The Warner Archive title THE MAN WITH TWO FACES (1934) was on TCM the other night and I just watched it for the first time; based on a play by Alexander Woollcott and George S. Kaufman; and I was surprised to find it contains a mild supernatural/horror/whatever-you-wanna-call-it element. For no reason that's given (or give-able!), villain Louis Calhern has a Dracula-like power over Mary Astor. She's an actress who was long-ago married to him, 'til it was discovered that he was a 24-karat rat; everybody thought he died; now he reappears, and whenever he's around, Astor (who hates him when she's herself) goes into a mute Mina-like trance, becomes like a zombie, obeys his every command.
SPOILER
Then later in the pic, when Calhern is poisoned and dies, we cut to a taxi cab interior where Astor, in the back seat, suddenly looks ill and starts grabbing at herself, then looks relieved and "herself" again. In other words, his powers over her end when he dies, and she (miles away) "feels" that he just died.
Everything else about it is "ordinary" -- there's just that Dracula/Svengali/Murder Legendre power of Calhern's. Weird.
My memory tells me that in the late '30s Warners gave some thought to remaking it, and at one point Karloff was the announced star. Or was it Lugosi?
