I’ve spent the morning watching videos: the 1932 movie The Old Dark House and last December’s MTV Unplugged with Bob Dylan. Directed by James Whale and starring Boris Karloff as their joint follow-up to Frankenstein the year before, The Old Dark House is a magnificent movie, not especially frightening but full of Whale’s dry-wit comic touches and playing against cliché. Interestingly, an opening credit attached to the film assured audiences that the Karloff who played the mad, (almost) mute butler Morgan in this film was indeed the same actor who had played the Frankenstein monster in the earlier film — just in case you couldn’t recognize him through the heavy (and completely different) makeup, which made him look like a cross between a particularly hirsute longshoreman and an ape. While Karloff didn’t get much chance to do pathos in this film — except towards the end, when he’s seen cradling the dead body of his one friend, the pyromaniac brother Saul Femm (Brember Wills) — Whale assembled probably the greatest all-star cast ever put together in a horror film, with Melvyn Douglas, Raymond Massey and Charles Laughton as the three men stranded at the titular “old dark house” overnight (there are also two women involved — Gloria Stuart as Massey’s wife and Lillian Bond as a chorus girl who transfers her affections from Laughton to Douglas during the evening) and Ernest Thesiger, Eva Moore and Wills as the Femms (the craziest, most anti-social family ever created by a fiction writer — in this case J. B. Priestley, whose source novel for this film was called Benighted — since Edgar Allan Poe made up the Ushers).
Thesiger plays Roderick Femm, Jr. (the “Jr.” is unstated,
but we do meet a Roderick Femm, Sr. in the film — more on that later), a withdrawn aesthete whose nomenclatory
similarity to Poe’s Roderick Usher is probably no coincidence. Thesiger was one
of the great horror actors; when he says, “Have a potato,” it sounds as
sinister as most actors do when they say, “I’m going to kill you.” Moore is his
sister, Rebecca Femm, a religious fanatic (the constant gibes at Christianity
throughout this film are probably no coincidence, either, given that the
director was Gay) who points to Gloria Stuart’s filmy white dress — and then at
her even filmier white skin — and tells her that age and sin will ruin them in
time. Even though all the Femms are senior citizens, their father is still
alive; Roderick Femm, Sr. is 100 years old, bedridden — and, in an interesting
streak of Whale casting, is actually played by a 102-year-old woman, Elspeth Dudgeon, whom Whale found in Britain and
brought here especially for the role (although, to preserve her apparent
maleness on screen, Whale credited the performance to “John Dudgeon”). It’s the father who explains to us that
the brutish butler Morgan is on staff because his strength is needed to protect
the house and its inhabitants against the even stronger evil brother Saul (the
only Femm, it seems, who had a first name beginning with a letter other than
“R”) — who turns out (surprise!) to be a seemingly harmless old man, who in
fact (double surprise!) turns out to be a maniac who corners Douglas in his
cell-like room (he’d been kept locked up for years, but on the night our guests
arrived Morgan got drunk and, frustrated when his attempt to rape Gloria Stuart
was foiled, let Saul out), quotes him the passage in the Bible about the original Saul’s murder attempt on David, throws a knife at
him and sets fire to the top story of the house. Eventually the fire goes out
(apparently put out by the driving rainstorm that led our heroes to seek
shelter at Chez Femm in the first place), everybody finally falls asleep out of
sheer exhaustion (except Saul, who is killed in a fight with Douglas, who is
injured) and they all wake up in the morning to a bright, sunny English day.
The Old Dark House is
one of Whale’s four horror masterpieces of the early 1930’s, and — at least in
England — it was as popular as the other three (General Films, Universal’s
British distributor, made it a regular Sunday night feature at theatres
throughout Britain from 1932 to 1945). Somehow, it mysteriously disappeared,
only to resurface in 1970 — I saw it for the first time at the San Francisco
Film Festival of that year, at 1 a.m. in a darkened theatre (this is one movie
that really should be seen at night in a theatre — it loses some of its
nervous, nervy appeal on TV), and again in the late 1970’s at the UC Theatre in
Berkeley (the northernmost outpost of the Landmark chain). It turned out to be
one of those films whose copyright was grabbed by Raymond Rohauer, who did film
buffs a great service by rescuing from oblivion some of the greatest movies of
all time (including Buster Keaton’s silent masterpieces and Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr), but who also locked his treasures away from the
world for years with the manic intensity of a Femm — only recently have the
Keatons Rohauer controlled finally made
it to home video, and one suspects it will be a while before The Old
Dark House likewise surfaces on cassette.
