“Even the phone is dead…”
By the time The Ghoul was released in July 1934, to
lukewarm reviews and box-office in America, Boris Karloff had already returned
to the U.S. The long-awaited script for The
Invisible Man still wasn’t ready, undergoing seemingly endless re-writes in
James Whale’s quest to hit the right tone. Meanwhile, he absorbed himself in a
sincere desire to better the conditions for Hollywood film actors. He attended
secret meetings to discuss with others how they might replicate the success
that Actors’ Equity enjoyed in representing theatre members (which had resulted
in the first ever theatre employees’ strike in 1919). He and his colleagues
knew they would have to bide their time until movie producers made the kind of
exploitation mistakes that would persuade the stars to join forces with them
into a powerful enough body that could be taken seriously.
Whilst the
Screen Actors Guild was being formed, the beginning of June saw Karloff briefly
in exactly this type of fractious negotiation with Universal over his contract
option being picked up for a new term. He was due to rise from $750 a week to
$1250, representing two agreed steps of increase of $250. He suggested waiving
the first and going immediately to the higher amount due. The studio refused,
but the matter was smoothed with a new five-year contract that earned him $2000
and gave him the attractively rare carrot of a guarantee that he would be
billed on publicity as ‘Karloff’. Intriguingly, Variety reported that The Return of Frankenstein would be the
opening project.
Karloff’s
filming schedule at first moved ahead without Universal. He worked with the
emerging genius John Ford for RKO’s WWI drama The Lost Patrol, shot in the brutal heat of Arizona, which sapped
the actors’ energy and the equipment. Soon after its release, garnering mixed
reviews about Karloff, praising his intensity and criticising a ‘theatricality’
in his performance, he was part of a historic power-play off-screen. In good
company with 22 other star actor signatories including Gary Cooper, Frederick
March and James Cagney, he resigned from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences. ‘Dissatisfied with the fashion
in which their interests have been represented in NRA code hearings in
Washington’ according to Variety on the 2nd of October, the
ex-members felt that their self-formed Screen Actors Guild would protect them
better than the code, which tried to bail out the economy in part by imposing
measures counter to actors’ livelihoods -
for example banning producers from bidding competitively between
themselves over actors, (which would effectively stop performers from a vital
aspect of financial betterment). The code had also ratified, without
consultation, a move that forced a ceiling on actors’ earnings of $100,000 and
enabled producers to control the licensing of performers’ agents. These two
rules alone clearly established that producers were being allowed unequal
bargaining power. It was only a few weeks before the Guild’s membership
expanded to 4,000 members under its inaugural president Eddie Cantor, who used
his influence with U.S. President Roosevelt to ensure the offending sections of
the code were excised.
Following
his evil Ledrantz in the nascent 20th Century Fox’s Napoleonic drama
The House of Rothschild, another historic
moment happened for Boris Karloff and horror fans at the start of 1934. It was
to mark his first of eight on-screen pairings with fellow star Bela Lugosi in horror
cinema – The Black Cat. Karloff was
back in the Universal family again with a fee of $7500 for the four-week shoot.
Lugosi accepted an offer of $3000, sadly indicative of his waning bargaining
power by comparison. (This would see him gradually descend into increasingly shoddy
parts with only his remarkable Ygor in 1939’s Son of Frankenstein to worthily showcase his versatility). Lugosi
had just finished one of the many stage Dracula
tours he would be forced to take on the road over the decades.
Karloff and
Lugosi benefitted from the directorial and visual flair of Edgar G. Ulmer, a
former set designer in German theatre and then film, most notably on The Golem and Metropolis (reviewed here
respectively on 28/12/2015 and 5/02/2016). His art design for Poelzig’s house
in The Black Cat featured much that recalled
German Bauhaus architecture and an expressionistic use of light and shadow. Ulmer’s
unity of vision was further strengthened by his co-writing of the screenplay
with George Sims, a mystery thriller writer who later served in WWII in the Army
Intelligence Corps and then became a rare book dealer, a grounding in reality
that made his eerie thrillers particularly highly-regarded.
