In short: The Cat and the Canary (1939)

You know the drill as well as the audience in 1939 did: a group of relatives is called to an Old Dark House for the reading of a will, trapped there by eccentric stipulations in said will that put a curious emphasis on death and madness, and somebody starts to murder people. Hidden passages, gorilla or “gorilla” costumes and such abound.

Elliott Nugent’s version of this particular classic of the Old Dark House formula recommends itself highly with an ability to keep hokey thriller and comedy perfectly balanced, never leaving the audience hanging without a joke for long, yet also not making the actual business of heir-murdering and heiress-gaslighting silly in itself. Or at least not sillier than it is by nature. This is a particularly remarkable feat since even by the time when this was made this style of film was not exactly fresh and original anymore. Certainly not in the second - or third, depending which movies you count - movie adaptation of this specific play.

The cast is rather fantastic: Bob Hope is at the point in his career when his persona hasn’t hardened into shtick, making for an actually likeable and funny lead, comedically stumbling through and upon a plot everyone around him plays rather seriously indeed without becoming annoying. Paulette Goddard isn’t exclusively there to be driven insane (INSANE! I tell you) and look pretty, but actually is allowed a degree of agency – not a given in 1939 or today – and never comes over as the fainting hysteric so many female leads of this time and sub-genre are. She projects enough personality to convince one she’d get through this whole affair alive and well even without Hope’s help. That these two have actual chemistry does help their romantic subplot quite a bit, of course.

I’m also particularly fond of the performances of genre stalwarts George Zucco and Gale Sondergaard here. The former does his knowing and dramatic lawyer in a most delightful way (and gets a very slasher-style body discovery moment to boot), while Sondergaard hams up her role as spiritualist, melodramatic housekeeper whose middle name must be DOOM to the delight of everyone who enjoys a good doom-laden housekeeper.

All of which turns The Cat and the Canary into a rather delightful example of its genre.

In short: The Mummy’s Hand (1940)

Backlot Egypt. For reasons one can’t help but suspect to be gullibility and incompetence, roving archaeologist (who just happen to sound like grave robbers more often than not) Steve Banning (Dick Foran) and his odious comic relief buddy Babe Jenson (Wallace) just can’t find a job with any serious archaeological institution anymore. When they are nearly destitute, Steve stumbles upon on a vase that hints at the location of the long-lost tomb of the Princess Ananka.

They wander off to the Cairo Museum to acquire funding for digging up the dead woman’s bones, but its boss, one Mr Andoheb (George Zucco), poo-poos Steve’s theories. That’s not because Steve is actually wrong, mind you, but because Andoheb is the leader of a heroic group of Egyptian citizens protecting their ancestors’ graves against Westerners out to rob them. Ahem, I mean “an evil Egyptian cult”, of course.

Eventually, the idiot protagonists do get their funding from a stage magician, who, together with his mandatory love interest daughter (Peggy Moran) will haunt the rest of the movie with his less than exciting presence. Because Babe alone just wasn’t bad enough.

Eventually, and I mean eventually, Andoheb is going to get around to bringing the mummy Kharis back to life to fight off our so-called heroes.

Universal’s new-found interest in its monster properties in the 40s resulted in some good things early, namely the basically perfect Son of Frankenstein and the wonderful The Wolfman, before it descended into usually pretty dire monster mashes. The first new mummy film is neither a Son nor a Wolfman, alas, but rather a tepid and slow attempt at making a runtime of 66 minutes feel like hours.

As is pretty typical for Universal’s modus operandi when they weren’t making great films, The Mummy’s Hand, as directed by Christy Cabanne, suffers from a script that seems to have little idea of why anyone might want to watch a movie of said title, and so decides to introduce us to its monster only about twenty minutes before it is already over, instead wasting much of its running time on its personality-less main characters doing little of interest, lots of comic relief that is neither funny nor a relief, and a romance that’ll leave every eye in the house tearless. Which isn’t just a shame because spending time with these characters will make anyone in the audience automatically side with the supposed villain of the piece – George Zucco also granting us with the only fun performance on screen – but because it turns nearly two thirds of the film into a painful slog.


This also does a heavy disservice to some perfectly adequate mummy stalking sequences late in the film, but that’s only par for the course here.

