Old Dark Capsules X: THE PHANTOM (1931), DRUMS OF JEOPARDY (1930), MURDER BY THE CLOCK (1931), HOUSE OF MYSTERY (1934), THE WAYNE MURDER CASE (1932)

Autumn... despite our current plaga, it means all the best things in life (and death) are now arrived.. especially old dark house movies from the 1930s,

These days, I wonder if I might be alone in this last part. Kids today don't have to love the old dark house movies, the way we Famous Monsters-reading kids did back yonder. Why would anyone bother treading through such blurry dross when there's every single old horror movie on streaming all the time? And if we don't get used to the genre and learn to love its creaks and groans, how can mild chills like Cat and the Canary or The Phantom of Crestwood ever resonate like they should?

What is an old dark house movie vs. say, a mystery or a thriller or a straight-up horror movie? Well, just as all of 'modern' country music stems from a handful of songs by Jimmie Rodgers, Patsy Cline, and Hank Williams Sr. (which stem in turn from old string band reels and traditional ballads) so all of the old dark housers are based on a handful of barnstorming mystery plays that used to tour the country in roadshows, The Cat and the Canary (there are at least four film adaptations, including one lost to time "The Cat Creeps"), The Bat (at least two faithful versions and a zillion spinoffs) and The Gorilla. From these three basic plots spins the entire genre (just as the three in turn spring from drawing room mysteries and barnstorming Victorian melodramas). 

What makes an old dark house movie, aside from the old dark house itself? Usually there are a few recurring motifs: a threatening note; the reading of a will; a terrified maid; a shifty-eyed butler; a smart aleck reporter; a gorilla; one or more secret passages; a masked madman; incompetent cops or asylum guards who might actually be escaped mental patients; an imperiled heiress; hidden jewels, greedy heirs forgotten in the will unless the current heir dies or is proven insane; a black cat racing up the stairs, the sound of sheet metal thunder / stock footage lightning cutaways; gnarled or furry hands reaching out towards oblivious heroines as they sleep. One or more corpses! Repeat! ARGH!

For settings they fall back to an era long before the dawn of suburban tract homes, when extended families all lived together in big cavernous houses that were passed down through generations. Today they are mostly all cut up into co-ops but some still exist. If you've ever stayed overnight in one then you know ho creepy it is just waking up in the dark and trying to find the bathroom at night. You can easily get lost in the dark, and if you hear a strange noise it's almost impossible to search for its source. Families can live comfortably together without ever seeing one another. Guests can fill the rooms for long weekends of creeping around long hallways; and if the cops in the foyer hear a scream somewhere above, they may not even be able to find the one who screamed by the time they get up the stairs. Once you split up and search different rooms you may never find each other again). 

The secret panels and hidden lairs are what I think most grabs me. The idea people could be watching you through the walls, and you'd never know it. Or more cozily, vice versa. If you don't believe they're real I can tell you from experience: nearly every single old mansion has them, especially if they were built before or during Prohibition; but no one thinks to look for them. They'd rather say you're crazy when you say someone peered out from behind the bookcase. I've been in two rich kid houses that had hidden rooms adjacent to their bedrooms, secret spaces so quiet and isolated you could do whatever you wanted out of sight or smell from parents. Never before had I seen total freedom just a hidden door away from mind-numbing conservative patriarchal bourgeois repression.

But then, in general, the old ultimate patriarch, the dying old codger in the wheelchair symbolizes the extent of social isolation, of both sides, the rich patriarch's alienating inflexibility -driving his children against him until he only sees them when he's on death's door, their hands outstretched for their inheritances, or the children themselves, who've shut themselves away in hidden lairs of excess, the wealth affording them the freedom to wind up utterly alone in a room full of mirrors. In each case, their massive house becomes void of all but a few weird servants who become as disturbed and jaded as the owner. When forced to face mortality via the old will, only then is this hermetically sealed world of long shadows and empty rooms suddenly thrown open to relatives, cops, and cameras. The cops must pick through the list of suspects in search of where the old man might have hidden the loot or who may have killed him. If you've ever gone through the effects of a dead loved one then you know the weird frisson - like investigating your mother's or father's most private life, everything that was hidden from you all your life. Now, nothing personal is off limits. That's why the number one famous last words of our modern age isn't "forgive me, father," but "hide my porn."  

