Jun 121931
 
two reels
MurderbytheClock

Cruel, elderly Julia Endicott (Blanche Friderici), matriarch of a dying family, walks through the cemetery, trailed by Philip (Irving Pichel), her feeble-minded, brutish son and Miss Roberts (Martha Mattox), the housekeeper. Julia claims they are going to the family crypt to lay flowers, but really it is to check the moaning alarm horn she’s had installed so that she can call for help if she is entombed alive. Do you think we’ll be hearing that horn again? So begins Murder by the Clock. Vampish Laura Endicott (Lilyan Tashman) is sick of living below her standards, and of her weak, alcoholic husband, Herbert (Walter McGrail), who she presses to get money out of his Aunt Julia while she goes off to visit her lover, Tomas Hollander (Lester vail). Julia despises Laura, but surprisingly, she decides to make Herbert her heir. What choice does she have: a man-child who dreams of killing or useless Herbert. But that’s not enough for Laura. She doesn’t want to wait. What follows is a string of seductions, murders, and the obsessive detective work of police lieutenant Valcour (William Boyd)

It was 1931. Sound equipment was primitive and filmmakers were trying to catch up to the skill level they’d attained with silents. Horror had always been a tricky proposition, with audiences, by which I mean those claiming moral authority, likely to rebel. And no one knew quite what the limits were. Only Universal, old hands at horror in the silent era, really had any kind of a handle on it, and Dracula, their first horror classic, was still new. So Paramount dipped it’s toe. It had money, and it had talent, but it was never comfortable with horror.

Instead of going with a horror property, Paramount chose a melodramatic mystery novel, and the (as far as I can determine, unproduced) play based on it as the basis for their film. Then they grafted on horror elements: mists, cobwebs, ghostly sightings, death masks, graves and crypts, secret passageways, moans, screams, and an atmosphere of gloom. It doesn’t all fit together, but it is horror, and it is interesting.

All of the confusion and skill is evident when watching Murder by the Clock. There’s some elaborate sets that perfectly define the mood. Besides the house and the marvelous graveyard with crypt, there’s the lover’s apartment/studio filled with statues of Laura. And to frame those was soon-to-be Oscar-winning cinematographer Karl Struss who found moments of macabre beauty. But they didn’t have a lot of skilled sound directors yet, and none familiar with horror. Edward Sloman does a passable job, but he couldn’t add the necessary magic that Whale and Browning and Freund were injecting over at Universal. The graveyard scenes, similar to what would appear within the year in Frankenstein, invoke that sense of wrongness that a horror film needs, but I couldn’t stop imagining that extra push that Whale could have given it, and did in his own film. What’s good here, should have been better. And there’s plenty that isn’t good. If your actors can’t move too quickly, or in all directions, or speak naturally, all for fear of missing the words with the mics, then your film has serious flaws, ones that Sloman didn’t know how to cover.

Luckily he had actress Lilyan Tashman, who pulled out all the stops. Laura is self-obsessed, trampy, money grubbing, controlling, murderous, and just a whole lot of fun. Everyone is a mere shadow next to her and she dominates the movie. She’s a great villain, and it doesn’t hurt that I wasn’t going to shed a tear for Julia. There are no redeeming characters in the Endicott family. Whie this is Laura’s movie, the rest of the Endicott’s are a good deal of fun too. Irving Pichel makes Philip a frightening creature, and a first cousin to the Frankenstein monster, but with a touch less soul. He thinks strangling people will be a lot fun, and has the right mix of child-like and lustful to be really uncomfortable.

But the Paramount confusion shows up with Valcour. He’s clearly the hero who we are supposed to be rooting for, and there’s nothing interesting or likable about him. He’s mostly drab, with his one character trait being his self-righteous compulsion to solve the crime. He’s obnoxious, but otherwise boring, and I wanted him to lose. And that’s a problem in a film where clearly he’s going to win.

The ending is a bit of a mess as well. It’s the ending you’d have for a procedural mystery with just a touch of thrills, not for a horror movie. We reached the point when several deaths were absolutely necessary for the film—and they didn’t happen. We get some police work when we should have had screams.

There’s a lot of good here, and a lot of potential. In better hands, Murder by the Clock would have been one of the great early horror films.

Note: It is frequently categorized as an Old Dark House film simply because there’s an old dark house. That’s not enough.