Foster on Film

‘Deadlegs’ Flint (Walter Huston) is a paraplegic who rules over a small area of the African jungle with a combination of cruelty and magic tricks. From there he plans various illegal schemes which are executed by his cowed henchmen Hogan (Mitchell Lewis) and Cookie (Forrester Harvey). He also keeps around sex toy Tula (Lupe Velez). All his substantial will is focused on revenge against Gregg Whitehall (C. Henry Gordon), who stole his wife and crippled him years ago, and it’s time to put the first part of that plan into action. He’s kept Whitehall’s daughter Ann (Virginia Bruce) in a convent school for years. Now he will drag her into the jungle and degrade her in every way imaginable before confronting her father. Entering into this hellhole is Kingsland (Conrad Nagel), drug-addled doctor, who falls for Ann while Flint forces him to stay for his own purposes.

Sadism, rape, whippings, incest, mental & physical abuse, drug addiction, alcoholism, forced alcoholism, prostitution, pimping you daughter, torture, and human sacrifice, and in 1932. I didn’t know they made them like this then. Hell, they never made them like this. Kongo is all things exploitation turned up to 11. It laughs at SAW and Hostel. It’s sleaze, but it’s sleaze elevated and perfected. There is no taunting or teasing. It lays it all out. No, we don’t need many films like this, but if we need one, this is it.

Kongo is often said to be a remake of Tod Browning’s 1928 silent West of Zanzibar, starring Lon Chaney, which is a partial truth. Both are based on the 1926 stage play Kongo, which starred Walter Huston (Virginia Bruce is often cited as being in it as well, but she’s not listed in the original cast). Browning’s version softened it, removing the drug references and making Flint—known as Phroso in that version—more sympathetic by adding an unnecessary opening, as well as slightly easing up on the abuse of the daughter. It’s a good movie, but Kongo is the real deal.

William Cowen’s career as a director was brief and otherwise not noteworthy, but he knew what to do with this material. His restraint is amazing. The story is over the top, the dialog extreme, and the acting drags you kicking and screaming into the film, so Cowen keeps the camera calm. He keeps the focus on character and avoids anything that could distract. He had a wonderfully lurid script filled with sharp cruel dialog and a cast that could project the nastiness involved so he got out of the way and let it happen. Sometimes that’s the best kind of direction.

I can’t praise the cast too highly. Each brings levels I didn’t expect. Perhaps most surprising is Conrad Nagel who is normally bland in early Hollywood bland leading man parts. Not here. He takes the character that could so easily have been overshadowed and gives him real depth. Kingsland’s romance with Ann is believable, perhaps because they walk through the abyss together. It’s actually quite heartwarming to see them still moving after all their suffering, and it helps that Kingsland isn’t simply a paragon of cinematic virtue; he’s a drug addict that has sex with Tula for a fix. Virginia Bruce is a revelation as well. I didn’t know she was capable of this. It’s her finest performance and it could easily have gone wrong. She walks a fine line between virtue and depravity. Ann is the victim, and Bruce never tries to hide that, but she plays it as more. She’s not just some thing to be rescued. She’s exhilarating. And of course there is Huston, a legend of ‘30s Hollywood, who owns Flint. He feels dangerous from the instant we meet him, and even more malevolent. It’s easy to hate him, yet I couldn’t help reveling in his vile actions.

Kongo is everything 1970s Euro-trash cult films promised but never seemed to deliver, in part because they were never made this well. Kongo is lewd and malignant and I could feel the sweat and filth and disease. If a film could infect you, this is it, and I loved it.

Svengali (John Barrymore) is a talented musician living in an artists community that include his follower Gecko (Luis Alberni), and painters The Laird (Donald Crisp), Taffy (Lumsden Hare), and Billee (Bramwell Fletcher). He’s also a cad, who uses his charisma and hypnotic powers to gain what he wants, and in one case, to cause a no longer useful woman to kill herself. He stumbles upon vivacious artist’s model Trilby (Marian Marsh) and realizes she could be a great singer. She falls for Billee and vice versa, but he rejects her, at least momentarily, in a fit of moral pique when he sees her nude modeling. Svengali, who had left a suggestion in her mind to think only of him when he had hypnotized her to rid her of repeated headaches, convinces her to fake her own death, and then be reborn as a great opera star under his tutelage. However, when he rid her of her pain, he took it into himself, and it is slowly sapping his strength.

It’s exciting to find a great movie that had somehow escaped my notice. While I’ve been a fan of the Universal horror films since I was a kid, I’d never even heard of this. Strange as it was a big hit. Of course I knew the term “Svengali” and that it referred to a character, though I’d never read George Du Maurier’s novel (titled Trilby). This is the 5th feature version, and the first with sound, and everyone should know it. It deserves a place next to Frankenstein and Dracula. It’s a shame it was made at Warner Bros instead of Universal as they’d have done a better job of keeping it in the public consciousness.

Like all the best monsters, Svengali is sympathetic. I didn’t give a damn about Billee, but I felt it when Svengali was harmed, when he ached. It’s a wonderful performance by John Barrymore, the “Great Profile” and renowned drinker. He’s helped by an iconic character design. Svengali’s long hair is swept back; his beard ends in multiple points, and his eyes are intense, and shine when he uses his powers. For most of the first act, he seems just a playful rogue, much like the other artists, except for causing that woman to die… He is jovial, and above the traditions that pull down others (like Billee), but despair is always underneath, and eventually must show through. His love for Trilby is heartbreaking as he can make her appear to love him, but then he’s just “talking to himself.”

Trilby is a light in the sea of darkness which was female roles in the early ‘30s. In this regard, Svengali rises above its universal rivals. She’s sharp, fun, and very much alive. She has to have such strong agency for it to matter when it is taken away. Seventeen-year-old Marian Marsh (they started them young back in the day) glows in the part. While she doesn’t upstage Barrymore—no one could—she holds her own with him.

As good as those two are, they are beaten by art director Anton Grot and Cinematographer Barney McGill, who make Svengali a dreamlike wonderland. I’ve never seen expressionism used so effectively outside of the works of James Whale. They, and director Archie Mayo, were clearly big fans of Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Nothing is quite right. No door is straight, no room is square, and spaces are far larger than reality would dictate. But then in a world of artists and hypnotists, what is reality?

I’m not the first to note that Svengali can be taken as a comment on May-to-December romances, with the elder controlling and sapping the life from the younger, while the stress of it does him in. But things are a bit more complex, as one would then expect Billee to be the true love Trilby should have been with, and that’s not the case. He’s shallow and cruel, in part due to his youth. The older man would almost certainly have been the better match for her, if only she’d been given the choice.

Svengali is a mesmerizing mix of tragedy, horror, and comedy. It may be difficult viewing for horror fans only familiar with modern film, but if German expressionism interests you, you’ll enjoy it.

Note: Warners attempted to follow up the success of Svengali by casting Barrymore and Marsh in a very similar project, The Mad Genius (1931), this time with Barrymore excessively controlling a ballet dancer. However, they removed all of the fantastical and horror elements, leaving a passable melodrama. It’s nicely directed by Michael Curtiz, who would soon become one of the great directors (and my choice for the greatest of all time), but Barrymore’s kind of ham works better when his eyes are magic and he’s surrounded by a dreamlike world.