REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:


THE BLACK CASTLE. Universal, 1952. Richard Greene, Boris Karloff, Stephen McNally, Rita Corday, Lon Chaney Jr. and Michael Pate. Written by Jerry Sackheim. Directed by Nathan Juran.

   A ripping yarn from producer William (Tarantula, Creature from the Black Lagoon…) Alland, this was marketed as a horror film, but it’s more like a swashbuckler with a few creepy elements.

   Richard Greene, who will always be Robin Hood to me, stars as an English aristocrat going undercover as a guest of Count Von Bruno (Stephen McNally) the tyrannical lord of a castle in the Black Forest, who had a somewhat checkered past in Africa (he still keeps an alligator pit to remind him of the good old days) and may have murdered two of Greene’s friends.

   And that’s pretty much all the plot there is here: Greene sneaks around trying to get the goods on McNally, romances his countess (Rita Corday) crosses blades with his toady (Michael Pate) and generally plays the doughty swordsman to the hilt (see what I did there?) as he exposes McNally’s villainy…. and gets coffined alive in the process.

   Boris Karloff has a supporting part here, but it’s an interesting one: the Castle Physician, whose loyalty (or disloyalty?) to the Count forms the linchpin of the story, as sundry poisonings, mysterious deaths and other nonsense peppers the plot. But it’s rather sad to see Lon Chaney Jr. lumbering around fat, drunk and grunting, particularly when I recall him playing so effectively off Karloff in House of Frankenstein (1944) a memory more poignant because most of the background music in Black Castle was lifted from the earlier film.

   But the show here really belongs to Stephen McNally, one of the best bad guys of his day, and he carries it off wonderfully, alternately baleful and leering, laughing maniacally when the occasion demands, and generally carrying on in the best Lugosi tradition. It’s the sort of part that’s hard to take seriously unless you’re a little kid (or a kid at heart) but McNally plays it without a trace of condescension, aided enormously by director Nathan Juran (7th Voyage of Sinbad, Attack of the 50′ Woman…) who keeps things moving and puts the action scenes across with inventive camera angles and an infectious sense of fun.