Foster on Film » Page 127

Captain Blood (1935)

Feb 241935

Captain Blood marked the beginning of the golden age of Swashbucklers (yes, every genre has an era known as its golden age; just go with it). Before it, the complications in recording sound while filming the movement inherent in the genre made these films impractical. Sure, a silent Douglas Fairbanks could leap off a mast, but sound swashbuckling heroes had to settle for a lot of talking and just a little fencing in a confined space. Pseudo-Swashbucklers like The Scarlet Pimpernel or my own listed The Count of Monte Cristo contained more sitting than acts of daring-do. With Captain Blood, that changed, though it is a slower paced movie than most people remember.

It was a film of firsts. It was the first “talkie” based on a novel by Rafael Sabatini. It was the first film with a score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who is arguably the greatest composer to ever work in Hollywood. It was Errol Flynn’s first starring role, a part he picked up only after Robert Donat backed out due to poor health. It boasts both the first pairing of Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland (they would have seven more) as well as the first swordfight between Flynn and Basil Rathbone (they would meet three years later in one of the great filmed swordfights in the finale of The Adventures of Robin Hood). It was also the first Swashbuckler for director Michael Curtiz and his first film with Flynn and de Havilland. There would be many more.

It was Curtiz who made Captain Blood more than a B pirate romp. He rarely receives the credit he deserves because he worked in the studio system. More independent directors are lauded over for expressing their personal artistic vision without considering their actual skill to direct. No one could get a better performance from an actor, choose the proper actor for a role (and he did fight for actors when he knew he was right), and create a better shot, than Michael Curtiz. No director has ever been as versatile. He is responsible for White Christmas, Life with Father, Mildred Pierce, Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Santa Fe Trail, and The Adventures of Robin Hood. Musicals, melodrama, Film Noir, Comedy, romance, Swashbucklers, he was an expert in every genre. For Captain Blood, his most important contribution was working with Errol Flynn. Flynn was uncertain of himself when the film began; he had yet to develop his easy manor with stylized dialog. Curtiz gave him the confidence that would allow him to become a genre star, and then re-shot the scenes where Flynn had been less-assured. Curtiz’s style filled the movie. He was part of the German expressionist movement and he put that to use. The look of the early scenes, in the rebel’s house and in the courtroom, could have been pulled out of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Rooms are overlarge with a lack of decoration. Walls seem to tilt in unexpected angles. It is odd to watch, and quite effective. The strangest scene in the movie, and one of the best, has slaves pushing round a large wheel. Why? It doesn’t appear to do anything, at least nothing the audience can detect. It is just a representation of enslavement and is reminiscent of the clocks from Metropolis.

The plot of Captain Blood plays out less like a single story and more like a series of episodes. Part 1: good Dr. Blood goes to the medical aid of a rebel, is arrested, and sentenced to a life of slavery. Part 2: Blood lives life as a slave at Port Royal, where he uses a whining governor and two clownish doctors to plot an escape, but ends up stealing a Spanish war ship. Part 3: The slaves become rollicking pirates. Part 4: Blood makes an alliance with Capt. Levasseur, an “evil” French pirate. Part 5: Romance and sexual tensions on the high seas as Blood and Arabella Bishop (Olivia de Havilland) mix their love with pride. Part 6: Political changes turn the pirates into heroes. The film changes tone dramatically with each part; some are in deadly earnest while others are nearer to comedy.

Captain Blood holds up as well as most golden age Swashbucklers to changing times, with a few exceptions, primarily involving bold text emblazoned on the screen. I’m sure the viewer wasn’t supposed to laugh when the words “Blood…Blood…Blood” popped up, but it reads like a comic. Even more amusing is terminology used to depict the pirates: we are told that the pirate city is “where easy money consorted with easy virtue” and that Captain Levasseur is a “hard fighting, hard-gaming French rascal.” Consorted? Easy Virtue? A rascal? I would love to hear an evening news cast describe a mass murderer as a rascal, perhaps one in search of easy virtue.

