Michael Curtiz's Dr. X (1932)

The suspenseful tempo created by Curtiz overcame several lapses in the credibility of the script.
--- Alan K. Rode on Dr. X (Michael Curtiz, University of Kentucky Press, 2017)

Dr. X is full of credibility lapses, as most horror films are, unfortunately (see Val Lewton's films for some of the few exceptions):  Dr. X (Lionel Atwill) putting his daughter (Fay Wray) out for bait, Lee Tracy as the comic relief making irrelevant wisecracks, etc. Dr. X was one of five films Curtiz made in 1932 and Jack Warner kept the shooting schedules short.  To the extent the film succeeds it is for two reasons:  the art direction of Anton Grot (see my post of Nov. 21, 2014) and the eerie effectiveness of the two-color technicolor (few two-color prints survive, since the films were usually shot in black-and-white at the same time). Two-color technicolor had a palette of mostly green, blue, red and orange.  Jack Lemmon once said to me that it took him a long time to appreciate films in color because they did not look real at first and later they did.  Even if this is true, why would one want color to look "real" in something as artificial as a movie; some of us want to see what a director can do with color, though mostly now (as opposed to two-color or the highly saturated three-color technicolor used from 1935 until well into the fifties) "directors put something blue next to something orange and think nothing of it," as cinematographer Philip Lathrop said to me.