The Black Cat (1934)

The Black Cat is one of those pictures that, because of its miniscule budget, could get away with things the big boys wouldn’t dream of attempting. You can find elements of sadism and Satanism in films made before 1934, but locating one with those things plus pedophilia, incest, and necrophilia would make a tougher search. The only title that comes immediately to mind is Alice in Wonderland.  Just kidding.

The film opens in a train station in Mitel Europe. Geography is as blurred in this film as are other elements, but the setting is Austria. Newlywed couple Peter and Joan Alison (David Manners and Jacqueline Wells) are asked to share their train compartment with Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi) who is on his way to visit a man he has hated since World War I. With a hint of reluctance, the couple agrees.

As Joan sleeps, Werdegast, who has alternated between being mysterious and icily polite, stares at her, finally reaching out to move his hand over her hair in a phantom stroking gesture. Peter catches him at this and the doctor apologizes with the explanation that she reminds him of his own wife, lost to him during his stay in a prisoner of war camp. Not for the last time, Peter looks at Werdegast with suspicion.

Arriving at the next station, the three travelers discover that they will now have to share a bus ride. As they roll on through a wicked thunder storm, their driver tells them that the country around them was one of the most horrific battlefields of the late war. Suddenly, he loses control of the vehicle and it crashes, killing him and knocking Joan unconscious. Carrying his wife, Peter follows Werdegast to the home of the man he has traveled to see, Hjalmar Poelzig, Austria’s greatest architect.

At the house, a stark, sterile Bauhaus monstrosity, we see Karloff (as he is billed, with no first name given) for the first time since the cast was introduced before the story began. Then, we just saw the back of his head as he sat at the organ. Now, we see him lying in bed next to a young woman. She is between Karloff and the camera, and the image is blurred slightly as we are looking at the figures through an opaque curtain.

Both figures are on their backs, looking stiff as death. We will be reminded repeatedly that Poelzig is death personified. When he awakens, he sits straight up, like a corpse in a John Carpenter movie. He rises from the bed, wearing black pajamas. It may not be subtle, but it ladles on the atmosphere.

Wedergast introduces Peter and the still unconscious Joan, and explains about the accident. Poelzig, who constantly looks as if he knows something the others don’t—and it isn’t warm and fuzzy—shows Peter where he can deposit Joan for the night. The three men engage in some stiffly polite pleasantries and we learn that Poelzig’s house is built on the ruins of a fort that he commanded during the war, and then turned over to the Russians. His men were left as prisoners, Wedergast included. The doctor then spent 15 years behind bars. This is the treason that he has journeyed so far to avenge.

Suddenly, Joan appears in the room. She is wandering about in a light trance, not indicating too much interest in where she is or how she got there. Peter rushes to her side and, before leaving the room, kisses her.

This action gives us one of the most memorable moments in the picture. The couple is standing upstage in a medium shot. In the immediate foreground is the out-of-focus figurine of a nude woman, seated and with her arms stretched behind her to the base of the figure. The pose is sexually charged, as if the woman were inviting a lover to come to her. Suddenly, the camera focuses on the figure and the couple goes blurry. When Poelzig’s hand grasps the figure tightly, the image on screen is a certain representation of lust.

At this point the story by screenwriter Peter Ruric begins to turn blurry as well. We’ve had the sense of being in some gothic Cloud Coo-Coo Land all along, but now Ruric and director Edgar G. Ulmer twist the entire enterprise a couple of notches above normal.

We discover that Poelzig is the high priest of a cult of devil worshippers and that on the night of the dark of the moon he intends to sacrifice Joan to his lord. We learn that after betraying Wedergast to the enemy, Poelzig ran off with the doctor’s wife to America, then Spain, than back to Austria. When she died and a few years later, Poelzig married Wedergast’s daughter Karen (Lucille Lund), and she was the young woman we first saw him sleeping beside.

As Poelzig tells Wedergast his history for the 18 years since the end of the war, he takes the doctor into the bowels of the old fortress. They move downward into the former gun turret room and we see the source of the film’s true horror.

Poelzig has had more women than Wedergast’s in his life, and all but Karen have died. The architect has preserved their bodies and but them on display in glass coffins. But the corpses are not lying on their backs. He has found a way to suspend them, surrounded by glass, so he can visit them and see their preserved beauty from any angle. Unger has lit the scene as only a German trained in Expressionism could. We see Poelzig’s face reflected back at him from the glass, as if his own spirit were also entrapped with his late wives.

The two rivals for the dead play a game of chess for the Alisons. Wedergast loses and it seems like Joan will be sacrificed at the Black Mass. Poelzig’s acolytes have gathered—watch the crowd carefully for a quick look at an uncredited John Carradine—but, of course, there is a rescue.

After finding out that Poelzig has murdered Karen for trying to make friends with Joan—no, it doesn’t make a bit of sense, but by this time we’d be surprised if it did—Wedergast manages to overcome his enemy and prepares to skin him alive. Misunderstanding Wedergast’s attempt to help Joan, Peter shoots the doctor, who concludes that he will have to forego a slow death for Poelzig. He gives the Alisons five minutes to get to the road before he pulls the inevitable lever that blasts the house and its guests to hell.

