A Kinky Old, Dark House

In The Black Cat (1934), a perverse dark-and-stormy-night creeper, the Poverty Row legend Edgar G. Ulmer sets up his camera and lights his sets
as well as any A-string director. He builds mood through perspective and angle. Ulmer also has a supremely literary bent — you can see that his conceptual inventiveness comes from a mind that knows and loves books. He’s whack the way old ghost stories are whack. In movies like The Black Cat, The Strange Woman (1946), and Detour (1945), Ulmer isn’t a terribly good action director; neither was Josef von Sternberg. Sternberg kept his camera in motion but almost never pulled off a compelling action scene with his actors. Ulmer worked as a set designer for Max Reinhardt in the theater and apprenticed with F. W. Murnau on Sunrise (1927). His true strength was setting, not action. These directors excelled in static intensity. When Ulmer attempts to move the story in The Black Cat forward with simple action — as he does when David Manners is conked out twice, and we wait for him to come to so that he can rescue Jacqueline Wells, but he never does, or when Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi physically tussle — the effect is abrupt or incoherent, a real dud. But Ulmer is superb at creating that sense of campy dread that everyone enjoys in The Black Cat, quite like the fun of seeing the work of James Whale in The Old, Dark House (1932) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). When Lugosi reaches over to fondle the blonde hair on the sleeping heroine, it’s a peerless kinky moment.

Good kitty. Jacqueline Wells

The Black Cat is marred with flaws, too. Ulmer lets slide a number of opportunities that probably most people in the audience expect to see fulfilled, which prevents his movies from being classics. The black cat itself inexplicably disappears halfway through the picture. You expect to see it resurface when Lugosi is ready to blow up the crazy castle (it’s both Art Deco and Baroque), trotting out of the rubble completely unfazed. Instead, we get a silly, obviously tacked-on scene in a train carrying the honeymooning couple. Ulmer should have panned the camera to the train seat to focus on . . . the black cat! Even more important, what happens to Lugosi’s daughter? The plot hinges on her, but she shows up once for a brief chat and then it’s as if the movie forgot about her. But maybe it’s Ulmer’s particular gift to guilelessly reveal his flaws (in another scene, the local police travel up and down the mountainside on bicycles) that they seem essential to the dumb theatrical charm.

The Greatness of Audacity

Mesmerizer. Jack Barrymore

In answer to the question: What is the greatest American movie performance of the early sound era? Boris Karloff in Frankenstein (1931) or Scarface (1932)? Chaplin in City Lights (1931)? Jimmy Cagney in The Public Enemy (1931)? Jeanne Eagels in The Letter (1929)? Marie Dressler in Dinner at Eight (1933) or the barely remembered Emma (1932)?

John Barrymore (Broadway’s Orson Welles) in Svengali (1931) unpacks theatrical traditions and his own sly, self-referential archness into a variety of grand gestures—the sing-song accents, interrogative upturns, and squeaky upper registers of the Eastern European Jew; the static postures and bearing of the angular nobles in the Eisenstein historical epics (Barrymore is made up to resemble Nikolay Cherkasov in Ivan the Terrible); and the tortured self-doubts and sadism of the Shakespearean villains. Barrymore is so audacious that all these styles blend seamlessly—he gets to the essence of the art of acting: creating a character that is both lifelike and larger than life. When his great death scene occurs, you expect him to spring uncannily back to life. And the special effects in the mesmerism scenes have sensual heat: Svengali’s eyes glow like molten metal.

Watching John Barrymore spellbind in Svengali is like watching a fabled stage performance from some long-lost age of theater. He stalks the floorboards in high-heeled boots and overcoat, as gaunt as a vampire. But his voice and mien are so commanding that the gothicism never degenerates into camp—Barrymore is no mandarin nut job. Like watching Karloff’s terrifying, confused monster in Frankenstein or Sam Jaffe’s nebbishy Grand Duke Peter in Josef von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress (1934), the experience is too appallingly profound for camp.