May 071933
 
three reels

Newly elected President Judson Hammond (Walter Huston) is a typical weak and corrupt politician of the early 1930s. He has no plans to do anything, just like his predecessor, so the depression will continue and crime will run rampant. Working for him is his non-corrupt secretary, Beekman (Franchot Tone) and his mistress, Pendola (Karen Morley). Everything changes when Hammond has an automobile accident. Instead of dying as his doctor’s predict, he recovers after seeing a glow that Pendola later identifies as the angel Gabriel. He awakes a changed man, possessed by the angel. Now upright and good, he sets out to solve the problems of the country by declaring martial law, killing and threatening those in his way, and generally becoming a benevolent dictator.

Gabriel Over the White House is an artifact of a specific time, of the Great Depression when people were willing to trade away freedom for food. When you have nothing, you have nothing to lose. Despair gave rise to fascism in Europe, and this film suggested the same for the United States, and people listened. Luckily things didn’t turn out that way, and within a few years the events in Europe gave fascism a bad taste and this movie was buried for years.

The political weirdness comes from competing horrendous views. Mainly it was from the hand of newspaper oligarch and the film’s financier, William Randolph Hearst, but he had an assist from studio mogul Louis B. Mayer. Hearst, a pestilence upon the nation, was a fan of authoritarianism. He also opposed the Republican administration. Mayer supported the Hoover administration, which took the view that the evils of the country could be repaired by doing little except helping their wealthy friends and letting “lesser” people—the poor, Blacks, malcontents, etc.—die off so that the “worthwhile people—that is, the rich—could continue unburdened. Hearst countered that foul view with the notion of a benevolent dictatorship that could do whatever was needed. FDR wasn’t his candidate of choice, but he hoped that Roosevelt could become what he wanted, and this film was meant to support him. Hearst was later disappointed and became a fierce opponent of FDR. Mayer, who was friends with Herbert Hoover, fought to delay the film, and succeeded to keep it off screens until the election was lost.

What we have here is a propaganda film in support of dictatorship. The film paints the evils of the Republican right not coming from any ideology, but from corruption and weakness. Well, it isn’t as if they didn’t have examples to work with. President Hammond is modeled after Warren G. Harding at the beginning of the film—surrounding himself with his cronies, making appointments purely for gain, and keeping a mistress. The plan to use the military to stop a protest march in the film is a reflection of Hoover’s use of the military to murder protesting veterans. Yes, Hoover did that.

The film’s answer is for the president to shut down congress, create his own personal police force, and replace courts with military tribunals. And all of this is celebrated. Forget the Constitution. Hammond does as he ignores not only the division of powers, but the 18th Amendments as he opens government liquor stores to compete with the mob’s bootleggers. Hammond blames much of the US’s economic problems on Europeans not paying their war debts (a concern in 1930). The answer is to threaten these effete foreigners with war. After all, if you are right and act tough, then other countries will fall in line, right? …right?

The imagery is shocking when you think that this wasn’t a joke. After the gangster are convicted in a kangaroo court, complete with statements from the “judge” about an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, they are taken out and shot by firing squad with the statue of liberty in the background. Liberty is all about eliminating troublemakers…

Gabriel Over the White House is directed well. It looks good and we get some interesting camera work (such as in the scene where there is a drive-by shooting of the White House—yes, there’s a drive-by shooting of the White House). Huston is as good as anyone could be in the role of fascist savior. Both Tone and Morley are amiable, which is handy as it is hard to like the guy running a star chamber and dressed as a secret policeman.

This is an interesting look at the past. I hope we’ve learned enough to see that the answers suggested in Gabriel Over the White House are dangerous.

 Fantasy, Reviews Tagged with:
Feb 161933
 
one reel
cryingwoman1933

After a man dies at night from the cry of a woman, Don Fernando (Paco MartĂ­nez) tells his nephew Dr. Ricardo de Acuna (RamĂłn Pereda) of the great danger his child is in. All the first born sons of the family die when they are four years old. He claims this is due to a curse placed on the family when their ancestor refused to acknowledge his mistress and child, resulting in her killing herself and the boy. A hidden book connects the curse to an indigenous princess in the time of the conquistadors, who swears vengeance after her son is stolen by the Spanish.