It’s remarkable to think that the Peolzig house was decorated for a mere $1500, but Ulmer’s set design and the art direction of Charles D. Hall were photographed by John J. Mescall to look both rich and Spartan as a tomb.

An uncredited Jack Pierce worked on makeup. Only Karloff’s is notable, and Pierce has him looking Satanic from head to tow.

Karloff is thin to the point of gauntness as Poelzig, and he moves with perhaps more grace and fluidity than he ever will again. He also emphasizes his natural lisp and the impediment becomes another indicator of the character’s flawed emotional state.

Lugosi had the hero—at least, the anti-hero—role so he is less interesting here than he would be a year later when re-teamed with Karloff in The Raven. In that one he would play the madman, and play it to the hilt. He does have one affecting moment in The Black Cat, however, when he sees the displayed corpse of his wife. The sorrow and pain Wedergast expresses is well acted and quite touching.

One last observation.  No, the film has absolutely nothing to do with Edgar Allan Poe, despite the title. That was just to make the picture more commercial. And it worked, a lesson that wouldn’t be lost on Nicholson and Arkoff at American-International a quarter-century later.

The Black Cat is one of the most unusual horror films to come out of Universal. It touches on sub rosa themes that horror movies even today tend to avoid. It’s also the best film Karloff and Lugosi made as equal co-stars and, I’m pleased to say, it is a fine showcase for the much-maligned David Manners, who also played it straight in Dracula and The Mummy. This is one of best of the Universal thrillers.

Mark of the Vampire (1935)

Some film reviewers try to slip by saying that the actors in the movie seemed bored. What that generally means is that there is nothing in the plot or characters to energize the interest of intelligent or experienced actors—or audiences.

Well, the actors in Mark of the Vampire appear absolutely catatonic and I would guess that the staff and crew weren’t far behind. Among classic horror films with any kind of pedigree, this may be the worst. And if it’s true that director Tod Browning lost interest in Dracula after the death of its intended star, Lon Chaney, this somnolent remake of Chaney’s original London After Midnight, also directed by Browning, is a Nyquil cocktail.

The name above the title is Lionel Barrymore’s. He’d worked with Browning before (The Show, 1927; West of Zanzibar, 1928) and would again (The Devil-Doll, 1936) but I wonder if he wanted to make this one, if he’d lost a bet, signed contracts in his sleep, had to do what MGM told him to do, or just wanted to help a pal after the fiasco that had been Freaks (1932).  Barrymore plays a police detective posing as a doctor and his performance is so hammy you expect it to come with a hunk of Swiss between two slices of rye. 

The story is set in 1934. Sir Karell (Holmes Herbert) has been killed and his blood drained, apparently by a vampire. The Professor (Barrymore) has been called into the case by Inspector Neumann (Lionel Atwill) and Baron Otto (Jean Hersholt) because they fear the monster may return to kill Sir Karell’s daughter Ilsa (Elizabeth Allen).  Of course, she has a worried fiancé Fedor (Henry Wadsworth) and the household is rounded out by the usual 1930s staff of comic relief servants.

The villains next door are the vampire team headed by Count Mora (Bela Lugosi) and the wide-eyed Luna (Carol Borland). Their abode is filthy and bedecked by cobwebs. Opossums hiss and scurry, representing, I suppose, mutated rats. Lugosi and Borland, in mostly non-speaking roles, even descend a grand staircase, passing through (off camera) a large cobweb without breaking it.

Any single element of this movie, no matter how insignificant, that reminds the viewer of Dracula is purely intentional.

Lugosi is said to have disliked what was done with his character and petitioned Browning to make changes, but the director stuck with the script as written by Guy Endore, Bernard Schubert, John L. Balderston, H.S. Kraft, Samuel Ornitz, and Browning himself (the latter four uncredited).  Even with the talent involved, the screenplay is such a mess, determining whether director or actor was right is a waste of time.  Nothing could salvage this stinker and I suspect that everyone but Lugosi knew it. Without Chaney’s unique talent for verisimilitude through makeup and gesture, this one became silly on page one.

Only the cults of Browning and Lugosi have kept this one breathing as long as it has—those pus one of the most gob-smackingly out-of-left-field endings you’ve ever not-quite-believed you were seeing.

Mark of the Vampire is a must for classic horror and/or Browning and/or Lugosi fans, but even at a little over an hour it will tax the patience and credulity of anyone else. I mean, I’ve seen it a half dozen times and I still don’t believe it. It just reminds me how much, like Browning, I miss Lon Chaney.

The Raven (1935)

At the pinnacle of his insanity in The Raven Bela Lugosi, as the mad surgeon Dr. Richard Vollin, screams out, “Poe, you are avenged!” But who will avenge Poe for the misuse of his name in this monster mish-mash of mad scientist, torture chamber, haunted house, and ugly-faced butler clichés?

