Sat 9 Jan 2016
HOUSES THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT, Part One: Movie Commentary by Walter Albert.
Posted by Steve under Mystery movies , Reviews[11] Comments
Movie Commentary by Walter Albert
In French classical tragedy, a major “don’t” is the intrusion of the supernatural. One of classical tragedy’s less elevated offspring, the puzzle detective story, has kept to that tradition and it has always seemed to me that readers of detective fiction, in general, abhor a mixture of the “real” and the ghostly.
However, I must confess that I am perhaps inordinately fond of a dash of the supernatural in a film or tale of detection and/or mystery. I don’t require that the spooks be dispelled by a rational explanation and I’m happy even if the threat is fake spookery as long as it keeps me in a state of shivery suspense for an hour or so.
One of my favorite varieties of this kind of fiction/film is that of the menacing house in the country where a faceless (i.e., masked) horror keeps popping out of secret passageways and stretching out a fearsome claw from a panel over the heroine’s bed. I think I can trace my affinity to two sources: the thirties serials The Green Archer and The Iron Claw and a delightfully wacky 1939 version of the archetypical example of the genre, The Cat and the Canary, starring Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard (Paramount, 1939).
Forty some years later, I remember with unabated delight the scary confrontation of hero and villain in a cobweb-bedecked passage. I haven’t seen it since then and perhaps it is just as well. I might be disappointed and, at my age, such disappointments can provide graceless coups de grace to pleasurable childhood memories.
I did see, on television, the 1981 version directed by Hadley Metzger. The cast was decent (Wendy Hiller, Edward Fox, Wilfrid Hyde-White and Honor Blackman, among others) but the spooky old house was clean as a whistle, and no spider ever survived long enough on that pristine set to spin an atmospheric web or two in a dark corner (of which there were also depressingly few to be glimpsed). Atmosphere is crucial in this kind of film and the scrubbed-up, glossy technicolor versions just won’t do.
(I might add that I have never seen the highly regarded silent version directed by Paul Lent and am glad to know that this particular pleasure lies in wait for me.)
TO BE CONTINUED…
January 10th, 2016 at 12:16 am
I love the old haunted house movies and serials, especially the ones with secret passageways and scary claws, etc.
One of my earliest memories is when I ran screaming out of a movie theater when I was 3 or 4 with my mother trying to catch up to me because I had just been scared by the spooky eyes looking out of a painting from a secret passage.
January 10th, 2016 at 2:55 am
Oddly enough one of the notable things about the early Gothick movement in literature was despite novels like THE MONK and MELMOTH the norm was that the supernatural element had to be explained away by the novels end — no matter how absurd the explanation, and it is pretty absurd in Walpole’s CASTLE OF OTRANTO, which is pretty much the first old dark house mystery though elements of it show up in Elizabethan theater in Shakespeare, Webster, and Marlowe three centuries earlier.
As Walter points out it was a staple by the thirties that goes on to this day one way or another. I sometimes think fully a third of the mysteries made in the thirties and early forties are old dark house mysteries since aside from the obvious advantage of atmosphere and small cast in a closed environment they were also cheap and could be shot with virtually no exteriors or expensive sets since so much of the set would be in the dark and only suggested anyway.
Nothing seems half so spooky as shadows on a wall in black and white, shadowed corners, cobwebs, dust thick as talcum, and the feeling something is watching and or scurrying just out of sight. It goes back to the monster under the bed or in the closet or just outside the window when we were little and first put to bed by ourselves in a dark and shadowed room.
There is a small school within the detective story that leans toward what Frank McSherry dubbed the Janus Solution, one in which the supernatural is given equal weight to the natural scientific explanation.
It is more common in movies, certainly the comedy mystery where after the phony ghost is laid a real one shows up, but does exist in books, notably John Dickson Carr’s THE BURNING COURT and Helen McCloy’s THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY and to a lesser extent MISTER SPLITFOOT. Most writers, even those who write occult and straight stories, do one or the other, or like Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy the crime always turns out to have been committed by natural methods even if magic is used in detecting it. True Janus solution stories are so rare that to find a third example I have to refer to a novella by Poul Anderson called “Dead Phone” that featured his half Japanese half Norwegian sleuth Tygreve Yamamura.
Knowing how writers like to have their cake and eat it too, you would think more would attempt the hat trick.
January 10th, 2016 at 8:41 am
By now Walter has seen and appreciated the silent CAT/CANARY and I hope his comments are forthcoming. It seems you can’t go wrong with this story as all three versions (despite Walter’s reservations) are highly enjoyable. I also give high marks to THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE/THE BAT/THE BAT WHISPERS.
My only problem with the GREEN ARCHER serial was the frequent sight of hero Victor Jory wading into a dozen or so bad guys and vanquishing them with his fists– VICTOR JORY?!?
January 10th, 2016 at 10:04 am
I watched the Iron Claw just this past week. The print was a bit muddy and dark, which is tough going for a “dark and stormy night” movie. I was surprised as how many secret passages there were in that old dark house; almost one in every room!
January 10th, 2016 at 11:19 am
I’d also recommend The Ghost Breakers, the Hope-Goddard follow-up to the Cat and the Canary. And it’s got zombies!
January 10th, 2016 at 12:51 pm
The two Hope-Goddard movies are near perfect examples of how to do this sort of thing. They’re both pretty much done absolutely straight, with Hope being used to puncture the mood every now and again in order that the audience doesn’t laugh at the wrong place (and even he plays his role for real at the end of THE CAT AND THE CANARY, genuinely heroic despite his terror). I recall watching it with a young relative, and she was on the edge of her seat at the climax of the movie. The real problem came later on when lesser movie makers reused the format without lavishing the same care, and without understanding the dynamics of the genre.
January 10th, 2016 at 1:00 pm
Victor Jory, as a teenager, took up boxing and was very effective.
January 10th, 2016 at 9:26 pm
The supernatural element in The Castle of Otranto isn’t explained away. In fact it’s fulfilled, preposterous though the procedure is. It was Mrs Radcliffe who specialised in rationalised explanations.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the original old dark house film, The Old Dark House, where there is no supernatural element, merely Welsh nonconformism and inbreeding. Going by Herbert M Vaughan’s
The South Wales Squires it was probably pretty realistic.
January 10th, 2016 at 10:31 pm
Ghost Breakers is easily the best old dark house movie ever made.
Priestly’s OLD DARK HOUSE (BENIGHTED) was hard to see for years. I was in my forties before I caught up with it. The color remake is not worth mentioning.
An off beat and little seen silent old dark house film is SEVEN FOOTSTEPS TO SATAN loosely based on the A. Merritt novel and by all accounts turned into a comedy. My understanding is Cornell Woolrich worked on the screenplay and it drove him away from Hollywood.
January 12th, 2016 at 3:12 pm
I still enjoy the first Hope/Goddard “The Cat and the Canary,” but stylistically I find it to be outclassed by “The Ghost Breakers.”
One of the great disappointments of Turner’s scheduling was pulling the announced showing of “Seven Footprints to Satan” some years ago. I managed to get a somewhat murky print of the film with Italian captioning. I don’t think it’s particularly comic but a restored print would be welcome.
I enjoyed immensely the comments this review elicited. It reminded me that there is a community of like-minded spirits out there.
January 12th, 2016 at 4:39 pm
FOOTPRINTS is available on DVD from this seller:
http://www.silentera.com/video/sevenFootprintsToSatanHV.html
At least for now, the film is available on YouTube. I’ll see if I can’t embed it here. It’s restored from the same seller as above and looks to be in viewable condition: