SONG AT MIDNIGHT, directed by Weibang Ma-Xu in 1937, is China’s first horror movie, a PHANTOM OF THE OPERA knock-off with a lot of nice studio-bound atmosphere. The sequel, which incorporates chunks of FRANKENSTEIN and DRACULA too, with suitably wacky make-ups (think of the kind of crude but enthusiastic putty prosthetics showcased in Mexican horror movies) looks a lot of fun too, but I’ve only found short extracts in Edward Yang’s documentary on Hong Kong cinema.
Lots of atmospheric prowling around in dark sets — with lots of music. Since China took a few years longer to switch to sound than the west, they were perhaps able to note the developments since Max Steiner’s work on KING KONG really popularized the film score in America, or maybe they had noted the earlier work of Rathaus and Waxman in Germany…
The trucking through deserted, cobwebbed spaces suggests the influence of Paul Leni and THE CAT AND THE CANARY, and anticipates the long-winded travelling of Olivier’s HAMLET. Although Gaston Leroux has certainly supplied the story seedling, there’s no obvious attempt to copy the Lon Chaney film.
And all the singing is subtitled. Is the idea that the dialogue would be dubbed in other eastern markets (those not conquered by Japan) but that the singing would stay? Or is this just so the audience can sing along with the Phantom?
The movie lingers on and inhabits the mood of each moment so languorously and hypnotically that it often resembles a tone poem more than a narrative feature film. Incredible stuff — more on this later.
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?
Joe May’s career has a curious shape. From detective series starring Anglophone-sounding heroes called Stuart Webbs and Joe Deebs, he graduated to epic adventure films starring his wife Mia, then sold his studio and went to work for UFA, reaching an artistic pinnacle with HEIMKEHR and ASPHALT. When sound came he turned his hand to musical comedy, and kept at that as he emigrated rapidly through France and Britain and wound up in Hollywood where he made another, MUSIC IN THE AIR.
His American career was patchy, and declined rapidly to B-pictures, but these are not terrible. He never made a little classic like his protege E.A. Dupont’s THE SCARF, but he never made THE NEANDERTHAL MAN either, so there’s that.
During his speedy passage through France, he managed to make three films, and two of those he made twice: PARIS-MEDITERRANEE (1932), for instance, was shot in French, and again in German (as ZWEI IN EINEM AUTO). Presumably the French contacts helped May get out of Germany the following year. The French version was a Pathe-Natan production, and I got hold of a scrappy off-air recording of it back when we were making our documentary NATAN. Somebody subsequently made very good subtitles for it, and Fiona and I just watched it.
Charmant! Annabella is lovely as ever and her then-husband Jean Murat essays a totally convincing English accent throughout. Scenic views of the Riviera. All very fuzzy, with an intermittent sound problem that makes everyone like they’re snorting helium at the bottom of a well while wrapped in vinyl sheets.
The movie is nothing remarkable, except that the early sound musicals are full of invention, even when the stories are souffle-light and not particularly memorable. This one ends, for instance, with the two comedy relief idiots hanging off a tree over a cliff on the Riviera, with the jealous Spaniard (José Noguéro) biting the buffoonish accountant (Frédéric Duvallès) on the bottom. It’s not exactly LE REGLE DE JEUX.
More big thick matte lines for us to enjoy, though! Tricky to be making a romcom road movie a year before the Translux scene was gifted to the film industry by its inventor, Yves Le Prieur, making rear-projection a vastly more effective technique, and making KING KONG possible. If the film had been silent, May could have filmed the car stuff for real, but a talkie needed to be filmed in the studio, so we get Jean Murat and Annabella haloed with wavering jagged white outlines that keep biting off portions of their heads you would not think they could do without. Excellent stuff. Even if the film were not as charming as it is, that kind of thing could make it endlessly diverting. Elsewhere May rapidly cuts together real car POV shots with our heroes outlined against a perfectly blank whiteness, as if driving into Jimmy Stewart’s nightmare limbo in VERTIGO.
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