THE PHANTOM

(1931) Written and Directed by Alan James

***1/2 (or * depending on your tastes)

"Say, that guy ain't no regular butler!"

The saddest eyes in show biz - Niles Welch

One of my new favorites in both the so-bad-it's-good and the old dark house genres, the surreal-comic barnstormer THE PHANTOM (1931). Clearly marked a real departure for the mightily-titled Supreme Pictures, whose wheelhouse was silent-era westerns and serials, and moving into sound did not come easy. I don't think Alan James quite learned how to writer or film dialogue, or when to say 'action' and how to edit (each scene opens with a few seconds of dead air while a pair of actors loiter about waiting to be told the camera is rolling. A lot of Supreme's silent actor cowboy stock can be seen here, which is fine --it's the heard part that's the problem: they just don't know how to talk and seem natural, as if this isn't just the first time they've spoken out loud on film, but the first time they've been indoors. 

Consider the opening: the warden's office of a nearby prison. The.... Phantom (the word always comes bordered with pregnant pauses) is on death row about to be zapped. The warden talks about the case with a reporter; someone sees a plane outside, buzzing the yard. Suddenly... ''the Phantom"...  jumps from the big house wall onto a passing train as a biplane comes roaring overhead, keeping time with the train, throwing down a rope ladder, which the... Phantom... grabs onto and is lifted away to freedom. It's such a great stunt we can't blame Supreme Pictures for recycling it from one of their old serials. It doesn't really connect with the rest of the picture, but nothing connects in... The Phantom... 

And that's why I love it. I love its drift into hissing incoherence and confused script: Though the Phantom's upcoming execution is on all the front pages, and he's a notorious master criminal on death row, once he escapes no one knows what he looks like! It never occurs to anyone to look in the paper, or get his mugshot. All they know for sure is that he threatened to get even with the DA (Wilfred Lucas) for sending him up the river, though he didn't really. Enter rock-hard Sgt. Collins (Tom O'Brien) assigned as his bodyguard. Meanwhile the DA's society reporter daughter Ruth (Allene "Sweetheart of San Antonio" Ray), one of the talkies' immanent casualties, her tipsy nasal bubbly speaking voice she sounds like a lot like Lily Lamont in Singin' in the Rain, and went the same way.

At any rate, she's nicer than Lamont, and a career girl. Her sad-eyed boss, Sam Crandall (Niles Welch -upper left). the coolest character in the film, for some reason we can't quite suss out, is in love with her. One wonders many things about this deep-eyed actor: did he have a death in the family before shooting started? Was he still treating early sound recording like it was 1929, when you had to speak... slowly... and... clearly with... many pauses... ? Or is he just too drunk to remember his lines and is being fed them through some whispering prompter? Whatever the reason, he has a distracted melancholic gravitas that perfectly fits being put in the odd position of being asked by Ruth, who he hoped to marry, to promote square-jawed cub reporter, Dick (Guinn "Big Boy" Williams) so Dick--a dope who sends Ruth's dad a telegram signed the 'Phantom,' then holds him at gunpoint while pitching his plan to catch the 'Phantom' so  can be successful enough to marry her. "So... if I give Dick the job," intones Sam, gradually adding it all up for those who fell asleep, "you... and he... will be married?" (she nods, looking down demurely in that silent film heroine kind of way.)

They deserve each other. After 'solving' the case, the first thing Dick does is ask for a two week vacation. And meanwhile Crandall has already written the story but gives Dick credit. Wait, what?

it's a mystery this time, pardnuh! 

Poor Sam, he's really better off without this girl Ruth. We never get why a cool Britt Reid / Lamont Cranston -style man about town would be into an overdressed, tipsy elf-voiced little heiress like her, aside from she's the only girl in the movie (not counting her shrieking maid). At least she and Big Boy Williams clearly have some chemistry. Sure, he's twice her height, but if she stayed on her horse it might work. And she no doubt rides a horse a lot in earlier Supreme pictures, and was a rancher in real life, as was Big Boy. Though dumb as paint (he doesn't give the impression he knows how to hold a pen, nor do we ever see him try) his hard edges help give him an inscrutable, dangerous air, like the director wants us to think he might be... the Phantom... at least in an earlier draft. 