The
Black Cat took the title of Edgar Allen Poe’s story yet had no connection
with it. Instead, it was partly inspired by a court case surrounding famous
British occultist Aleister Crowley, the self-styled ‘Great Beast 666’ whose
far-reaching influence extended to include appearing as one of the 20th
century’s cultural icons on the cover of the Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Stephen
Jacob’s superb biography Boris Karloff:
More than A Monster details how Crowley had taken umbrage at the reference
in his friend Nina Hammett’s autobiography Laughing
Torso that: “He was supposed to
practise Black Magic…and the inhabitants of the village were frightened of him.”
Crowley sued for libel on the basis that his was the more benign White Magic.
However, his case was thrown out after an occult student of his in Sicily,
Betty May Loveday, testified that her husband died as the result of a ceremony involving
drinking the blood of a sacrificed black cat.
Ulmer and
Sims were inspired to blend some of this grisliness into the creation of
Hjalmar Poelzig, Austrian architect extraordinaire and Black Magic devotee played
by Boris Karloff. With his stone-faced demeanour, black gown topped with an
occultish pentagram necklace and hair oiled to a widow’s peak, he is every inch
the secret Satanist – aided by Jack Pierce’s much simpler make-up than for
previous horror roles. The other blueprint in creating the character was the real-life
German architect Hanz Poelzig. Lugosi, meanwhile, is allowed a pleasing change
of pace into a more humane, even heroic figure, that of Dr Vitus Werdegast.
(With names like this, perhaps the writers were masquerading as practising sadists
to actors too!). His character is a promininent Hungarian psychiatrist who suffered
the devastating loss of his wife and has only recently been released from the
ravages of 15 years in a Siberian prison camp. “After 15 years….I have returned”. (This underlying deep-seated
trauma was based on Ulmer’s study of the PTSD effects upon survivors from the French
fortress Doumont following World War One).
Despite the
heavyweight aspect to the material, Ulmer found Karloff bringing a continual
levity, pre-take, to a part he struggled to regard seriously, whereas Lugosi
exuded an intensity of passion that Ulmer had to judiciously cut away from at
times.
Due to a
booking mix-up on a train to Hungary, he is forced to share a compartment with
a canoodling honeymoon couple, writer Peter and his wife Joan Allison (David
Manners and Jacqueline Wells). Although Manners had already been the 1931 Dracula’s John Harker opposite Lugosi, a
residual aloofness of manner from the older actor discouraged Manners from a
friendship off-camera.
Nevertheless,
Lugosi portrays Werdegast as a tweedy, avuncular gentleman of impeccable manners
and unlike almost all of his recent post-Dracula
roles, this is not a pose that dissolves to reveal a stiff, glowering Svengali
of evil. When the new friends’ bus crashes, hurting Joan, it forms a useful
plot device to gather all three together at Poelzig’s home, a ‘friend’ of Werdegast,
built on the foundations of Poelzig’s old command post of Fort Marmarus. Their
host appears with a strident music cue and the forbiddingly focused gravitas of
Karloff that enables Lugosi to play more humanely opposite him by contrast. Joan
is put to bed and treated by Werdegast with the hallucinogenic Hyoscine. The
young couple are thus not privy to the seething real animosity Werdegast has
nurtured toward Poelzig since the war, his home “..built upon the masterpiece of war…the masterpiece of destruction”.
Poelzig had given up the fort to the Russians, sacrificing 10,000 soldiers and
now Werdegast is back “To kill your soul….slowly”.
It’s amusingly ironic to note David Skal points out in The Monster Show that Vitus Werdegast literally translates as ‘Life
becomes guest’. He demands to
know where his wife Karen is, which Polezig perversely satisfies by showing her
dead body perfectly preserved on display in a glass cabinet. This morbid sight
overcomes Werdegast with grief. Poelzig argues that his gallery of others like
her are the living dead, preserved as though they are still alive. Good thing
he doesn’t yet know that Poelzig also sleeps with her beautiful blonde identical
double daughter. (There’s only so much a concentration camp survivor can take
on his release).
