The House of Fear (Universal, 1939)

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

Over the last week Charles and I have been exploring a number of “B” movies from the early 1940’s, three of them from grey-label DVD’s and one from an above-ground source. After watching Paul Leni’s 1929 thriller The Last Warning – originally released as a part-talkie with synchronized music and sound effects, but presented in Universal’s DVD and Blu-Ray reissue as a silent with a newly composed score – I wanted to revisit The House of Fear, Universal’s 1939 remake with William Gargan as Arthur McHugh, who reopens an old theatre one year after it closed when the star of the play it was performing fell dead in the middle of the show on opening night. The story began life as a novel actually called The House of Fear by Wadsworth Camp, published in 1915; it was then adapted into a play called The Last Warning by Thomas Fallon, which got purchased by Universal and directed by German expatriate Leni (whose last film it was; he died at age 44 of blood poisoning from an abscessed tooth just after finishing it) from a committee-written script (Alfred A. Cohn, J. G. Hawks, Robert F. Hill and Tom Reed).

The 1939 House of Fear had only one screenwriter, Peter Milne, and he made one change in the story that I think improved it. In the Leni film McHugh was just an opportunistic producer seeking to make a quick buck by buying the theatre where the mysterious death occurred, putting on the same play with all the surviving cast members, and promoting that he was staging the play in defiance of the ghost of the dead actor that was supposedly haunting the theatre. In The House of Fear, McHugh is actually a police detective who’s working the original murder as a cold case and hits on the idea of reopening the theatre and staging the same play, Dangerous Currents, with the surviving cast as a means of solving the original crime. As its title suggests, Dangerous Currents is a play about radio – particularly about an egomaniac broadcaster who insists on dredging up a 20-year-old murder case and thereby potentially ruining the lives of the victim’s surviving relatives, much like the 1931 Five Star Final – and the opening sequence shows the murder occurring during the climactic broadcasting scene in an attempt to fool any audience member who remembered the original movie (including Charles and I, who had seen the recent Blu-Ray re-release of The Last Warning recently) that they had updated it to be about a murder taking place in a radio studio during a broadcast instead of in a theatre during a play. Then the camera pulls back to reveal that it was just a play about radio.

Overall, the two films track pretty closely plot-wise, including the identities and motives of the murderers, but I found myself liking The House of Fear considerably better than The Last Warning, if only because dialogue made it quite a bit easier to follow the convoluted plot. Ironically, The House of Fear, like The Last Warning, was directed by a German expatriate, Joe May, who had been a major “name” in German cinema in the early 1920’s – he’d owned his own production company and regularly made vehicles for his wife, actress Mia May – only he fled Germany for the U.S. when the Nazis came to power in 1933 and never had that big a career in this country. After this movie he would make The Invisible Man Returns (1940) – noteworthy for being Vincent Price’s first horror film and for a class-conscious and anti-capitalist script by Hollywood Communist Lester Cole, but otherwise hardly at the level of James Whale’s masterly original from 1933 – and an adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, also from 1940. He later quit the movie business to open a restaurant in Hollywood, but at least according to what I’ve read it was a failure because May, living up to the stereotyped German, told his customers what they should order instead of letting them decide for themselves.

May copies some of Leni’s effects from the earlier film, including having the killer scramble up and down the stage’s rafters à la The Phantom of the Opera (1925) – a film that clearly influenced both versions – but for the most part it’s a surprisingly unatmospheric film for a movie made by a German director from the Weimar era. Still, it’s quite an enjoyable movie and has some unexpected twists and turns – and the antagonism between Gargan’s detective character and his boss at the police department, who’s fretting over how much of the department’s money he’s spending on his production, is well done and one of the most entertaining elements of the film. And if there wasn’t already enough confusion over the various titles of this story and the films, in 1945 Universal recycled the name The House of Fear for one of the later Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies, though its plot (set in an old dark house and nominally based on the Conan Doyle story “The Five Orange Pips”) has nothing to do with this one, but if you’re looking for a grey-label copy of either movie you have to be very careful in ordering to make sure you get the one you want.