Supreme made naught but a handful of pictures after The Phantom and as far as I'm concerned it's a shame. Clearly uncomfortable having to remember lines or speak clearly, everyone in the cast plays these stock old dark house characters-- from the terrified maid to the passive-aggressive butler "James"--like they've never seen a sound movie before, lending the whole thing an endearing air of primitivism that's just this side of priceless. This extends to Allan James' direction and the camerawork as well, the framing of each scene is so inept it skirts back around to brilliant. Characters swingle and dingle in corners of the screen during long static shots. Every element is slightly off, even the silence. 

The hissing of the 'room tone' in early sound films is, for some of us, a thing of joy. The room tone in The Phantom is almost a character in itself. It's like we're hearing what air sounds like for the first time, and we're amazed how easily people can walk through it without seeming like they're underwater. When they do finally speak, it's slowed, careful, as if they don't... quite.... trust... that words will carry through this thick aether). 

I think too there's something cool about cops trusting the adult judgement of civilians, and giving them guns; I like that nearly every male is armed, like they'd be in a western, and have no problem barging into places, skulking in and out of passageways and swimming through the thick crackling and hissing air. It's meant to be a mystery, so you're not supposed to know if Dick is... the Phantom, or Sam Crandall is... The Phantom or... is it that short guy who runs around with his face covered in a black slouch hat and a or is it the little hunched over guy  (Sheldon Lewis) who looks just like The Shadow crossed with Chico Marx?  Waving his big oogie-boogie hands at either Ray or the terrified maid, one suspects him of being..... the Phantom.... but is he? 

Either way, I love him. 

The dialogue is weird, too (including the first time I've heard the use of the word "cool" in a behavioral context in any early-30s film), allowing suspicion to flood the motivations of nearly every character. For proof, here's one of the great, surreal exchanges of vague dialogue between Hampton the DA, and Niles' enigmatic editor (it seems to take five minutes), when reading, remember to hold the .... pauses :

Niles: (pause) "Well Mr. Hampton.. (pause). I'm sure you'd like to know what this is all about..."
Hampton:  (pause) "Yes... I would..." (pause)
Niles: (pause) "Well... (pause)... I'll be very glad to explain it..." (pause)
Hampton: "Good...(pause) come on and sit down...." (pause)
Niles; (pause) "...OK...." (pause)

(long pause- as they walk over to a sofa)

The last act leaves the mansion and moves off to mysterious psychiatric "rest home," an amazingly dark hall of odd shadows with a dream-like massive palm frond-bedecked reception/waiting area, a hidden operating room, and secret passages galore. Ruth pretends to have fainted to warrant their barging in. Out of the woodwork (in some cases literally) creeps storky William Jackie (below left), whose got buggy Bruce Spence reptilian eyes and and the kind of lean tall body where, were he to turn sidewise, he might well disappear. Jackie is a last act breath of WTF? fresh air. He's got no problem with early sound recording. He just speaks in either a terrible or genuine Swedish accent with a bunch of fractured possible clues buried in his dialogue, if you can understand it. 

Note his surreal exchange with Dick, who insists on staying on script with his answers, regardless of what this crazy Swede might say:

Jackie: "Shhhhh- dis here's a crazy hoose: there's tree tousah why hunda why a men her." (my presumed translation "This here's a crazy house- there's three thousand, five hundred men here")

Big Boy: "What... What did you say his last name was?" 

Jackie: "I say d'ere's 7,777 seasick men here and d'ere all crazy, like me." 

 Big Boy: "ohh"

Jackie: "You know my son, he is the daughter of this here stable." (etc).

The finale gets even 'crazier' once Ruth is spirited away to the secret chamber operating room by the brain transplant enthusiast Dr. Elden, who mulls over the shelf of skulls from his failed attempts with his fey lab partner, the urbane Alphonse . What's truly crazy is that this guy is running an asylum but (SPOILER), if he's the Phantom, how come his two assistants--the freaky Chico Marx as the Shadow guy and Alphonse--didn't notice he was in jailed. It seem unlikely that they were the ones who busted him out, so the end reveal holds naught together. 

The craziness is even more whole-hog when-- moving shakily down the long 'shock corridor' in the dead of night, trying to find the abducted Ruth by shouting her namel--Dick is handed a note reading: "She's in Uncle Tom's cabin." Outside in the garden, the chauffeur is knocked out (by someone else) but wakes up and blames the stork-stepping Jackie and they get in a fight which Jackie presumes is just playful sconce bonking. The end finds the endangered Ruth stalling in the operating chamber while Dick tries to get the secret door combination from Jackie, who would rather tell him the story of "a-Yack and Yill."

