The Cat’s Pajamas

Edgar Ulmer’s THE BLACK CAT (previously described here) is notable for being possibly the first Poe adaptation to take the title and nothing else from the source story — it certainly wasn’t the last. It’s also the first film to pair Karloff and Lugosi, Universal’s two great horror stars. And its Bauhaus castle is rightly noted as a triumph of modernist design in the horror movie.

But watching it with Fiona and our friend Mary, we were struck by a little-appreciated aspect of the film that deserves your attention: the wondrous variety and quality of night attire depicted.

Boris Karloff’s snazzy black robe with a cinched waist, dazzles the eye. Bela Lugosi’s slavic/chinese ensemble looks both practical and suave. Leading lady Jacqueline Wells has a whole array of nighties, robes and negligees, and at the film’s climax, as she flees the detonating mansion, her skirt flies off of its own accord, reducing her to boudoir-type attire. Hubby David Manners is, as usual, not so interesting as everyone else.

I seem to recall Lucio Fulci’s fave film was Ulmer’s DETOUR, so he must have liked this one also: he made his own, somewhat more faithful, version of the story in the 70s. And I’m sure Dario Argento has sung the film’s praises. He cites Poe’s “non-cartesian” approach as a major influence on his own storytelling. While Ulmer and his co-writers leave out everything except the titular cat, they certainly take a non-cartesian view of things, weaving an oneiric tapestry of perversity, tragedy and wildly inappropriate humour…

About those co-writers: credited scribe Peter Ruric was in fact George Carol Sims, who contributed to Lewton’s MADEMOISELLE FIFI (not a fright film, alas, but a very good melodrama/propaganda piece). Under the name Paul Cain he wrote thrillers for Black Mask magazine. His collection Seven Slayers features one yarn which, as my friend Comrade K pointed out, compresses the whole plot of Hammet’s Red Harvest into about ten pages. Hammet is famously terse. Cain is terseness personified. But it’s a little hard to detect his precise influence on THE BLACK CAT.

I can uncover little about Tom Kilpatrick, the uncredited additional scenarist, but he did have a hand in one other horror/fantasy classic, DR CYCLOPS. But nobody involved in this film ever made anything like it again. There IS nothing like it.

Another filmmaker who idolizes the movie is Raul Ruiz, and I can see why. Like his version of TREASURE ISLAND, it’s a “house of stories”. I never saw this one as a kid, but later read about it in Danny Peary’s Cult Movies, where he points out the abiding strangeness of the film’s “plot” — moving in fits and starts, setting up lines of action and restlessly abandoning them, with blurry backstory branching off in all directions, and expectations spluttering out at every turn. Some of this is probably due to post-code censorship (when pre-code movies were trimmed for re-release, they chopped the original camera negatives, making restoration often impossible) — Ulmer’s daughter Arianne reckons there was more spiciness to the black mass originally. Never mind, what we do get is a lovely upended crucifix, and Boris Karloff mouthing Latin homilies in lieu of satanic verses (“In wine is truth… with a pinch of salt…”)

As good as it all is, nothing is as good as the basement of Hjalmar Poelzig’s castle, a reinforced concrete torture dungeon, where dead women float as ornaments, and Ulmer’s camera floats away from the action to chart the illimitable darkness of the vast, death-haunted bunker (“Even the telephone is dead.”) That place is like the bottom level of dream, the nightmare basement way down in our back brains, the place where sense itself stops functioning and obliterating fog roles in over reason and sanity…

