<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Donovan’s Brain was Curt Siodmak's most lasting contribution to the SF/horror genre as an author, aside from creating the Wolf Man in the eponymous 1941 film. It was a five-million-copy bestseller dedicated to his wife, Henrietta, and hailed by The New Yorker as “a masterpiece of horror.” His first novel composed in the language of his adoptive U.S. homeland, after he fled the Nazis and vowed never to write in German again, it was originally printed in the legendary pulp magazine Black Mask in 1942, turned down by nineteen publishers, and then acquired by editor Barney Smith at Alfred A. Knopf, which finally brought the book out in hardcover the following year. Adapted for the 1940s radio series Suspense by Orson Welles, and for television’s Studio One with Wendell Corey, it was filmed three times and spawned two sequels, plus countless imitations, ranging from the gory, low-budget shocker The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962) (aka The Head That Wouldn't Die) to the Steve Martin comedy The Man with Two Brains (1983).

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One of the richest men in America, Warren Horace Donovan is critically injured in a plane crash near the Arizona home of Dr. Patrick Cory, who is experimenting with keeping a monkey’s brain alive in an artificial respiratory. Cory is forced to amputate both of Donovan's legs, and brings him to the laboratory in his house. Cory realizes that Donovan will not survive, and browbeats his alcoholic friend and former mentor, Dr. Schratt—who has reservations about the morality of the experiment—into helping him transplant the still-living brain from Donovan’s body into a glass bowl, where a small pump forces blood through rubber arteries and glass tubes irradiated with ultraviolet.

Probing Donovan’s mysterious past, Cory investigates his efforts on behalf of condemned killer Cyril Hinds, secretly Donovan’s illegitimate son. Cory also learns from Chloe Barton, Donovan's oft-divorced daughter, that when the possessive Donovan found out his future wife Katherine loved his best friend, Roger Hinds, instead, he deliberately destroyed the latter’s career, driving him to suicide.

Schratt suggests that Cory might establish contact with the brain by clearing his mind and allowing it to reach him telepathically, but the literally disembodied Donovan dominates the doctor, who is helpless to break the brain’s control except when it is sleeping or distracted. Cory even assumes Donovan’s habits and signature to carry out his last wishes in Los Angeles. Cory uses funds from a secret account Donovan had opened under an alias, which raises the suspicions of his children and his lawyer, Nathaniel Fuller. Meanwhile, Schratt informs Cory that photographer Herb Yocum, who saw the brainless body in the morgue and tried to blackmail Cory, has broken into the lab and tried to attack the brain, which killed him through sheer force of will alone. Suddenly freed from its influence while trying to strangle his wife, Janice, Cory returns to Arizona to find Schratt dead and clutching the equally deceased brain. When violent signals from the encephalograph had indicated the brain was about to kill again, Schratt used a clever tongue-twister to shield his mind from its telepathic waves, and wrested it from its glass vessel to their mutual doom.

Produced and directed by George Sherman for Republic Pictures, as were several of Siodmak’s own screenplays, the first screen version emphasized horror over SF; retitled The Lady and the Monster (aka The Lady and the Doctor, 1944), it retained the Arizona locale, but substituted a Gothic castle worthy of a Frankenstein film as its setting. In this version, Cory (Richard Arlen) is no longer the prime mover behind the experiment but is instead the assistant, while Schratt has become Professor Franz Mueller (Erich von Stroheim), a typical mad scientist and Cory’s rival for the affections of his ward, Janice Farrell (Vera Hruba Ralston), thus recalling Siodmak’s Hinds-Donovan-Katherine triangle. Screenwriters Dane Lussier and Frederick Kohner simplified the tangled web of Donovan’s personal life, effectively conflating Fuller, Yocum, and Donovan’s son Howard into his crooked attorney, Eugene Fulton (Sidney Blackmer); likewise, Chloe (Helen Vinson) is now his widow, who has been left penniless and conspires with Fulton to seek access to the secret account.

