“The Black Cat” (1934)
Bravo’s “100 Scariest Movie Moments” part II, minute marker 13 minutes
Universal Pictures did remarkable things in establishing the horror genre in 1931 with the double release of “Dracula” & “Frankenstein” (both are on this list) and followed these two triumphs with a string of fourteen more releases before the end of that decade, the majority of high quality, several undeniable classics, most starring either Boris Karloff or Béla Lugosi, their horror super-stars. As Universal’s horror films became increasingly childish in the 1940s, RKO stole their thunder.
“The Black Cat” is one of the classics of the bunch, and notable for a number of reasons, is best remembered as the first that cast these two men together. That casting was gimicky for sure, but that doesn’t change the fact that a couple of these seven were great films. The two best of the pairings is this film with Universal, which is the first, and “The Body Snatcher” (1945, it should be only list but it isn’t) with RKO, which was the last.
Director Edgar G. Ulmer this film was pitched as a “sure hit” tapping into the heart of the franchise, not only with the stars, but the choice to making it an adaption of a story that the audience would recognize as a classic of literature, just like “Dracula” & “Frankenstein.” He chose Edgar Allen Poe’s 1843 short story “Black Cat” before considering how to translate into a filmable senario, and the early drafts of the script were the reasonable sounding project of combining it with Poe’s 1839 story “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Soon though Ulmer and his co-scripters Peter Ruric & Tom Kilpatrick abandoned that, Ulmer determined “The Black Cat” was impossible to dramatize, and went forward with a boldly unusual project, baring no relationship to the story except the title Poe still got listed in the credits (that justly earned the film some harsh mocking from critics). This bumpy evolution is emblematic of the rest of the production, and is deeply woven into both its exquisite crafting, and its damaging silliness. Fact is, they made this baby up as they went along.
Ulmer's background was primarily as a set designer and this shows in the film’s memorable interiors. While still in Germany, he worked with the legendary directors like Carl Boese, Paul Wegener, Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau on such classics as “The Golem” (1920) “Metropolis” and “Sunrise” (both 1927). It was while working on “The Golem” that he received the seed for this tale. In a 1970 interview with Peter Bogdanovich he described meeting novelist Gustav Meyrinck, who "was contemplating a play based on Doumond, which was a French fortress the Germans had shelled to pieces during World War I; there were some survivors who didn't come out for years...And the commander was a strange Euripedes figure who went crazy three years later, when he was brought back to Paris, because he had walked on that mountain of bodies."
It was in America proved his capability as a director in minor projects like low-budget Westerns and a syphilis education film. He recognized this project, product of an improbable pitch, was his golden shot, and he went whole-hog on it.
The film was budgeted at a third of what the studio had spent on “Dracula” (1931) or “Frankenstein” (1931), and allowed a brief fifteen-day shooting schedule. Because Ulmer had a genius for crafting ambitious films on incredibly low budgets, “The Black Cat” looks as though it cost twice as much as it did.
Ulmer, like Todd Browning (the director of “Dracula”) before him, learned the directors craft in the silents and had to adjust to a new technology. Though few would consider him as masterful as Browning, in this one film he was a few steps ahead of the superior director, who failed to employ music or ambient in an effective manner. “The Black Cat” was a significant breakthrough in the new motion picture form, incorporating the music much in the way it was in the silent era by live musicians at the theater where the film was shown. There is an almost continuous background score throughout the film, a selection of classical music compiled by Heinz Eric Roemheld. He pushed it one step further, using the music as a means to free the camera’s from early cinema’s often oppressive stage-bound nature. In one sequence, the camera leaves the actors behind and drift upward, out of the dungeon. Karloff silky theatrical voice continues it intonations as Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 begins to dominate, and the mood builds and builds.
The more important of his two script collaborators was George Sims, a prolific magazine and script writer, who had so many pseudonyms literary historians have been stymied in creating a complete list of his work. His most famous is the 1932 novel "Fast One" written as Paul Cain, the “hardest” of all the hard boiled, it is also among the most misogynistic. This film proved a great collaboration, because even though the story is more than a little bumpy, the writing is ultimately realized in the atmospherics so seamlessly that it’s hard to tell where Sims ends and Ulmer begins. This script lacks the famous novel’s overt hostility towards its female characters, but substitutes a not unrelated extreme objectification of women that deeply informs the film’s creepiest elements. Also, the film is rare in its taboo themes, and though focusing on different subjects, displays the novel’s rage against conventions that dominated the relative freedom of the pulps, this time turned against the films industries much greater censorship. The film a massive “F--k you” directed at the newly minted Hayes code--instituted in 1930, its restrictive rules made any realistic dramas, gritty crime movie, and any horror movie, an exercise in the purest and most fearless determination. For it’s first thirty years, the quality of most Hollywood films could been measured in its ability to circumvent it. By the time the code was abandoned in 1968, two generations of America’s greatest filmmakers had already won the battle of rending it toothless.