We also watched EDGAR ULMER: THE MAN OFFSCREEN, which I’d held off on for ages because I wanted to like it so much I was afraid of not doing so. I needn’t have worried. We met Arianne Ulmer, the Great Man’s daughter, when she attended Edinburgh Film Fest’s Ulmer retrospective some years ago. She’s a font of movie-world knowledge and gossip, having been around film sets since infancy: naturally, Fiona & I were smitten.  So I was disposed to like this film. Arianne Ulmer’s labour of love charts her father’s career/s, interviewing admirers and collaborators, and skillfully using extracts to evoke the mysterious beauty of the filmmaker’s low-budget masterpieces. Director Michael Palm films most of the interviews in moving cars, which works well, keeping the images moving, situating the interviewees in their various cities, and providing a rolling backdrop of illustrative opportunities: when Wim Wenders talks about being a German in Hollywood, we see a billboard behind him advertising TROY, directed by Wolfgang Petersen. The whole conceit pays off even more when Palm uses a car in front of a rear projection screen to interview the late, great Anne Savage, star of DETOUR (much of which unfolds in front of just such a screen), and Jimmy Lydon, star of the appropriately named STRANGE ILLUSION, who wanders behind the screen to give the film its loveliest image ~

Other talking heads include Joe Dante and John Landis, Roger Corman, and Peter Bogdanovich.

I rarely see movie documentaries which attempt anything interesting, and when they do, it often backfires. I still groan to think of the THIRD MAN doc which projects all its clips on Viennese monuments, a momentarily diverting idea which swiftly becomes irksome as the clips go on and on, and we can’t see what’s happening in them. THE MAN OFFSCREEN is a real success in the way it uses cinematic language without obscuring its informative purpose. And, fascinatingly, it allows doubt to be cast on some of Ulmer’s stories. It could easily have been a hagiographic exercise in hero-worship. Instead, it first tells Ulmer’s story as he told it, and then allows some more cynical voices to question whether he really worked on almost every classic of the German silent cinema, while also working in America at the same time. In the end, the question is left open — I’m certain Ulmer did work on at least some of the Lang or Murnau films he mentioned, but I’m pretty sure not all of them. But we can’t know. Fittingly, the life of the director of THE BLACK CAT branches off into tributaries, separate lifelines which fade out into a fog of mystery, and nothing can be said with certainty.

“We have seen too much of life.”

US buyers:

Edgar G. Ulmer – Archive

The Bela Lugosi Collection (Murders in the Rue Morgue / The Black Cat / The Raven / The Invisible Ray / Black Friday)

UK buyers:

The Black Cat [1934] [DVD]

The Sunday Intertitle: Sometimes a Great Notion

POE WEEK is HERE!

Seven days of Poe-try and eerie pleasures. We begin with DW Griffith’s THE AVENGING CONSCIENCE, his somewhat moralistic, yet often effective, adaptation of The Tell-Tale Heart. For another, lesser version, see here. Later, we can hopefully pay some attention to Jules Dassin’s magnificent short film version, which has some MGM-inspired moralism of its own.

Not that Poe’s story is immoral or amoral, it’s just that the “Thou Shalt Not Kill” side is contained within the action, so nobody has to preach, certainly not the author. Really, the avenging conscience of the story takes the form of a disembodied heartbeat coming from beneath the floorboards because it’s a disassociated part of the protagonist’s mind, something he doesn’t acknowledge the existence of, which finds an escape through this route.

Griffith is fairly faithful to this idea, so after the hero has made away with his guardian/uncle, he’s tormented by visions, including the double-exposed ghost of the old man, and later some nifty imps and spectres, including a lovely Halloween with, complete with broomstick (bristles forward, in the fashion of the time).

The star is Henry B. Walthall, who also played the hero of BIRTH OF A NATION, and Poe himself in Charles Brabin’s 1915 film THE RAVEN, one of several Poe biopics (Griffith made a ten-minute one). Walthall is sometimes startlingly contemporary, authentic and informal, sometimes he’s highly rhetorical and stylised. Which is fun to watch.

Griffith also throws in a blackmailing Italian, whose nationality is repeated so often, and is his sole identifying trait, that one suspects an unacknowledged further wrinkle on Griffith’s famed racism. But, given the film’s spider-and-fly motif, I dig the fact that a little insect alights on the Italian’s cap just as he witnesses the murder… (I could, and may, write an entire essay on the enhancement provided by unintended fly cameos in cinema history, from the buzzing witnesses who perch on Jack Gilford’s pillow in A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM, to the chitinous interloper whom Paul Freeman swallows in mid-speech, without even noticing, in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.)