When the first pairing of Karloff and Lugosi in The Black Cat (1934) turned out to be a hit, Universal concocted a story “suggested by Edgar Allan Poe’s immortal classic” “The Raven.” Unfortunately, the new script, credited onscreen to David Boehm alone, although there were seven other contributors, including Dore Schary and Guy Endore, was one of the most insipid from Universal’s golden age of horror.

Lugosi is Dr. Vollin, whose reputation as a brilliant surgeon proves to be more a curse than a blessing. When Jean (Irene Ware), the daughter of Judge Thatcher (Samuel S. Hinds) crashes her car and her life is in the balance, the young woman’s doctors tell her father that Vollin is the only man who can save her life. Vollin has given up his practice to devote himself to research and at first refuses to help. Thatcher plays on his vanity and Vollin agrees to operate.

Within a matter of weeks, Jean is up and perfectly well again. Vollin misreads her gratitude as passion and determines to wed her. Thatcher, at first thinking like Vollin that Jean loves him, tries to dissuade the older physician from encouraging her attentions. When he realizes that it’s Vollin who is doing the chasing, he become horrified and warns the doctor to keep away.

The good-natured Jean, who is a ballerina, choreographs a dance called “The Spirit of Poe”—dressed in a costume that makes her look like a Margaret Brundage “Weird Tales” cover girl--to show her appreciation to Vollin, who is such a admirer of the writer’s that he has created life-sized replicas of the torture devices mentioned in Poe’s tales.

Discovering the extent of Vollin’s fanboyism is one of those hold-the-phone moments. This is a man who boasts about building and owning working torture devices and no one appears to find it in the least peculiar. Books, okay. Miniatures, okay. But a full-sized pit and pendulum set-up? “Death is my talisman,” he says. He first saw Jean lying still as death on the operating table, as good a stand-in for a morgue slab as the wealthy necrophile can find.

Paging Dr. Krafft-Ebing—call for Dr. Krafft-Ebing.

Now it’s time for Karloff to make his entrance into the story. He is Edmond Bateman, on the lam from the law after shooting his way out of prison and killing two policemen in the process. He’s also shoved a burning acetylene torch in some fella’s face, pretty much on a whim. Yes, he’s the one we end up feeling sorry for, which just goes to show what a fiend Vollin is.

Bateman is in some kind of dive or speakeasy. We can’t hear what’s being told to him, but we find out later that he is in search of a doctor who can alter his face enough to avoid recapture. He goes calling on Vollin.

Why? When a killer needs a crooked doctor, why does Vollin’s name enter the conversation? Vollin agrees to help Bateman when he gets the idea that if he makes the escaped con look ugly, he will be more apt to perform ugly acts. Vollin takes Bateman to his hidden operating room and reassures the con that a simple operation on the nerve endings of his face will alter his appearance, and it will take only ten minutes. The desperate Bateman agrees.

When the bandages are removed we see that the right side of Bateman’s face has been altered, but not for the better. Thanks to an uncredited Jack Pierce, Karloff’s face seems to have been melted. The actor completes the image by tipping his head slightly to the right, as if the neck muscles could no longer hold it upright. He shifts his shoulders forwards to create a stooped, hunched look.

Bateman first sees his new face in a series of mirrors that have been installed around the walls of the circular room. Each is behind a curtain, and the curtains are drawn one by one revealing a curved line of reflections. The moment is effective, but the question arises, why would Vollin have such a place in his house unless he’s made a hobby of distorting people’s faces and then forcing them to stare at repeated images of their new ugliness?

From this point on the film becomes more and more a reflection of Vollin’s mind, and as such it becomes less and less sane. The doctor lures Jean, her father, and her fiancé to the house for a weekend party—along with two other couples of such lesser importance it is difficult to fathom why they invited along unless they represent a plot development that was cut from the final film.

But now the house, with its secret doorways, hidden torture chamber, steel shutters, and traps in the floor, becomes huge. There is no end to the torture chamber, which goes on forever into the shadows.

Vollin straps Judge Thatcher—perhaps named as he is for a representative of solid American respectability and sanity in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn—onto a slab under the swinging pendulum, and he locks Jean and her fiancé (Lester Matthews) into a steel-walled that will crush them to death.

Vollin and Bateman have the inevitable falling out over the girl’s fate and only those who deserve a horrible fate receive one.

There are two attractions to The Raven. One is the pairing of its two stars, both of whom are credited at the film’s opening by their last names only. They are still working well together although Lugosi’s over the top hysterical mania is less convincing than Karloff’s soft-spoken, hesitant, almost reluctant murderousness.

The film’s second pleasure is its heedless rush to barking madness. Director Louis Friedlander’s (later billed as Lew Landers) lack of restraint stands out in a field that has since given us The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as the benchmark of cinematic no-holds-barred lunacy.

The Raven is a 12-year old boy’s interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe, all they-think-I’m-crazy-but-I’ll-show-them-how-sane-I-am-heh-heh-heh screeching and posturing. It’s not possible to take it seriously, nor is it in the least frightening at the visceral level. But it is fun and, taken with The Black Cat, it makes a nice showcase for its two leads.