Past Misdeeds: The Black Room (1935)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

The olden tymes, in an Austria situated right next to the countries of Universal's backlot gothic Europe, where various accents, curious costumes and customs, and dubious temporality take on the appearance of a dream of the past. An old prophecy pronounces that the house of the de Berghmans will fall when the younger of two twins will kill his brother in the Black Room of their ancestral castle, repeating the founding sin of the house.

Consequently, reigning Baron de Berghman (Henry Kolker) is full of pronouncements of doom when his wife gives birth to twins. On suggestion of Colonel Hassel (Thurston Hall), one of those movie military members who never actually do anything military, de Berghman seals up the Black Room so that the prophecy will never be fulfilled.

Twenty years later, with the elder de Berghmans dead, the older of the twins, Gregor (Boris Karloff), is now the Baron. He's not exactly well-loved by the local populace, what with his habit to indulge in his darkest impulses, and the surprising number of disappeared peasant daughters last seen with him. Gregor has also found a secret door to the Black Room, where he now hides the rotting proof of his indiscretions, but that particular of his vices remains unknown to everyone.

Gregor's younger brother Anton (of course also Karloff) has spent the last fifteen years or so away from home, trying to put distance between himself and the family curse story, and living an actual life. But now, Gregor has begged for Anton's return, and Anton - the nicest guy ever prophesied to become a murderer - can't help himself but return.

Unfortunately, Anton's return home is only the first step in the elder brother's fiendish plan to get the increasingly lynch-mob-y peasants off his back, take Anton's place, and marry a particularly boring girl named Thea (Marian Marsh), who just happens to be Hassel's daughter. One hopes the prophecy will still come to pass one way or the other.

In his thirty year career, The Black Room's director Roy William Neill made a lot of movies for the b-movie (in the initial sense of the word) arms of various studios. Going by the parts of his filmography I'm acquainted with, Neill was a particularly deft hand at squeezing a lot of gothic mood out of comparatively little resources (not so little when compared to what directors working for something like PRC had available to them, obviously). Some years after the movie at hand, Neill would go on to direct most of the Rathbone/Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies which were at their best whenever the director indulged in the unholy cross of gothic and pulp sensibilities (something that happened quite a lot in print in the pulps at the time as well).

Unlike the Holmes movies, The Black Room has no Nigel Bruce as the worst Watson on screen (or imaginable) ruining everything. In fact, there's not bumbling comic relief in the movie at all; if there's any laughter to be had here, then it's of the grim sardonic kind that appreciates the subtle humour of the way Karloff plays Gregor impersonating his good brother Anton.

In tone, The Black Room is pure gothic melodrama with a hint of the supernatural but also more than just a small hint of the idea that prophecies of murder of the kind presented in it could really turn out to be rather self-fulfilling. The script by Arthur Strawn and Henry Myers adds an additional flourish to its suggestions of psychological pressure shaping children's minds by turning Anton, the twin who would actually have a reason to envy his brother and is prophesied to become a murderer, into the socially acceptable brother of the two, yet also hinting that knowledge of the looming prophecy itself is at least in part responsible for Gregor's nasty turn of character.

The film never discusses this theme, or the tension between the idea of fate as a an actual working power (in this case, the hand of fate is a dog, by the way) and the concept of self-fulfilling prophecies overtly. However, I think it is this tension that gives the film's intensely melodramatic tone actual power, for without it, this would just be the usual gothic tale of fate (or rather Fate) indulging in its ironies.
On the visual front, Neill, in often inventive ways, emphasises the idea of twins being mirror images of each through the frequent use of mirrors. The titular Black Room's walls, for example, are made of - now dusty - polished obsidian, heavily suggesting that Gregor very literally kills his better half in the Room, yet also that he is showing his full, corrupt self only there.

In The Black Room, mirrors are not only a way of seeing one's true self (like in the scene where Gregor, shortly before his wedding, indulges in his old self for a moment in front of a mirror), they are also objects revealing one's true self to others (see the earlier scene where Hassel realizes Gregor-impersonating-Anton isn't Anton by accidentally watching him in a mirror). That's pretty interesting and complex for what probably was a quickly shot entertainment without open aspirations to artistic merit.

On the other hand, Neill is rather good at that "entertainment" bit as well, turning out one of the faster paced gothic melodramas I know, a film where not a single second seems wasted on anything not pertinent to plot, theme, or mood - characters are of course archetypes. It's quite an achievement in a genre tending to the slow and ponderous, and in an era of filmmaking where scenes of odious comic relief "breaking the tension" (why would you want that?) were nearly mandatory.

Neill - and everyone else behind the camera - does get quite some help with his efforts by Karloff - I can't help but add "of course". At first, the great man's performance seems rather too on the nose, the brothers a bit too good or evil, respectively, even when you keep the very different ideas the 30s had about acting in mind, but further study reveals a layer of subtlety below the obvious that enables various elements the script only touches on, and gives these gothic stock characters dimensions beyond excellent scenery-chewing, suggesting some degree of psychological depths in the archetypes.


Karloff's performance is emblematic for The Black Room as a film where much more is going on below a highly polished surface than it at first seems.