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.
When I was a student we worked something out, before we had any great understanding of lighting. If you put a lamp on the floor, it would look interesting. But when you mucked about with fill lighting and three-point lighting and realistic lighting and you didn’t know what you were doing, you just spoiled it. So the cry went out, “Just put a lamp on the floor!” It was quick and easy and it looked great, even if it didn’t make any sense.
On Sunday we had a double bill of THE BAT WHISPERS (1930) and the following year’s THE BLACK CAMEL, the which I understood to be the first surviving Charlie Chan movie with Warner Oland. (Run-down of earlier entries — Paul Leni’s THE CHINESE PARROT with Sôjin Kamiyama as Chan is currently lost, alas; so is the serial THE HOUSE WITHOUT A KEY featuring George Kuwa; BEHIND THAT CURTAIN, the earliest surviving Chan, has a bewildered-looking E.L. Park in a tiny cameo as Chan, looking as if he just wandered onto the set by mistake, an interesting approach to the role. You can enjoy his strange performance here at 1.18:51. That’s the last time an Asian actor is trusted with the role, and the Swedish Warner Oland debuts in CHARLIE CHAN CARRIES ON in 1931, which is also lost — but I’ve just learned that the Spanish-language version, ERAN TRECE, survives, with Manuel Arbó as a Latin Chan).
Anyway, THE BLACK CAMEL is basically junk, but you can see director Hamilton MacFadden trying to get with the programme — he knows the camera should move on occasion, he’s just not sure why, and he continually struggles to set up a shot with three people who aren’t all facing away from the lens.
However, when Oland’s Chan SAYS THE TITLE, he puts a lamp on the floor and it’s very effective.
I would have given him more credit if we hadn’t just watched THE BAT WHISPERS in which Roland West shoots Chester Morris with a floor-lamp TWICE:
THE BAT WHISPERS is the only film in which Chester Morris is actually interesting, and it should be admitted that it’s not all due to the interesting lighting. His whole approach is different: when he gets his appeal to the audience not to give away the twist ending, he does it with a Wellesian twinkle absent from all his later performances. Maybe what he needed, like Welles, was to have the other actors removed so he could perform for us alone (Welles went so far as to have the jurors close their eyes when he did his big summing-up in COMPULSION). By a cruel twist of fate Morris found himself confined to B-movies so cheap there was no time to remove the supporting cast.
Roland West, something of a visionary, had very little interest in performance despite marrying an actress, but he certainly had an eye for a striking visual. In this case, it looks like his eye had landed on Paul Leni’s THE LAST WARNING which has one of the best lamps on the floor shots in all cinema, and conceivably the first:
Shots like this make the loss of THE CHINESE PARROT even more tragic.
One more example — James Whale was a great admirer of THE LAST WARNING, but doesn’t provide as much floorlamping in FRANKENSTEIN as he would in its first sequel, which features maybe the best example of the bunch, combing low-level light with a high-level camera to give us this beauty:
Best of all, it’s MOTIVATED by all that Kenneth Strickfaden lab equipment. Chester Morris is apparently generating his lamplight by star wattage alone.
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?
shadowplay 