Is it a good film? Yes. But as I mentioned, it is a film of firsts and it feels like it. Everything is there to make a great movie, but none if it quite manages it. Flynn pulls off the cocky champion, but he would do it far better in The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Seahawk. Korngold’s score is top notch by Hollywood standards, but with only a few weeks to prepare it, it does not reach the heights of those he wrote a few years later. Rathbone’s antagonist pirate is entertaining for the small part he plays in the film, but is a shadow of his later villains. Of course he’s not helped by having to use a comical French accent. The clowns and jokes that are a hallmark of Swashbucklers are all there, but the bumbling doctors and the churchman who recites Bible verses after each attack make me wince more than laugh. These would also be done better in later films. Plus the studio hadn’t quite got down the pacing of an adventure yarn or the skill to disguise obviously fake backdrops. It is hard to beat the climatic sea battle, which is surprising as Curtiz had no full sized ships and only one deck set to work with. He had a few small ship models and footage from the silent versions of Captain Blood and The Seahawk to reuse, and yet with some smoke and a huge cast of pirate extras, Curtiz makes it real. Captain Blood is a good film, but is more important as the basis for the films to follow.

The Production Code

The filmmakers of the ‘30s and 40s were masters of sneaking in scenes or concepts that the censors would have blocked, had they recognized what was on the screen. With Captain Blood, the object of such attention was androgynous Jeremy Pitt. How should we take such lines as Col. Bishop asking what is between Pitt and Blood, or Pitt’s statement that he has been watching it go “in and out, in and out”? Pitt’s whipping adds in a touch of B&D. It’s all implication, which is how it was done then, and makes the film just a little more fun.

Reviews, Swashbucklers Tagged with: Four Reels

The Count of Monte Cristo (1934)

Sep 271934

Any list of top Swashbucklers needs at least one film based on the works of Alexandre Dumas, and this is the best of them. Pleasingly acted and filmed, it still just barely counts as a Swashbuckler due to its leisurely pacing and scarcity of swordfights.

Important, Important Swashbucklers, Reviews Tagged with: Five Reels

Maniac (1934)

Jul 241934

Dr. Meirschultz (Horace B. Carpenter) is a mad scientist. Make that a wacky scientist. He yells and leaps around and yells some more. He’s also working on serum for raising the dead. Helping him, due to a combination of debt and blackmail, is Don Maxwell (William Woods), a vaudeville performer with top makeup skills who is nearly as loony as his boss. When their first attempt to bring a corpse to life goes well, the good doctor makes the perfectly rational suggestion (well, he yells his suggestion) that Maxwell kill himself so they can resurrect him. Maxwell takes this poorly, and instead shoots the doctor, and the whole subplot of resurrecting the dead exits the picture. When a mental patient shows up at the door, Maxwell sees no alternative but to masquerade as the doctor and treat him (injecting water, “because that will do no harm”). There’s also something about his wife learning about inherited money and a neighbor who skins cats for fur. And then from time to time we are given a helpful written lesson on mental illness, because… Why not?

Ah, pure sleaze! I don’t mean porn. Porn is wholesome by comparison, and also is more concerned with quality as pornographers want you to see the bits you’re gazing at. Sleeze-makers don’t care and Dwain Esper was the master of sleeze. A conman, he won some equipment so decided to make films that would be shown outside of normal distribution channels, where the production code and religious zealots couldn’t reach him. Often his movies masqueraded as informational, usually on some taboo subject. And it’s one of those that is his legacy: Reefer Madness. Well, if you know the subtlety and good taste in that film, then you know what you’re up for here. But as he is director as well as producer on Maniac, the filmmaking skill is even lower.

With a script written by his wife, Esper offers up whatever he could shove in front of his camera. Acting was of no concern, nor were sets. However, girls exercising in their underwear as well as the occasional peek-a-boo nipple were important. So was a man gurgling and spitting up foam, two women whacking each other with boards as they rip clothing, and our hero eating a cat’s eye. Of note, the last one was fake (something that needs to be specified in a film like this), however, there was a real backyard cat farm that skinned them for fur; It’s unclear if the location in the film is that actual place—I’d bet against it, but, this is Esper, so maybe.

Maxwell has visions throughout the film that look far more interesting and professional than anything else. That’s because they are stolen images from much better silent pictures (variously reported to be from Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan, Fritz Lang’s Siegfried, and Guido Brignone’s Maciste in Hell; I didn’t consider it worthwhile to investigate it for myself).

As would become Esper’s frequent ploy, Maniac pretends to lecture on the important subject of mental illness. It does this by having intertitles pop up with textbook definitions of various mental issues, or just to tell us that fear is bad. These appear randomly, sometimes between scenes, and sometimes right in the middle of “the action.”