Voodoo Man (1944)

The area around Too-Lazy-To-Give-It-A-Name, USA is plagued by a series of disappearances. "Girl motorists" (and their cars) just seem to vanish into thin air, or at least, that's what the comic relief sheriff in his wisdom thinks (if he does think). In truth, Doctor Richard Marlowe (Bela Lugosi) and his merry band of malcontents - among them his Igor, the dedicated zombie wrangler, unfunky drummer and hair fondler Toby (John Carradine, doing his worst until it is oh so right) and gas station owner and voodoo priest Nicholas (George Zucco, often dressed in the most ridiculous voodoo priest get-up you'll ever see) - kidnap the women to solve a typical Lugosi problem. You see (and you just might have heard this one before), Bela's wife has been dead now for 22 years, but her loyal husband is still trying to revive her by transferring other women's wills to live (that's the technical term) to her body. Alas, not just any donor will do for a project like this. He has not been too successful until now, leaving the poor man with cellar full of young female voodoo zombies in white gowns (not even especially flimsy gowns!) to be hair-fondled and told about their prettiness by Toby and not much else to show.

I'm quite sure Bela would be able to triumph over death given enough time (let's say a few centuries), but as things like this go, he has finally kidnapped the wrong woman. Turns out that it's not a good idea to abduct the cousin of the fiancee of a Hollywood hack (Tod Andrews when he was still called Michael Ames, giving an absolutely perfect impression of a wooden doll with rubber arms; just too bad he's supposed to be human), unless one wants to be pestered by the incredible skill of the "romantic lead" (and golly, does this position deserve its quotation marks) of a Poverty Row movie at doing nothing at all and still being called a film's hero and triumphing over evil (by lying unconscious on the floor) in the end.

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who hear about a Monogram picture featuring Lugosi and Zucco and Carradine and jump (not fall) into an ecstatic state of mind quite like being hypnotized by Bela himself and those (poor sods) who just look kinda puzzled and shrug while they're slowly backing away from the person who brought them such glorious news.

I don't know what else I can do for the latter group than to pity them; to the former group I can say that the film is very much like one would expect, which is to say, not a good film at all but still very lovely.

Sure, I'll give skeptics that the plot of the film makes no sense, that the comic relief is as painful as always (though at least lacking in racist stereotypes thanks to the total absence of non-white people - for a voodoo movie from the 40s, that's actually positive), that the young lead characters should be shot on sight, that William Beaudine's direction is as pedestrian as always. But what are these minor questions of quality compared to Bela doing his hypnotic shtick, the gloriously low-key and/or impoverished voodoo rituals (so cheap they couldn't even afford Hollywood voodoo drumming and had to go with John Carradine and Pat McKee performing their own drumming, very badly of course) or the mindbogglingly boring "finale"? Not much, as most people with discerning tastes (a much nicer way to say "I", don't you think?) would agree.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,bela lugosi,john carradine,george zucco,reviews

In short: Dr. Renault's Secret (1942)

Dr. Larry Forbes (Shepperd Strudwick - best name for the young male lead in a film of this kind I ever saw, to my chagrin billed as John Shepperd) has come to France to take his fiancé Madelon Renault (Lynne Roberts) back to the states with him to get married.

The first night he spends at an inn near the Renault's mansion, another traveling American is murdered there. The trouble is that the man was sleeping in a room that was supposed to be Larry's. It could be a coincidence, or someone could want to see Larry dead.

Dr. Renault (George Zucco) doesn't believe in such nonsense, but what would you expect from a man whose gardener is a convicted felon and whose servant Noel (J. Carrol Naish) is actually the product of Renault's experiments in transmutation - a gorilla who now is neither man nor beast?
Noel is completely infatuated with Madelon, which is no surprise since she is the only one who treats him with any decency; Dr. Renault being just too mad to be human in any way.

"Oh, who might be the killer?" he asked with a puzzled expression.

 

Dr. Renault's Secret was produced by Fox's b-division, compared to Poverty Row productions however it looks absolutely lavish. The script is technically a lot sounder than you'd see on Poverty Row, the higher budget does away with the need to stretch the running time with the help of much pointless dialogue. Instead, the film can afford something amounting to action.

Still, I can't help to think a Poverty Row film would be a lot more fun to watch. This movie's script might be comparatively tight, yet it is also lacking a certain amount of madness. That's the problem with solid craft - it seldom is as interesting as great craft or as surprising as amateur efforts can be.

The same can be said for Harry Lachman's direction. It's very competent but mostly lacking spark or fantasy.

The acting however makes the film worth watching anyway. Zucco is of course a wonderful mad scientist, even if his madness is a lot more low-key than we are used from him. The real star of the film is Naish who makes the ape-turned-man Noel a more tragic and much more believable character than he has any right to be. The apeman make-up here for once is rather effective as well, avoiding most of the silliness inherent in the concept.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,in short,george zucco,j. carroll naish,horror,mystery