by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark
Afterwards I played Charles the new Blu-Ray disc of a 1929 film from Universal, The Last Warning, directed by Paul Leni, who had become an international star filmmaker from his 1924 film Waxworks. Waxworks was an all-star production from UFA studios in Leni’s native Germany that featured Emil Jannings, Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt and William Dieterle in a story that used the device of a wax-figure exhibit in an amusement park to tell various historical tales of such gruesome figures as Caliph Haroun-al-Raschid, Ivan the Terrible and Jack the Ripper. Dieterle plays “The Poet,” who narrates the stories of these people as part of the show given by the owner of the wax-figures exhibit. Universal hired Leni in 1927 and for his first film in the U.S. gave him The Cat and the Canary, an old barnstorming play about a young heiress being subjected to a plot to drive her insane and thereby disqualify her from her inheritance. The Cat and the Canary was a huge hit and is remembered today as a successful fusion of Leni’s stylized visual style with Hollywood conventions.
Leni’s next film, The Chinese Parrot, is based on Earl Derr Biggers’ second Charlie Chan novel and is regrettably lost today (though less likely silent films have turned up and so hope springs eternal), not only because it was apparently an equally interesting showcase for Leni’s visual style but because Charlie Chan was actually played by an Asian, Japanese actor Sojin Kamiyama. Leni’s third American film was The Man Who Laughs, for which Universal wanted to re-team the stars of The Phantom of the Opera, Lon Chaney and Mary Philbin – only Chaney was by then an MGM star and they couldn’t reach a loanout deal, so they hired Conrad Veidt to play the part of Gwynplaine, a prince facially altered by gypsies so he could do nothing but grin (a Jack P. Pierce makeup later copied by Batman creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger for the character of the Joker). It did well but probably not as well as it could have if they’d been able to get Chaney for the male lead – Veidt was great at stylized villainy but he couldn’t sound the pathos in characters like this the way Chaney could – and if it hadn’t got caught in the silent-to-sound transition. Originally shot as a silent, The Man Who Laughs had a synchronized recorded score attached and a few scenes in which human voices are heard “wild” (i.e., not specifically connected to the picture), notably one in which crowd noises are dubbed in as Philbin, in her role as a gypsy dancing girl, is about to perform.
The Last Warning turned out to be Leni’s last film – shortly after it was made he died at age 44 of blood poisoning from an abcessed tooth – and it re-teamed him with Laura La Plante, the leading lady of The Cat and the Canary and an actress Universal tried for years to build into a star (while they fired the young Bette Davis after three minor roles and three loan-outs) in a story that begins with a performance of a play called The Snare that ends abruptly when its leading actor, John Woodford (D’Arcy Corrigan), dies for real during an intense confrontation scene as he’s reaching for a prop candlestick. The scandal drives the theatre out of business for years (exactly how many years we’re not told by writers Alfred Cohn, Thomas Fallon, J. G. Hawks, Robert F. Hill and Tom Reed, adapting a novel called The House of Fear by Wadsworth Camp) until it’s suddenly reopened by a mysterious producer named Arthur McHugh (Montagu Love) who plans to reunite the original cast of The Snare and put the play on anew – only the same bad guy who knocked off Woodford is still around and targets Harvey Carleton (Roy D’Arcy), who’s been cast in the dead Woodford’s old part. Leni’s directorial touches are evident mainly in the prismatic montage sequences that show Broadway at play while the deadly goings-on are happening at the Woodford theatre and the almost relentless camera movements that follow the actors.
The Last Warning was released as a part-talkie with dialogue sequences as well as a synchronized music-and-effects soundtrack, but it also went out in an alternate all-silent version for the rapidly shrinking handful of theatres that still hadn’t wired for sound by 1929. It’s not clear whether the part-talkie survives, but if it does I’d rather have seen it than the one Universal just restored, which is the silent version (pieced together from partial 35mm and 16mm prints – and you can tell which scenes came from which print) in reasonably good image quality, but with a new and sometimes anachronistic score by Arthur Barrow. Frankly, if the original soundtrack records still exist I’d have preferred either to have heard them or been given the choice – especially since Leni didn’t live long enough to direct a full-sound feature and therefore the dialogue scenes for The Last Warning (assuming he shot them, which wasn’t always the case with sound sequences inserted into otherwise silent films) would be the only time Leni worked with sound. Reviews of the time praised Leni’s directorial style (though the borrowings from The Phantom of the Opera – notably the collapse of a backstage staircase when the bad guy cuts the rope suspending it the way the Phantom cut the chain to a chandelier, and the final scene in which the suspected killer does a monkey-like series of climbs through the theatre’s rafters and keeps evading capture – are pretty obvious) but criticized the film for being virtually incomprehensible plot-wise. In 1939 Universal did an hour-long “B” remake which reverted to Wadsworth Camp’s original title, The House of Fear, and once again hired an expatriate German director (Joe May), for a film which made a lot more sense – in that version it was made clear that the mystery producer was actually a police official who had seized on the original murder as a cold case and was restaging the play to solve it at last – but didn’t have the stylistics of Leni’s film.