When Maniac didn’t sell a lot of tickets, Esper retitled it Sex Maniac, after which it did much better. Shocker. With any title, it has been called the worst film of all time, and like most films that acquire that designation, it is more often said to be so bad it is good. I can’t use the word “good” with anything connected to this film, but it is amusing.

Horror, Mad Scientists, Poverty Row, Reviews Tagged with: Two Reels

House of Mystery (1934)

Jun 121934

Twenty years ago, obnoxious treasure-hunter John Prendergast (Clay Clement) insults and attacks a Hindu temple, and is cursed. He makes away with two million dollars in temple gold. In “current” day, his investors and their heirs find him, and want their cut. He agrees, but only if they stay the week in his house to see the curse in action. The house fills with an absentminded professor and his abrasive wife (Harry Bradley, Mary Foy), an insurance salesman (Ed Lowry), a hypochondriac and her spiritualist companion (Dale Fuller, Fritzi Ridgeway), a gambler (George ‘Gabby’ Hayes), their lawyer (Sam Godfrey), Prendergast himself, his Hindu housekeeper/dancer (Joyzelle Joyner), his cute nurse (Verna Hillie), a plumber (John Sheehan), and a gorilla. To no one surprise, people begin to die.

Just what kind of legal advice were people getting in the ’30s? If my lawyer suggested I live in some weirdo’s house for a week that had avoided paying me what he owes me for years, I’d get a new lawyer.

Poverty Row loved Old Dark House movies. They also had a strange fondness for killer ape flicks, so here we have both. Two years earlier we’d gotten The Monster Walks, with a angry chimp in a house. Luckily House of Mystery doesn’t take itself seriously because the stupidest thing on hand isn’t the gorilla. I won’t say what takes the crown as there are so many options.

I call this a “light” film rather than a comedy because nothing is funny. I’ve no doubt the filmmakers intended some lines to be jokes, but they didn’t put enough effort in to make the gags work. So it ends up as fluffy nothingness. It isn’t boring, nor is it engaging, People die. People have a séance. People discuss insurance. It all has the same weight. It is amusing how little the characters seem to care that bodies are piling up around them.

Some might cringe at the Orientalist stuff at the beginning, though I rather like it, particularly the temple and dancing girl. Sure it fetishize the mysterious East, but the “Asians” (I assume Indians; the tile card simply reads “Asia–1913”) are the good guys and the colonialists are depicted clearly as slime.

After you’ve watched a dozen other Old Dark House films, give this one a shot, but not before.

Dark House, Horror, Poverty Row, Reviews Tagged with: Two Reels

The Ghost Walks (1934)

Apr 181934

On a dark and stormy night, as is normal in these sorts of pictures, theater producer Herman Wood (Richard Carle) and his secretary Homer Erskine (Johnny Arthur) are being driven by playwright Prescott Ames (John Miljan) to his home when a fallen tree forces them to take refuge in a nearby house, owned by psychologist Dr. Kent (Henry Kolker). Also within are the butler Jarvis (Wilson Benge), Gloria Shaw (June Collyer), who happens to be Ames’s fiancée, Terry Gray (Donald Kirke), who also has designs on Gloria, and Terry’s widowed sister Beatrice (Eve Southern), who is being treated by Dr. Kent and speaks to her dead husband. All are marooned there for the night when spooky things begin to happen, however, it turns out almost no one is who they say they are and a completely different mystery and danger are about to appear.

We’re in standard Old Dark House territory here, though with the comic bits turned up and the thriller ones turned down. Quirky characters are stuck in a spooky mansion, with murder and sinister happenings all around, but it is clear from the start that things will be Scooby-Do’d in the end. There are secret passageways, painting where the eyes move, and people vanishing. There is a nice twist at the end of “the first act” that sets this apart from its brethren, though less is done with it than I would have expected (avoid other reviews as almost everyone gives away the twist). Otherwise, everything unfolds as expected.

Ames is an amiable enough protagonist, but most of the fun comes from the comic bickering of puffed-up Wood and effeminate Erskine. That sort of routine often annoys me, but here it is written well and it doesn’t wear out its welcome.

The dialog is a step above the norm (mainly the jokes), as is the acting. The house looks nice enough, but there isn’t enough of it. We keep getting the same angles of the same rooms when we should be seeing strange new locations, or at least a new setup for the camera. Clearly there wasn’t enough money to create the needed sets.

This is a nice Old Dark House movie, so if you are in the mood for one, this will do nicely. But there’s no reason to choose it over others in the sub-genre, and is more a film to watch if it happens to come on TV than to seek out.

