Donovan's Brain
Entry updated 4 November 2024. Tagged: Film.
Film (1953). Alan Dowling Productions/United Artists. Directed by Felix E Feist. Written by Feist, based on Donovan's Brain (1943) by Curt Siodmak. Cast includes Lew Ayres, Steve Brodie, Gene Evans and Nancy Reagan (then Nancy Davis). 84 minutes. Black and white.
One of three films based on Siodmak's novel of the same name, the others being The Lady and the Monster (1944) and Vengeance (1963; vt The Brain). Two Scientists and a wife, during experiments with monkeys, obtain the brain of a dead businessman's after his plane has crashed, and keep it artificially alive in a tank (see Brain in a Box); but it has an evil, Telepathic influence over them. eventually possessing one of them (see Identity Transfer). Feist, whose previous sf film was Deluge (1933), directs unspectacularly, but gets a good performance from Ayres, who accomplishes the transitions from his natural to his possessed state very well. The female lead later married Ronald Reagan. Despite its sf elements, the film is more Gothic than scientific – the brain itself is ludicrous. Donovan's Brain was parodied in The Man with Two Brains (1983). [JB]
see also: Transcendence.
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