If you’re looking for a slightly leftfield scary movie for Halloween, you could do a lot worse than 1934’s The Black Cat, which not only stars horror titans (veterans division) Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in the first of a run of movies they’d do together but is directed by Edgar Ulmer, a largely wasted talent who could put on a real show when he wanted to, and he does here.
Freud lurks in the undergrowth of the story of a man back from the Great War facing down the man who stole his wife while he was away. But first let’s meet the teams, as they say. In the vanilla corner, a couple of newlyweds, Peter and Joan Alison (David Manners, Julie Bishop), Americans on a honeymoon journey through old Europe, who are joined in their carriage by a courtly, faintly creepy gent, Dr Vitus Werdegast (Lugosi), who tells them his tale of woe – a prisoner of war only now released after 15 years in a detention camp.
Eventually, this threesome take to the road, there is a terrible road accident resulting in the death of their driver (no one cares), and Werdegast and his two fellow travellers are thrown on the mercies of a crazed architect, Hjalmar Poelzig (Karloff), at his modernist show-castle. This, the Alisons will soon learn, is the man who stole Werdegast’s wife while he was incarcerated. What a hand fate has played bringing the two men together.
What the Alisons also don’t know, but we see quite early on, is that Poelzig appears to have dead but perfectly preserved women in toplit glass cases lining one of his dark corridors. AND he’s also a practising Satanist, and much later on will be incanting Latinate mumbo-jumbo for a finale in which everything gets very gothic as a human is prepared for sacrifice.
It’s fabulously mad, short (about 65 mins), weird and periodically very creepy. For Universal the attraction of having the man who played Dracula (Lugosi) and Frankenstein’s monster himself (Karloff) in the same film is obvious, but each actor seems wary of being upstaged by the other, and both put in performances that are at the restrained end of scenery chewing.
Karloff’s character is based partly on the British satanist Aleister Crowley – making a name for himself around this time – combined with Fritz Lang, a sadist when it came to working with actors. Lugosi’s is a tamer version of Dracula – the creepy urbanity toned down, but the dark eye make-up still evident.
It’s a technically brilliant film. Watch Karloff’s entrance scene(s). In one Ulmer has him rising in silhouette from his bed like a wraith, his naked wife in bed next to him (it’s Werdegast’s wife, we only later discover). Then he’s introduced again, to Werdegast and the Alisons, in a scene where Ulmer’s camera comes at him from three intercut directions at the same time. Unsettling and highly effective.
Look at the clothes. Everyone is in superbly tailored suits but Karloff gets the best stuff, a modernist Jazz Age (as they were still calling Art Deco back then) smoking jacket with silver collar. His hair is cut geometrically to match the interior design. The lighting is by John Mescall, who’d do Bride of Frankenstein a year later, and he loads The Black Cat with gothic shadows. The early scenes set in a howling storm at a train station in the middle of nowhere are a tsunami of light and water.
Meanwhile, in a foretaste of the way musical scores in the future would all develop, Heinz Roemheld gives us music all the way through – very unusual in the early 1930s – a collage of various classical music faves allowing audiences to play “spot the steal”.
The story is credited to Edgar Allan Poe but that was only on the posters for marketing reasons. In fact it was dreamt up by Ulmer and co-writer Peter Ruric, who give us, in shadowplay, the Great War all over again – bright, optimistic, young Americans getting caught up in old European feuds.
Nice for a change to see Lugosi playing the hero of the piece. As for the black cat – it turns out that Werdegast is afraid of them, for reasons to do with linking the story to Poe but which deliver nothing to the film whatsoever, apart from a nice visual. There’s plenty more to enjoy though. This was Universal’s biggest hit of 1934.
The Black Cat – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
