The Brute Man (1946)

the audience applauded

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

This was a B film made by Universal but sold to poverty row outfit PRC for distribution, and there are no big names here and no big budget, but it is very poignant for several reasons, which I will get into later.This is basically a 20th century Frankenstein story. Someone is going around murdering people with his bare hands - "The Creeper" as he is called by the newspapers and the police. The audience sees the murderer from the beginning, and none of the murders seem premeditated. It is initially a deformed man with monstrous strength apparently visiting people he knew before, and when they become afraid or try to scream or run, he kills them in anger. The police almost catch "The Creeper" after the second murder, but he climbs up a fire escape and into the apartment window of a girl playing a piano. The girl seems unafraid of him and when she asks him if he is in trouble followed by knocking on her door, she hides the man and tells the police that she has seen nor heard anything strange. However, the police never identified themselves, and later you can hear running, yelling, and shooting nearby. If The Creeper is in her apartment who exactly are the police shooting at? But I digress. The Creeper learns the girl is blind, cannot see his ugliness and is therefore friendly, plus she didn't know it was the police at the door, because they never said who they were. Like the Frankenstein monster, in a blind person The Creeper has found a friend.Meanwhile the police have connected the first two victims and go to visit two people who were connected to them 15 years before in college and who are now married and doing well for themselves. They tell a tale of a popular athlete, Hal Moffat, who was tutored in chemistry by the husband, but when Hal got a little too friendly with his girl - now his wife - the tutor gave the jock the wrong answers to questions for an oral exam the next day. As a result, Hal failed the oral test and was given a long complicated chemistry experiment to do as remedial makeup work. Always having a bad temper, and realizing he had been deliberately tricked, Hal threw the test tubes to the ground, but the liquid splashed on his face. In the hospital, the doctor told his friends that Hal's features would be deformed, and that even his glands, which effect how features are formed and how bones grow, would be effected.So we have a blind girl who needs money for an operation to restore her sight, a bitter homicidal man who knows that the couple who betrayed him years ago are doing well financially, and who also tends to take violent revenge on anybody who crosses him, and the police who now know who the murderer is, they just have no idea how and where he is living and what he looks like. How will all of this work out? Watch and find out. The poignant part of this is how art so imitated the life of the man who plays "The Creeper", Rondo Hatton. Mr. Hatton was also a popular athlete during high school who was injured by poison gas during his service in WWI. That chemical exposure later caused acromegaly, a slowly progressive deforming of bones in the head, hands and feet, and internal and external soft tissues caused by disease of the pituitary gland. The deformity, which was progressive, broke up his first marriage. He did, however, marry a second time. So it may be that the low rating is from people who do not like the fact that Universal, who had a contract with Mr. Hatton, used his deformity to exploit him in such roles. However, I think his performance was pretty good. After all, there is no time for real dramatic depth in these old B films. I'd recommend it as a well done modern horror film.

One of the later and weaker Universal horror films. The story is about a disfigured man (Rondo Hatton) who blames two old friends (Tom Neal, Jan Wiley) for an accident that caused him to look the way he does. So he takes his revenge by killing a bunch of people. He also befriends a blind lady (Jane Adams). Honestly, the movie has about fifteen minutes of story that it pads out to almost an hour. Universal disowned it and sold it off to the illustrious PRC for distribution. Hatton's performance isn't very good but given his deteriorating condition it's not surprising. He died not long after this was finished. The best performance comes from the always entertaining Donald MacBride as the police captain out to solve the case. Universal horror buffs will possibly enjoy it more than most. One minor note of interest for Universal or Hatton fans: despite films usually trying to portray Hatton as a hulking giant, here we see him standing opposite Adams and Wiley and it's clear that he wasn't even six feet tall.

The Brute Man (1946)** (out of 4) Hal Moffat (Rondo Hatton) was once an up and coming doctor but he was brutally attacked and left as a deformed monster. Now with vengeance in his heart he sets out as The Creeper to seek revenge on those who left him in his condition.Poor Rondo Hatton. You can read up on his medical condition, which led him to look the way he did but basically Universal exploited his looks and threw him into a number of their horror films over the last two years of Hatton's life. Hatton would end up dying before this film would be released and this would stand as his final picture.I must admit that I have a hard time watching his films simply because of knowing his true story and it's pretty sad seeing him exploited. With that said, there's no question that he was an amazing presence on the screen and it's easy to see why the studio would want him in the movies. He certainly does a fine job here playing the victim as the studio obviously went for sympathy towards his character and threw in a subplot dealing with a blind woman, which seemed to be a wink back to the BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN.As far as the film goes, it's pretty much a routine horror film but at just under a hour it's certainly entertaining enough for what it is.

It is rare for any film to present so human a portrait of a villain and still succeed in warning the audience so effectively. See "The Brute Man" and you will beware the murderous psychopath who disarms his victims by preying on feelings of sympathy.Rondo Hatton, better known for his role as the "Creeper" in the Sherlock Holmes movie, "The Pearl of Death," also plays the Creeper here – this time without Sherlock Holmes – but with such a depth of feeling that audiences more accustomed to hating and fearing monster-murderers may feel pity for the vengeance minded killer instead.Only in the movie "Freaks" has any actor exploited his unusual appearance to such telling effect. Without makeup, Hatton plays very true to life as the hot tempered college football star Hal Moffett – maimed in a laboratory accident – who decides to take deadly revenge upon the friends he irrationally blames for his disfigurement.Even though the grotesque drifter's bloody scheme is terrifying, antihero Moffett never seems like a purely evil monster. He is like a misguided adolescent driven mad by his misfortune and his own unyielding character, obsessive in the drive to heal his injured vanity by acts of desperation.As masterfully lensed under the direction of Jean Yarbrough, Hatton's performance is outstanding, even by comparison to other horror movie legends; Hal Moffett/The Creeper may possibly have been his greatest role. Yet "The Brute Man" was conceived as a modest little shocker, was made on a low budget and is today not very well remembered even by nostalgia-minded critics. Perhaps that is because "The Brute Man" seems contrived to exploit the commercial successes of "The Pearl of Death," "City Lights" and "Phantom of the Opera," from which it derives some of its main story elements (including the sentimental scenes with the blind girl and the theme of disfigurement and revenge). There is, however, no cheating in the use of classic ideas; they are combined so craftily as to create a new legend of Gothic significance and intensity, one which is also true to historical accounts of murder and realistic in a frighteningly everyday way.