Griffith also gives us a romantic interest, Annabel Lee (Blanche Sweet), her glamour slightly inhibited by her tendency to wear all of her clothes at once. But then, looking at the way all the curtains and tablecloths are madly billowing about in her house, one can’t blame her: it must be blowing a gale in there. This must be the result of the open air “studios” favoured in the nineteen-teens. Studios might be greenhouses, or they might simple be back-lots, where three walls could be erected with the sun shining in, unobstructed. That was the whole reason the movie industry went to Hollywood.

Emphasizing the oddly exterior nature of the Lee pad is the above shot, where a superimposed sky fills the window, but also eats up most of the wall. I love the double-exposures in this movie, because their technical imperfection always has poetic advantages. The see-through dead uncle persecuting the hero is always just the wrong size, his shrunken or overgrown cranium a sinister contrast with the normally-proportioned thesps around him. God knows, he’s disturbing enough in appearance at the best of times ~

And the actor’s name is Spottiswoode Aitken, which is just perfect.

Thanks to Arthur S for the recommendation.

The Avenging Conscience

Griffith Masterworks 2 (Way Down East / D.W. Griffith: Father of Film / The Avenging Conscience / Abraham Lincoln / The Struggle / Sally of the Sawdust)

Overcompensating?

Another funny movie logo is Edward Small Productions — the contrast of the monolithic proportions with the name “Small” always makes me chuckle, and wonder what sort of fellow E.S. was. Did he have a sense of irony? I’m thinking maybe not.

The logo was attached to many films, but the one I just watched was THE CORSICAN BROTHERS. I wish I’d seen it as a kid, it’s the kind of simple, unpretentious swashbuckler I’d have enjoyed more then. As an adult, I was noting the influence on THE PRINCESS BRIDE, enjoying Akim Tamiroff as the baddie, and one more thing ~

The late F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre once told me in an email that he couldn’t work out how the filmmakers had achieved the scene where Douglas Fairbanks Jnr. fights himself. I was keeping an eye on the twin special effects throughout the film, and in my view, the fight is not the most mysterious part.

Here’s the two Dougs, meeting for the first time. Throughout, the filmmakers use different techniques to double Doug, so that we don’t settle into thinking we know how it’s being done. In this kind of locked-off shot, we might expect split-screen to be the answer, but the actor smack in the centre of the frame disproves that idea. And then one Doug extends a hand and has it clasped by the other.

A slight awkwardness about the way the hand extends suggests the answer. It’s coming from somebody else. If my copy were higher definition I suspect the join might be rather distinct. I think the Doug on the right is standing in front of a rear-projection screen, on which the other characters and the background are projected. If we could see that original shot, it might be rather amusing — everyone reacting to a brother who isn’t there, while a crouching stand-in thrusts forth a costumed arm at the appropriate moment.

Here’s the mind-blower ~

A cinch to do if you’re David Cronenberg with a motion control camera and Jeremy Irons, and even easier today with computers and all that. But this tracking shot, where two Dougs amble along together, was technically NOT POSSIBLE in 1941. So my assumption is that a different technique altogether has been used: not split screen, not matting, not rear-projection. Just a really good stand-in.

This fits in with Michael Powell’s advice that the correct way to use a double is not to have him skulk around, partially obscured, like Ed Wood’s dentist in PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, but to have him boldly stomp through shot in plain view. It will never occur to the viewer that the fellow on-screen is not the fellow who was playing the part a second ago. I must say, if I’m right, they’ve found an excellent looky-likey for Doug.

This explains the fight scene later, where the Dougs circle one another, something that would be impossible if any trick effects were involved. But the shot above is actually much more striking because it’s closer, and slower-moving. Kudos to Gregory Ratoff for having the nerve to attempt it.