Condemned to Live

 

(1935)
Directed by Frank R. Strayer
Written by Karen DeWolf
Starring Ralph Morgan, Maxine Doyle, Mischa Auer, Pedro de Cordoba
IMDB Entry

One of the charms of vampire stories are that they are so mutable. You can take the basic idea of a human that drinks blood in the night and add and remove whatever elements you like. Condemned to Live is an early film example of a vampire legend that strays from the common tropes.

The film starts out with a short scene of a couple of explorers, including a pregnant woman, in South America hiding in a cave from the natives and a mention of the vampire bats. Then we go forward to a small village where young women are being murdered. They blame bats, but Professor Kristan (Ralph Morgan) pooh poohs the idea saying that there is a reasonable explanation. The people stay indoors at night, with plenty of candles. Still, the murders continues and we learn that the professor turns into a killer at night, and wakes up with no memory of the events. His faithful assistant, the hunchback Zan (Mischa Auer) knows of the transformation, and makes sure that all evidence is removed. He confesses his affliction to Dr. Bizet (Pedro de Cordoba), who speculates it was because his mother was bitten by a vampire while in South America. Kristan fears for the safety of his fiance Marguerite (Maxine Doyle), but events conspire to have her outside in the dark when Kristan is hunting.

The story is slow-paced, but is interesting in that Kristan doesn't revel in the killing and, once he discovers what's happening, tries to do his best to fight against it. Most of the elements of vampire films are missing -- no drinking of blood, no turning into a bat -- but the result is still interesting, especially as it shows Kristan as a man tormented by what he turns into, usually the theme of werewolf movies.

None of the actors are known to me other that Mischa Auer, which is a strange casting.  Auer was a tall man (6'2"), so seeing him as a hunchback is more than out of character, though, to be fair, he does a good job of scrunching down.

Director Frank Strayer had a long career as director of B pictures, most notably the Blondie series.

The film was produced by the delightfully named "Invincible Pictures," which turned out to be very vincible and was absorbed soon after into Republic Pictures, a purveyor of cheap programmers.