The folktale of La Llorona is well known in Central America. An indigenous woman is taken as a lover by an upper-class Spaniard, and then abandoned. In rage and grief, she murders her children and wastes away, becoming a white-clad, weeping woman, wandering the night killing children, or in some versions, killing anyone who she meets. The legend deserves a better film.

The strange treatment of La Llorona doesn’t help. We are shown two separate ghosts, but neither, in ghostly form, play any role in the “main” story. One kills an unknown man at the beginning, but otherwise the curse is carried out by cultists (or the descendants of the princess’s loyal servants if you prefer), one of whom is apparently possessed. Why not stick with the ghost?

The doctor’s behavior is also ridiculous. Sure, I’m with him in discounting a supernatural answer, but if every single first born of my family had died at age 4, then I’d come up with something better than “hey, it’s a big family and tragedies happen. ” This guy’s in deep denial.

Then there is the house, which is so filled with wide hidden passageways and huge secret room, that either the film needed to have been shot in an expressionistic style, or it should have been a comedy.

But the larger problem is that no one involved had the skill to make a movie. Clearly the scriptwriter and set designer were in over their heads, but no more so than the actors, who seem to think they are in a soap opera. And they excel next to the camera man – although I suspect money was the problem there. Even if everything else had been passable, The Crying Woman dies in editing. It is slow, sometimes bizarrely so. Excessive time is spent showing children sitting at a birthday party and focusing on the priest at a wedding, while the horror aspects are rushed. Every scene is poorly edited. The entire film is 73 minute film, yet it uses 27 minutes of that for the first flashback and another 7 for the second, leaving very little time for the modern story or the “main” characters.

Neither creepy nor interesting, The Crying Woman is just boring and sad.

Dec 221932
 
two reels

Young lovers Madeline Short (Madge Bellamy) and Neil Parker (John Harron) arrive in Haiti for their wedding, arranged by wealthy plantation owner Charles Beaumont (Robert Frazer). But Beaumont isn’t being helpful. He’s obsessed with Madeline and wants to steal her away. Failing to win her over with his charm, he settles on the mystical route of Murder Legendre (Bela Lugosi), who has the ability to convert humans into zombies.

The first zombie movie, White Zombie sits at the crossroads between talkies and silent pictures. The acting is stylized—flamboyant with a combination of stillness and wild waving about. There are pauses that would make William Shatner blush. The cinematography is simple, creating beautiful moments, but has little flow. The often static camera doesn’t help. The soundtrack is too quiet, with many pauses, but also with sudden bursts. Frankenstein seems as vital as it did in 1931; White Zombie is stogy and dated.

But those moments are enough: The tour of the mill, with the zombies mindlessly walking in circles; The zombies carrying the coffin; The enchanted Madeline having her hair combed, standing on the balcony of the castle, and descending the stairs. Together they may not do much, but separately, they are art.

The story starts solidly, and as long as you like your horror with a dose of melodramatic romance, isn’t too silly, but the ending is anticlimactic. The film is more about tone, and in that it is generally successful, as long as we are keeping to Lugosi and the zombies. The scenes with Parker and the priest are less successful and feel like they were pulled from a kids adventure serial.

In the hands of a more imaginative director, or with a plan to go more stylized into a near dream, perhaps White Zombie could have been the classic it was claimed to be when it was thought lost. If you are at all interested in cinema history, you need to see it. But for enjoyment, I suggest putting an animated gif of Madeline on the balcony in a video picture frame and choosing a more dynamic film to watch.

Nov 281932
 
two reels
Unheimliche-geschichten-1932

Zealous reporter Frank Briggs (Harald Paulsen) hears a scream while driving down a road, and hops out to investigate, going to the house of inventor Mörder (Paul Wegener) who had just murdered his wife. This begins a chase that has the two passing through events from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat and The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether, and Robert Lewis Stevenson’s The Suicide Club.

