Last night I ran Charles The Cat and the Canary and Nocturne. The main interest of The Cat and the Canary today is the incredibly stylish direction by Paul Leni, who was brought over from his native Germany by Universal and whose first American film this was. Basically, The Cat and the Canary was a tale (based on a well-known stage play) of a young heiress (Laura La Plante) whose relatives are trying to drive her insane so someone else will get the money instead — not exactly the freshest story line even then, but Leni’s direction and the nicely honed performances of La Plante and Tully Marshall (as the sinister attorney Roger Crosby, who ends up the first victim of the plot — did Marshall ever get to make a movie in which his character was alive and well at the fade-out?) make up for the triteness of the story. The opening sequence is magnificent — an unseen hand sweeps away cobwebs from a window to reveal the credits, and we’re told that the eccentric millionaire Cyrus West has built this home on the bank of the Hudson River in upstate New York. When we actually see the home it’s clear that the model he gave his architect must have been King Ludwig’s Neuschwanstein — the exterior (a model shot) is hardly more than a series of spires, and the interior (some of whose sets may well have been recycled for Dracula and some of the later Universal horror films) is full of long hallways with billowing drapes (anticipating the great effect in Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast 19 years later), secret passages and walls, bookcases and fireplaces that move aside to reveal them — we even get to see the innards of the walls, including the cobwebby gears that run these mechanisms. Then the spires dissolve into a stack of bottles, a title tells us that all Cyrus West’s relatives have gathered around him like cats around a canary — and around the bottles we see real cats, blown up to giant size, dwarfing the figure of Cyrus West in his rocking chair. After that opening just about anything would be a comedown — and there are parts of this film that are just plain silly, notably Creighton Hale’s “comic” performance as the scared romantic lead (one could readily see why Paramount had the idea this story could serve as a vehicle for Bob Hope — they bought the rights from Universal and remade it with Hope in 1939 — nine years after Universal’s own sound remake, retitled The Cat Creeps) — but Leni’s direction and the marvelous cinematography by Gilbert Warrenton (with the camera in almost constant motion, prowling through the hallways trying to keep up with the characters), along with some of the supporting players (the sinister housekeeper anticipates Judith Anderson’s role in Rebecca and the psychiatrist who’s supposed to decide whether the heroine is sane enough to inherit the West estate is so Caligari-esque I half-expected a plot twist would reveal that he is part of the plot to drive her insane!), make this a marvelous little gem of a movie and one of those you can look to as having set the clichés that were later run into the ground (but not before James Whale’s quirky sensibility could make fun of them in The Old Dark House at the same studio five years later!). I’d only seen The Cat and the Canary once before — in 1975, at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, on a triple bill with White Zombie and Supernatural.
•••••
Our “feature” last night was the 1927 version of The Cat
and the Canary, which I had in the backlog
on a 100-minute Alpha Video DVD in wretched shape in terms of picture quality
(Alpha Video seems to have done a straight transfer of one of the surviving
original release prints without any
attempt at digital image cleanup) but surprisingly 20 minutes longer than the “official” Kino version (which Charles and
I had watched years before, when we were just starting to date, through a VHS
tape I’d taken off Turner Classic Movies back when you could still record shows for later viewing without having
to pay your cable company yet more ransom money on top of their basic bill) —
though as I pointed out in my recent comments on the 1939 remake from Paramount
with Bob Hope, what I’d really
like to see is a digital restoration of the 100-minute version witih a bonus
feature containing the surviving excerpts of the intervening version, a 1930 Universal
talkie called The Cat Creeps (a
couple of minutes of footage Universal used in a 1932 short called Boo and four Vitaphone soundtrack discs, representing
about half the original movie, held by the Fafners at the UCLA Film and
Television Archive). I’d wanted to watch the 1927 The Cat and the
Canary since Hallowe’en night, when I saw
the 1939 version (a movie that had somehow eluded me until now) as part of the
Turner Classic Movies haunted-house marathon. The basis of the story was a
stage play by John Willard that had a three-month, 148-performance run on
Broadway from February to May 1922 (oddly Universal advertised the 1927 film as
“Direct from Broadway!” even though the Broadway play had been presented five
years earlier!); in the tail end of the silent era Universal bought the rights,
assigned Robert Hill and Alfred A. Cohn to do the adaptation and Cohn to write
the script — ironically Cohn would go from his work on this film to writing the
1927 Warner Bros. production The Jazz Singer, the film that would start the two-year process of
putting silent movies out of business — and, in a decision that ensured both
the artistic and commercial
success of this film and its
continuing interest for film buffs, decided to assign the direction to Paul
Leni, a German expatriate, as his first American film. Leni had achieved an
international hit with the 1924 film Waxworks, which was not only the first horror film ever set
in a wax museum but featured Germany’s biggest star, Emil Jannings, along with
Werner Krauss and Conrad Veidt (reunited from the cast of The Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari five years earlier) and, as
the juvenile male lead, cast Wilhelm Dieterle, who would later become a
director and have a long career in Hollywood, much of it at Warner Bros., with
his name Anglicized to William Dieterle. Waxworks cast Dieterle as a barker who invents colorful
backstories about the figures in the wax museum in order to attract customers,
and this enables Leni to tell stories about some of history’s most famous
real-life villains: Caliph Haroun al-Raschid (Emil Jannings), Czar Ivan the
Terrible (Conrad Veidt) and Jack the Ripper (Werner Krauss).
