Spoilers: The 'Continuity' goof

The following is loaded with spoilers.

The one "Goof" listed for this film--and for a modestly budgeted 1950s sci-fi film, just one is a pretty good record--points out that Frank Schratt (Gene Evans) tells Janice Cory (Nancy Davis [Reagan]) that her husband Pat (Lew Ayres) had the freedom from Donovan's brain's mental domination to make a tape recording because the brain was concentrating on corrupt journalist Yocum (Steve Brodie) to make him effectively kill himself. The item goes on to point out that Dr. Cory is seen to make that recording well before Yocum's death, in direct contradiction to Frank's statement. It implies that the film was just incorrectly assembled in the editing room ("However, in the final edited version of the movie...."). I don't think it's that simple. Here's the sequence of events directly involved in this problem as seen in the picture:

1. Cory makes the tape in his city hotel suite.

2. Trying to get away from IRS investigators when his cabbie refuses to cooperate, Cory steps in front of a car and is hospitalized.

3. Wife Janice visits him in his hospital room and Pat is himself long enough to inform her of the tape's existence; but the brain reasserts its dominance and orders her to leave. Instead of going to the hotel to find that tape, she calls Frank from a hospital telephone booth and tells him she'll stay there and keep watch.

4. Yocum visits Pat in his hospital room, continuing his blackmail of Cory/Donovan, who sends him to his rural home and into an obvious (to the audience, anyway) trap, which is immediately depicted as leading to his death.

5. Fairly shortly after Yocum's departure, Cory himself dresses and leaves the hospital (apparently without official discharge), his wife still in the hospital's waiting room/lounge/whatever. A montage indicates that he returns to--and spends some time at--writing and cashing checks on Donovan's various pseudonymous accounts, and a scene shows him attempting to coerce a former associate of Donovan in his corruptions.

6. Back at the Corys' home, Frank and Janice have the conversation including the erroneous statement which we started with.

7. Cory shows up there and mentions Yocum's death to Janice, who charges that he couldn't have heard about it. The implication is of course that he knows about it because at this time he is effectively Donovan who is responsible, not Cory.

Note that the dialogue referenced in point 7 requires Yocum's death to have happened a very few hours before Cory arrives back home, but point 5 contradictorily requires far more time than that to have passed, to say nothing of the fact that Janice being depicted as still in the city when Yocum's fatal car crash induced by the brain occurred also makes Cory having to know about it only via Donovan's brain waves unworkable. Let me summarize this: Cory makes the tape in the hotel suite, tells Janice about it while hospitalized, and also while hospitalized--but after being visited by Donovan's would-be heirs--brain-dominated-Cory sends Yocum to his death, yet Frank tells Janice that the recording and Yocum's death happened simultaneously. The only way that scene could have been filmed in good faith is if the picture was seriously reshot and reedited--in particular the hospital sequence--after production was initially deemed finished. There's more: Once Cory has effectively checked himself out of the hospital, how can Janice think it is ever safe to go to the hotel and look for the tape her husband described to her? She can't possibly predict his comings and goings there with any confidence. I can't even imagine her getting into that suite without her husband's--and by extension the brain's--knowledge except by getting his key from his personal belongings while he was hospitalized, then returning it while he was still there. Yet, later she and Frank are quite familiar with the recording's contents. Speaking of which--one VERY big spoiler here, so big that in spite of my warnings in my thread's title and opening line I will cover it--the scene of the brain's destruction actually plays as an act of God, but Janice, Pat and Frank all say it was the result of a rig described in Pat's tape recording; BTW, given that Frank knows this has been set up and that a thunderstorm is clearly beginning, why does he enter the lab and attempt to directly destroy the brain with gunfire?. I'd say this film was heavily reworked, and not just in the editing room. More than one User Review states that the final scene is implausible, and I'll add that it plays like a tacked-on "Hollywood happy ending."

One last thing: a Trivia note claims that the author of the source novel, Curt Siodmak, was himself "...set to direct, but at the last minute he was replaced by Felix E. Feist." Since Feist also gets the screenplay credit, that doesn't seem likely. I mean, would the author direct an adaptation of his own novel yet not write the script? And remember the words there, "...at the last minute...." That doesn't leave time to write a completely new screenplay, I'd say.

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UPDATE: I've come up with something: As scripted and filmed, Cory was hospitalized on two separate occasions! On the first, Yocum visits and gets sent to Cory's lab and his death. Brain-dominated Cory lets the reporter get well away from the hospital then checks himself out. Janice returns home and Donovan/Pat goes back to his suite, perhaps locking Cory in because he knows his control of the scientist will weaken while he kills the reporter. During this event, Cory makes the tape recording. Again dominated by the brain, he goes back home where his knowledge of Yocum's death proves suspicious. For whatever reason, perhaps Cory collapses because he wasn't fit to leave the hospital, he is readmitted to the medical facility. For unknown reasons (left entirely on the cutting room floor in the massive re-edit, no doubt), the brain's domination slips long enough for Pat to tell Janice, who has again made the trip to the city, about the tape and she gets it while he is still hospitalized. Along with the question of the reason for Cory's second hospital stay, we are left wondering about the slip of the brain's domination then, but I find this reasonably satisfactory, requiring no reshooting after filming was thought complete.

The GREEN HORNET Strikes Again!