Old Dark Capsules 2: Phantom of Crestwood, The Black Cat (1941), Horror Island, The Rogue's Tavern, One Frightened Night

THE BLACK CAT

1941 - Universal **1/2

 It's confusingly titled since the Ulmer 1934 is the Black Cat as far as every horror fan in the world is concerned, but this name-only version has charms of its own, hampered (unless you've a benign tolerance for idiots) by insurance salesman Broderick Crawford's spazz and bluster and the endless tut-tutting of Hugh Herbert. The climax exemplifies Griffith's dictum re: you don't crosscut from the heroine about to be grilled in a cat crematorium, Perils of Pauline-style, to old Hugh Herbert fiddling around with old lamps and screwdrivers laughing to himself like a simpleton, since it creates a feeling of rage rather than suspense in the viewer (his exact words, I swear!) Another rule: never turn your back on someone after you've accused them of murder, especially when you're alone with them inside a secret, soundproof chamber. Luckily there's the triple threat treat of Basil Rathbone (as a greedy heir), Bela Lugosi (as an enigmatic groundskeeper), and Gayle Sondergaard (as a suspicious housekeeper); and dialogue so rattattat one gets the whiff of amphetamines in the air. However, unlike Howard Hawk's ingenious use of overlapping dialogue, here they wait for the other person to finish their lines (if you'll forgive the expression) so there's a weird disconnect, as it takes longer to go a shorter distance even while moving  twice as fast. As a result, more stuff happens in the first half hour of this film than in six ordinary old dark house films, yet it never really goes... anywhere... at all...  'til the fiery furnace finish.

In addition to Basil Rathbone ("who does he think he is," quips the Brod, Sherlock Holmes?") there's a young, surly Alan Ladd in his film debut (would that Veronica Lake was around to chill him). And while Brod's schtick grows wearisome fast, there's some satisfaction to be had when he jumps off a second floor balcony and lands face down in the mud in a single wacky take. After flying through the air and tackling an empty suit of armor or the wrong guy over and over though, you'd think he might hesitate the smallest bit with his wild accusations the next time a single whiff of red herring catches his dopey blue-collar nose. Nope. Still, like that Ritz Brothers' Gorilla movie, if your mood is undiscriminating enough, there are worse variations on the theme, and it certainly ladles on the atmosphere. This Cat has even more secret passages and panels than most; the cat sculpture and its surrounding marble mausoleum are gorgeous; and there's two deaths by hanging (they weave around the censors by showing dangling legs reflected in the mirror).

Gale Sondergaard is good as always as the sinister catkeeper (the old rich dead lady wants to keep her house a cat sanctuary after she dies) but poor Bela--though featured prominently in the credits--is literally stuck out in the cold as the shaggy groundskeeper. Clearly they wanted his name on the marquee but didn't want to deal with him at all, except maybe through a second unit. Was the morphine or just his infamous Hungarian temperament that reduced him to these wasted household servant parts at Universal all through the 40s? While we're on the subject, I would like to see one movie, just one, where Bela has a girlfriend. Why couldn't he be married to Sondergaard or something? Actually there is one film where a girl likes Bela, Monogram's BLACK DRAGONS. (Rattle metal thunder sheet and flicker the lights)

HORROR ISLAND

1941 - Universal - *1/2

There are a lot of things wrong from the start with Horror Island but none more so than the three lead males: squeaky clean Dick Foran in a Popeye-style sailor man suit as a dope struggling to pay off his boat; Fuzzy Knight, making Andy Devine seem like like Errol Flynn as his cornpone first mate; and Leo Carrillo, shameless hamming it up as a Spanish pirate, replete with earring. They're seeking some buried pirate gold on a remote island, but need money for the expedition so they market it as an adventure expedition. Signing up is wiseacre heiress Peggy Moran, her drowsy playboy companion, Thurston Coldwater (Lewis Howard), and some other tourists. After some on-deck skullduggery they land on a rocky coasted island and an old mansion and then commences the ghostly howls, and the dusty suits of armor that m-m-m-move by themselves. Simmer for 30 more minutes of tepid candle-lit corridor creeping and you got yourself a bland comedy-mystery cliche stew. Worse even, a lot of the spook happenings turn out to be fake. A sinister shadow in a slouch hat tries to add to the studio enforced and censor-scrubbed 'fun' but whether he succeeds probably depends on what age you were when you first saw this. 

