That box wasn’t studio-specific: it peculiarly mixed a selection of seven films produced by three different outfits (1944-1957): four Republic’s (The Lady and the Monster, The Phantom Speaks, The Vampire’s Ghost, Valley of the Zombies), two from 20^th Century Fox (She Devil and The Unknown Terror), and one Monogram programmer (Return of the Ape Man).

Of course, Imprint too was late to the game with its publishing of several of these titles. The now defunct Olive Films had already given us singular Blu-rays of three later featured on the Imprint set (Return of the Ape Man, She Devil and The Vampire’s Ghost). But it was Imprint’s inclusion of several films from the Republic vault - Valley of the Zombies, The Phantom Speaks and The Lady and the Monster - that compelled folks like myself to pre-order despite the combined pain of the price of the box set, overseas shipping costs, and title double-dipping.

Despite my enthusiasm, the Imprint box set was odd in its archiving. While the set contained a trio of long sought after offerings from Republic, curiously missing was Lesley Selander’s The Catman of Paris. Imprint would later issue that film as a standalone Blu in 2023. Happily, this new set from Kino somewhat corrects that omission by neatly gathering four earnest Republic chillers together. More frustratingly, Kino omits Selander’s The Vampire’s Ghost from their set. For those of us who own a copy of the 2017 Olive Films Blu such omission is forgivable. Perhaps if this edition sells well, Kino will treat us to a second Republic set, one that will include The Vampire’s Ghost and Woman Who Came Back – and, yes, The Girl Who Dared - with an additional atmospheric Republic mystery to buffer. Fingers crossed.

I’m not complaining. We’ve enjoyed access to a glorious wave of rare-film home video releases over the last few years, and for that I’m entirely grateful. Decades ago I gave up hope of ever seeing any legitimate home video issues from the Paramount-owned Republic Pictures horror catalog. So, similar to other starved aficionados of 1940s horror-mysteries, I sought out serviceable - if hazy - gray-market bootlegs of Republic’s catalog films. If nothing else such bootlegs - sourced from well-worn 16mm television prints - helped fill empty slots in our home video collections.

Republic Pictures is often regarded as one of Hollywood’s “Poverty Row” studios. That’s not quite fair: both talent and production at Republic was often of high-caliber despite low budgets. The economically-financed pictures are understandable when one considers the studio had produced more than a thousand features and serials since its 1935 inception. Some historians dismissively compare Republic’s penny-pinching output with that of Monogram Pictures, another maligned purveyor of 1940s low-rent westerns, horror and mystery pics. It’s true the Monogram pics are the better remembered of the two. The Monograms are not necessarily “better” films but, more often than not, would cast such genre stars as Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, George Zucco, Lionel Atwill and John Carradine in villainous roles.

The reasons Republic’s horror pics have too long been glossed over is threefold. For starters, they had been almost entirely unavailable to view for decades. The films of Monogram and PRC have otherwise long been available to fans – even if only through dupey, home video releases of public domain status. In contrast, the Republic horror pics have remained almost entirely commercially inaccessible for decades. Paramount, the company that absorbed Republic’s catalog, appeared disinterested in making them available.

Secondly, while Republic’s wildly popular horse operas featured such personalities as Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and John Wayne, their horror pics offered no horror stars of comparable marquee value. Republic tendered Carl Esmond, Ian Keith, and Tom Powers as primary boogeymen in their chillers: good actors all, but none with names of renown amongst horror movie fans. Had Republic’s horrors featured walkthroughs of Lugosi or Karloff, there’s little doubt there would have been more interest in getting these films out to fans and collectors.

Thirdly, Republic was late to board of the horror-film train. The studio only really began to test the market when public interest in horror fare was clearly dimming. Though Universal famously released The Wolfman in 1941, they also offered such disguised mysteries as Horror Island and The Black Cat as chillers that same year. By 1946 even the Universal reliables as Dracula, Frankenstein and the mummy Kharis were absent, replaced on screen by such fog-shrouded whodunits as The Cat Creeps and She-Wolf of London. The iconic Universal monsters would return in 1948, but only to serve as comedic foils to Abbott and Costello.

Republic’s first horror pic entry, George Sherman’s The Lady and the Monster (1944) is, logically, the first of the four pics offered in Kino’s collection. The Lady and the Monster features a grim Erich von Stroheim as the humorless, lovesick mad scientist Professor Franz Mueller. The film’s script - by Dane Lussier and Frederick Kohner - is based loosely on Curt Siodmak’s 1942 novel Donovan’s Brain. The physical brain of a deceased plane crash victim manages to take telepathic refuge in the cranium of Dr. Patrick Cory (Richard Arlen), Mueller’s assistant. The endgame of Mueller’s experiment is to assist a bit of post-mortem legal wrangling and whereabouts of the deceased’s fortune. There’s a romantic-entangling subplot as well.