The worldwide
box-office success of Waxworks
attracted attention from Hollywood, and Universal’s founding president Carl
Laemmle, whose German ancestry (most of the other early Hollywood moguls came
from Poland or elsewhere in Eastern Europe) gave him a leg up in the
competition for German talent. He landed Leni and, for his first Hollywood
assignment, gave him this rather prosaic story about a plot by a bunch of
greedy relatives of a long-deceased rich man to do his heir, an innocent young
heroine, out of her inheritance by driving her crazy. Leni kicked out the jams
big-time and threw all the stylized devices that had made Waxworks a hit at this story. The 1927 and 1939 versions of The
Cat and the Canary actually track quite
closely story-wise: the mysteriously reclusive multimillionaire Cyrus West
(he’s not listed on imdb.com but he’s depicted in the film in a marvelous
prologue — Walter Anthony’s titles say that he was now at the end of his life
and medicine could do no more for him, so he’s shown seated in a big chair
surrounded by giant medicine bottles that dwarf him; they look like the skyline
of the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz, and it seems likely that the ripoff was deliberate, especially since
the makers of The Wizard of Oz
ripped off two famous gimmicks from Waxworks: the long entrance hall to Haroun al-Raschid’s
office and the hourglass with which Ivan the Terrible signals his victims how
long they have left to live before he has them executed) stipulates to his
attorney, Roger Crosby (Tully Marshall, the marvelous corrupt villain of Erich
von Stroheim’s The Merry Widow
and Queen Kelly as well as the
mastermind of the murders Alan Ladd is hired to commit in This Gun
for Hire), that the will he’s written
naming his heir not be read until 20 years after his death (the writers of the
1939 version, Walter DeLeon and Lynn Starling, cut that to 10), and West’s
ominous mansion is in upstate New York instead of the Louisiana bayous. Also
the name of the dead man was changed to “Norman” in 1939 (the reasons are
unclear, though one imdb.com “Trivia” poster suggests that was because Mae West
was still making movies in 1939) and his heiress was “Annabella West” (Laura
LaPlante) in the original and “Joyce Norman” in 1939. Some people commenting on
the 1939 version have said that the comic character played by Bob Hope was
added, but he wasn’t: Paul Jones (Creighton Hale), the male lead in the 1927
film, is also very clearly played for comic relief: he’s equipped with Harold
Lloyd-style glasses and is shown as a doofus with neither the resourcefulness
of the real Lloyd nor the witticisms of Hope.
Aside from Tully Marshall, easily
a match for George Zucco’s marvelous work as the lawyer in 1939 (though Zucco,
unlike Marshall, wasn’t allowed to play a character with a first name!), and
Martha Maddox as the housekeeper who’s supposedly been the only person, aside
from the attorney, in the West house during the 20 years since Cyrus’s death
(she’s just as powerful and intimidating a screen presence as Gale Sondergaard
in the remake even though, despite the hints in both version that the character
is supposed to be at least partly African-American, she doesn’t look any more
Black than Sondergaard did), the acting is nowhere near as good as it was in
1939. Universal spent six years trying to build Laura La Plante into a major
star (while they fired Bette Davis after just six months, clearing the way for
Warner Bros. to pick her up on the cheap and make millions off her!), but here,
as in so many of her films, there’s nothing wrong with her performance but nothing particularly right
about it either. She pretty much walks through the scenes, and though
admittedly it’s a nothing damsel-in-distress role one misses the nuances
Paulette Goddard brought to it 12 years later. And Creighton Hale is simply
annoying, while the other actors — Forrest Stanley as Charles Wilder, the [spoiler
alert!] alternate heir who sneaked a peek
at the alternative second will naming him as the next heir in case Annabella
died or went crazy, so he rigged up the West house with various secret passages
and other devices that would drive Annabella insane; Arthur Edmund Carewe (so
good as the undercover cop disguised as a Persian in the 1925 The
Phantom of the Opera) rather dull as Harry
Blythe, the third rival for Annabella’s affections; Gertrude Astor as Cecily
and Flora Finch as Aunt Susan — are good enough at being overbearing we believe
Cyrus West’s lament that when he was on his deathbed they were circling him
like cats around a canary, but they have little left to offer. The 1927 version
also retains the escaped lunatic from a nearby mental asylum (whom Charles
disguises himself as to menace and try to kill the heroine) and the guard
(George Siegmann) sent from the asylum to recapture him — but fortunately the
writers of this version avoided the fillip at the end of the 1939 film that the
guard had gone crooked and stolen the heroine’s priceless necklace, a part of
the West fortune he had hidden in plain sight in the house and given her a
special envelope telling her where to find it (a straightforward message in
this film, a puzzle hero and heroine have to solve in 1939).