People who caught on TV in their youth do love it. It even has a chapter in the Guilty Pleasures (Vol. 1 - Midnight Marquee) which I think is out of print so you'll have to take my word for it (I can't find my copy or I'd quote it. For you, it should be enough to know that it's there, in the book, and that some writer likes it. I will say this: if you just relax into the film and take it as a bunch of vaguely connected shots of young men and women in dreary wartime fashions and pasteurized pirate costumes skeedaddling in and out of secret panels and conking each other on the back of the head, maybe you can muddle through.

There is one bright spot: Moran's effete rich pal, Thurston, played with great ennui by Howard, who lounges around and makes droll wry comments like an anesthetized Waldo Lydecker. He can do wonders with a line like "Listen, my impetuous young friend," and he even has the last joke. Why didn't he star?!?!

PHANTOM OF CRESTWOOD

1932 - RKO  ****

It's got everything I love: it occurs over one afternoon and night, ends at dawn, it's got fog, a washed-out road, a wind-blown house, murder suspects, death masks, and two of my favorite actresses: Anita Louise (Titania in the 1935 Reinhardt Midsummer Night's Dream) and Karen Morley (Poppy in Scarface). The latter delivers a scene-swipingly slithery performance as wry gold digger 'party girl' Jenny Wren, who's decided to retire and intends blackmailing all her rich ex-lovers in one fell swoop, gathering them for a party at a remote Southern California mansion at midnight, along with their wives, if any. The scandal! If this got out I'd be ruined (x3). Jenny's retirement is prompted--we learn via then-groundbreaking whirlwind flashbacks--bysome naive rich baby-faced college boy's leaping off cliff to his death after she dumps him (papa cut him off because he wants to marry her). Then his ghostly face appears on the balcony, and then she's dead, too, from a thrown dart (?). Ricardo Cortez and his group of gangsters arrive, initially to steal some of Jenny's incriminating love letters, but when they see the corpse, decide to hold the whole party hostage, and need quick solve the murder before the landslide is cleared and cops arrive. 

Yet another great instance of pre-code casting genius: Hilda Vaughn is Morely's awesome deadpan maid, a kind almost a Leporello-level co-conspirator and/or sewing circle "companion: rather than a mere servant. And if the lesbian currents don't run deep enough for you, there's the butch old aunt played by Pauline Frederick who--like Mercedes McCambridge in Giant--is fond of using horse breeding terminology when scrutinizing potential in-laws (i.e. Anita's innocent sister home from college). They're all great but it's really Morley's show - though she's in the role of the rotten blackmailer everyone wants to kill, she's so honest about her machinations, so amused at the way her suckers fear scandal, yet so winning in her "chalk it up to experience, youngster" worldliness, we want to write her incriminating love letters ourselves.

 The ending, on a foggy cliff with a single engine police plane coming in overhead and the two guys walking off into the fog, foreshadows Casablanca!!  The only difference, the plane is going the opposite direction! The End! The photography is shadowy and intoxicating almost to Von Sternbergian levels, but with all its (in this case, Spanish-style) old dark house accoutrements -- secret passages, clues, washed-out bridge keeping the cops away, complex motives and sophisticated pre-code banter, it doesn't even need to look good to be great.

THE ROGUE'S TAVERN

(1936) Dir. Bob Hill / Puritan Pictures - **

Detective Wallace Ford wants to marry Babara Pepper (a former department store detective)--and quickly-- so they head to a remote lodge the next state over (where its presumably easier to wed impulsively), there to meet a preacher at a tavern for a quickie service. But man, did Ford ever pick the wrong place! They haven't any vacancies. And the justice hasn't shown up. A gaggle of suspicious types mill in the lobby,  the wind howls softly outside in the night, and then a dog (Silver Wolf) bares his fangs on cue at certain windows and soon, sans preacher, they're all locked in by a mysterious killer. Suspects include a cabal of diamond smugglers, an old coot in a wheelchair and a sexy, strange fortune teller lady (the colossal Joan Woodbury) with a habit of staring straight into the camera during moody close-ups! And Silver Wolf! I've seen this movie a dozen times and fallen asleep every time, but there are worse films to doze off to than this one--the photography, framing, performances, and foggy, dog-howl atmosphere (we hear people scream alongside growls in another room and people run in just in time to see Silver Wolf jump through a broken window and the victim fall down dead) lifts it two steps above the average comparable Monogram picture--and long as you wake up in time to marvel at the sustained crazy killer monologue finale. Seriously, you'll love who the killer turns out to be - it becomes almost a giallo. 

Please note also the big fireplace in the lobby / lounge / tavern, which apparently was a mainstay of RKO-Pathe soundstage, chosen 2-1 by fly-by-nite indie outfits like our 'Mercury Pictures.' When at RKO-Pathe, make sure to build your set around the big fireplace, if it's available (too big to move off the soundstage). You won't regret it. "Have you got a fireplace?" asks Wallace Ford. "Have we got a fireplace!" 