The film features the former Czech Olympic figure-skater Vera Ralston as leading lady. Ralston plays Janice Farrell who, to the consternation of Mueller, has googly eyes on Cory, not him. Ralston is a beauty, without doubt: but as an actress she’s hamstrung, delivering her dialogue phonetically. The commentary track on The Lady and the Monster is provided by comic book artist and horror enthusiast Stephen R. Bissette and author Gordon Michael Dobbs. They explain Ralston’s casting as the decision of Republic founder and president, Herbert Yates. Though married and the father of four, Yates fell hard for Ralston, the ingénue forty years his junior. Having chosen to abandon his wife and family for the skater, Yates was driven to transform Ralston from figure-skater to movie star.

The commentary of Bissette and Dobbs is entertaining and informative: they run down the filmographies of cast and crew and borrow bits from Tom Weaver’s interviews with the film’s surviving players, and suggest The Lady and the Monster is technically an “A” picture in its mounting. Director Sherman, who from 1938 through 1941 was churning out nine-to-ten films a year for Republic, professionally delivers a very worthwhile horror/sci-fi pic, one abetted handsomely by cinematographer John Alton’s brilliant photography. The Lady and the Monster did well enough for Republic that the studio chose to greenlight a double-dose of horror in 1945: The Vampire’s Ghost (again, not included in this set) and The Phantom Speaks.

Richard Arlen (as Daily Globe reporter Matt Fraser) again gets top billing in The Phantom Speaks but, in all honesty, the film’s featured player is Stanley Powers as Dr. Paul Renwick. Renwick is introduced as a doctor of “psychic science.” His particular interest is with the cross-pollination of the physical and the spiritual. Can one’s spirit be sustained following physical death, he mulls? Renwick believes it can and has even written a book on the subject. He purposely sends a copy, stupidly, to Harvey Bogardus (Tom Powers), an unrepentant murderer scheduled to die in the electric chair.

Just prior to the execution, Renwick visits Bogardus in his cell, asking the killer to agree to an experiment. Though it would have been advisable that the doctor had chosen a less unsavory character to test his theory on, Renwick finds Bogardus an excellent candidate. The murderer is of strong-will and Renwick needs a subject who’s “will is strong enough to reach back from the grave.” Though he admits to having read Renwick’s book, Bogardus finds it the work of a “crackpot.” On the other hand, Bogardus really has nothing to lose. “I’m not through yet,” Bogardus growls as he’s led to the electric chair. In this, he’s mostly correct.

Unfortunately for Dr. Renwick - and others soon dispatched – Bogardus is so strong-willed that following his execution he manages to subjugate the mind of the doctor himself. Renwick is now the conduit for the criminal’s vengeful bidding. Detectives are puzzling over all of the dead bodies piling up during the course of a three-month murder spree. The killings appear to be the work of an executed man, one “too dead to be going around shooting people, unless he’s a ghost.” Which, in a sense, he is.

The Phantom Speaks, written for the screen from an original story by John K. Butler, is a rather downbeat affair, a film ending on an unusually grim and gloomy note. That said, it’s also one of the more engaging films in this set, having been capably helmed by veteran Republic director John English. The film’s audio commentator, Tim Lucas, notes that English was a director of talent, having previously helmed Republic’s “best action serials, hands down.” The Phantom Speaks is one of those curious horror-gangster picture hybrids of the 1930s and 40s. It’s in the vein of Michael Curtiz’s The Walking Dead (Warner Bros., 1936), Nick Grinde’s The Man They Could Not Hang (Columbia, 1939), and Arthur Lubin’s Black Friday (Universal, 1940).

As with others in this set, the running time of The Phantom Speaks clocks in just about right. It’s not overlong and the story moves along at a good clip with a good sampling of cinematic bumps and surprises. The critic from Variety got this one correct in their 1945 appraisal. The trade offered the pic as, “A spine-tingling sadistic chiller that has its odd moments.” I’ve no argument there.

Just as Universal’s reign as the preeminent horror-movie studio was winding down, Republic’s was revving up. In early May of 1945, the Los Angeles Times reported executives at Republic, “encouraged by the current success of The Vampire’s Ghost and The Phantom Speaks,” were planning a new pair of chillers. Under the watchful eye of producer William O’ Sullivan, the studio’s newest horror pics, promisingly titled The Catman of Paris and The Valley of the Zombies, were to “be sold to exhibitors as a pair.”

Though it’s not a great film, I hold nostalgic affection for Lesley Selander’s The Catman of Paris. Parisian police detectives believe the sinister Catman prowling about is none other than the handsome, best-selling novelist Charles Regnier (Carl Esmond). The French government is annoyed by Regnier’s most recent work of fiction, Fraudulent Justice as his narrative mirrors a true-life criminal trial of dubious prosecution - a secretive judicial hearing that aroused public mistrust of the government.