Eerie Tales, also known in the US as The Living Dead for no damn reason, is a follow-up/semi-remake of director Richard Oswald’s silent film of the same name. Both are anthology films, the first with five tales, including two in this movie, The Black Cat and The Suicide Club. But what binds the stories together is new. Oswald doesn’t just reuse actors for each segment, as is common with these sorts of movies, but connects them into one narrative by inserting his two main characters into each part. It’s ingenious, and I wonder why it hasn’t been done more often. However, some of the stitching is rough and in several cases poor choices were made in the roles these two played in the stories. It’s a great idea, with mediocre execution.

Paul Wegener is a force on screen. Best known as the Golem in three silent pictures, he conveys his entire character with a few facial expressions. Mörder is filled with anger, fear, hate, and desire and I could feel it all. He gobbles up the screen and I was completely absorbed by him. When he was missing from a scene, I was just waiting for him to come back..

Harald Paulsen, on the other hand, is an emotional void. He brings nothing to the part, which is doubly unfortunate as the part supplies nothing on its own. He’s a reporter, and reporting is really important to him. And that’s all we know. Is he heroic? Is he brave or a coward? Is he intelligent, dim, kind, vicious, humble, proud? Is he even, in the broadest terms, the good guy? I’ve no idea. He’s nothing. That wouldn’t be a problem if he was just a shadow, always in the background chasing our villain, as he probably should have been, but he gets more screen time than Wagener. He’s there, lapping up frames, stretching out scenes, and giving nothing.

There was a lot of potential here, and occasionally, with Wegener and with the darkly comical inmates of the asylum, it comes close. Over all, Eerie Tales is a disappointment.

Oct 091932
 
two reels

David Gray, a man obsessed by the occult and no longer able to distinguish reality from fantasy, is awakened by a strange man who has entered his room. The man, who turns out to be the lord of a nearby manor house, is panicked about death, and leaves a book about vampirism. Later, Gray goes to the manor, finding the man mortally wounded, and determines that a vampire is at work and is after the lord’s daughter.

Released the year after Dracula and Frankenstein, but looking like it was made ten years before them, Vampyr is only technically a talkie. Filmed as a silent movie, the few lines of dialog were put in during post production and most serve no purpose. The story, what there is of it, is advanced through the used of intertitles (those cards that pop up between shots in silent films). Sometimes, they relate the text of the vampire book David Gray is given, while at others, they give information which should have been shot (one states that Gray walked across the park; as this is a movie, walking across the park is the sort of thing I’d expect to see, not read).

Writer-producer-director Carl Theodor Dreyer didn’t care about story, or about character, but was going for a mood. Events occur, then other events occur, with little connection between them. At times, he succeeds in creating a beautiful gothic world, particularly in an early shot when a man with a scythe rings a bell for a boatman to take him across the river. Shadows that move on their own, and a sequence where Gray, locked in a coffin with a glass window, rides in the back of a cart, effectively create an eerie atmosphere. But Dryer can’t keep the mood going. With nothing building on previous events, nothing matters and time just passes.

While initially a failure, Vampyr has caught on with critics who have always loved to discount horror except when it can somehow be classified as something else. In this case, they classify it as “a surreal dream.” As a dream, they can ignore the standards usually used in evaluating a film. And as a work of surrealism, it can be valued artistically above the monster films meant for the masses.

While overvalued by critics, is it worth seeing? Yes, but just barely. As a movie, it fails in almost every way, with stiff acting (the performers weren’t professionals) joining the lack of a coherent story and the failure of consistent mood. But it does have the occasional image that will stay with you. Those images would be moving still photographs. Too bad that isn’t the way Dreyer presented them.

