1953 Directed by Felix E. Feist
A scientist takes the brain of dead man and revives it via electrodes as it lays suspended in a tank of liquid. Soon, the brain grows to possess enormous psychic powers and inflicts its personality upon the doctor who saved it, creating a "Jekyll and Hyde" paradigm.
Lew Ayres Nancy Davis Reagan Gene Evans Steve Brodie Tom Powers Lisa Howard James Anderson Victor Sutherland Michael Colgan Peter Adams Harlan Warde Shimen Ruskin John Hamilton Don Brodie Stapleton Kent Frank McLure William Cottrell Max Wagner Sam Harris Paul Hoffmann Mark Lowell Walter Merrill Charles Sullivan Katherine Yorke
Donovans Hirn, El cerebro de Donovan, Il cervello di Donovan, O Cérebro Maligno, 多诺万的脑袋
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Noir-November Challenge! Movie #15
Horror/Sci-Fi Noir cross-over about a disembodied brain of a sinister dead millionaire whom is not above murder or taking over the world!
Stars former first lady Nancy Reagan along side actor Lew Ayres!
Nothing to write home about.. but watchable!
Perhaps I'll cure Frank and every other alcoholic if I can solve the mystery of Donovan's Brain. I think it's a matter of chemistry how the brain thinks. The problem is to find out what chemical combinations are responsible for success... failure... happiness... misery.
This picture warned us, we have to destroy every billionaire's brain immediately after their death to prevent them from causing further harm.
"You know, stealing a dead man’s brain is quite a rap."
For a movie about a megalomaniac businessman’s brain in a tank developing telepathy and body-control abilities, this was pretty dull. Perhaps I shouldn’t have read the Curt Siodmak novel its based on as prep, because the source is classic can’t-put-down pulp. It's populated with grotesque characters and a misanthropic mad scientist protagonist, whose eerie descriptions of his possession by Donovan’s brain sound uncannily like Get Out’s sunken place*.
The movie goes for a more downplayed approach, with fine performances by Lew Ayres’s hubristic doctor, Gene Evans’s as his alcoholic partner in surgery, and Steve Brodie as the reporter digs too deeply. But grounded also means less fun, and the…
Beginning by asking interesting and contemporary-minded questions about science, medical ethics, and progress, "Donovan's Brain" quickly sheds its thematic overcoat to become a slow-rolling potboiler about a disembodied brain that can control those around it. The film is solidly made but lacks the energy or momentum to make it anything more than just an average science fiction entry. It is compelling but cold stuff, a watchable but damp cautionary tale.
DONOVAN'S BRAIN is one of those films that feels as if it has been seen before ... and that is hardly surprising. Prior to it, there were almost enough brain transplant movies to qualify as its own genre. In the book (written about a decade earlier), the brain is kept alive without a biological housing. Both the film and the book were popular enough to be used as a theme for a number of "copycats." Of course, once the "supercomputer with an agenda all its own" came to the forefront, brains that lived outside of bodies declined in the cinema.
Despite its obviously low budget, DONOVAN'S BRAIN is probably the best of its type that I've seen. It could easily…
I didn't go into this film expecting a masterpiece but, given how silly the premise is, there should have been some fun to be had here. Alas, there wasn't. This was awful. The biggest problem is the villain. Does he gleefully go on a murderous rampage? No. He solemnly goes to his accountant and starts a tax avoidance scheme. Whole chunks of the film were just people talking about money. The only notable thing about it was that the male lead resembled a very poor man's Jack Lemmon.
Forget those German Expressionist-inspired castles in some vague European country with aristocratic mad scientists and travel with me, if you will, to somewhere in the American southwest where Lew Ayres, Nancy Davis (yes,the Nancy Reagan), and Gene Evans are doing mad science in the type of ranch house that you'd see in sitcoms of the 50s and 60s.
Lew Ayres is a really different casting choice for the mad scientist, although I don't think it's necessarily a bad one. He's so mild, so reasonable that if you try not to think too hard, you can almost see why his wife and alcoholic research friend go along with the bonkers plan.
Said plan involves the brain of a dead/dying financial despot,…
Felix E. Feist’s science-fiction horror in which three scientists illegally remove the still existing brain of a perished magnate and test with it, but the brain has ideas of its own.
Adapted from the novel of the same name by Curt Siodmak, which was published eleven years earlier, the story concerns an effort to keep thriving the brain of tycoon self-important W.H. Donovan after an otherwise deadly plane accident. The brain has other thoughts and starts to possess individuals.
Lew Ayres gives an okay performance in his role as Dr. Patrick Cory, the man who begins to experience Donovan’s Brian being controlled in him, while Nancy Davis is alright in her role as Janice Cory, Patrick’s wife.
Elsewhere, Gene Evans,…
If you're looking for some '50s schlock, Donovan's Brain is passable entertainment.
I came at this flick from a different angle than most people will. I grew up listening to old radio shows. One of the more memorable was the two-part "Donovan's Brain" on Suspense, starring Orson Welles, broadcast in 1944. For me, that's the definitive adaptation of Curt Siodmak's novel. The radio version with Orson Welles is dark and creepy. The transformation of his voice as he is taken over by the late W.H. Donovan is bone-chilling.
Watching this movie for the first time, I was disappointed by how flat and uninteresting everything was. Lew Ayres will forever be the voice of Dr. Kildare on the radio for me,…
Future First Lady of the United States, Nancy Reagan, tries to stop her scientist husband from being driven mad by a telepathic brain. Donovan's Brain never goes as campy or as weird as you hope it'll go, but it's still a pretty fun and silly time watching Nancy Reagan act beside an evil, telepathic brain.
Joseph F. Biroc: truly one of the great, unsung image-makers of Hollywood. It would be extremely misleading to say that he always "elevated" material - because this would imply that elevation was always something his material called for. Instead, Biroc always met the text where it was at - even (or, maybe, especially) when the text was simple, pure pulp. He could lens the teary sentimentalism of Capra with It's A Wonderful Life, the visual ribalry of Zucker/Abrahams with Airplane! or Brooks with Blazing Saddles, the raw politics of Fuller with Forty Guns and China Gate, the kitschy fantasy of Castle with 13 Ghosts and I Saw What You Did, or even the sexy pop art of Elvis (and Ann-Margret)…