Unfortunately, when the fireplace is the film's best artistic asset, it's gonna be a long night. Splotchy sound (sometimes there's none at all, when something like music, or wind noise, or even footsteps, would be nice; other spots people are talking but there ain't no sound to that either). Pepper's character has that post-code nag problem where instead of just telling Ford what she's seen out the window, i.e. fangs, murders, she hems and haws and stammers like Lou Costello while Ford (a detective in his day job) is busy cross-examining the rogues, and he's reluctant to listen to her, thinking she's just making some excuse to monopolize his time or make some dumb faux-Ann Sheridan wisecrack. One longs for the relative tactlessness of Jimmy Chan! Luckily the jewel thieves get some good knowing lines ("the preacher must be busy with something awfully important," notes one of them), the mystery keeps moving forward, and all three of the women in the cast are all fully-formed characters (for all my grousing, Pepper is a pretty on-key sleuth, silently trailing after suspects, searching everyone's room, etc.) The DVD version on Alpha and is pretty blurred (the Prime print is better). But I don't think clarity would help. The fog of booze, on the other hand, just might. 

ONE FRIGHTENED NIGHT

1935 - Mascot Pictures - **1/2

A dark and stormy night, a crotchety old man (Charley Grapewin) gathers his greedy heirs and promises them each a million dollars, but then some blonde shows up claiming to be his long lost granddaughter, so he changes his mind and leaves it all to her. If you want your granddaughter to survive the night!! Secret panels, passages. grisly masks, and a house full of strange blow guns and other indigenous tribal weaponry... you get the picture. 

ONE DARK NIGHT is a little more lively and ape-free than most old dark house pics, but finds itse;f  saddled with the inescapable Wallace Ford. He plays a Vaudeville magician named 'the Great Lavalle,' whose car conveniently breaks down near the old mansion during the storm. His assistant (Mary Carlisle) just so happens to be the real granddaughter heiress. The old man believes her because she refuses to have anything to do with him or his filthy money. Meanwhile there are poison darts, Hindi sculptures, and a line-up of suspects who all must sooner or later tangle with the usual carload of clueless, gun-jumping cops. Rafaela Ottiano (the human trafficker in SHE DONE HIM WRONG) is the maid; Arthur Hohl and Hedda Hopper (you heard me) are suspects. Ford has no interest in Carlisle except as a pal and assistant, which is unusual, so she upgrades to Regis Toomey, despite the fact he may be the killer.

FRIGHTENED has been a fall-asleep C-level favorite of mine for years in a more truncated version than the somewhat blurry Alpha DVD (I had taped it in the early 80s off the old PBS show Matinee at the Bijou).  I even used footage from it in my cynically unclaimed 2009 smashed hit, CURSE OF THE MALE GAZE. What better way, perhaps, to close this capsule collection than to present it now? 




See Old Dark Capsules 1 here (with OLD DARK HOUSE, CAT AND THE CANARY, THE GHOUL, THE MONSTER WALKS, THE GHOUL)

Exit Visas from Paradise

One thing marvelous about the secret language of Hollywood's 'production code' is the way poetic/romantic dialogue invariably packs a subversive undercurrent - hip screenwriters compelled to bury layers of dirty innuendo beneath shallow graves of poesy. When it's done right, the code--such as it is--works well, as children and adults end up seeing two completely different movies.

Watching CASABLANCA (1941) for the millionth time last night, for example, I noticed deep currents of sexual bartering in the dialogue that just weren't there before. I realized the film is now--for me-- completely different than it was back when I taped it at 15 and watched it incessantly. Back then it was a tale of witty rapport between Bogie and Raines, some Nazi action, thrilling music, some draggy romance redeemed by Bogie's toughness. My old teenage-days film making partner Aland and I studied Bogie's every move - this was how we wanted to be when--if--we ever had dates of our own.

Now, countless dates and viewings later, I find the whole enterprise much richer, dirtier and more cynical. I'm presuming you've seen it, so forgive spoilers: Let's start off with Bogart's embittered reunion with Ilsa after she sneaks back to see him after her first visit to Rick's American with her husband, Victor Lazlo (Paul Henreid), seeking the letters of transit (she leaves Victor asleep back at the hotel). She tells Rick how important it is she gets the letters of transit, how hard it's been for her since they parted, etc., to which he coldly mentions hearing similar sob stories 'before, with a tinny piano playing downstairs,' a remark so cruel it shoos her off.