Other Poverty Row horror films from director Frank R. Stayer: Tangled Destinies (1932), The Monster Walks (1932), The Vampire Bat (1933), Condemned to Live (1935).

Dark House, Horror, Poverty Row, Reviews Tagged with: Two Reels

El hombre bestia o las aventuras del Capitán Richard (1934)

Apr 081934

WWI Capt. Richard (Saverio Yaquinto) takes off in his biplane to scout enemy positions. He’s shot down and ends up lost in a jungle, where he turns savage, which includes growing some rather unlikely globs of hair that seam glued to his shoulders. Eventually another pilot lands in a clearing in the jungle and Richard strangles him and steals the plane. He runs out of gas and lands near a mad scientist’s house. The scientist immediately injects him with a “diabolic” drug that brings out the lust in Richard, who escapes and begins kidnapping local women and taking them to his cave. Who will stop this human beast? Well, I can assure you it won’t be the unruly sailors who are hired for the job and die really easily.

El hombre bestia {The Beast Man} is Argentina’s first horror film, and according to Janne Wass on Scifist, there was not another for eight years (which saved me all kinds of time searching). There’s a solid argument that it isn’t a horror film, but an action flick modeled after American serials (the second part of the title is Or The Adventures of Captain Richard). There’s a better argument that it isn’t any kind of film at all. Made not by an experienced filmmaker, but by journalist C.Z. Soprani, El hombre bestia appears to be the result of a hobbyist playing around in his free time, not someone seriously trying to make a motion picture, and then trying to make a few pesos at small-town theaters that weren’t able to get real movies and in private screenings. With that title it could attract a few horror fans or a few adventure fans, and once they’ve paid, it doesn’t really matter what you show them if you aren’t planning on sticking around.

El hombre bestia was considered a lost film, which makes it sound far more important than it is. No one considers the video I took at a convention in 1999 a lost film just because I don’t have it any more. No one it seemed, including Soprani, bothered keeping it around. But in the years it was missing, it gained a mystique. It was, after all, Argentina’s first horror film, so it must be significant. There’s even a documentary about it now, which is massively better than the film itself; its main weakness is having a subject not worthy of a documentary. And it turns out someone—a child of one of the amateur actors—had a copy that got ported to VHS (and in so doing, destroyed the film) as you might an old home movie. So now we can all see a poor copy of a film that doesn’t deserve that much.

Soprani had gathered a few non-actors together, pointed his camera in their general direction and then they moved around, some like Yaquinto, energetically, but mostly slowly and with no real idea what they were doing. Well, Soprani had no idea, so why should they?

Argentina had a small silent film industry primarily in Buenos Aires, but things took off when sound arrived. It was a lot easier for Hollywood to dominate non-English speaking countries when language wasn’t in the equation. So by 1934 Argentina was pumping out Spanish language pictures with tango soundtracks. As El hombre bestia can barely be called a movie, it bucked this trend. It’s essentially a silent picture, complete with intertitles, that occasionally has a scene with dialog—dubbed after filming. None of those involve Captain Richard, who runs about abducting women without even sound effects—just a loud classical score. One of the more amusing aspects, and one that would make a great drinking game, is how the booming music will cut out when we enter a talkie moment, and as soon as the dialog is complete, the music returns.

The editing is…odd. Best I can tell, scenes often start or stop with a piece of cardboard slowly being pulled across the camera lens. It’s a technique whose time has never come.

I’ve seen others say that Soprani used a great deal of “stock footage” but that’s being too charitable. A more accurate description is that he stole chunks from other films and stuck them in his. The only good looking scenes are the charging soldiers and dueling planes at the beginning, all of which was lifted from real movies. I do, however, believe that the pointless beach scene could be stock footage, although I think it is more likely Soprani’s family vacation film.

It’s unfair to call El hombre bestia a horrible film because it isn’t a film. It’s a sad little joke, or a con, or something just fiddled around with. However, it can be amusing to watch in the right state of mind, which would drunk.