As Philip French wrote, "The movie unfolds like a nightmare that involves necrophilia, ailurophobia, drugs, a deadly game of chess, torture, flaying, and a black mass with a human sacrifice. This bizarre, utterly irrational masterpiece, lasting little more than an hour, has images that bury themselves in the mind."
The film opens with two really annoying Americans, the Alison’s played by David Manners and Julie Bishop, who are meant serve the role of audience identification. They are honeymooning in Hungary. They are told by their bus driver, “All of this country was one of the greatest battlefields of the war. Tens of thousands of men died here. The ravine down there was piled twelve deep with dead and wounded men. The little river below was swollen red, a raging torrent of blood. And that high hill yonder where Engineer Poelzig now lives, was the site of Fort Marmorus. He built his home on its very foundations. Marmorus, the greatest graveyard in the world.”
A person they meet on the bus, Dr. Vitus Werdegast, played by Lugosi, has a terrible, personal connection to these events. Peter, the American husband, immediately (and deliberately) annoys with his weakly comical innuendo-laced banter that clearly indicates that the marriage has yet to be consummated (this is a plot point, as there’s an occult ceremony that requires a virgin sacrifice later on). This is contrasted by Lugosi’s barely-concealed fascination with Joan’s beauty. Lugosi most sympathetic when he does the creepiest things, like a scene where, as the couple sleeps, he touches her hair as the couple sleep. It is simultaneously touching and sinister, and more so after we learn that she is similar in appearance to both his dead wife and daughter.
Creepy or no, Lugosi isn’t the villain here, this is in fact virtually his only post-1931 hero role. Werdegast was one of the survivors of the battle, and his commander, Hjalmar Poelzig, played by Karloff , had betrayed him and thousands of his comrades to the to the Russians. Even after escaping death, Werdegast was sent to a notoriously brutal prison camp, where he watched many more die. Now liberated, but in no way free of his past, he’s hell-bent on vengeance against Poelzig, who has perversely built a luxurious castle on top of the corpses of those he condemned. Reasonably early on, we see Werdegast has more than adequate motive for murder, but the real depths of Poelzig’s betrayals will take the whole of the picture to reveal, and they ultimately shock even Werdegast, who hated him and has been savoring revenge through fifteen years of soul-crippling deprivations.
To the degree that film has any coherence at all, it is about the storm warnings of the coming of Second World War, but it addresses these themes without addressing imperialist opportunism, and only subtly referencing the millennialist political ideologies, that were driving then contemporary events.
Released only two years after Hitler achieved the Chancellorship of Germany following an election but by far-from-Democratic process, and one year after he achieved absolute dictatorship, the film’s attitude is strongly war-weary and isolationist. Europe’s sickness is incurable, even the sympathetic semi-heroic Werdegast has been turned into a monster by ancient enmities and cultural rituals that are odder and more powerful than the satanic rituals at the center of the plot. There is an important, but also irrational, a game of the chess game to the death has nothing to do with occult belief, but has to do with two men trapped in old and bizarre traditions and hierarchies they probably couldn’t even articulate.
The bus has an accident, stranding the American’s, who unsuspectingly take shelter in Poelzig’s castle, and are thereby drawn into Poelzig & Werdegast’s drama.
Poelzig character was influenced by real-life of occultist Aleister Crowley, then living in California, who became an international scandal only two years before when artist Nina Hammett exposed his devil-cult worship seances in her autobiography. He sued for libel and lost. This was decades after his first notoriety, he had almost single-handed destroyed the organizational structure of Europe’s most sophisticated occult circle, “The Golden Dawn” (confirmed or alleged members included the great horror and crime writers Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Sax Rohmer, and Bram Stoker, and the even greater poet William Butler Yeats) for no other reason than they didn’t recognize his overwhelming importance in the universe. In the early 1930s he didn’t need Hammett’s bad press as a distraction in his campaign to convert Hitler to his one, true, religion of the Ordo Templi Orientis. Ultimately, Hitler ultimate jailed some of Crowley’s friends and shut down his organization in Germany. Crowley then labeled Hitler a black magician and offered his services against Hitler to British Naval Intelligence during WWII, but was turned down.