(A remake I’ve never seen from 1963 — which starred Tom Poston, and whose
director, William Castle, offered Karloff a chance to repeat his original role,
which Karloff turned down because the script was terrible and too far removed
from the original — circulated on TV for years.) A pity, given how
comprehensively MCA has been restoring so many of the Universal horror classics
to well-deserved video circulation (including such oddities as the
Spanish-language Dracula) —
especially given the historical importance of The Old Dark House as Charles Laughton’s first feature-length film[1]
(and Raymond Massey’s second, and first in the U.S. — its only predecessor was
the 1931 British film The Speckled Band,
in which he played Sherlock Holmes), though Laughton is almost unrecognizable
with a full shock of dark hair
and a thick Welsh accent! — 5/15/95
•••••
I called Charles, made some pancakes and — as a Hallowe’en
celebration — went over to see Charles with two of the quirkier horror films
ever made by Hollywood, The Old Dark House
(virtually a British picture in exile since the director, writer and most of
the cast were British and it took place in the British countryside) and The
Seventh Victim. Charles liked both movies,
though he was a little put off by their abrupt endings — certainly James
Whale’s spoof of all the old-house movies to that time (and, for that matter,
since) and Val Lewton’s doom-laden tale of Satanism in contemporary New York
hardly count as typical “horror movies” then or now (and one wonders what 1932 audiences made of The Old Dark House after being lured in to see it by ads stressing the
participation of the star and director of Frankenstein!). — 11/1/96
•••••
Charles and I finally got
to watch a movie, and I reached back to the early years of Universal’s talking horror
films again and ran The Old Dark House, an unsung masterpiece James Whale made in 1932 that, since it doesn’t
really have much of a plot, offers far more of a showcase for Whale’s quirky
wit than just about any of his other films (though The Bride of
Frankenstein remains his masterpiece in the
genre). There’s really not much
more story to it than a motley group of five travelers, in two cars — first
Philip and Margaret Waverton (Raymond Massey and Gloria Stuart) and their
friend Roger Penderel (Melvyn Douglas, second-billed); then self-made man Sir
William Porterhouse (Charles Laughton, in his first American film) and his
(platonic) companion Gladys Duquesne, nèe Perkins (Lillian Bond) — are driving through the back country of Wales
when a ferocious rainstorm forces them to stop for the night at the home of the
sinister Femm family: brother Horace (Ernest Thesiger coming off as what Truman
Capote would have been like if he’d made it to his 80’s), his religious-fanatic
sister Rebecca (Eva Moore), their father Roderick (played by an actor who was
billed as John Dudgeon but was really the centenarian British actress Elspeth Dudgeon, given outrageously phony whiskers and a
male first name to pass herself off as a man) and their older brother Saul
(Brember Wills), whom they keep locked up.
In order to make sure Saul doesn’t
get out, they need to have a fierce-looking butler, Morgan (Boris Karloff,
top-billed but still under the title), who like the Frankenstein monster (at
least in the first Universal Frankenstein) is mute except for inchoate grunts and moans. (When Penderel and the
Wavertons arrive at the Femm manse
and Morgan greets them at the door with such noises, Penderel says, “Even Welsh
ought not to sound like that!”) About all that happens during the evening is
that Morgan gets the hots for Margaret Waverton and tries to rape her, but
Philip fortunately saves his wife by throwing an elaborate lantern at the
butler; and later on Morgan lets Saul out of the locked room — and he turns out
(surprise!) to be a mild-mannered little old man who’s really (double
surprise!) a pyromaniac who attempts to set the Femm home on fire by lighting
some of the heavy wall curtains with a log from the fireplace. (He tried to do
this once before but this time around is stopped well short of causing any
danger for the other people in the film.) Eventually one of the guests kills
Saul in self-defense, Morgan gets a sad scene when he’s shown cradling his dead
friend Saul in his arms (the one best bit of acting Karloff did in a film that
otherwise really didn’t challenge him all that much), day breaks, the travelers
leave — in the meantime Gladys has transferred her affections from Porterhouse
to Penderel, and leaves with him — and the Femms go back to being the Mother of
All Dysfunctional Families. I can’t separate my feelings about The
Old Dark House from the context in which I
first saw it: at the end of a long day at the 1970 San Francisco Film Festival
— I’d sneaked in and sat in the theatre as they ran movie after movie, culminating
with this and Mystery of the Wax Museum. Both were recent rediscoveries at the time and hadn’t been seen
publicly in decades — Mystery not
since its initial release in 1933 and Old Dark House not since 1945, when Universal’s British
distributor, General Film, withdrew it because all the prints had worn out —
and I was sitting there in the Palace of Fine Arts theatre wondering how the
hell I was going to get home since the last buses back to Marin County had long
stopped running by the time the film ended. (I walked home about halfway across
the Golden Gate Bridge and was apprehended by a police officer, who took me the
rest of the way home and said he’d been inclined to let me go but I’d said
something that made him feel like I was mocking him — that early in my life my tongue was already getting me
into trouble with authority figures!)