Classic Horror, Foreign Language, Horror Tagged with: One Reel

Menace (1934)

Mar 211934

In Africa, three bored, wealthy wastrels, Helen Chalmers, Col. Leonard Crecy, and Norman Bellamy (Gertrude Michael, Paul Cavanagh and Berton Churchill) harangue their friend (Ray Milland) to come and play bridge with them, even though there’s a storm, the dam he’s responsible for could burst, and he’d have to fly his biplane to get there. But eventually he gives in and shows up for the card game. When he receives dire news from the dam, he takes off, but ends up dead. His insane brother swears revenge on the three, giving an exact date on when he will kill them. On that day, the three gather at a large, secluded house in California, along with Cavanaugh’s chauffer (Forester Harvey). They also hire a new butler, Skinner (Halliwell Hobbes), and welcome Helen’s kid sister (Arletta Duncan) and her brand new boyfriend (Robert Allen). Finally they are joined by the eccentric old woman from a mile or so down the road (Henrietta Crossman) and the young man who is a friend of her son’s (John Lodge). It soon becomes clear, in case it wasn’t already, that the killer is in the house.

I’ve pointed out that the Old Dark House films are the ancestors of Slashers. Menace shows you can have your children when you are young. It’s often categorized as an Old Dark House film, but it’s a Slasher, one of the earliest, coming four decades before the subgenre’s normally stated birthdate. We have our groups of dim characters, gathered together, with a knife-wielding maniac set to kill them. And the targets of his wrath aren’t randomly chosen, but people who bare partial responsibility for a death.

And as in so many Slashers, these are remarkably stupid people. The psycho told them he would kill them on a particular date. So they get together. Why? Since they had just been scattered over three continents, it would have been impossible for the threat to be carried out. They choose as their haven a house over a mile away from the nearest neighbor, and distant from a town. And they choose this day to hire a new butler (are they so degenerate that they couldn’t take care of themselves without a butler for a single day), as well as receiving a visit from a sister who brings a guy she’s only known for a few weeks, and let in the neighbor with a man she’s only known for a few days. Is this really the time to be having visitors? Either hire a team of 10 or 15 bodyguards, or keep out all strangers. And shouldn’t they have asked the doctors at the asylum just what the maniac looked like?

And once they know the killer is there, their stupidity rises a level. They separate over and over again. They do so for trivial matters, like wanting another cocktail and moving a body (shouldn’t they leave it until the police show up) and for important ones, like fixing the fuse. Sometimes they run off on their own. Sometimes this is an actual plan. The Colonel is the worse offender, telling the others to go off here and there. It’s dumb the first few times, but after that it’s just funny.

If you can get past how brain-dead these people are, you are left with a passable thriller. Somehow with them all in eveningwear it comes off as slightly less silly since this is a stiff-upper-lip crowd, and hey, didn’t rich people in the 1930s act like this? (The answer is no, but it feels like they might.) Menace builds up the appropriate level of tension, and is unusually graphic for 1934 as we get to see the dagger sliding into a victim (I did say this was a Slasher). The characters are at least identifiable, and the old lady is amusing. You also get a few minutes of a very young Ray Milland. I’d have felt gypped in 1934 paying full price for this, particularly as it’s 58 minutes long, but it isn’t bad to watch while curled up on the sofa.

Classic Horror, Dark House, Horror, Reviews, Slashers Tagged with: Two Reels

The Private Life of Don Juan (1934)

Mar 181934

An aging Don Juan (Douglas Fairbanks) returns to Seville with his servant (Melville Cooper) where he is threatened with jail by his loving wife Dolores (Benita Hume). He visits a few ladies, including a dancer, Antonita (Merle Oberon) and all the town is excited by his return. A young man pretending to be Don Juan is killed when found with a man’s wife and Don Juan takes this as his opportunity to escape his legend and relax by pretending to be dead. But he soon finds it less fun than he thought it would be to be a regular man.

The Private Life of Don Juan is not a Swashbuckler, but I list it with the genre as it is the end of a Swashbuckling legend, and a commentary on both the genre and on the end of legends. Douglas Fairbanks was the greatest Swashbuckling actor of the silent screen. He practically invented the genre. And his time was at an end. He didn’t make the switch to talkies—too old to play the action hero, and with a voice a bit too reedy to live up to expectations. After four failed attempts, he retired, but came back for one last hurrah (probably more if it had been the hit it should have been). Errol Flynn ended his era of big budget Swashbucklers with an aging Don Juan film and I said it was the perfect choice, but actually this is a far better end-of-career picture. Unlike Flynn’s there is no attempt at sword play and it is much more complete in deconstructing a legend.

