Watch Donovan's Brain For Free

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

When evil millionaire Donovan dies on his operating table, scientist Dr. Patrick Cory (Lew Ayres) seizes the opportunity and removes Donovan's brain, which still shows signs of life. He manages to keep the brain alive in a tank in his laboratory, where it grows in size in a short time as well as exhibiting telepathic abilities. Soon Donovan's brain becomes powerful enough to force his will on Cory and make him do his bidding.Entertaining '50s sci-fi with few bells & whistles but an enjoyable cast and decent ideas. Lew Ayres is good. I like to imagine this is what happened to Dr. Kildare: he left medicine to become a research scientist and things went horribly wrong. Nancy Davis (Reagan) does a fine job, though her obedient housewife role is likely to draw criticisms from the huff & puff crowd. Gene Evans is great as Ayres' surgeon buddy with a drinking problem who gives Ayres the inevitable "you're playing God" speech. Steve Brodie is fun as a nosy reporter who gets what's coming to him. Based on a novel by screenwriter Curt Siodmak (The Wolfman, I Walked with a Zombie, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, etc.). Siodmak doesn't write the screenplay here. The movie was adapted before as The Lady and the Monster and Siodmak didn't write that either. Not sure why he didn't try to write his own movie version of the novel. This is a good sci-fi flick, though the middle is little more than Ayres going from place to place barking orders at people and handing out money. The beginning and ending are best. Not a lot of action, which won't sit well with everybody, but I was never bored.

Overrated Movie, mostly because it is so seriously handled that it seems intelligent. Only seems. It is rather routine in all respects and is for the most part bland and boring. It does move along quickly and the best Scenes are outside the lab. Not a good thing for a Sci-Fi Film. In fact, it is the money manipulations and Government Investigations that come off as the most interesting.Another thing. There just isn't too much Horror or intrigue in watching a floating disembodied Brain in a fish tank. Some of the mumbo-jumbo is also quite elementary and stilted. Given all this, there must be something inherently haunting about "Brain" Movies because they do make quite a number of them. But nobody seems to know why. Everyone talks about how this is the best of this type of thing. But that isn't saying much. They most always are Kitsch or just Bad. But there are a lot of them out there when you get that uncontrollable urge and succumb to that particular brand of Mind Control or Brainwashing, you won't have much choice but to watch one of them. Actually you can take your pick without missing too much.

This is brainier (yeah, pun intended) than almost all the other 1950's sci-fi/horror movies but that doesn't mean it is that great and it certainly doesn't live up to its billing. Critics have overrated this movie for decades. I give it one thing: unlike most in its genre, it leans more toward the cerebral than the shock or visual. That's the good news. The bad news is that it gets boring by the halfway mark. Even at just 80 minutes, it is not an easy movie stay with, or one that rivet you to your movie seat. Don't believe the "elitists" who like to tell you how "intelligent" - and thus entertaining - this film is, because there is a reason less than 20 people have reviewed it here as of late 2007: it's not that good.B-movie stars Gene Evans, Lew Ayers, Steve Brodie and Nancy Davis star in the film. Evans overacts and is horrible - the worst actor in the film - while Davis - better known as the former First Lady Nancy Reagan - had a pleasant voice back then, but that was about it.

In the original Frankenstein film, the good doctor's experiment is flawed from the start when Dwight Frye takes the brain of a criminal from the medical school to give to Colin Clive for the final touch to his research. That was what Lew Ayres overlooked.Imagine if Dr. Albert Schweitzer had been in a plane crash and his brain had been harvested by Lew Ayres and Gene Evans? Would Ayres's experiment have turned out differently? We'll never know because on the day that research scientist Ayres was called away from his work to do actual doctoring it was for Warren H. Donovan, misanthropic millionaire. Ayres and Evans have devised away to keep Donovan's Brain alive in a saline solution with electrodes. Unfortunately the brain's really thriving in it, the brain and the ego inside. As it grows it takes over the personalities around it, though at this early stage it can only dominate one person at a time and it does need sleep like the normal human brain.Donovan's Brain has some big ambitions, nothing less than world domination of the global marketplace. The suspense that the film has involves whether this thing can develop before they're capable of destroying it. Stars Lew Ayres, future first lady Nancy Davis, and Gene Evans all do good work here. The performance I like the best is that of blackmailing reporter/paparazzi Steve Brodie. Donovan's Brain deals quite nicely with him.For modern audiences who think it can't happen, imagine in the age of the internet Donald Trump's disembodied brain in saline solution like Donovan's Brain near a laptop.