It struck me then as the scariest film
I’d ever seen, albeit in a low-keyed, un-obvious way — there aren’t any real
horror sequences in it but it’s spooky as all get-out thanks to Whale’s superb
direction, a marvelous script by Benn W. Levy (and an uncredited R. C.
Sherriff) that leaves us almost totally at sea as to what’s going to happen
next, wonderfully atmospheric cinematography by Arthur Edeson, almost Caligari-ish sets (Universal’s art department head, Charles
D. Hall, is the only name credited) and an overall combination of spookiness
and cheekiness that works surprisingly well. About the only disappointment in The
Old Dark House is how little Boris Karloff
has to do: he has surprisingly little screen time, the heavy hairpiece and
beard he wears in character as Morgan gives him little room for facial
expressiveness, he doesn’t get a chance to use his voice and a couple of his
scenes — a quick succession of three ever-closer shots of his face and the
attempted rape of Margaret — are all too obviously rehashes of his work in Frankenstein (there’s even a written prologue to the film
explaining that the mad butler in this movie and the “mechanical monster” —
sic; he was actually electrical —
in Frankenstein were indeed
played by the same actor), but the rest of the film is so good and the cast is
probably the most stellar ever assembled for a horror film (Melvyn Douglas,
Raymond Massey and Charles
Laughton! Only The Ghoul, with
Karloff, Ralph Richardson, Cedric Hardwicke and Ernest Thesiger, even comes
close). The Old Dark House is a
first-rate film, easily on a par with Whale’s three better-known Universal
horrors (Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and The Bride of Frankenstein) and worth being better known than it is. — 10/25/08
•••••
Last night Turner Classic Movies celebrated Hallowe’en by
showing a marathon of films with haunted-house themes, and I watched four of
them, starting with The Old Dark House,
the second of the three films in which James Whale directed Boris Karloff and
the first time in his life Karloff got top billing. (In Frankenstein he was billed fourth and the opening credits listed
the actor playing the Monster as “?”; only the closing “A Good Cast Is Worth
Repeating” credits bore Karloff’s name.) Whale made this in 1932, starting with
a novel by J. B. Priestley (whose name is misspelled “Priestly” on the opening
credits) called Benighted about a
group of travelers stranded in Wales on a dark, stormy night who take refuge in
— you guessed it — an old dark house. Universal was already big on
old-dark-house thrillers — in 1927 they’d had one of their biggest hits of the
silent era with an adaptation of John Willard’s 1922 Broadway play The
Cat and the Canary, about an elaborate plot
to drive an heiress crazy (and thereby disqualify her from the inheritance)
through making it seem like the old dark house she was about to inherit was
haunted. They’d remade The Cat and the Canary in 1930 as The Cat Creeps (this version is lost but a few minutes survive as
clips in a Universal short called Boo! and the UCLA Film and Television Archive holds Vitaphone sound discs
for four of the film’s seven or eight reels), and Whale decided to follow up Frankenstein with an old-dark-house thriller of his own that,
like The Bride of Frankenstein
three years later, would at once exploit the genre and spoof it.