As the film begins, Don Juan is not what he once was, but then he was never what his legend proclaimed. No one could be. His success with the ladies is now entirely due to his reputation. They want the fantasy and are willing to believe it in order to have it. And without that reputation, he is nothing but an ordinary man well past his prime.

The Private Life of Don Juan takes a few pokes at the people (or perhaps I should say audiences) who cling to the legends and swear their love to celebrities, but it also finds such legends important. The real target of the movie is those who would believe their own publicity. Fairbanks was mocking himself. Just as Don Juan was only important due to the legend, so Fairbanks only mattered for a brief time due to a beautiful lie, and he was replaceable (and would be replaced a year later by Flynn). This is a remarkably message-heavy film for being so light in tone over all. The Private Life of Don Juan is funny and never pretentious. Fairbanks is as good as he’d ever been and the army of beautiful women who slip in and out of the picture are delightful. This is no dirge. It’s about aging, but with a smile and a wink. Fairbanks couldn’t have gone out better.

Reviews, Swashbucklers Tagged with: Four Reels

The Count of Monte Cristo (1934)

Feb 241934

If there is a literary king of the Swashbuckler it would have to be Alexandre Dumas. His fast-paced historical fiction (which held only a winking acquaintance with actual history) was serialized in French papers in the mid 1800s and was extremely popular. His stories contained many of the elements that make a good film, so they have been made into films, over and over again—close to two hundred times. The most popular, and most often filmed, are The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. Unfortunately, most film versions of Dumas stories do not live up to the novels. The exception is the 1934 The Count of Monte Cristo.

It is a story of revenge. Edmund Dantes (played by Robert Donat in his only U.S. picture) is unfairly imprisoned by the actions of three men. There, he is taken under the wing of a wise eccentric who happens to know where a vast treasure is hidden. When Dantes escapes, he finds the treasure, and christens himself the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo in order to destroy his three enemies in ways most fitting to their personalities and flaws. It is a cathartic film and I couldn’t help smiling as each met his fate. Unlike other versions of the movie, this one is reasonably true to the book, and that’s a good thing.

Made only a few years into “talkies,” The Count of Monte Cristo has the look of a silent film. Gestures tend to be on the grand side and the pacing is languid. Donat, who is best remembered for Goodbye, Mr. Chips, plays the young Dantes a bit too angelic to be believed, but has complete control over the part of the older “Count” out for revenge.

Even with its flaws, The Count of Monte Cristo is a satisfying film. Once the retribution begins, it’s all fun. The newest, and much inferior version replaces a court scene with a swordfight, which would normally be a reasonable way of increasing the excitement. But it doesn’t work, in part because the fight is just standard violence where the court scene holds a much more poetic revenge.

Why is it Important?

Any list of top Swashbucklers needs at least one film based on the works of Alexandre Dumas, and this is the best of them. Pleasingly acted and filmed, it still just barely counts as a Swashbuckler due to its leisurely pacing and scarcity of swordfights. But due to its lineage, it’s impossible not to put it in the genre. It also represents where the genre was in the early ’30s. While it cannot be called the firstSwashbuckler (the genre faded into being from its silent roots), no earlier film demonstrates anything more about the genre than The Count of Monte Cristo.

Reviews, Swashbucklers Tagged with: Five Reels

Drums o’ Voodoo (1934)

Feb 231934

Tom Catt (Morris McKenny) has returned to rural Louisiana, with plans to carry out that are both immoral and illegal. Top on his list is blackmailing the upright preacher, Amos Berry (J. Augustus Smith), who has a secret indiscretion in his past that Catt threatens to make public. He’s nearly as interested in turning the preacher’s niece, Myrtle (Edna Barr) into a prostitute. The locals only way of dealing with Catt is to turn to Autie Hagar (Laura Bowman), the Voodoo woman, whose nephew, Ebenezer (Lionel Monagas) is in love with Myrtle, and has turned against Voodoo.

Drums o’ Voodoo, also known as Voodoo, Voodoo Drums, She Devil, and Louisiana, is not a horror film, but as a Voodoo film, it’s part of the discussion of early horror. It’s a race picture (very low budget films made by nearly all Black casts and mostly Black crews to be shown for Black audiences) based on star J. Augustus Smith’s stage play, Louisiana. That makes Drums o’ Voodoo the first film based on a work of a Black playwright. The play had a very limited run, summing the wrath of New York critics. Smith found a producer, who, as was generally the case with race pictures, was White, who then hired short-time White director Arthur Hoerl, who is better known as the writer of Reefer Madness.

