by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008, 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran
Charles the first and last co-starring films of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi:
the 1934 The Black Cat (there was
another one just seven years later, with Lugosi and Basil Rathbone, but neither
had to do either with the Poe story that gave them their titles or each other)
and the 1945 The Body Snatcher.
In his book The Universal Story, Clive
Hirschhorn calls The Black Cat “a
truly bizarre concoction of mayhem, necrophilia, satanism and sadism.” Made
just when the Hollywood glasnost
era was drawing to a close and the Production Code was beginning to be strictly
enforced, The Black Cat was
heavily butchered by the censors (even more heavily in Britain than it was in
America — and the British version also changed the title to The
House of Doom). As a result of the
alterations — and perhaps also weaknesses in the original material (the story
was the creation of director Edgar G. Ulmer and writer Peter Ruric; the two
collaborated on the basic storyline, Ruric wrote the script based on their
joint story and Ulmer directed) — the film really makes almost no sense, and
(as Charles pointed out later) is further handicapped by the fact that there
aren’t any truly sympathetic characters in it: Karloff is despicably evil;
Lugosi is so twitchy and crazy that one can’t root for him, either (had his character been drawn more
sympathetically the film might have been a good deal stronger dramatically);
and the “normal” leads (David Manners and Jacqueline Wells, later Julie
Bishop), unlike the ones in the very similar The Old Dark House, are drawn so blandly that one can’t really root for them either. The Black Cat has its pleasures: a truly frightening makeup for
Karloff (including the same half-Mohawk he wore in The Criminal Code!), an unusually violent climax for a 1934 film
(Lugosi says he’s going to skin Karloff alive, and he actually begins to do so on
camera!), stunning cinematography by John
Mescall, atmospheric direction by Ulmer and a futuristic setting (in the modern
house Karloff has designed and built over a battlefield of World War I) that at
least gives the film novelty value — for once it’s an old-dark-house movie that
isn’t set in a moldering old
castle! And it’s nice to see enough of the Hollywood glasnost spirit left that Karloff and his wife (Lucille Lund
— she’s Lugosi’s daughter and, in one of the kinkiest plot twists in any 1930’s Hollywood film, her mother was the wife
Karloff seduced away from Lugosi, and when she died her daughter took mom’s
place in Karloff’s bed) could actually sleep in the same bed, and he could be
shown getting out of it when Lugosi, Manners and/or Wells came a-calling. —
10/26/98
•••••
The 1934 Black Cat, an original story by director Edgar G. Ulmer and
his co-writer, Peter Ruric, is a bizarre film that acknowledges the horror
conventions and runs roughshod over them. I remember that when I was first
discovering the Universal horror classics on TV in the late 1960’s and early
1970’s it was one movie that put me off because I couldn’t understand it. Like Murders
in the Rue Morgue, it was heavily cut by
movie censors — even in the supposedly “pre-Code” era it was hacked to shreds
by censors both in the U.S. (surprisingly for a state with as cosmopolitan a
reputation as New York, their censor board was one of the toughest; it was,
after all, the state where Mae West served a 10-day jail sentence for playing a
prostitute in a play she wrote called Sex and noted the irony that she was in for playing a prostitute and
almost all her fellow inmates were there for being one) and abroad — including Britain, where the title
was changed to The House of Doom
(probably because, as Charles noted when he and I first watched this film
together, because in Britain black cats are a symbol of good luck, not bad) and most of the final scene was
surgically removed with the same precision with which Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Bela
Lugosi) starts literally skinning Hjalmar Pöelzig (Boris Karloff) alive at the
end. The Black Cat — which, as
Ulmer freely admitted to later interviewers, had virtually nothing to do with
the Poe story that gave it its name (three black cats, owned by Karloff’s
character, appear in the movie and Lugosi kills one of them) — is a movie that
upends the horror conventions as they’d already become established in plenty of
movies, particularly previous Universal productions. It starts out à
la James Whale’s 1932 masterpiece The
Old Dark House, with honeymooning couple
Peter (David Manners, less — pardon the pun — mannered than usual) and Joan
(Jacqueline Wells, who later changed her name to Julie Bishop and had a
fair-to-middling career at Warner Bros.) Allison, who are taking the Orient
Express to Hungary when Werdegast crashes their compartment. (It would be
interesting to make a list of all the films that have taken place, wholly or
partly, on the Orient Express.)