As a youth, the phrase seemed a reference to schmaltzy soap operas, in other words an allusion to pop culture's signifier for trite romantic clinches. It wasn't until this most recent viewing that it dawned on me: the 'tinny piano downstairs' is an allusion to a brothel, where the women hang out and drink cocktails with the potential clients in a downstairs lounge with a piano player, before luring a man upstairs for sex and maybe post-coital sob stories the women might tell--poor moms overdue on their rent, etc.--in order to maybe dig a larger amount of francs from the pockets of their homesick clientele. Bogart's indication that he's heard stories similar to Ilsa's with the tinny piano playing downstairs suddenly has sleazy meaning that no child would ever discern, at least I never did.

Now, of course, brothels are far less commonplace, the modern equivalent would likely be online mail bride services "like, "Mister, I just need you to wire me another $500 to bribe the embassy for my Russian travel visa." The actual idea of brothels as some kind of shared experience that can be alluded to in pop culture on the other hand, has faded to the point that line passes us right by these days, unless we're so familiar with the film we can begin to examine even previously ignored lines for hidden meanings.

The "tinny music" element ties in with the overall sleaziness on coded display in the city of Casablanca itself, namely the exchange of sex for exit visas between pretty refugee women and police captain Renault (Claude Raines). Renault makes this offer, apparently, often enough that Rick has become his go-to backer, assuring these young things he always keeps his word 'afterwards.' We see a typical examplewith a pretty young Bulgarian refugee woman who asks Renault while her naive young husband is trying to win the visas via roulette in Rick's back room. Rick foils this plan by letting him win, to which Renault is only mildly disappointed ("I'll be in tomorrow with a beautiful blonde, and it will make me very happy if she loses.")

I kind of gleaned this coded proposition as a youngster, but in this latest viewing, such black market transactions seemed the life blood of the film, sketching out the sleazy rubric so popular in women's pictures, the "How far would you go to save your husband?" theme, explored in films as old as TEN CENTS A DANCE (1931) and BLONDE VENUS (1931), right up to JEOPARDY (1953) and 1993's INDECENT PROPOSAL. The popularity of these films seemed to stem from sexually frustrated housewives' need to justify their real or imagined infidelity; in these contrived scenarios, cheating becomes heroic, noble. If a woman could only cheat on her husband to save his life, well, then Hollywood scenarists would find hundreds of occasions for just such a trade, as if all of life was one compromising situation after another (and the men all desirable, charming, rich or studly). Lazlo's endured cuckoldry is no different than this Czech boy's, or Herbert Marshall's in BLONDE VENUS, or Barry Sullivan's being stuck under a fallen beam as the tide rolls over him in JEOPARDY.

Another even sleazier unspoken coded concept--rather unique to CASABLANCA--is the indirect conversation between Ilsa and Lazlo where she basically gets advance permission from her husband to sleep with Rick, if necessary, in order to secure their exit visas. Now that is seriously European of him! One can't help but be impressed by the gracious way he acknowledges the 'what went on in your bed in Paris while I was in a concentration camp stays in Paris' credo.

It's to Henreid's credit as an actor that he makes this mcguffin-hungry anti-Nazi activist such an innocuous tool that he also 'deserves' to be cuckolded. I'd say that 'deserving' is implied, though not spelled out, via the scene where  Lazlo insists the orchestra play the French national anthem to interrupt the drunk singing of the German soldiers'. First of all, it's rude, not patriotic. Second, it's naturally going to have bad repercussions for Rick's cafe, ending the party thanks to Major Strasse's (Conrad Veidt) outrage. So Lazlo is a party pooper, a buzzkill. In fact, Lazlo's presence contributes directly to Rick's loss of status as someone everybody knows and respects in Casablanca. Lazlo reduces him to a man without a bar--at least temporarily-- all for a few moments of French "we conquered these Arabs first, so fuck you, Germans" pride. Why is it noble for France to sing their anthem in Morocco? It would have been great if halfway through the French anthem, the Moroccan busboys and waiters started singing their own national anthem. Until then, it's just one colonizer replacing another. Thus Rick pays the price for Victor's own arrogant pride (though he's not even French), so it's only fair Rick should steal Lazlo's woman.

All this is of course spelled out only parametrically in soft dialogue about how 'for your sake, I let her pretend.'

Then of course there's the oft-discussed 'two-second light tower' dissolve, which I wrote about in relation to BABY DOLL (here) and which Maltby wrote about and Zizek analyzes here. 

