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It is rare for any film to present so human a portrait of a villain and still succeed in warning the audience so effectively. See "The Brute Man" and you will beware the murderous psychopath who disarms his victims by preying on feelings of sympathy.Rondo Hatton, better known for his role as the "Creeper" in the Sherlock Holmes movie, "The Pearl of Death," also plays the Creeper here – this time without Sherlock Holmes – but with such a depth of feeling that audiences more accustomed to hating and fearing monster-murderers may feel pity for the vengeance minded killer instead.Only in the movie "Freaks" has any actor exploited his unusual appearance to such telling effect. Without makeup, Hatton plays very true to life as the hot tempered college football star Hal Moffett – maimed in a laboratory accident – who decides to take deadly revenge upon the friends he irrationally blames for his disfigurement.Even though the grotesque drifter's bloody scheme is terrifying, antihero Moffett never seems like a purely evil monster. He is like a misguided adolescent driven mad by his misfortune and his own unyielding character, obsessive in the drive to heal his injured vanity by acts of desperation.As masterfully lensed under the direction of Jean Yarbrough, Hatton's performance is outstanding, even by comparison to other horror movie legends; Hal Moffett/The Creeper may possibly have been his greatest role. Yet "The Brute Man" was conceived as a modest little shocker, was made on a low budget and is today not very well remembered even by nostalgia-minded critics. Perhaps that is because "The Brute Man" seems contrived to exploit the commercial successes of "The Pearl of Death," "City Lights" and "Phantom of the Opera," from which it derives some of its main story elements (including the sentimental scenes with the blind girl and the theme of disfigurement and revenge). There is, however, no cheating in the use of classic ideas; they are combined so craftily as to create a new legend of Gothic significance and intensity, one which is also true to historical accounts of murder and realistic in a frighteningly everyday way.
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