The surviving prints of Vampyr are in terrible shape. The English dubbed versions are all lost (Dreyer dubbed the film in three languages; as the lines were added in postproduction, there was no original language). The cuts that exist are scratched and filled with static. The English subtitles, which only show up for half of the dialog, take up a substantial portion of the screen and are written in an ornate font that pops up with a black background. Whatever tone the film has established is destroyed whenever they appear.

Oct 081932
 
three reels

When the police inform Dr. Xavier (Lionel Atwill) that they suspect someone from his Academy of Surgical Research to be the cannibalistic Full Moon Killer, he requests time to do his own “scientific” inquiry, to avoid adverse publicity.  However, investigative reporter Lee Taylor (Lee Tracy) overhears the police, and writes a story, forcing Dr. Xavier to take his four research scientists and his daughter, Joan (Fay Wray), to a forbidding cliff-side mansion where he carries out his peculiar experiment in order to discover the killer.

With the success of the Universal horror films, Dracula and Frankenstein, Warner Bros decided to try their luck with genre films.  So, adapting a light stage mystery by adding more frightening elements, they created this early and atypical Mad Scientist picture.  An old style “Tales of Terror” type story, Doctor X is a beautifully filmed but highly flawed gem.

On the beautiful side is the 2-strip Technicolor that creates a mysterious mood.  Pre-dating full Technicolor, Doctor X is the first horror film in color.  Using only red and green, the film looks like a series of illustrations.   The sets are impressive, as is the camera work.  It was directed by Michael Curtiz (The Walking Dead, Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk, Casablanca, We’re No Angels), who gets my vote as the most underrated director.  With a German expressionistic style, he could make any scene interesting and was a master of pacing.  He also understood actors, and could get the best from them.  His touch is in evidence on every frame of this film.

Basically a mystery, it takes five mad scientists (they are all loony, though most aren’t evil, just far too devoted to their work), one cute girl, a reporter, a butler, and a maid, sticks them together in a house, where they can determine the identity of the killer.  It was a structure used over and over in the ’30s and ’40s.  But instead of the reliable detective figuring it out, it is up to Dr. Xavier and his absurd tests.  While his methods lack both scientific integrity and a shred of thought, they do make for great cinematic images.  In the final experiment, each scientist is chained to one of the well-spaced, throne-like chairs, facing a stage where Fay Wray lies on a table in her lingerie.  Tall thin tubes of red liquid indicate the stress level of each of the scientists, and it is all bathed in green light.  Now that’s a cool scene.

While plot holes abound, they do little to take away from the effectiveness of the movie.  The same cannot be said of Lee Tracy and his vaudevillian newspaper reporter.  His inane antics (he walks around with a hand buzzer) belong in a completely different kind of film (that’s not true, they don’t belong anywhere).  Similar, though considerably less annoying, characters pop up in a range of ’30s movies; it is a cultural curiosity that such a man was considered desirable by studio producers.  I feel confident that no woman was excited by anyone remotely resembling Lee Taylor in reality.

It was followed by the sequel in name only, The Return of Doctor X.

Back to Mad Scientists

Oct 041932
 
three reels

A severe storm drives first Philip and Margaret Waverton and their friend Roger Penderel (Raymond Massey, Gloria Stuart, and Melvyn Douglas), and then wealthy Sir William Porterhouse and dancehall girl Gladys Perkins (Charles Laughton and Lilian Bond), to ask for shelter in an old dark house.  They are ungraciously greeted by prim Horace Femm (Ernest Thesiger), his nearly deaf and righteous sister, Rebecca (Eva Moore), and their brutish butler, Morgan (Boris Karloff).  They try to make the best of the situation, but there are too many secrets and too much danger connected to the Femm family for comfort.

The Old Dark House is the signature James Whale film.  His style—his mastery of shadow and movement, control of everything in the frame, and exuberant and quirky sense of humor—is visible in his classics Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, and The Invisible Man, but The Old Dark House has nothing but Whale’s style.  The plot is nearly nonexistent.  People are marooned at an out-of-the-way house.  Events, generally unconnected to other events, happen.  The end.  It’s odd to think that the film was based on a novel, as novels normally require stories.

