NO ABRAS NUNCA ESA PUERTA (NEVER OPEN THIS DOOR, 1952) is a two-part anthology film based on stories by William Irish (AKA Cornell Woolrich) and directed by Carlos Hugo Christensen — it’s another Argentine noir (literally I guess that means silvery-black, which seems appropriate).
It’s very elegantly made but maybe they shouldn’t have chosen two stories with sort-of-similar denouement — Woolrich wrote a great many excellent noir stories suitable for adaptation. I can see why you’d want the stories to connect up a little thematically, but repetition is to be avoided.
The first episode deals with blackmail. I particularly liked the Salvador Dali apartment.
I found the second installment much more compelling, though: a blind woman welcomes home her son and a friend, but gradually comes to suspect that they are the murderous bank robbers spoken of on the wireless. In particular, her son’s habit of whistling through his teeth is a “tell” connecting him to the crimes.
As she decided to take action to prevent him killing again, the suspense is ratcheted up to unbearable heights. Looong silent scenes as she tries to steal the men’s revolvers from their bedsides. Woolrich is the master of a kind of queasy tension that’s genuinely quite unpleasant, and he haphazardly dishes out awful fates to his most inoffensive characters. (See also: Fassbinder’s MARTHA.)
It’s Noirvember, so Page Seventeen of the internet this week comes to you from a selection of seven crime books shelved in the dark recesses of theShadowplayhouse. Illustrations by Franz Masereel.
This room was too big, the ceiling was too high, the doors were too tall, and the white carpet that went from wall to wall looked like a fresh fall of snow at Lake Arrowhead. There were full-length mirrors and crystal doodads all over the place. The ivory furniture had chromium on it, and the enormous ivory drapes lay tumbled on the white carpet a yard from the windows. The white made the ivory look dirty and the ivory made the white look bled out. The windows stared towards the darkening foothills. It was going to rain soon. There was pressure in the air already.
Dad was wonderful. He looked over his shoulder in one of his funny ways and said, “Molly, how would you like to sit in the lobby for about half an hour and pick me a couple of winners out of that racing form? I have to give Queenie here her exercise. You don’t want to startle her and make her sprain a tendon.” Dad kept still until Molly had gone but when she was outside the door she could hear the bed moving and she wondered if this lady could use Dad’s toothbrush and she hoped she wouldn’t because Molly wouldn’t want to use it afterwards. It would make her sick to use it.
There was a man hanging around in the lobby waiting for somebody. He was on his feet, drifting aimlessly around, from here to there, from there to the next place, the way a man waiting in a lobby does. He didn’t live in the building; Henderson had never seen him before. He wasn’t waiting for the car to take him up, because the indicator was unlighted; it was motionless somewhere up above.
The silver dress fitted me like a cold compress. It was one of those things that break up homes. The manager flagged me in the passageway leading back. ‘Did you notice that man all by himself at a ringside table? You know who he is, don’t you?’
These homely metaphors go deep into Hammett’s life. One of the few things that he could recall from his childhood past was his mother’s repeated advice that a woman who wasn’t good in the kitchen wasn’t likely to be much good in any other room in the house.
An excited trunkman left his work. I repeated fiercely the instructions about my trunk, and then asked how to get out of this foul place. I spotted an elevator and a small stairway, and without a further word was up these steps and out in a side street off the Rue de Rivoli.
This Matter you speak of, now, I don’t want to be quoted in it, see? but if there’s anything going in I want it to go in like it is, the truth about it, I mean, and not no pack of damn lies like the papers generally prints. What I say, now, don’t put it in like it come from me, because I don’t know nothing about it, except what I read in the papers, not being notified in no official way, see? Besides, it’s a matter which you might say is going to have a question of jurisdiction to it, and I don’t want to have nobody make no charges against me for interference in no matter which it ain’t strickly a point where I got authority. But, I can give you a idea about it and you can fix it up so them that reads the paper can figger out their own conclusion on how we stand in the matter.
