Thanks for the memories!

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

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.

This movie is a classic case of a good idea badly executed. Scientist illegally preserves dying man's brain and keeps it alive using electricity. Slowly the brain starts to take over the mind of said scientist,and.....makes him kill off his rivals? Start a series of shocking events that stun the nation? Plan for world domination? Chase girls? No. He makes him visit banks and write checks. Real sweaty palm stuff! How evil can a man possibly get? No, don't disinherit your children, you devilish fiend, have you not a shred of humanity left in you? True, in the end the brain proves to be an ungrateful guest by trying to kill off the doctor's wife, but since it's Nancy Reagan, sorry Davis who actually cares? Good thing for her she hooked up with Ronnie cause i've seen doormats giving more riveting performances than Miss Davis. Lew Ayres is the only good thing about this movie, but even he can't make smoking cigars and making phone calls seem sinister. What a great set up and what a huge letdown.

This is a relatively cheaply made sci-fi vehicle from the Golden Age of Science Fiction with some fairly big stars. Lew Ayres stars as Doctor Cory, a genial man who wants to find cures to diseases of the mind through experimentation with monkey brains. Nancy Davis(Mrs. Reagan) plays his devoted wife, and Gene Evans his drunken doctor sidekick. Anyway, a plane crashes and the body of a nearly dead millionaire is at stake, so Dr. Cory goes to him, brings him back to his lab, and when it is evident that his life can no longer be sustained - Dr. Cory, against the wishes of his wife and alcoholic helper, extracts his brain and houses it in a fish aquarium with some metal rods and tubing attached to it. The brain looks like an inflatable football, heaving and deflating every now and then. And man is that one big brain. Is it true what they say about men with big brains? The brain somehow takes over Ayres genial mind and he slowly becomes two personalities - the genial(wow - talk about repetition with a word)doctor and the repulsive, selfish, mean-spirited millionaire - hated by family and friends. Look, you know what you will get for the rest of the film. Ayres does a decent job surveying both roles. Evans and Davis are also okay, not they really have much to do. There is a nice small performance from Steve Brodie as a reporter with few scruples. Director Felix Feist, a journeyman director with more misses than hits, is competent behind the camera if nothing else. The movie is slow and talky at times, and the plot really meanders in the final third. The special effects though are a real let-down even by 1950s standards. Donavan's Brain, based on a novel by Curt Siodmak, is definitely a more thought-provoking sci-fi film of its era, but also, in my humble opinion, one of the lesser quality ones.

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.