Whale presents a stream of fascinating images.  Half of the cells in the film could be plucked out and hung in a gallery.  Nothing is haphazard.  Candles are precisely placed.  Actors stand as if posed for Rembrandt.  All movement is tightly choreographed, producing a near balletic effect.  Atmosphere is everything.

The characters are much of the mood.  The cast was remarkable.  Fascinating voices abound.  A young Charles Laughton (yes, Laughton was young once) rattles off a sharp, Welsh accent while a young Raymond Massey (yes, he was young as well) just does Massey.  Thesiger warms up for his role as the effete Dr. Pretorius in Bride of Frankenstein, but his Horace Femm is not powerful, but a weak-willed prisoner of his own home.  He is still flamboyant, and manages to make the line “Have a potato,” hilarious.  Melvyn Douglas brought his normal dashing, impertinent tones.  Gloria Stuart, known now as the old woman from Titanic, didn’t have an unusual or lyrical voice, but she was a beautiful woman who could scream and run down stairs with the best of them.  Unfortunately, Karloff, who had the best voice of all, is given little to do and nothing to say as a savage mute.

While The Old Dark House is a stylish picture, style is all it has and it isn’t enough.  Any moment works wonderfully, but as a whole, it gets tiresome.  There’s plenty of weird behavior, but little of it is funny.  With no real story to follow, it becomes a pointless exercise in skill.  It is more interesting than enjoyable.

Sep 231932
 
two reels

Thirteen years ago a dinner party is interrupted when the master of the house, John Morgan, dies. Only 12 of the expected 13 guests had arrived and his Last Will and Testament leaves the bulk of the estate to the missing 13th guest. Now Marie Morgan (Ginger Rogers), on her 21st birthday, has been sent to the old house which has been closed all these years. She’s electrocuted and her body left in the chair she occupied at the dinner. Police Captain Ryan (J. Farrell MacDonald) and his mentally deficient sidekick Gump (Paul Hurst) are put on the case and Ryan calls in obnoxious womanizing private Detective Phil Winston (Lyle Talbot). Then a second murder is committed by a black-robed figure, and it seems that someone plans to murder all of the still-living dinner guests in the order they sat at the table. To confuse things, Marie shows up alive; the first victim had been surgically altered to look like Marie.

Ah, Monogram Studios, king of Poverty Row. This is yet another of the many, many Dark House mysteries that they churned out in the 1930s, this one including a villain who’s straight out of the serials. It’s pushing it to call this horror or even an Old Dark House film since they keep leaving it and roaming about in the sunshine, but there’s secret passageways and murders, and plenty of screaming, so close enough.

This is a cheap flick, and it looks it. We’re talking bottom basement camera work and below bottom lighting. I hope you don’t want to actually see what is going on. Rogers and Talbot aren’t turning in their best work, and they are the only ones who give the impression of that they do this for a living.

It doesn’t seem any money was set aside for the script either, but then what charm it has might come from how stupid it is, and I’m not talking about the non-stop sexist sludge coming from Winston, who we are supposed to like. The fiendish plots (there are two of them) don’t make any sense. Why is the killer using such an elaborate method? Why is he dressed like a second-rate super villain? And why didn’t the script make Winston a police detective instead of a PI?. Private detectives cannot give commands to police officers and get judges to do their bidding. Unless the law has changed a whole lot in 80+ years, I think there’s something wrong here. But the film is easier to take when everything is silly. And this is one very silly film. I laughed at it, which beats sleeping through it. And that’s the key. It isn’t boring. It’s light, stupid fun, and not a horrible way to spend an afternoon, as long as you aren’t paying for it.

This made enough money for Rogers and Talbot to appear in a follow-up mystery, A Shriek in the Night, playing different characters. It was remade in ’43 as The Mystery of the 13th Guest.

