What an idea, stealing a man's brain.
In addition to his extensive film work, Curt Siodmak also wrote a number of novels, the most famous of which was 1942's Donovan's Brain, first adapted for the screen in 1944 as The Lady and the Monster and then again under its original title in 1953 by director Felix Feist. Even to one who's never seen Feist's film, its title instantly conjures up images of a scientist keeping a human brain alive in a fish tank in his laboratory, and the film definitely delivers on that. Prefiguring such cerebellum-centric titles as The Brain from Planet Arous and Fiend Without a Face, Donovan's Brain tells the story of a scientist (Lew Ayres) working on the problem of how to keep the brain alive outside of the body. With his live-in surgeon-on-call (Gene Evans) and ever-patient wife (Nancy Davis, who was soon to take the last name of her husband, Ronald Reagan) at his side, he succeeds just in time for his facilities to be of use when one Warren H. Donovan, millionaire, is in a plane crash nearby. Things go predictably awry, though, when the disembodied Donovan begins exerting his influence over the easily dominated Ayres.
Naturally, Evans and Davis are concerned when Ayres adopts Donovan's abrupt and demanding personality and begins conducting business in the supposedly dead man's name (which attracts the attention of the feds since they've been after Donovan for years to get him to pay his back taxes). Ayres even starts wearing Donovan's suits and smoking his brand of cigars, leading to the always-amusing spectacle of him lighting up when he winds up in the hospital. And as one would expect from a film made in the '50s, there's a fair bit of talk about God and answering to "a higher power," which can't help but sound funny coming from a scientist who telepathically communicates with a pulsating, glowing -- and growing -- brain. You'd think one would cancel out the other.