Regnier has returned to Paris following a fateful trip to the tropics. The writer now suffers regular headaches which bring about amnesia and awakens his inner-demons. During such sessions Regnier is visited by hallucinogenic visions of violent weather storms and of a mysterious black cat. Regnier’s patron, Henri Borchard (Douglas Dumbrille), suggests his friend’s fragile mental state is due to having contracted a fever in the tropics. There’s also a bit of astrological hokum threaded into the script as well.

Both Bouchard and Regnier’s publisher Paul Audet (Francis Pierlot) are concerned. Two gruesome murders have taken place in which their client Regnier appears tangentially involved: the publishing house fears his reputation and book sales might plummet and bankrupt them. The Catman’s most recent victim - high-society fiancé Marguerite Duvall (Adele Mara), had been suspiciously jilted by Regnier so he could enjoy a new romance with publisher’s daughter Marie (Lenore Aubert). Marie has fallen for the dashing Regnier and is completely convinced of his innocence. That is until she herself is chased through the misty evening by a cloak and top-hatted Catman prowling for blood.

Though the film would eventually be paired with Valley of the Zombies, The Catman of Paris was initially sent out on release with John English’s better-received ice-skating musical-mystery Murder in the Music Hall (featuring Vera Ralston, naturally). I can’t comment on the latter pic (I never saw it), but I can offer that director Philip Ford’s Valley of the Zombies briskly zips along just shy of sixty minutes in running time. The title is a bit of a misnomer. If you are a fan of Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932) or George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) or the AMC series The Walking Dead, you might be disappointed by this one.

There’s really no flesh-eating zombies rambling about, only the cloaked visage of Ormand Murks (Ian Keith). A half-decade earlier Murks was committed to a mental asylum by brain specialist Dr. Rufus Maynard (Charles Trowbridge). Believing Murks suffered from a “pathological” disorder of the brain, Maynard and assistant had attempted to correct this issue through a delicate operation. Unfortunately for all concerned, they lose their patient on the operating table... or at least it appears so. Afterwards, the hospital in which Maynard labors is inexplicably being robbed of its refrigerated blood plasma holdings.

It’s a crime no one can reasonably explain… that is until Murks suddenly resurfaces one night. He re-introduces himself (“I’m a strange man, Doctor…”) to the disbelieving Maynard. Murks explains he now exists in an “intermediate stage” somewhere between life and death. He advises Maynard of having had visited the “Valley of the Zombies” where, through “voodoo rites and devil’s potions” he was made immortal… with a caveat. To sustain his existence, he now requires periodic feedings of fresh blood plasma. So Murks is mostly a vampire, though one with a difference. Count Dracula can be indiscriminate in his source of refreshment. Murks, on the other hand, requires drinking only of the red claret that matches his own blood-type.

The police detectives believe Maynard’s associates, Dr. Terry Evans (Robert Livingston) and his nurse-girlfriend Susan Drake (Lorna Gray), are somehow involved in the doctor’s disappearance. Looking to clear themselves of any crime, the pair unwisely go off on their own to investigate. Suspecting the late Ormand Murks is somehow involved, the pair prowl about – in dead of night, of course – amongst woods, mausoleum and creepy estate of the Murks’ family.

In only his third primary directing role, Philip Ford delivers a pretty top-notch and entertaining horror yarn. This one features the requisite clutching hands, candelabra prowls, and mysterious fiend lurking about in the shadows. The script of brothers Dorrell and Stuart McGowan is tight and sassy in construction. As the distressed Susan Drake, actress Gray gets all the best lines of light-comedy relief. Third-billed (and menacingly under-lit) actor Ian Keith chews the scenery, deliciously emoting and dishing out the ghoulish dialogue provided. David Del Valle in his commentary describes Keith’s one-off performance as shining bright as one of the “great lights of horror.” I cannot disagree.

All four films in this collection from Kino prove that Republic’s spooky offerings are just as good – and sometimes superior – to the horror/mystery B-pics that Universal was releasing in the 1940s. The audio commentaries on both The Catman of Paris and Valley of the Zombies are provided by author David Del Valle and producer Miles Hunter are worthwhile listens, both informative and well researched. However, and while I know I’m in the minority here, perhaps an informative booklet could provide all annotation required. (Hey, I’m just doing my part to get writers a bit more paid (?) work).

The versions offered here have been reportedly mastered from Paramount’s own HD masters from 4K scans. These monochrome films look stunning, though there are some small issues present in The Catman of Paris: the negative used was from the studio’s 1956 re-release print, not of the ’46 original. Although the scan is not pristine - there’s a bit of speckling present throughout and moments of minor image jittering - for the most part the film looks quite crisp and not a deal-breaker. Should this set perform well, I’m very much looking forward to a Republic Horror/Mystery set, Vol. II from Kino. This set is clearly a must-have release for aficionados of Golden Age horror films.

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