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler; Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham; Phantom Lady by Cornell Woolrich; Angel Face by Cornell Woolrich, from Pulp Fiction: The Dames, edited by Otto Penzler; The Continental Op by Dashiell Hammett, from the introduction by Steven Marcus; The Diamond Wager by “Samuel Dashiell,” from The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction, edited by Maxim Jakubowski; ‘The Labor Leader’ by James M. Cain, quoted by Roy Hoopes in ‘Sketches and Dialogues’ from The Baby in the Icebox and Other Short Fiction by James M. Cain (and actually from page 19, page 17 being blank save a title.)
The genre that seems to have suffered the greatest ratio of casualties-to-survivors seems to me to be the spooky old dark house horror comedy. Above, we get a glimpse of what we’re missing vis-a-vis Benjamin Christensen’s THE HAUNTED HOUSE, of which only a few images and the Vitaphone sound-on-disc soundtrack are known to survive.
Christensen’s Hollywood movies are mostly not too exciting, in my opinion, even when he worked with Chaney, but SEVEN FOOTPRINTS TO SATAN, his third spookhouse movie, is a hallucinatory masterpiece, largely jettisoning plot in favour of a parade of grotesque images. You can really see that this is the maker of HAXAN.
7 FOOTPRINTS does survive, but has been very hard to see.
Christensen also made THE HOUSE OF HORROR, a part-talkie, all-lost. Confusingly, it has almost the same cast as HAUNTED HOUSE but is a different film. Cornell Woolrich wrote titles for HH and dialogue for HOH.
This all leads to LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT, possibly (for some odd reason) the most famous lost film. It’s a spooky Scooby Doo mystery.
I had assumed that THE CAT AND THE CANARY was the progenitor of all this, and it probably did set the late 20s cycle in motion, but wait! When Bob Hope’s remake was a hit, he was then starred immediately in THE GHOST BREAKERS, a remake of a 1914 Cecil B. DeMille (and Oscar Apfel) comic thriller, THE GHOST BREAKER singular.
Starring drunken sexy Jesus himself, HB Warner, the film is now, predictably, lost.
But wait and ah-hah! The film was remade in 1922…
Willie Best’s “comedy negro” act in the Bob Hope version did not originate the strong element of racial discomfort, it would seem, although at least Best was an actual Person of Colour, said colour not being the product of a can of shoe polish. But we need never worry too much about this, as the 1922 film is ALSO lost.
THE TERROR, an early Warners talkie from Roy Del Ruth, based on an Edgar Wallace shocker, sounds REALLY appetising. The traditional cowardly hero is Edward Everett Horton, which ought to get your pulse pounding. Contemporary reviews praised the mobile camera, suggesting that this is the exception among 1928 talks. The pics look atmospheric as hell.
Relax. It’s a lost film.
The sequel, RETURN OF THE TERROR, has a less exciting cast and less exciting stills. It appears to survive — but nobody has thought to make it available. Given the market for thirties horror movies, this suggests it’s either not in good nick or not a good film. But who knows? Somebody has decided not to let us see for ourselves.
The first remake of THE CAT AND THE CANARY, THE CAT CREEPS of 1930, is also (you guess it) lost. Apart from this footage:
I took the re-edited clips from a short call BOO! and cut them back into what seems to be their original form. From which we can see that it seems to have been a pretty faithful adaptation.
Fortunately for film history, Universal was in the habit of making films in multiple languages, so just as there’s a Spanish-language DRACULA, there’s a Spanish-language CAT CREEPS, LA VOLUNTAD DEL MUERTO, with Lupita Tovar, who was also in the Spanish DRACULA.
This movie would partially make up for CAT CREEPS being missing, except that it is also missing.
The silent version of THE GORILLA is lost, but there’s a talkie remake — also lost. But there’s a promo film which shows the gorilla-suited villain lumbering through a miniature Manhattan, a strong possible influence behind the 1933 KING KONG. One can imagine Merian C Cooper seeing the GORILLA trailer and then being annoyed that the film didn’t offer up an ape of comparable gargantuosity, or do I mean gargantitude?
So we’re lucky that THE BAT and THE BAT WHISPERS (in both Academy Ratio and the wonders of Magnifilm) survive. Paul Leni’s CANARY survives. His THE LAST WARNING was considered lost for a time, and his THE CHINESE PARROT remains MIA today.
And then there’s this — looks fun! Wikipedia says “It is not known whether the film survives, or who holds the rights.” Well, that sounds less final than “lost.” Has anyone tried asking the Boggart?
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