What makes this film is Leni’s direction, from that opening
surrealistic scene of Cyrus West surrounded by oversized medicine bottles
through the X-ray shots of various mechanisms (when the clock that stopped at
midnight 20 years earlier when West died suddenly starts again, Leni gives us
some sinister-looking shots of its mechanism; later on Leni also gives us
close-ups of how all the secret doorways and panels of the house work) and the
scenes of apparently disembodied hands reaching out of wall openings to clutch
out at the heroine, The Cat and the Canary is a superb triumph of style over (lack of) substance. Even the
opening credits — a disembodied hand wiping away a thick layer of cobwebs to
reveal the film’s title underneath (the sort of thing imdb.com has taken to
calling a “crazy credit”) — sets the mood and makes sure we know from the
outset that we are in for a very special film. The Cat and the Canary was one of the three films, along with The
Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The
Phantom of the Opera (1925), that
established Universal as the
go-to studio for horror movies, though it’s significant that none of them have supernatural or science-fictional
premises: the title characters of Hunchback and Phantom are physically deformed but otherwise normal human beings (the sorts
of roles their star, Lon Chaney, Sr., preferred to play) and The Cat
and the Canary is a collection of
physically possible incidents. Indeed, there’s a sort of metafictional aspect
to it (though I doubt even as sophisticated a filmmaker as Leni intended it),
in that the devices Charles Wilder has rigged up in the house to make Annabella
West crazy (or at least to make her think she’s crazy and therefore act out as insane) are the same ones
filmmakers would use to dramatize a supernatural haunted-house story. (Come to
think of it, maybe Leni did
intend it: after all, Waxworks
was also a movie about storytelling and myth-making.)
Though Alpha Video didn’t
have access to a good print and didn’t do any real rehab on the source they did have, they equipped the film with a good musical
score, an appropriately somber combination of piano, electronic organ and
strings that got a bit monotonous towards the end but still “worked” a lot
better than the random assemblage of public-domain recordings other cheap DVD
companies have slapped onto silent classics. The Cat and the Canary is a great movie that makes one wish Leni had lived
longer and done more — and also that more of the work he did do survives: his second Universal film,
The Chinese Parrot, is lost completely
(except for a few intriguing-looking stills), a real pity because it was based
on Earl Derr Biggers’ second Charlie Chan novel and, like the also lost 1925
silent serial of the first Biggers Chan novel The House Without a Key, actually cast a real-life Asian (Japanese actor
Sojin Kamiyama) as Chan. Leni’s third Universal film, The Man Who
Laughs, was also long thought lost, though
it eventually turned up (at least partial prints from the U.S. and Italy from
which a complete version could be assembled did) and was a major production,
with heroine Mary Philbin from Hunchback and Phantom as a blind
girl who falls in love with Gywnplaine (Conrad Veidt), a British heir who was
kidnapped by Gypsies and turned into a hideous monster with his mouth frozen in
a permanent, hideous grin. (Batman
creator Bob Kane based the character of the Joker on Jack P. Pierce’s makeup
for Veidt in this film; it was Pierce’s first job at Universal and he’d go on
to create all the famous Universal monsters: Frankenstein’s creation, Dracula,
the Mummy and the Wolf-Man.) Then sound came in and Leni did a part-talkie
called The Last Warning, which I
understand is also at least partially lost, dealing with a series of murders in
a supposedly jinxed theatre. Then Leni got blood poisoning and died at only 40
years old — one wonders if he’d lived if he’d have been assigned to direct the Universal Dracula and we could have had a better film than Tod
Browning’s rather dull version worthwhile only for preserving the performances
of Bela Lugosi and Dwight Frye. — 11/4/17
