Island of Lost Souls (1932) starring: Charles
Laughton, Richard Arlen, Leila Hyams, Bela Lugosi; Directed by Erle C. Kenton;
Screenplay by Waldemar Young, Philip Wylie. Based on the novel The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells (London, 1896).
Producer: None Credited. Run time: 70 minutes. Black and White. Drama, Science
fiction, Horror
While Universal gets credit for the early 30s craze for
horror film with Dracula
in 1931, they were not the only studio to make that genre of films. Paramount
Pictures had released Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) and wanted to make a follow-up with more
horrific and sexual themes. On June 1, 1931, Paramount paid $15,000 (equivalent
to $300,500 in 2023) for the rights to H. G. Wells' novel The Island of Dr.
Moreau, first published in 1896. Along with the novel, the studio also had
access to an unproduced play by Frank Vreeland that was based on Wells' story
and titled His Creatures.
The Paramount version of the story differed from the H.G. Wells novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, on which it is based. One of the differences was the addition of a character called The Panther Woman. This was used in pre-production as publicity with a talent search for the actress to play the role. Paramount publicist Arthur Mayer developed a contest that involved giving the winner a trip to Hollywood, $200 (equivalent to $4,470 in 2023) a week for five weeks, a home at the Ambassador Hotel, and a role in the film.
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| A copy of the form women could fill out to be considered for the role. |
Contestants were required to be between the ages of 17 and
30 years old, to be in good health, between 5 feet 4 inches and
5 feet 8 inches tall, and not have worked, or be related to anyone
who had worked, at Paramount. In his memoir, Merely Colossal, published
in 1951, Mayer claimed that the contest attracted 60,000 contestants. There
were four finalists; Lona Andre, Gail Patrick, Kathleen Burke, and Verna Hillie
and the judges were Cecil B. DeMille, Rouben Mamoulian, Ernst Lubitsch, Norman
Taurog, Stuart Walker, and Erle C. Kenton, who took over directing the film from Taurog.
On September 29, 1932, Kathleen Burke was summoned to the
casting office and told she had won the contest. Two days later, the film went
into production. There was location shooting on Catalina Island for a week, and
on the SS Catalina, which encountered real fog as called for in the script. Shooting
lasted until early November, with retakes of the scene of Ruth with Ouran on
December 8. Bela Lugosi was added to the
cast in October, replacing George Barbier as the Sayer of the Law. The film was first released in Chicago on December
23, 1932.