He also recruited a stunning all-star
cast: Raymond Massey and Gloria Stuart as Phillip and Margaret Waverton, a
young married couple who are traveling through the Welsh back country when they
get caught up in the storm; Melvyn Douglas as their ne’er-do-well friend
Penderel, who’s riding with them in their back seat; Charles Laughton as Sir
William Porterhouse, who responded to his late wife being snubbed at a
high-class social function (and dying of heartbreak shortly afterwards, at
least the way he tells the story) by determining to become rich himself; and
Lillian Bond as former chorus girl Gladys Duquesne, nèe Perkins, who’s become Porterhouse’s mistress but
doesn’t seem to mind because he’s never wanted her “that way.” (Even in the
so-called “pre-Code” era of loose Production Code enforcement, this had to be
obliquely hinted at by Whale’s screenwriter, Benn W. Levy.) Of course, given
the real-life sexual orientation of both Charles Laughton and James Whale, an
informed modern viewer will immediately think of some other reason why Porterhouse would keep his relationship
with his mistress strictly platonic! These oddly assorted travelers — the
Wavertons and Penderel in one car, Porterhouse and Gladys in another — get
stuck and have to seek shelter at the ancestral home of the Femms, a family
Priestley and Levy pretty clearly patterned on Edgar Allan Poe’s Ushers, down
to having the centenarian paterfamilias (played by an actor credited as “John Dudgeon” who was really veteran
British character actress Elspeth Dudgeon, though Whale listed her as “John” in
the credits to preserve her male incognito) being named Roderick. Roderick Femm had five children, two of whom
died young: the others include Horace Femm (Ernest Thesiger), who basically runs
the house and is able to say innocuous things like “Have a potato” as if he
were saying “I’m about to kill you”; his sister Rebecca (Eva Moore), a
religious fanatic who stops the dinner the Femms are about to offer their
guests by insisting that they say grace first (“My sister believes the roast
beef will be more tender if she invokes the blessing of her god upon it,”
Horace comments dryly in one of those odd swipes at organized religion Whale
loved to insert in his films); and their brother Saul (Brember Wells), who’s
kept in a locked room in the home’s attic much like the mad Mrs. Rochester in
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Boris Karloff plays Morgan, the Femms’ brutish butler, and despite a credit on
the original release assuring potentially skeptical viewers that he was indeed
the same actor as the one who’d played the Monster in Whale’s Frankenstein (“We explain this to settle all disputes in advance,
even though such disputes are a tribute to his great versatility” — a credit
that has, alas, been deleted from the currently available version of the film
from something called the Cohen Media Group) the fact is that the role is
written very much like the Monster. Karloff is non-verbal, though he can emit a
few groans and grunts (Margaret Waverton, hearing Morgan do so when he answers
the door, wonders what language he’s speaking, and her husband says, “Even
Welsh ought not to sound like that”);
there’s a scene in which he breaks into the bedroom of the heroine and menaces
her the way he did in Frankenstein;
and in one sequence Whale even does the same three quick cuts to ever-closer
views of Karloff’s face he used to introduce the living Monster. Penderel and
Gladys end up stuck inside one of the cars and spend the night together
something like Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslet did in the 1997 James
Cameron Titanic (and the presence
of Massey and Stuart in this film puts the rest of the cast one degree of
separation from both James Dean
and di Caprio!), and she transfers her affections from Porterhouse to him
(well, why not? At least he’s straight!). Penderel lets Saul Femm out of his prison in the attic, and he
turns out (surprise!) to be a seemingly harmless old eccentric who (double
surprise!) is really a pyromaniac determined to burn down the Femm home. He
gets as far as setting a few of the heavy wall-hanging curtains afire (oddly,
though the Femm home is still standing in the morning there’s no indication of
how the fire was put out) before being killed in a struggle with Penderel in
which they both come plunging down when a railing breaks and they fall from the
top floor to the bottom. There’s a quite touching scene in which Morgan, previously
depicted only as a brute the Femms kept around just to control Saul, embraces
Saul’s body — one of the depictions of intimate friendship between men the late
film critic William K. Everson suggested were reflections of Whale’s
homosexuality. In the end the five (relatively) normal people leave in the
morning, not much the worse for wear, and the surviving Femms bid them adieu
(there’s been a hint that Roderick Femm died peacefully in his/her sleep) and
life goes on.
Though The Bride of Frankenstein is Whale’s greatest horror film, The Old
Dark House is one of his most uniquely
personal works, neither a serious horror film nor a horror-comedy but a weird
blend of the two, superbly executed; cinematographer Arthur Edeson keeps his
camera in almost constant motion around the Femm home and shoots in the
high-contrast style that would later become associated with film noir. Wisely, Whale totally eschews background music;
instead of an elaborate score telling us moment by moment what we’re supposed
to be feeling, he “scores” the film with just sound effects: wind machines and
storm noises. I first saw The Old Dark House at the 1970 San Francisco Film Festival, when it had
just been rediscovered — after being shown regularly in British cinemas as a
Sunday night special by Universal’s British distributor, General Film, until
1945, it disappeared when J. B. Priestley, who’d just leased instead of selling the rights to his story to
Universal (a practice far more common after World War II than it was in 1932),
reclaimed them when the lease expired in 1957 and so the film disappeared from
circulation and wasn’t included in the Shock Theatre and Son of Shock packages by which most of the classic Universal
horror films made their TV debuts in the late 1950’s. It was accompanied by
another long-thought-lost early-1930’s horror, the 1933 Warner Bros. production
Mystery of the Wax Museum, and
they showed it at midnight (and the overall spookiness was just enhanced by my
uncertainty as to how I was going to get home from the screening!), and it’s
been one of my all-time favorite films ever since. — 11/1/17
[1] — It wasn’t;
Laughton’s feature-film debut had occurred in England three years earlier in
German expat director E. A. Dupont’s Piccadilly.