Only the bus that’s supposed to be taking them
from the train station to their hotel crashes, the driver is killed and they’re
forced to seek shelter, not in an
old dark house, but in a new dark
house built by Pöelzig on the foundations of the castle of Marmaros, site of a
terrible battle in World War I (in 1934, before World War II, it would have
been called “The Great War”) in which over 10,000 people died and Lugosi’s
character was taken prisoner, kept in a hellhole of a prison that most people
never got out of alive, and when the war was over he traced Pöelzig all over
the world. Werdegast is after Pöelzig not only because Pöelzig, like Benedict
Arnold, betrayed his country (apparently the Austro-Hungarian Empire) by
selling out the fortress of Marmaros to the enemy (in this case the Russians),
he also seduced Werdegast’s wife by telling her Werdegast was dead. Now the
wife, Kaaren, is dead — though Pöelzig keeps her preserved, standing up, in a
glass container I think Ulmer and Ruric copied from Vladimir Lenin’s tomb in
Moscow (though Lenin is at least allowed to be horizontal), and he’s since
married his late wife’s daughter, also named Kaaren (Lucille Lund), who’s shown
sleeping with him in a bed that, like the rest of the house, is up-to-date and
clearly influenced by the designs of the Bauhaus. (Ulmer, a designer in 1920’s
Germany, knew all about the Bauhaus and probably was friends with some of the
people involved in it.) The idea of having the young couple trapped by a storm
and a car crash not in an old dark house but a new dark house (vividly realized by art director Charles
Hall and chillingly lit by John Mescall, who would shoot The Bride of
Frankenstein the next year) was quite a
departure from Universal’s usual formulae, and so is the sheer extent of Karloff’s
evil and the decision to make
Lugosi’s character a mostly sympathetic one. He’s supposed to be a
psychiatrist, but he’s clearly a bundle of neuroses himself and at least one
imdb.com contributor gave this film points for being one of the first more or
less accurately to depict post-traumatic stress disorder (though of course it
wasn’t called that yet). It’s interesting that this film, which gives Lugosi a
largely sympathetic role, was made the same year as the Principal
feature-serial The Return of Chandu,
which cast him as a hero and romantic lead (a challenge he rose to brilliantly) — Lugosi was a much rangier actor
than he usually got a chance to show.
It was also unusual for 1934 (though it’s
become one of the horror film’s most annoying clichés since) to have the lead
villain be a Satanist — we catch than when he’s shown sitting up in that
high-tech bed reading a book on Satanic rites (a sort of Book of
Common Prayer for devil-worshipers) that
describes one which requires a human sacrifice — though The Black Cat is close enough to horror conventions you don’t need
more than one guess to tell who the destined human sacrifice is. Yep, it’s Joan
Allison, tied to one of those sideways crosses and about to be killed for the
greater glory of Satan (and it’s a nice touch that the members of Pöelzig’s
Satanic congregation look depressingly ordinary and normal — just like the
sun-worshipers in Alfred Hitchcock’s first version of The Man Who
Knew Too Much, also made in 1934) when
Werdegast crashes the party, rescues her and starts skinning Pöelzig alive
(though no blood is drawn, the preliminaries are shown surprisingly
graphically, including a shot in which Werdegast tears open Pöelzig’s shirt and
reveals how muscular Karloff was in his early 40’s, when he made this film —
all those years hauling sacks of cement had obviously bulked him up and given
him the strength to handle the 65 pounds of costume, padding and makeup he’d
had to wear as the Frankenstein monster), only Peter Allison thinks he’s
assaulting Joan and shoots him by mistake. The film ends with the dynamite,
secreted under Pöelzig’s home when it was still a wartime fortress, causing a
massive explosion as the dying Werdegast sends the innocent Allisons out just
in time before dying and taking Pöelzig and “your whole rotten cult” with him.
(Writers William Hurlbut and John L. Balderston used essentially the same
ending for The Bride of Frankenstein
the next year, with the Monster in Werdegast’s role as the character who sends
the nice young couple away before blowing up the laboratory before telling Dr.
Pretorious and his would-be bride, “We … belong … dead!”)
The Black Cat remains a strange and off-putting film today, and though the legend is
that Ulmer’s sexual antics helped collapse his career — he was courting his
script girl Shirley Castle even though he was (according to an imdb.com
“Trivia” contributor) already married to a Universal executive and/or
(according to other sources I’ve read) yet another sex interest of Carl
Laemmle, Jr., and though Ulmer married her and they worked together for the
rest of his career, this supposedly got him blacklisted from all the major
studios and forced him to work at ultra-cheap PRC (where in the mid-1940’s he
made his best films, Bluebeard, Out of the Night a.k.a. Strange Illusion — a modern-dress version of Hamlet — and Detour). There’s one story that Ulmer based the character of Pöelzig on
director Fritz Lang, whom he hated for his sadistic treatment of everybody on
hs films (his female stars in particular); there’s another story that, despite
his interest in Shirley Castle, Ulmer also had the hots for Lucille Lund and
one day left her literally tied
up on the set as revenge for her rejecting him. (Just in case you still thought
the shit Harvey Weinstein pulled was anything new in the movie business … )
According to imdb.com, The Black Cat
was one of the three highest-grossing releases Universal made that year — but
the other sources I’ve seen said it flopped, partly because of the censorship
problems and partly because 1934 audiences just didn’t understand it. The
latter is more believable; despite all the issues Ulmer might have created for
himself by where he put (or wanted to put) his dick, given the way Hollywood
worked (and still works) all his sexual shenanigans would have been forgiven if
his film had been a blockbuster hit at the level of Frankenstein or Dracula instead of an off-putting cult film, the sort of thing that not many
people like but the ones who do
like it like it fiercely and devotedly.