----

DRUMS OF JEOPARDY

(1930) Dir. George B. Seitz

***

It's never been on TCM... or DVD, or VHS, or TV, but one can find the 1931 Return of Fu Manchu if one looks hard enough (I finally got to see it on Youtube a few months ago but then it was gone again) and one should. Until then, Drums of Jeopardy offers basically the same plot, and Oland seems to have just as much drunken fun there as he does as crafty Fu. In many scenes, his eyes glisten with the ecstasy of drink. By day he was playing good guy Charlie Chan over at Fox, by night he was slinking out to wreak havoc as Fu Manchu or--in this case, master chemist Boris Karlov (!). Enraged by his daughter's pregnant suicide (she won't name names, but she's hiding a clue, the famous necklace, the "Drums of Jeopardy," a Petrov family heirloom, no doubt stolen and given to her by the craven father; so Karlov crashes a dinner party and stares down the entirety of Russian aristocracy, demanding the guilty Petrov step forward. He doesn't, but Karlov knows it's one of them, so why not kill them all.... one at a time...one to each brother, and father, in return, as receiving one of the "drums" (supposed to denote immanent death --hence the name). Convenient coincidence? Maybe. But very cool. 

Petrov's scene at the restaurant gets him hauled off to jail but.. in a purloined letter brought to the now Moriarty-like Karlov by his right hand man Mischa Auer, we learn he later escaped jail to become a leader of the Bolshevik secret police. He's now hunting Petroffs all over Europe, with a small but very capable squad of men at his command. Very cool. The letter also says what boat to America the remaining Petroffs are taking to escape, allowing Karlov a chance to prepare a warm reception.  

As with the Oland's Fu Manchu films, his motivation may be grief (unlike the Sax Rohmer Fu), but he's clearly having a blast and we're rooting for him and his Trotsky-like right hand man (Mischa Auer) all the way, relishing how they manage to have all the luck (like when the comic relief auntie is sent in her nightgown out to the streets to find a doctor and she runs right into Auer). and loathe the bland and bickering Petroffs and their flatline American aides. Even though he takes way too long to kill the final one good Petroff, allowing him chance to escape with the random girl who dared to help him by calling the cops when he showed up shot and disoriented in her apartment.  The bland good couple may prevail but whatever, the atmosphere is plenty thick, and there's cool moments like sharing a cigarette with the Nayland Smith equivalent (who trusts it's not poisoned--that would be "too easy") 

Oland can get great mileage out of little lines.

"They sent me for a doctor," Auer tells him in their hideout a block or two away.

"Well" says Karlov, "we must not disappoint them." He turns and looks back, "get my hat and coat and my bag... my black bag. "

The endangered Petroff is surprised to see Karlov leaning down over him when they arrive, the comic relief aunt fretting as she shoos them in: "You don't think he's going to die?" 

Karrov: "that would not surprise me... at all."

Too bad then, that the Nayland Smith character arrives to chase them away! But they're not gone long. The Amazon Prime print is pretty good, so dig in! 

HOUSE OF MYSTERY

(1934) Dir. William Nigh

**1/2 / Amazon Image - C-

"Hindus! Tom-toms! Apes! Haunted Houses!"

the posters for this film are lame so I figured I'd show
this Bernie Wrightston salvia hallucination comic book cover

There's a lot going on with John Pryn (Clay Clement), a super shady archaeologist who robs an ancient temple in India. He's such an entitled colonialist shit he whips the high priest with a riding crop for daring to object to his looting their active temple, causing the old man's prayer bead necklace to break (the beads scatter down the temple steps dramatically). No one seems willing to stop him. The temple dancer girl Chanda (Joyzelle Joyner) likes him and even helps him outrun the temple's pet gorilla. Rather than worry about getting the jewels back, the priest just levies "the Curse of Ka-La" --all who gain from his theft will die horrible deaths at the hands of some giant ape or other (what else do you want from an old dark house movie?). It can only be... "the curse of Ka-LA!" 

