An accident in Hungary lands Peter Alison (David Manners) and his slightly injured wife (Jacqueline Wells) at the home of famed architect and war criminal Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff). Dr Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi), who has befriended the couple, is there for revenge, and to find out what happened to his wife and daughter while he was in a prisoner of war camp.
I loved each of the classic Universal horror films upon first viewing in the 1970s, all except The Black Cat. It seems this is not a film for an eleven-year-old. However, as a fifty-year-old, I can’t look away.
The main attraction in 1934 was the confrontation between horror icons Karloff and Lugosi, the first of eight. But The Black Cat is not satisfied with being a stunt movie. This is a twisted tale in several different ways. The story combines vengeance with fascism, Satanism, incest, and a hardy helping of insanity, sometimes tied tightly together, sometimes not. It is horror by way of the art house.
The sets are a bizarre glass and brick wonderland. It’s hyper-modern architecture meets military fortress and it is beautiful. The cinematography keeps it simple—no tricks; it just shows off those sets. If anyone could replicate those sets, The Black Cat could be a solid stage play as a majority of the picture is confined to a few rooms.
With such gorgeous weirdness and suggested perversion, it is no surprise that the ending is a let down, though the degree of that drop is a bit of a shock. Everything wraps up too quickly and cleanly. There needed to be another scene or two dealing with Werdegast’s daughter, as well as some more of whatever plan Werdegast was supposed to have been playing out. And it needed a more gruesome finale. I suppose the motion picture code wasn’t going to allow it to go where it needed to, but it did need to go further. So it ends up being a fascinating might-have-been.