(Nedan utkast till en artikel. Någon som har mer information om stories med
levande hjärnor i lådor? Jag har postat utkastet på en engelskspråkig lista
också och fick en rad tips, så artikeln lär behöva kompletteras ganska
mycket... När jag nu får tid med det. --AE)
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The Chinese Detective and the First Brain-in-a-Box
A few years ago Swedish Tv had a documentary about Werner Oland, born 1879 in
the north of Sweden as Verner Ölund, and the original star of the series of
Charlie Chan detective films. Unfortunately he died of a heart attck while on a
visit to his old homeland in 1938, where he had been treated like the film star
he was, reaching almost Greta Garbo attention!
Charlie Chan is a Chinese detective with the Honolulu police, created by the
author Earl Derr Biggers (1888-1933) and Oland did 16 of these movies, said to
have been the only profitable films for the Fox studio which at the time were
in deep troubles. I have seen a number of the Oland C Chan films, which seem to
be in the public domain and are available on Youtube. Oland's life has been
covered in a Swedish TV documentary and has been made into the theatre play
"Werner Oland - Bjurholmspojken som blev hollywoodstjärna" ("WO - The Bjurholm
Boy who Became a Hollywood Star") by the Västerbotten Theatre.
After Oland's death studio had to quickly find a replacement, and after a
series of screen test their choice fell on Sidney Toler (1874-1947) who did an
additional 22 (!) Charlie Chan films. Towards the end Toler was in bad health,
the budget was shrinking, manuscripts where getting worse and this interesting
detective character, speaking in pidgin English and invented Chinese proverbs,
fell into oblivion. I have enjoyed the Charlie Chan films I've seen this far
though, but perhaps this is just because I'm a nerd for old, odd movies in
black and white...
So I turned to Sidney Toler's first Chan film, "Charlie Chan in Honolulu"
(1938) - and found a surprising science-fiction element!
The plot is centred around a murder on a ship in the Honolulu harbour. A man
carrying a secret stash of 300 000 dollars, to be delivered to a woman on the
ship, is murdered and Charlie Chan is called for. (Except initially, the comic
element in the form of Charlie's son, assumes the investigation, while Charlie
is in hospital to follow the new addition to his big family being born:) There
are several possible suspects onboard, including the "mad scientist" Dr
Cardigan.
About 35 minutes into the film it shows that Dr Cardigan in his cabin has a
complicated apparatus hidden, which contains a so called brain-in-a-box! The
brain is kept alive in a big glassbulb or retort with pipes and wires leading
to it and is said to be the brain of a famous Chinese criminal. This device
doesn't play any major role in the plot (Dr Cardigan is involved in exposing
the killer though) but the point is that it may be the *first* appearance of a
brain-in-a-box! At least as far as I know.
Earlier I had thought that the brain-in-a-box was invented by Edmond Hamilton
in his Captain Future series of novels, where one of his "Futuremen" was the
scientist Simon Wright, who after an accident is put in a glass box. His Living
Brain appeared already in the first story, Captain Future and the Space Emperor
(1940); these stories were very popular in eg the 1940's Swedish pulp magazine
Jules Verne Magasinet/Veckans Äventyr (1940-1947.) Did Hamilton see the 1938
Charlie Chan film?
A famous use of the same concept is to be found in Robert Siodmak's novel
Donovan's Brain (1942), adapted for the screen no less than three times: "The
Lady and the Monster "(1944), "Donovan's Brain" (1953), and "The Brain" (1962).
The bodyless, living brain was also popular in the wave of drive-in cinema
flicks from the 1950's and on (titles like "The Brain That Wouldn't Die", 1962,
"The Atomic Brain", 1963, "The Saved Hitler's Brain", 1968, and so on).
But it was also used by "serious writers". We have for instance PC Jersild of
Sweden, himself an MD and well-established as a "literary writer". In 1980 he
published En levande själ (available in English as A Living Soul, transltaed by
Rika Lesser) which deals with a brain kept alive artificially in an aquarium,
by an "unethical" giant medical research corporation named Ypsilon. His novel
was made into a short film in English, in 2014 directed by Henry Moore Selder,
Swedish Wikipedia claims that Jersild has copied the basic idea from a short
story by Roald Dahl from 1960 ("Willian and Mary", from the collection Kiss
Kiss). It seems the authors in Wikipedia are unaware of the even earlier
brains-in-boxes from popular fiction and films.
Or as Charlie Chan would put it: Old Chinese proverb says "Men of Fine
Literature often ignorant..."
--Ahrvid Engholm
Some links:
"Charlie Chan in Honolulu": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8okV9a0clY and ;
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0029984/ ;
Werner Oland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warner_Oland and a trailer for the ;
play about his life https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpKM3g9fMa4 ;
Sidney Toler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Toler ;
Charlie Chan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Chan ;
Captain Future: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Future ;
Donovan's Brain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donovan%27s_Brain ;
PC Jersild: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._C._Jersild ;
En levande själ/A Living Soul (in Swedish; try a translation service on the
net): https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/En_levande_sj%C3%A4l and ;
http://www.sfi.se/sv/svensk-filmdatabas/Item/?itemid=77965&type=MOVIE&iv=PdfGen ;
Swedish Wikipedia about En levande själ (dito):
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/En_levande_själ ;
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