Boris Karloff as the pseudo-Crowely is made a striking figure by the good work of the legendary Jack P. Pierce, who had also created Karoff’s “Frankenstein” make-up. Karloff physique is made inhumanly geometric in is black cloak, padded shoulders, mandarin collar, and triangular hair cut. When the character is first introduced, lying in bed with his unconscious woman. Karloff is dictated by the script, "the upper part of a man's body rises slowly, as if pulled by wires, to a sitting position." Karloff objected to this mechanical approach to performance. "Aren't you ashamed to do a thing like that, that has nothing to do with acting?" Ulmer insisted, and ultimately succeeded in what was obviously his goal, to get Karloff’s angular visage perfectly integrated in to the environment of the castle, which is not Gothic stone fortress you’d expect, but an ultra-modern Bauhaus styled evil castle, with glass bricks walls, stainless-steel staircase, chrome fixtures and neon lights. Through out there’s effective use of expressionistic lighting and jarring and interesting geometric patterns and designs. Late in the film, when reach the dungeon that is part of the far older Fort Marmorus (the cancerous history beneath the veneer of cosmopolitan European culture) those jarring geometrics are exaggerated in the inky black and illogical shadows.
This list of films is also a list of villains, and among them, Poelzig is one of the most vile. He’s a traitor; he’s his denigrated his stature as a world-renowned architect to build his palace on the bodies of his victims, and thus demeaning them; a satanic-cult leader with a taste for human sacrifice; obviously a murderer on a grand scale; an illicit drug user; he stole Werdegast’s wife by lying to her and telling her that her husband was dead, after her death; Werdegast now suspects Poelzig had a role in her death; he keeps mom’s beautifully preserved corpse in the basement–though the censors at the time missed the subtext, every contemporary reviewer brings up Poelzig necrophilia in the first paragraph; actually, there’s more than one beautifully preserved corpse in the basement, so he’s a polygamous necrophilic; and one more thing, Poelzig told Werdegast that his daughter had died, but he lied, he seduced the grieving child, secretly married her, and kept her locked in the castle like Goldilocks. I mean--Eeeeew! Had the Hays’ office been actually paying attention to what was going on in this movie, Sims ends and Ulmer would been lynched.
Karloff described his 61-year-long acting career as “a long and happy life of being a monster,” never played anyone as bad as Poelzig, and he’s clearly having a ball.
Lugosi’s part was the more challenging, as making this illogical film not wholly absurd rested entirely on his shoulders. Werdegast was once a warrior, now an emotional cripple, much of the film’s running time hinges on him being incapable of doing the very obvious, and acting against all the motives ascribed to him. If you believe his helplessness before force of Poelzig’s presumption of personal-godhood, his worse than Hamlet dithering is more suspenseful than the threat to the life of the American virgin. If you don’t, the whole damn thing is insufferably stupid.
I believe Lugsi, but Ulmer insisted on taking much of the credit for that. Even this early on, Lugsi’s reputation for overacting was beginning to maginalize him, and the fact that he very quite overcame his thick accent, and almost reflexively thickened it on set, only exacerbated this. Ulmer says his moderated Lugosi's performance by limiting his screen time, focusing more on reaction shots of other characters. "You had to cut away from Lugosi continuously to cut him down."
This may have been over-harsh, Lugsi’s face got a lot of screen time, and his accented voice was also fluidly musical in its menace. He managed to make some very bad dialogue memorable, like the films most easily recognizable to lines:
Mr. Alison, once again proving he’s a dolt: "Sounds like a lot of supernatural baloney to me."
Werdegast: "Supernatural, perhaps; baloney, perhaps not."
Trust me, it sounds better than it reads.