Years later the man finally agrees to share his stolen treasure with all of his expedition's investors (or their heirs). The catch, they must remain in his gloomy mansion with him for one year to um.... protect themselves from the curse of Ka-la! Naturally they all start dying in mysterious ways, and what's up with that motionless stuffed (?) ape in the library? And why does he have Chanda around as a kind of spiritual housekeeper/mistress? What's her deal? (She can't be an out and out mistress or wife --miscegenation was still illegal in southern states.)  And the sound of the drums... of Ka-La... keep pounding when it's time for another killing. 

It's impoverished and star-starved but it does zip along. The only caveat is the annoying young insurance salesman heir as the ostensible hero. He thinks he's mighty irresistible, hitting on the now-crippled Mr. Pryn's cute nurse. She tries to ward him off but where's she gonna go to get away? Urgh. So dated. Luckily he has just enough of a Jackie Oakie dab about his cheeks and stances to not totally suck. 

The archaic early sound recording system means long... pauses.. occur between each sentence (it seems to have been made much, much earlier than 1934). The long rambling scene of Pryn rattling off the terms of his release of the entitles hares, and the worry about the terrible curse is a great time to get popcorn or go the bathroom. Exchanges like: "Chanda is a strange person." / "Person? hah! She looks more like Gandhi's ghost" are pretty offensive. Luckily, the sharp-tongued old broad married to the fuddy-duddy professor has some good lines and there's an unspoken lesbian vibe between the faux hypochondriac  psychic"companion" who calls on her spirit guide "Pocahontas", leading to great exchanges between "them" like asking Pocahontas "What is that which afflicts our nostrils and enervates our senses?" / "This night," answers Pocahontas "one of you will go behind the veil." Everyone not currently dead regularly dims the light for seances in the pitch dark until the psychic herself gets a giant ape neck snap. A looney plumber with a big cigar arrives with a line of funny Vaudeville patter. And there's the usual overblown comedy of the dopey cop ("There's been a murder committed here... Who did it?"). 

As with all these kinds of things, there's not a lot of tears shed for those gone beyond the veil and the three cops are each stupider than the last... in fact, this is almost the same blueprint later used in 1939's The Gorilla, except instead of Bela Lugosi as a sardonic butler, there's a dopey plumber walking around with a stogie, and... of course... Chanda! She's a very interesting character in how she ultimately 'last man standing"'s her way to glory! 

THE WAYNE MURDER CASE

(aka Strange Adventure)

(1932) Dir. Phil Witman

*** / Amazon Prime - C

This peppy short little old dark mystery is of special interest since the reporter is very smart and cool and a girl, "Nosy" Noodles (June Clyde). She's not afraid to scoop all her fellow journalists, yet they all think she's "regular". There are a few knowing glances between her and her cop boyfriend Mitchell (Regis Toomey!) and they both definitely know how to ferret out clues and sneak around the big empty house undetected to spy on murders, murderers, and tip-toeing suspects. In fact this is about the easiest piece of detective work ever since there's no dopey habit of being constantly in the wrong place at the wrong time. Noodles and Mitchell swap banter and he threatens to take her over his knee if she doesn't keep out of his way as he ponders clue-containing documents and sends chicken-eating coppers to round up the usual bickering suspects. Yet he respects her and knows that, like him, she has skills as far as how watch people skulk in the wee hours without them seeing her, leading to a lot of cool little scenes of watching her watch people creep around and pounce on each other, kind of like "Sleep No More" if you ever went to that. (I did, and didn't like it, but I like this). The old duffer, Silas Wayne, who kicks off to set the mystery in motion, is a hateful fool so we surely don't mourn him and there's all sorts of great little touches like a wry bit of fake jewel substitution: Silas realizes his big rock is a glass fake, then the secretary deftly swaps the real one he just stole with the fake so Silas re-test it, then he switches it back when he puts it back in the safe and Silas take it out and tests it again and its fake! Culprit caught!, thus sending for the cops but then he's dead!! And Dwight Frye plays the romantic gigolo nephew! What?! It's barely over an hour and there's even a gooney dude in oversize hood and black sleeves, waving his arms around. My favorite thing ever!

Alas, with racist butlering ministered by 'Snowflake.' He misidentifies a suit of armor as a "night-guard" amongst other things. Well, progress is slow, but look at us now! 