As in the novel, Cory is contacted by a man who offers to bribe the jurors in the trial of Donovan’s unacknowledged son. Under the brain’s influence, he tries to kill a key witness but, in this case, Roger Collins (Bill Henry) is innocent, an unwanted heir left by Fulton and Chloe to take the rap after Donovan killed his stepfather, who had threatened to expose him. Siodmak’s anticlimactic ending was revved up into Hollywood melodrama, with Cory freed at the critical moment, when the brain is drugged with morphine by the housekeeper, Mrs. Fame (Mary Nash), who apparently loves Mueller but guns him down as he battles Cory in the final melée, while Janice smashes the tank containing the brain. With atmospheric photography by noir master John Alton, which maximizes the menacing appearance of von Stroheim—nicknamed “The Man You Love to Hate”—and the enthralled Arlen, the film is well directed by Sherman, a prolific veteran of Republic’s Three Mesquiteers Westerns.

Although it removes the Cyril Hinds subplot, the second version is by far the most faithful and, significantly, the only one filmed under its original title, directed and scripted by Felix E. Feist for United Artists in 1953 and adapted by Hugh Brooke; again, despite its low budget, it was blessed with an outstanding cinematographer, Joseph F. Biroc. Here, Cory (Lew Ayres) is more sympathetic than Siodmak’s moderately misanthropic original, and his relationship with Janice (future First Lady Nancy Davis) more cordial, while Donovan’s financial misdeeds are consolidated as income tax evasion, with Cory cleaning out various accounts to blackmail a Washington connection, “Mr. Adviser” (Tom Powers), into using his influence to resolve the case in Donovan’s favor. A deus ex machina was added in which Schratt (Gene Evans) is overpowered by the brain while trying to destroy it, and is forced to shoot himself, whereupon a literal bolt from above strikes the lightning rod (which Cory, in a lucid moment, had advised be hooked into the power supply) and overloads the system, setting the brain afire.

Shot in England, Vengeance (aka The Brain, Over My Dead Body, 1962) was an Anglo-German co-production whose European title, Ein Toter Sucht Sei ner Mörder (A Dead Man Seeks His Murderer), reveals yet another shift of emphasis, this time into mystery, by screenwriters Robert Stewart and Philip Mackie. The Oscar-winning cinematographer of Sons and Lovers (1960), Freddie Francis was making one of his first films as a director, and had to shoot two different solutions when one of its producers, Artur Brauner, insisted that an alternate German ending, with an indigenous actor as the murderer, be created at the last minute. A former Miss Great Britain, actress Anne Heywood, was the wife of Brauner’s British counterpart, Raymond Stross, yet German leading man Peter van Eyck developed such a dislike for her that he refused to join her to shoot their scenes together; as Francis told writer Matthew R. Bradley, “It’s very difficult to play love scenes when there’s only one of the characters on the set.”

When the private plane of international financier Max Holt explodes in midair, Dr. Frank Shears (Bernard Lee, best known as “M” in the James Bond films) reluctantly removes his brain at the behest of Dr. Peter Corrie (van Eyck). Once the latter falls under its influence, the story becomes a whodunit as he writes a list of names, each suspected of causing the crash. They are Holt’s daughter, Anna (Heywood); his lawyer, Stevenson (Cecil Parker); his mistress and former secretary, Marion Fane (Maxine Audley); his business associate, Mr. Walters (Siegfried Lowitz); and his son, Martin (Jeremy Spenser), while in the hoariest of clichés, Corrie is present not once, but twice, when characters are shot by an unseen hand just before revealing vital information. In the German version, the killer is Holt’s partner in a drug manufacturing deal, Immerman (Hans Nielsen), who tries to force Corrie to reveal the name and location of the drug’s creator. In the British ending, Anna admits murdering Holt because he planned to profit by withholding the cure for the disease that slowly killed his wife.

Sadly, Siodmak dismissed all three films in his memoir Wolf Man’s Maker (although his low opinion of the 1953 version is no doubt due in part to the fact that he was originally slated to direct the film, but was replaced by Feist after clashing with the producer), yet retained control of Dr. Cory on the printed page in his sequels, Hauser’s Memory (1968) and Gabriel’s Body (1992). The former became a 1970 TV movie, with The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’s David McCallum as a Jew who uses the doctor’s experimental technique to inject himself with a dead scientist’s RNA, hoping to unlock the secrets in the memory that periodically controls him. He is caught between agents of the East and West while trying to exorcise Hauser’s past in a Nazi concentration camp. Written by Siodmak (whose publisher rejected it) before Donovan’s Brain, and revised when his wife unearthed the manuscript decades later, Gabriel’s Body brings the saga full circle, for here it is Cory who controls another man with his own brain, striving to escape from an aging and pain-wracked body, which was horribly disfigured in the laboratory explosion that killed his assistant.