The Old Dark House (Universal, 1932)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Impatient Virgin I cracked open a Blu-Ray disc I’d just bought of James Whale’s next film in sequence, The Old Dark House, a truly great movie which for years was the stepchild of Whale’s four horror classics (the other three being Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and The Bride of Frankenstein) because for decades it was unshown. The Old Dark House began as a novel by British author J. B. Priestley, published in his own country in 1927 under the title Benighted but not available in the U.S. for two years after that. The American publisher changed the title to The Old Dark House because of the fear U.S. audiences wouldn’t know what “benighted” meant (though that word appears in the dialogue for the film) and it was a best-seller that seemed to have the makings of an important and commercial movie. Universal had already become known for movies taking place in old, dark houses filled with eccentric characters, notably German director Paul Leni’s 1927 hit The Cat and the Canary (Leni, making his first American film, took a typical Broadway melodrama about an heiress who’s deliberately being driven insane by relatives who covet her fortune and threw at it the entire armamentarium of expressionistic effects he’d learned in his native Germany) and Rupert Julian’s 1930 part-sound remake, The Cat Creeps.

Meanwhile, Universal had offered Boris Karloff a long-term contract after the huge success of Frankenstein, though they had hardly used him to advantage – they had given him the part of a New York nightclub owner in a gangster “B” called Night World (which contained a musical number called “Who’s Your Little Whosis?,” choreographed and directed by Busby Berkeley, not a name one expects to see associated with a Karloff film!) and cast him as himself in an episode of their popular “Cohens and Kellys” series, The Cohens and the Kellys in Hollywood. The Old Dark House was to be his second all-out horror production for Universal, and the original prints included this notice even before the studio logo and the official credits: “Karloff, the mad butler in this production, is the same Karloff who created the part of the mechanical monster in ‘Frankenstein.’ We explain this to settle all disputes in advance, even though such disputes are a tribute to his great versatility.” Alas, the Cohen Media Group, the current owners of the rights, have deleted this credit, ostensibly because Morgan, Karloff’s character in The Old Dark House, is not all that different from the monster: they’re both in heavy makeup and are mute except for making pre-verbal groans, grunts and screeches. But it still seems unfair to be deprived of a quirky credit the original audiences for this film got to see. The original ads for The Old Dark House also began Universal’s practice of billing Karloff only under his last name – later films would be promoted with trailers which billed him as “KARLOFF – The Uncanny!,” as if he were himself some monstrous being instead of simply a normal human actor with a special gift for these sorts of roles.

With a British setting and a mostly British cast as well as a British director, original story writer and screenwriter (James Whale’s friend Benn W. Levy), The Old Dark House often seems like a British film in exile, filled with scares and also the dry wit the Brits love in their humor that leavens the horror and makes the scary parts that much scarier. I confess I can’t separate The Old Dark House from the odd circumstances in which I first saw it: at the San Francisco Film Festival in 1970 on a late-night double bill with another then-recently rediscovered horror classic, Mystery of the Wax Museum (the 1933 film, the last feature made in two-strip Technicolor, which was more famously remade in 1953 as House of Wax, the first horror film in 3-D – but Mystery is a much, much better movie), and the uncertainty as to just how I was to get home from the screening only added to the unsettled mood the film put me in as I watched a movie I’d never heard of that turned out to be a masterpiece, fully the equal of the Whale horror movies I had heard of before: Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and The Bride of Frankenstein.

The Old Dark House takes place on the proverbial dark and stormy night in Wales in which three people are caught in a major storm: they are married couple, Philip (Raymond Massey, who was Canadian but counted as “British” by extension because Canada is part of the British Commonwealth) and Margaret (Gloria Stuart) Waverton, and their friend Penderel (Melvyn Douglas), who it’s mentioned in passing is part of the so-called “Lost Generation” of the 1920’s because he’s suffering from what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder from his experiences in World War I. (World War I would be a lodestar for James Whale: he served in the British army until he was captured by the Germans, he spent the last two years in a POW camp where the only entertainment available was amateur theatricals the prisoners wrote, directed and acted in themselves – which Whale enjoyed so much he decided to make the theatre his career after the war – his first big stage success was the World War I play Journey’s End and his first three films, Hell’s Angels, Journey’s End and Waterloo Bridge, were all about the war.) An avalanche (staged surprisingly effectively by Universai’s special effects person, John P. Fulton) cuts them off and forces them to seek shelter at the Femm family home. Later they’re joined by two other people who’ve been stranded in the storm, working-class kid turned financier Sir William Porterhouse (Charles Laughton) and his companion Gladys Perkins (Lillian Bond), a former chorus girl who in order to pursue a career in showbiz took the name “Gladys Duquesne.” (This reminds one of Mae Clarke’s character in Waterloo Bridge, who also took a French-sounding last name, “Deauville,” to further her career as an entertainer.) Of course, when Gladys says that Sir William is nice to her because he only wants her as a companion and never tries to “do” anything with her, Charles and I couldn't help but joke, “Of course not! He’s Charles Laughton! He’s Gay!”