When Joan
enters in somewhat of a trance state, the sight of a black cat causes Werdegast
to react with fear. Poelzig tells his guests that Werdegast has a serious phobia
of cats, whom Werdegast feels are “deathless
as evil”. There’s a tangible atmosphere of death over the whole film in
fact, an unshakeable funereal fog of mourning that works very well. The theme
is constantly referenced by the two combatants who eventually settle down to
the literal game of chess that they’ve already metaphorically begun since
Werdegast arrived. They agree that the safety of the Allisons will be the stake.
Werdegast
also introduces another lit fuse to keep things darkly simmering – he reminds
Poelzig’s undertaker-like Majordomo, (Egon Brecher) who is secretly working for
him, that the house sits on top of a colossal store of dynamite.
This is not
to suggest that Ulmer lacks the confidence to add a little comic relief into
the mix courtesy of a group of Gendarmerie who arrive to take statements about
the bus crash. The harmless squad bicker amongst themselves about which is the
most beautiful local village, resembling chocolate soldiers rather than
officers of the law. Their quaint ineffectuality is enhanced even more when the
Allisons ask for a lift (to flee what they suspect is a madhouse) and are
regretfully told the policemen only use bicycles.
Eventually,
the mask of decorum slips off. By the time Poelzig savours the observation that
“Even the ‘phones are dead”, the
guests are well aware that it’s time to leave their key at reception as events
build to a nightmarish climax. Joan is carried away by the hulking man-servant
Thamal (Harry Cording), while Poelzig plays the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor signalling
his Phantom of the Opera ghoulish intentions.
He presides over a well-attended
underground Black Magic ritual, “the
rites of Lucifer” while Joan is visited in her room by Karen’s namesake
daughter. Somehow, Poelzig knows this and breaks away from demonic business
long enough to reprimand Karen in a genuinely unnerving off-screen fatal ‘reprimand’
from which she shrieks.
Such is
Karloff’s unholy energy that it takes Thamal and Werdegast to bring him down,
seized even as Werdegast is by the grief-fuelled anger of seeing his daughter
on the slab at the hands of Poelzig. Those who think Lugosi has been neutered
in this film need have no fear. He suspends Poelzig on his own rack, stripping
him of his shirt and teasing his captive with “Did you ever see an animal skinned, Hjalmar?” He is thwarted by a misconceived
shot in the back from Peter, but this inspires a new height of refreshing heroism
that Lugosi may never have achieved on screen again. After urging the couple to
go, he flips the switch that primes the dynamite and with the satisfying
epitaph “It has been a good game”, he
blows up the house, Ulmer making what seems cunning use of WWI trench explosion
stock footage. In a train epilogue, Peter reads to Joan a review that accuses
his novels of being far-fatched. Not that we care, as we’ve just seen a bravura
example of lead horror actors enjoying an entertaining battle of wills discarding
the humdrum need for realism.
The Black Cat was originally completed in less
than three weeks of the allotted four, but under pressure from the MPPDA Ulmer had
to reshoot sequences and excise others to tone down the more enthusiastic focus
on occult sensationalism, such as a graphic flaying of Poelzig by Werdegast,
and “a derogatory reference to Czech Slovakians
as people who devour the young”. Ulmer’s daughter recalled though that the
hint of necrophilia in Poelzig’s corpse-preservation kink had sneaked in under
the code’s radar. On release, it generated almost a quarter of a million
dollars in spite of the New York Times
and Variety praising Karloff and
Lugosi but criticising it over-harshly for an oppressively thick atmosphere and
story unoriginality. Even so, it became the studio’s biggest hit of 1934 thus
proving it was a ‘good enough’ game…
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