Sep 141932
 
one reel

A small passenger plane makes an emergency landing in the middle of nowhere to avoid a storm. The passengers take refuge in a large, empty house. While romances and minor intrigues occupy some of the passengers, one is murdered. It turns out he was carrying diamonds. The security guard hired to protect the stones wants to find the killer while most of the others are more interested in dinner and the storm.

Low budget director Frank R. Strayer is at it again with another Poverty Row Old Dark House film. This one is even harder to call horror than the others, and reasonably hard to sit through. Strayer wasn’t given much to work with, and unfortunately he didn’t have the skill to stretch a buck. The sets are drab square box rooms with the camera parked on one side. The design is boring as is the cinematography. Strayer could bring a little extra to stylized horror period pieces, but the closer a story was to reality, the less he could do with it. It’s funny that he finally found his niche directing Blonde movies.

The little known actors are game, but seem to have been given little help. The many long pauses turn the whole thing to sludge, and since the dialog has no flare, I didn’t need more time to dwell on what anyone was saying.

There’s a ghost of a good idea in the elderly woman who spends her time knitting and watching everyone else, getting involved in two romances as well as the discovery of the murderer, but it isn’t developed well enough. Perhaps if she’d been the lead, instead of just another of the thirteen… But I just as easily could say, “Perhaps if the script had been better…” The ending is both silly and uninteresting, though there’s no reason for an average viewer to stick around till then.

 

Strayer’s other Dark House films are The Monster Walks (1932),and The Ghost Walks (1934). He also directed the non-Dark House horror films The Vampire Bat (1933) and Condemned to Live (1935)

Aug 171932
 
three reels

Ivan Igor (Lionel Atwill), a master artist of wax figures, is crippled by a fire that destroyed is greatest works. Unable to use his hands, he now oversees a group of sculptors, but his goal is always to recreate what was lost. Luck comes his way when he sees Charlotte (Fay Wray), who would be the perfect model for his long lost wax figure of Marie Antoinette. Reporter Florence Dempsey (Glenda Farrell) is investigating a murder that also involves body snatching, and she believes that Igor’s wax museum has clues that will break the case.

I love two-strip Technicolor. It produces a dreamlike look that is fitting for horror and fantasy. In the proper hands, it can be used to produce stunning images, and Michael Curtiz, the master director of The Adventures of Robin Hood, Casablanca, and The Sea Hawk had the proper hands. He was an expert of all genres and in all styles. Mystery of the Wax Museum was his follow-up to Doctor X (1931). Both are two-strip Technicolor horror films focusing on a reporter uncovering a mystery, and starring Lionel Atwill and costarring Fay Wray. Unfortunately, only B&W prints of Mystery of the Wax Museum were available for thirty years and the color one that was finally discovered was a copy in Jack Warner’s personal collection. So it is less vibrant than Doctor X. It’s a good looking film, but I can only imagine how beautiful it once was.

There’s no flaws in casting, but it is the cinematography that stands out. Even with the faded film, there are cells that should be hung as art, particularly those of the evil lair. But the script doesn’t match the look. We spend too much time with the reporter. While initially amusing, she grates quickly. Worse, she spends a lot of time away from the main action, including in two poorly conceived romance subplots.

It was remade as House of Wax in 1953, with Vincent Price taking over for the burnt artist. The later version improves on the first by decreasing the reporter/mystery side of things, and increasing the horror. But it loses out both in direction and in the marvelous expressionistic sets. So I’ll call it a draw, but suspect if the original negatives of this version were ever found, it would slip ahead.

Lionel Atwill played mad doctors or police inspectors in and string of horror films, including The Vampire Bat (1933), Mark of the Vampire (1935), Son of Frankenstein (1939), Man Made Monster (1941), The Mad Doctor of Market Street (1942), The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), Night Monster (1942), Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), House of Frankenstein (1944), House of Dracula (1945).