The Femms themselves, as I said in a previous blog post on The Old Dark House, are the most relentlessly dysfunctional fictional family since Edgar Allan Poe made up the Ushers: their apparent head is Horace Femm (Ernest Thesiger, an actor Whale had known in England for over a decade when he brought him over for this, his first American film; later he would brilliantly portray the mad but also quite personable and charming Dr. Praetorius in The Bride of Frankenstein), a prissy and evidently repressed old man. His sister Rebecca (Eva Moore) is partially deaf and a hugely judgmental Christian who in one of the film’s most remarkable scenes points to Gloria Stuart’s diaphanous white dress (an outrageously impractical garment she had to put on because her other clothes got wet in the storm before they arrived – James Curtis’s Whale biography ridiculed him and his costume designer for putting her in something so ridiculous for the environment and missed the point that she’s wearing that because all her other clothes are wet) and her even more white skin and says that both of them will rot and she will be consigned to hell unless she finds God in a hurry. Rebecca mentions a long-dead Femm sister named Rachel who supposedly led a dissolute lifestyle and died in her 20’s, and there’s a fourth Femm sibling: Saul (Brember Wills), who’s kept in a room whose doors are locked from the outside because if he were let out he’d try to burn the Femm house down.

Though all these people are quite old, it turns out their father, Sir Roderick Femm – an obvious reference to Poe’s Roderick Usher – is still alive, and when two of the visitors discover him, ancient and bedridden, it is he who gives them the key exposition about who Saul Femm is and explains that, though Morgan is nothing but a brute, they have to keep him on staff to keep Saul under control. The other surprise about Sir Roderick Femm is that, though he’s a male character, Whale cast him with a woman, an aged veteran of the British stage named Elspeth Dudgeon, though to preserve her male incognito he not only had makeup artist Jack Pierce put spirit-gum whiskers on her face, he billed her in the credits as John Dudgeon. During The Old Dark House Morgan the butler gets drunk and tries to rape Gloria Stuart’s character – it’s Penderel, not her husband, who pulls him off and rescues her – and Morgan also unlocks the door to Saul’s room and lets him out. Saul turns out [surprise!] to be a harmless-looking old man who [double surprise!] is as crazy as the father said he was, babbling his delusions in a sort of matter-of-fact way that’s quite like how real crazy people talk and unlike how the movies usually depicted insanity, then or since, and ultimately grabbing a torch and setting fire to two old curtains in the house. In a major plot hole, the next scene takes place at daybreak, with the storm having ended and the roads dried out enough that the unwelcome guests can leave, but there’s no sign of the fire and we have no idea how it got put out. During the night chorus-girl Gladys has transferred her affections from the rich Sir William to the broke Penderel – a development Sir William is downright philosophical about – but that and the death of Saul in his struggle with Penderel are about the only things that have changed the status quo from the beginning of the film.

The Old Dark House is very much more a film about character than plot, and as a Boris Karloff vehicle it leaves a lot to be desired (about the only scene in which he shows pathos is when he sadly cradles the body of his dead friend Saul) and was probably a disappointment to viewers after his still impressive performance in Frankenstein. But it’s also one of the fullest expressions of Whale’s peculiar dry-wit sense of humor. Even in a film as blatantly patched together as The Impatient Maiden one can see Whale’s unusual ability to blend drama and humor, making films that even if they aren’t out-and-out laugh-inducing are still stunning in their smooth ability to make myself laugh, cry and fear at the same time. According to James Curtis’s Whale biography, The Old Dark House was a financial disappointment for Universal – though fortunately Karloff’s next big horror spectacular, The Mummy (superbly directed by Dracula cinematographer Karl Freund and featuring a script by the great John L. Balderston perfectly balanced between horror and romantic fantasy, which gave Karloff not only a chance to use his full speaking voice but to project love, warmth and the pathos of a doomed romance, opportunities he wouldn’t get that often as he later went pretty much from one cookie-cutter “horror” role to another), was a huge hit and restored his commercial reputation.

Maybe The Old Dark House wasn’t a hit in the U.S., but in Britain it did so well that General Films, Universal’s British distributor, had it in near-permanent release as a Sunday night feature from 1932 to 1945, when all the British prints had worn out. The reason it disappeared almost totally from circulation between 1945 and 1970 was that instead of selling Universal the movie rights to his novel outright, J. B. Priestley had leased them to the studio for 25 years, and when the 25 years were up Priestley regained the rights. William Castle licensed them for a 1963 remake which I’ve never seen but which is reported to be ghastly – the delicate balance between comedy and terror Whale got superbly right apparently totally eluded Castle – and the script was so bad that when Castle offered Karloff the chance to repeat his role from the earlier film, Karloff angrily turned it down. The Old Dark House wasn’t re-seen until 1970 and didn’t get on TV until the 1990’s, so it’s taken a long time for this film to return to the public’s attention and gain the reputation it deserves – and as much as I like Boris Karloff and am willing to watch him in virtually anything (even as out-and-out a piece of garbage as one of his last films, Isle of the Snake People), I’ve long argued that the summits of his artistic career are the three films he did for James Whale in the 1930’s (Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, The Bride of Frankenstein) and the three he did for producer Val Lewton in the 1940’s (The Body Snatcher, Isle of the Dead, Bedlam).

And early on during The Old Dark House I mentioned to my husband Charles, “This entire cast is one degree of separation from James Dean and Leonardo di Caprio!” Raymond Massey acted with Dean in East of Eden (1955) and Gloria Stuart was in Titanic (1997), though she was supposed to be the older version of Kate Winslet’s character and therefore had no actual scenes with di Caprio. What I hadn’t realized was that The Old Dark House and Titanic have another thing in common besides Gloria Stuart’s presence: both feature newly come-together couples making love inside a parked car.