They ported the play over mostly intact, including a majority of the cast and the set designs. Drums o’ Voodoo is closer to a recorded play than a typical movie. The backdrops are obviously painted flats, the camera seldom moves, and everyone speaks toward the same direction. All of that is less of a problem than you might think. A majority of the race pictures I’ve seen have had such poor camerawork that it’s an improvement to park it, and the acting may be overly theatrical, but that’s its main downside, which is a step up from actor’s emotionlessly reciting words they don’t understand. Taken for what it is, it’s not bad.

And there’s a lot to like in the story. Mixing Christianity with Voodoo creates some nice philosophical and character moments. Drums o’ Voodoo isn’t negative about Voodoo. Christianity has its good points, but for dealing with terrible people, sometimes you need Voodoo. The preacher and the Voodoo woman are on friendly terms and work together more often than not, while Ebenezer’s desire to get away from Voodoo purely for social acceptance presents lots of interesting possibilities. It’s refreshing.

There are a few odd makeup choices that may have had meaning in the 1930s that escapes me. Laura Bowman wears Blackface, except she’s Black. Did they think she was too pale for a Voodoo priestess? It’s noticeable. Far more noticeable is James Davis as Brother Zero (listed as Brother Zumee on IMDB) who also is a Black actor—though I can’t confirm that—who is in full mistral show Blackface. No one else is. Since he’s both an ass and a comical character, I assume that his look was to indicate he was a fool, but now it’s just strange.

Unfortunately there is one insurmountable problem with Drums o’ Voodoo. It was lost for fifty years, and when found, it wasn’t in good shape. Nearly twenty minutes are missing, including most of the climax. Enough exists to explain what happens to everyone, but some needed details are gone. It makes for a very unsatisfying conclusion. I’ve found no evidence for their being a complete copy of the film.

Horror, Poverty Row, Reviews Tagged with: Two Reels

The Black Cat (1934)

Feb 221934

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.

Classic Horror, Reviews Tagged with: Three Reels

El fantasma del convento (1934)

Feb 211934

Somewhat effeminate Eduardo (Carlos Villatoro), his wife Cristina (Marta Roel), and Eduardo’s more manly friend Alfonso (Enrique del Campo) get lost while walking in the woods at night. A strange man with his dog, Shadow, appears and offers to take them to the nearby monastery of the cloistered Order of Silence. There they are taken in by the mysterious monks, and frightening things begin to happen, many of which seem to relate to Cristina and Alfonso’s secret affair.

The Mexican film industry had gotten off to a shaky start—revolutions will do that. Though it would rise quickly to become the dominant Spanish language film provider in the world, in 1934 things were just getting started, and while government backing made filmmaking financially safe, the lack of Hollywood-type money restrained it. Combine all that with the general reluctance for anyone to make horror and Mexico’s extremely powerful Catholic church, and it’s a shock any horror movies were made in Mexico.

Fernando de Fuentes was the most important Mexican director to try his hand at the genre in the 1930s. He was known primarily for his revolution films, and for creating the comedia ranchera genre, not for horror. This was the second Mexican horror film of the sound era (little survives of silent Mexican cinema, including records), so he had no precedent to work from and was finding his way.

On the horror front, de Fuentes does surprisingly well. This is a creepy picture with tons of atmosphere. His location (I’ve been told it was an actual building instead of a set—though I’m dubious that some of it wasn’t shot on a soundstage) is wonderful, both an attractive and freaky monastery. And he makes great use of it; if there’s a shadow to be played with or an ominous door to approach, de Fuentes does so with style. He takes his cues not from Hollywood, but from Germany, who were the masters of creepy photography. This would fit nicely next to Vampyr.

With plot, things aren’t so good. There’s maybe 30 minutes of story here, if I’m being generous. Far too much time is spent with the characters sitting or standing still, talking. We know Eduardo is a bit cowardly; we don’t have to hear about it over and over.

The score is a bit over the top, but it helps a lot when it is there. However it vanishes far too often, leaving silence which isn’t scary, just dry.

El fantasma del convento is a nice second attempt at the horror genre. It feels a bit primitive, but then Mexican filmmaking was a few years behind.

The title is translated both as The Phantom of The Convent and The Fantasy of The Monastery. The first is a poor translation as there is neither a single Phantom nor are they in a convent.

Classic Horror, Foreign Language, Horror, Reviews Tagged with: Two Reels

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