MURDER BY THE CLOCK

(1931) Dir. Edward Sloman

**1/2 / Youtube Image - C

I've long been a proponent of getting this one remastered and released on disc--for to my recollection it has never been shown on TV, either on TCM or back in the UHF era, and has never been on VHS or even some misbegotten Alpha DVD. For a long time the only proof it even existed was a loving write-up in a classic horror film book I had as a child.  Few critics have written about it since, or waxed sufficiently euphoric over the gleeful 'evil Mae West'-style performance of Lilyan Tashman as Laura, the conniving wife of lily-livered Herbert (Walter McGrail), nephew of the stubborn, premature burial-fearing matriarch Julia (Blanche Friderici) of the once-prominent Endicott clan (their memory evokes Ambersons-style magnificence in the mind of the elderly cemetery groundskeeper across the street). Today, the big house holds only Julia, her only son--a totally deranged but childlike simpleton (hammed through the roof and beyond by the great Irving Pichel) with immense crushing power in his strong hands--and the no-nonsense housekeeper, who has to regularly check the 'alarm horn' inside Julia's waiting tomb. (Fun fact: being buried alive wasn't uncommon in the 1800s and early 1900s, leading to a real life craze for burial horns, visible windows in coffins, easy-escape tombs, etc i.e. Poe wasn't the only one to become obsessed by the horrifying thought of waking up from a coma in a dark oblong box with no one able to hear you scream. 

Anyway, what sets the dastardliness of Murder By the Clock in motion is Julia's foolish idea to--after a bickering row with the maid compels her realize her house would go to brain dead Pichel when she dies-- Julia makes the mistake of changing her will over to her spineless louse nephew Herbert. Making him her prime beneficiary! Not smart, Julia, when he's married to the dollar sign-eyed monster Laura. And so, the night after signing the new will, Julia is murdered... like clockwork! Are we going to hear her funeral horn in the third act? 

I'll never tell. But I will say it would be a great old dark house movie just between Julia's morbid rantings, Pichel's lunatic laughter, the eerie graveyard across the street, and all the midnight creeping around the old mansion. But then you add the divine Tashman. Oh! Oh, that Lilyan! O what a gal!

Plying her strange seductive charms with all the subtlety of a punch in the face, Tashman proves one thing ably: shy men will always let themselves be manipulated by sexually forward women... they're just so grateful not to have to work up the courage tpo bust the first move. With shyness having cut them off from a dozen opportunities in the past, It can be oh so tough for shy guys to resist an assertive girl, even (or maybe especially) if--like Tashman-- she's only slightly attractive (i.e. 'ugly-sexy'). If a really beautiful woman comes onto a man who isn't used to it, the effect can be a kind of uncontrollable terror, stammering and running out the door (followed by weeks of self-reproach). If the shy guy and the hot girl do end up having sex, it's never any good. And I'll tell you why!

See, the hot girl is used to being bedded by expert seducers, which means the hot girl becomes more like a wine snob, used to the very best. A shy guy is too inexperienced to measure up, and she's never been sex-starved enough to savor whatever she gets. But an ugly-sexy lady like Tashman, a cop might figure he could let her seduce him and then arrest her and not feel bad about it. And that's why she's so dangerous. Over the course of the film she first manipulates her husband into killing Julia, then after she's dead, manipulates her sculptor lover into killing her husband. Pichel is blamed for Julia's murder - jailed on suspicion. Tashman's Laura comes to visit him and true to its (pre)code, lets him all but molest her through the bars while convincing him to break out (he can bend the bars with ease) and kill her husband, and/or her sculptor lover - whichever is still alive by then! So he's got every man killing every other man to be with her, just throwing them all into the big gloomy house, hoping none of them will live long enough to rat her out. Hot damn this lady rulez!

And ultimately the thing is, there is no hero or romantic lead to root for which makes it kind of a strange ride: all the men are easily seducible murderers. Only the homicide cop on the case, the Bickford-esque William Boyd, has any integrity.  Julia may have the other sucker's snowed with her ugly-sexy seductive pre-code wiles, but he's not having it. Still, he admires her powerfully for trying and even admits--before hauling her away-- he considered it; some might say Boyd brought a little bit of her cunning relish to his later role as Zolok, the evil ruler of The Lost City (1935), the glint of feral madness in the eyes, maybe. Either way. get this gem onto a good-looking Blu-ray or TCM edition, so we can finally savor it in all its full evil pre-code splendor!