Hitchcoc There's always someone out there who feels he can do whatever he wants. A scientist finds a man, hanging on to life by a thread, from plane crash. He is unable to save his body, but decides he has the ability to keep the brain alive. It turns out that the brain is that of a man name Donovan who was a ruthless, cutthroat businessman, with no moral or ethical sense. Somehow, the brain begins to inflict its will on the scientist. It isn't long before the brain is ordering the man around and he isn't having him do acts of kindness. This movie is pretty bad, but it has a history, and people seem to enjoy it. My father, who probably saw about three movies in his life, knew this one. If you just want to have some fun and don't want to ask too many questions, this may be your cup of tea. Perhaps they should have sent the thing into politics. They could use some brains in congress.

John Bailo Most here have commented on the Sci-Fi aspects, but I wanted to focus on what seems to be an element of Business Fiction underlying the Sci-Fi (the science and experimentation being perhaps a way to cover another theme that some might want not to hear).The antagonist is a ruthless businessman whose brain is preserved...or more importantly, his mind. This mind lives on and infects others to do its will. The businessmen does not want to be bound by the rules of Government, taxation or even normal morality, it merely wants to conquer, possess and benefit itself. Some of you may be familiar with the work of Napoleon Hill and his book "Think and Grow Rich" which posits that business empires are the work of forming a Mastermind between people to accomplish and build great corporations.Wow. And the year is 1953? Can you imagine if someone had made a plain spoken film about such things? I wondered if Donovan (who flies in small planes a lot) is based maybe on Howard Hughes?Then there is the doctor. He is driven to perform his highly irregular experiments. He seems driven, but also reckless. He hustles his obviously inebriated friend into the operating room! He gets him to perform illegal and unregulated experiments on humans! This all goes on in the California mountains, away from the eye of the law (Nancy Reagan's future husband would be proud!) Law Enforcement are mere tax collectors, looking for their cut.We have the professional class, serving the business class and inflicting pain on the "little people". The Press, represented by a two-bit hustler named Herbie Yocum are no more than a bunch of blackmailing ambulance chasing paparazzi. Bankers, who are supposed to safeguard money, are more concerned with losing a big account than with giving money away to a potential fraud. And everyone else, hotel clerks, and so on, are bullied or cajoled by money. (Oddly, the one solid citizen is a taxi driver, who can't be persuaded by Donovan's money to ruin his livelihood for a short term payday.)Donovan's partners, confronted with the absurdity of their boss now inhabiting the body of someone else, pause for just a minute, then, seeing dollar signs, nod their heads and move on with the deal making. The Horror here is not a pulsating growing brain, but the giant Mastermind manipulating, and perhaps corrupting, all of America.

dbborroughs Second official film version of the "classic" of a brain in a tank.(First was the Lady and the Monster and The Brain followed) The basic story has influenced probably hundreds of films and stories over the years that proves that there is life in the story despite it now being clichéd and almost laughable in premise.For those that don't know this is the story of the doctors who save a wealthy industrialist after a car accident, or rather they save his brain since his body is badly banged up. The problem is that the industrialist was a real SOB and he somehow manages to use psychic mind control to control those around his tank.Yes it sounds silly, but for what ever reason it still kind of works. The trick is of course you have to go with the basic premise, and assuming that you've picked up the tape or DVD odds are you're at least going to make that effort. Well made and containing its share of tension this is one of the better versions of the story that has come down the pike. Well acted by Lew Ayres as the doctor who probably shouldn't have made the effort and Davis Nancy (soon to be Regan) as his love interest, this is the sort of movie that works because the actors sell it. Ayres in particular manages to make the shifting personalities, his own and Donovan's, believable especially since in this tale we have nothing to go on of what Donovan was like before other than what we are told.If you are in the mood for a good, though slightly silly, thriller for a dark and stormy night this should be right up your alley.Between 6 and 7 out of 10

bkoganbing 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.