The oddly named Mr. Sardonicus (1961) is a cautionary tale for the modern religious zealot. In (fictional) Gorslava, the superstitious young peasant, Marek, has a shrill young woman, hungry for improvement, for a wife. She rejects the gift of Marek’s father, a lottery ticket, one of the hundreds the old man has bought over the years, foolishly in her eyes. The next night, the old man is dead of a heart attack, and Marek buries him in his favorite coat.
Months later, the lottery winners are announced, and the gift ticket is a winner! Lo, let the celebrations begin – once Marek has dug up Dad in order to retrieve the ticket from the pocket of his favorite coat. But during the night time operation, Marek suffers a terrible affliction from, he supposes, God on high. It is punishment for being a ghoul, a creature that digs up and consumes the dead. His wife is terrified, and soon takes her own life.
Years later, Marek is now Baron Sardonicus. He bought the title and land using his lottery winnings, and now stalks about with a mask to conceal the horror that is his face. His sole occupation is now a desperate search for a medical cure for God’s affliction. Remarried to a woman who cannot stand his appearance, he & she contact her former boyfriend, Doctor Sir Robert Cargrave, who is now a successful researcher into various conditions, in hopes that he may be able to affect a cure.
He comes to visit, and discovers there are medical experiments underway, managed by the one eyed man-servant, Krull (love that name!). The subjects are vulnerable young women, and an appalled Cargrave orders Krull to discontinue the experiments. Krull is grumpy about the matter, but wary of dominant men, for we soon learn Sardonicus is responsible for Krull’s missing eye. Meanwhile, Cargrave soon meets his former love, Maude, and then his host, the Baron. After some exploratory conversation over a repast, the Baron retires to secretly take his pleasure with a local innocent peasant woman.
The next day, the Baron reveals his affliction to Cargrave: the punishment meted out by an angry god is that the Baron’s face is to model that of his own father.
No so bad, you think? But context is all, and in this case, the face he displays is that of his father in the grave, dead and decayed. Sardonicus is stricken with the rictus of death. He admits that he could not speak for years after being so afflicted, and only achieved speech through careful retraining. Sardonicus wishes Cargrave to bring his successful heat and massage techniques to bear on this curse from God, and Cargrave agrees.
His technique fails, however, and Sardonicus demands he try experimental treatments, or he’ll torture his own wife. Cargrave reluctantly agrees and engages in months of research on a cure involving South American poisons which will relax the muscles causing the rictus. At the moment of an announcement of success on a dog, Sardonicus requests an instant treatment. Despite Cargrave’s demurral, Sardonicus demands and manipulates until Cargrave agrees.
As it happens, Sardonicus’ father’s corpse is resident in the house, and it is to this room they repair for the treatment, at Cargrave’s insistence. Sardonicus is strapped down, facing his father, the drug injected, and the others leave the room. As the candle goes out, Sardonicus loses his nerve and begins screaming, inducing his man-servant, Krull, to open the door, which throws some light on the corpse, inducing more terror in Sardonicus.
And the muscles in his face relax, and once again he is normal, except now he cannot open his mouth. Cargrave announces this to be a temporary condition, a matter of a few hours. Sardonicus releases his wife, Maude from their marriage, and soon Cargrave and Maude are at the train station. This is where Krull catches up with him and begs their return, as Sardonicus still cannot open his mouth.
And now we get another reveal: there was no drug. Sardonicus was injected with distilled water. This cure was a reluctant psychological experiment, inducing Sardonicus to relax his own muscles through terror, just as initially the terror paralyzed his muscles. It’s all in his mind, Cargrave says, that’s all Krull must tell the Baron, and he’ll cure himself. Krull returns to the castle to inform the Baron.
Except …
This story is bookended by an anonymous, omniscient narrator. Flippant, he treats the camera as a theatrical audience, and at this juncture, he calls for a democratic vote: Should Sardonicus be rewarded, or punished? And Krull will the carry out the result of that final vote, now won’t he?
So, you must be wondering how this applies to the religious zealot. I see it this way: The submission of reason to emotion, which begins Sardonicus’ descent into hell, is strongly reminiscent of the true religious zealot’s experience of life: the attempts to explain the vagaries of existence through the exigency of a supernatural creature. Once experiencing a supposed incident of supernatural nature, every counter-action becomes supremely a matter of certainty for the believer – a fatalistic belief that the activity, regardless of its morality, is sanctioned by the divine, or, worse, will be forgiven by the divine.
So it is with Sardonicus, a superstitious peasant, transformed through his self-inflicted horrific incident. He becomes a man, elevated to dominance, who has suppressed all communal, positive impulses in favor of his egocentric requirement to find a cure for a condition which, frankly, is merely repulsive, but not a danger to the Baron’s life. Utterly certain of the rightness of his position, there is no compromise, nor any hurdle upon which he balks. Krull is brutalized, and then required to brutalize other test subjects. Cargrave can find no traction in his protests against those demands, and Sardonicus is willing, even eager, to sacrifice his wife to gain his goal.
This is not unlike most religious movements, where the belief that since the divine favors the believers’ movement, the absolute goodness of any action taken by the movement is assured, and is analogous to the old horse-before-the-cart position. The phantom foundation shifting under their weight, of course, is the belief in the supernatural, whether it be ghouls, vampires, or gods.
And one may see in Krull those members now on the edge of disbelief, who have faced too many harsh realities to believe in the fairy tale. To be fair, Krull hasn’t espoused the fairy tale; he labors without rest in the service of the Baron. But as Sardonicus is revealed as having never been punished, but, instead, being a foolish victim of his own beliefs, Krull becomes the disillusioned members of the sect, leaving with bitterness in their hearts.
Heck, even the GOP could learn from this movie.
Technically speaking, this is a competent movie in all respects. The cinematography of this B&W effort is especially well done.
All that said, I can’t say I found this to be a compelling movie. It is interesting, trying to understand where it would go next, and what appeared to be the ending was almost appalling, until we learned how the finale would really play out. And the necessary tensions were just not as vibratory as I might have hoped.
But it was fun.