Aug 161932
 
three reels

Big game hunter Bob Rainsford (Joel McCrea) is sailing back from a hunt with his wealthy friends when their yacht hits a reef and sinks. Rainsford alone makes it to the shore of a small island, which is inhabited by hunting enthusiast Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks) and his servants (Noble Johnson, Steve Clemente, Dutch Hendrian). It also is currently acting as sanctuary for Eve Trowbridge (Fay Wray) and her brother Martin Trowbridge (Robert Armstrong), survivors from a previous wreck. While it seems friendly to Rainsford, Eve tries to warn him that there’s something sinister going on, and that the secretive Zaroff may be a murderer.

How many versions of this are there? I’d seen 6 or 7 as episodes of TV shows before I read the short story, and I did that in junior high. IMDB lists 19 film versions, but there are many, many more when you include television. It’s a fun, quick little story and directors Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Schoedsack took an important lesson from the literary source and made a rapid fire movie. It runs only a touch over an hour and there’s no slow moments and no wasted time. We zip through a fearful chat to a ship wreck to a shark attack to a strange castle to a menacing henchman and on it goes.

The filmmakers also had the benefit of free sets, and good ones. Production overlapped King Kong’s, with all it’s lovely jungle sets just sitting there. The Most Dangerous Game also shares much of its cast and crew with Kong. Fay Wray is lovely and Leslie Banks makes for a proper wide-eyed sadistic loon. And it’s all shot with style.

The fast pace is needed as the flaws would overwhelm the picture if it slowed down even a little. Joel McCrea was a limited actor, and he was given no help here either by the directors or by his character, which is a generic, overly upright he-man. That makes it hard enough to root for him, but add in that Rainsford’s a rich kid that gets his kicks by murdering animals and its tough to choose between him and Zaroff. At least Zaroff has done some minor self-examination. And Martin’s drunk routine is way over the top, existing less to fit the story or character, or show how drunkenness works, and more to push producer Merian C. Cooper’s anti-alcohol views. Finally, there’s Eve. Fay Wray comes off as the best actor of the main cast, and she has some wonderful moments, but at random times, Eve acts incredibly stupidly, basically to fulfill her role as the incapable damsel in need of rescue.

All of that is pretty bad, but the viewing experience is better than it should be. Before I really get a chance to be annoyed by any one the problems, we’re on to something else, and then to something else again. Sometimes, speed saves.

Note: I’m amused that this is one of the few cases I’ve seen of white-face. Johnson was a black actor, here made up to look like a Russian Cossack.

Aug 141932
 
one reel

A strange scientist dies suddenly and his will is read ridiculously quickly in his old dark house on a stormy night. attending the reading, or just hanging around nearby, are the dead man’s odd lawyer (Sidney Bracy), his paralyzed and very suspicious brother (Sheldon Lewis), his two plotting servants (Martha Mattox, Mischa Auer), his constantly fainting and screaming daughter (Vera Reynolds), her he-man fiancée (Rex Lease), and their raciest-caricature chauffeur (Willie Best). There’s also a chimpanzee in the basement that hates the daughter and whose mate was killed by the scientist in an experiment. Of course bad things will happen.

It’s another randomly titled Old Dark House film from prolific Poverty Row director Frank R. Stayer [Tangled Destinies (1932), The Vampire Bat (1933), The Ghost Walks (1934), Condemned to Live (1935)], and we get all the expected elements: mysterious sounds, secret passageways, hands reaching out over sleeping girls, no one believing claims of being attacked, and murders. And we get an angry chimp. Two years later in House of Mystery, a killer gorilla in the house was presented in a joking way, but The Monster Walks is very serious. Well, it’s very serious except for the raciest stylings of Willie Best. His “Yes’m master” routine is never amusing and drags down any film he is in, but at least he has only a small role this time.

It’s that earnestness that’s the real flaw. A lot of what goes on is silly by nature, and several actors are so over-the-top in their “I’m eeeevvvvil” ways that they really should be winking at the audience. It’s too goofy to be so humorless. The characters actually sit around and discuss how the chimpanzee might be making plans and using secret passageways. This isn’t realistic drama folks, and he ought to make that clear. It wants to be both horror and drama, and can’t manage either.