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Director Tod Browning just wasn't drawn to normal people. His movies are often set in circuses and carnivals, or else involve criminals who take on weird or grotesque disguises. Deception of one kind or another is a common theme in his films. Some find his movies to be profound commentaries on the human condition; others see them as just weird. I see Browning as a unique film artist. As to the extent of his genius, it's hard for me to gauge. There's no one else quite like him. Whenever I'm watching a Browning picture I'm inevitably more thrilled by the ideas behind it than I am by the film itself. The Devil Doll concerns a man framed for a crime he didn't commit who is sent to Devil's Island, where he learns the black art of shrinking people to the size of mice from an inventor. He escapes from the island and returns to Paris, where he proceeds to extract his revenge on those who sent him away. There's a lot of plot in this one, far more than I just outlined, and the movie has on occasion a Victorian-Dickensian feeling, aided in no small measure by the casting of Maureen O'Sullivan and Frank Lawton, who had just appeared in the movie of David Copperfield, as the romantic leads. Lionel Barrymore is the star, and still quite capable of getting around, and delivers a fine performance, alternately sympathetic and diabolical. This is not a fast-paced or exciting movie by today's standards, but it has its virtues, most of them pictorial. The special effects are superb, and the elf-people uncannily persuasive.
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