The Mad Doctor

Outside of his famous depiction of Sherlock Holmes for 20th Century Fox and Universal, Basil Rathbone is perhaps best known, at least among noir fans, for his roles as suave psychopaths in films like A Night of Terror (1937), Rio (1939), and Tim Whelan’s entertaining if illogical The Mad Doctor, in which Rathbone plays a Bluebeard-type character whose string of successful mariticides faces complications with his latest wife, played by Ellen Drew. From the opening sequence, in which a neighboring country doctor (Ralph Morgan) is called to the home of psychiatrist George Sebastien (Basil Rathbone) during a thunderstorm, only to find Sebastien’s wife dead in her bed, Whelan establishes a dark, menacing atmosphere with a Gothic sheen, which is maintained in various dosages even once the action soon moves to the city. In New York, Sebastien moves in on his next victim, the lovely and wealthy Linda Boothe (Drew), whose journalist ex-boyfriend Gil Sawyer (John Howard) becomes so suspicious of Sebastien’s intentions that he conducts research on Sebastien’s background to write an exposé on psychiatry in general (“New York is full of these quacks”) and Sebastien in particular, but will he uncover the truth before it’s too late? Martin Kosleck plays Maurice Gretz, Sebastien’s live-in assistant (and, most certainly, gay lover) whose job duties include digging up corpses (a brilliantly shot graveyard scene) and offering moral support for the psychiatrist’s criminal ambitions. Note the stunningly dramatic city rooftop setting introduced early on in the film; according to Chekhov’s law, someone is bound to fall off by the end.