Lugosi was both immensely proud, and immensely resentful, of his horror roles. Before 1931's “Dracula” he was frequently cast as a romantic lead, this was especially true with his home country (1917 through 1922) and but in the US (starting in 1923). But after 1931, he was iron-clad type- cast, more so than even Karloff, who seemed less bothered by it. This horror role gave him a rare chance to widened the public’s perception of him, and the fact that Ulmer initially made Werdegast as villainous, murderous and lustful as Poelzig became a point of contention. Ulmer grudgingly agreed to reshoot several scenes, downplaying the brutality of the climatic torture scene, making Verdegast more of a protector of Mrs. Alison than a pervert waiting for an opportunity, etc. This of course required major late-in-the-project rewrites. But Ulmer took advantage of the extended shooting schedule to add a even more new scenes, bring about even more radical transformations. The introduction of necrophilia was one of them.
Poelzig leads Werdegast on a tour of the trophies he stores in the dungeon: a series of beautiful women, dead, embalmed, exquisitely posed in glass display cases, Werdegast’s wife among them.
Poelzig: Now you see, Vitus, I have cared for her tenderly and well. You will find her almost as beautiful as when you last saw her. She died two years after the war.
Werdegast: How?
Poelzig: Of pneumonia. She was never very strong, you know.
Werdegast: And, and the child, our daughter?
Poelzig: Dead.
Werdegast: And why is she...Why is she like this?
Poelzig: Is she not beautiful? I wanted to have her beauty - always. I loved her too, Vitus.
Werdegast: Lies. All lies Hjalmar. You killed her. You killed her as I'm about to kill you!
Werdegast draws a revolver, but is frozen by the sight of a black cat entering the room. That big, long, word that appeared early in this critique, “ailurophobia,” is the fear of cats. Werdegast paralyzing neurosis of them is the only, absurdly tenuous, link to the Poe story. Those cats will stay Werdegast’s vengeance more than once, setting up the chess game to the death:
Poelzig: You're interested?
Werdegast: Maybe.
Poelzig: I thought so. Well I'm not. Only spiritually.
Werdegast: Spiritually?
Poelzig: Tonight, it is the dark of the moon. We shall gather and...You had better come Vitus. The ceremony will interest you.
Werdegast: Don't pretend Hjalmar. There was nothing spiritual in your eyes when you looked at that girl. You plan to keep her here.
Poelzig: Perhaps. (With his little finger, he caresses the breasts of the Queen, one of the chess pieces)
Werdegast: I intend to let her go.
Poelzig: Is that a challenge Vitus?
Werdegast: Yes, if you dare to fight it out alone.
Poelzig: Do you dare play chess with me for her?
Werdegast: Yes. I will even play you chess for her - provided if I win, they are free to go.
Poelzig: You won't win, Vitus
Finally, in the middle of the Satanic sacrifice, Werdegast takes command of the situation, and makes Poelzig pay. The defeated Poelzig is shackled to a vertically standing rack where he poses his corpse-concubines while embalming them. He is stripped to the waist:
Werdegast: Do you know what I am going to do to you now? No? Did you ever see an animal skinned, Hjalmar? Ha, ha, ha. That's what I'm going to do to you now! Flay....tear the skin from your body...slowly...bit by bit!..."How does it feel to hang on your own embalming rack, Hjalmar?"
Beautifully composed shadows and misdirections save this scene from being censorship-incurring explicit, but still striking brutal even today.
Werdegast chooses to die with Poelzig by blowing up the castle (the dungeon is conveniently wired to do just that; there is no explanation why) while the Alison’s and his daughter escape.
This is followed by the film’s postscript, which belongs to the annoying Americans. The relieved couple are on a train and Peter Alison reads aloud from a the review of his most recently published novel, “Triple Murder”:
Peter Alsion: In Triple Murder, Mr. Alison's latest mystery thriller, he fulfills the promise shown...We feel, however, that Mr. Alison has, in a sense, overstepped the bounds of the matter of credibility. These things would never, but with a further stretch of the imagination, actually happen. We could wish that Mr. Alison would confine himself to the possible instead of letting his melodramatic imagination run away with him.
He looks at his wife with amazement as the screen dissolves to black.
Good going director and writer, telling the audience that if we were enthraled, then we were stupid.
There have been no less than five “adaptations” of the near unadaptable Poe story, most bare no more than a vague connection to the source material, most are also quite bad. But then surprisingly, Italian horror master Dario Argento did a really fine, and shockingly faithful, adaptation in his segment of the anthology film “Two Evil Eyes” (1990, not on this list, but then again, the other segment wasn’t very good).
“Black Cat” Trailer:
“Two Evil Eyes” Trailer:
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