Another observation this go-round was how CASABLANCA sketches a particularly melancholy/happy portrait of a paradise where no one knows what they got until they lose it. We hear that Casablanca is a rough place in the opening narration, but what we mainly see is a bar full of people having a good time, with the great piano of Dooley Wilson guiding us through beautiful tracking shots--Rick's is pre-Edenic paradise, evoking 1980s, LOCAL HERO, in which Peter Riegert plays an oil man sent to buy out a remote Scottish seaside village in preparation for a massive oil refinery. Its citizens are anxious to sell out and get away while Riegert realizes they don't know how good they have it at this magical locale, and how sad it will be when it's all wiped away, no matter how much money they all make.

 

The town of Casablanca is, in Curtiz' film, a kind of Arab-themed corner of Hollywood, a giant playground sandbox costume party with real life refugees from the war-torn Europe's theater and film departments as refugees stuck at the exit ramp out of Axis-occupied world and off to freedom in America.  Everyone is playing someone hiding who they are, dressed up as somebody else, and few making even an attempt at an Arab accent as they wear an array of fezzes and costumes culled from all corners of the Warner costume dept. In the metatextual refraction sense, the influx of artists-- Jewish, homosexual, and politically anti-Nazi--such as Peter Lorre and Conrad Veidt (read my appreciation of his work in A WOMAN'S FACE here) finding a Casablanca-esque expat oasis in Hollywood, often playing the very Nazis they had escaped from, held an irony certainly appreciated by the sardonic Weimar artisans and actors, whose work taught us all to savor sardonic black humor as a consolation in a world gone mad, like Walter Huston, teaching Tim Holt to laugh at the loss of their gold dust fortune at the end of TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE.

In short, Hollywood's Casablanca is a paradise of eternal play, disguise and joy, all enabled by what Todd McGowan (1) would call the absence of the imperative to enjoy. Because Casablanca is supposed to be a hell hole, the people are free to enjoy without anxiety, without the specter of the presence of the big other. Zizek compares this to life under communism where since the command to enjoy wasn't present, the people were free to enjoy as an act of covert rebellion, a rebellion discreetly sanctioned by the state as a kind of necessary evil. When you know just who and where the 'Big Other' is, you feel more free to enjoy than you would in an enjoyment-centered society where a definitive Other is externally absent and so becomes internalized, stifling enjoyment via the imperative to enjoy.  Because everyone is supposed to be miserable if they can't fly to Lisbon and freedom, there is no pressure to have fun, which allows joy to form the way it only truly does: when one is staring mortality and loss directly in the face, like the brave blokes of the THE DAWN PATROL.

Of course part of the appeal, the precious moment-in-time beauty of the cafe, stems from Rick's aloof cynicism, and also the cynicism and desperation of the refugees. A triple ex-pat, Rick fled to Spain to escape American persecution for some unnamed crime, fought for the anti-fascists and then fled that war to France, then escaped to North Africa right before the German's march into Paris; now he's basically at the end of the rope, protected by international law and the help of Louie (Rains), the prefect of police, he's like a kid who is free from worry because he is a virtual prisoner (the town itself has a curfew, as if it was populated by teenagers). The arrival of Ilsa signifies not just a chance to redo the past but to leave the perpetual adolescence of this purgatory town and move forward in an Ilsa remarriage--ala Stanley Cavell's analysis of screwball comedies (with the Ralph Bellamy part being Viktor Lazlo).

On the other hand, why bother? At the famous plane climax I felt a sense of recognition, like I was Rick, and Ilsa and Victor were all my friends from college who decided to wed and raise children while I stayed in the East Village and romanced a beautiful rich, already married, Parisian businesswomen, and ended up with nothing, not even a Renault, yet for all that resistance to the 'normal' plan of family-raising, contented. Like Rick, I wound up staying in Casablanca and heading off to join the Free French, symbolizing a heroic rejection of adulthood's sticky reproductive flytrap. His bar sold, he follows the adage of Pavement's Stephen Malkmus: "Between here or there is better than either here or there!" and so he flees once more.

Finally recognizing 'this is the place and time' to shed his neutrality on the Nazi issue and cut the last remaining cord that ties him to the natural process of aging -- signified by the plane to Lisbon "and then America" -- Rick chooses sides against the Nazis once again. Let the balm of war--the only true cure for lovesickness--come home to America, where it belongs. Rick is staying in the only place where paradise may truly endure, the deepest womb of hell, where people go to escape their past, the Free French Foreign Legion... like Geoffrey in UNDER THE VOLCANO, it's his natural habitat - "and that makes Ricky a citizen of the world!"

1) McGowan's Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment informs this essay and comes highly recommended.