THE BLACK CAT (67) (second viewing: 75)

Directed by: Edgar G. Ulmer (1934)

Starring: Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, David Manners, Jacqueline Wells

The Pitch: A battle for the souls of two innocent travellers between a Devil-worshipper and the doctor who's come to take his revenge on him.

Theo Sez: Rather anaemic as a straight thriller - virtually plotless, in fact - but a strange, somnambulistic experience, tinged with overtones of decadence and decay : despite the Mitteleuropean setting, the villain's lair isn't a crumbling old castle but a gleaming temple of (then-)modern Bauhaus, raising suspicions of a hoary old chiller cloaking a comment on the mid-30s here-and-now, especially perhaps on Europe-vs.-America between the Wars, Old World corruption vs. New World innocence and energy. A Hollywood film made almost entirely by Europeans, it ranges its characters very deliberately into two camps - Americans in one, Manners as the bumptious young newlywed complaining about "supernatural baloney" ("Next time I'm going to Niagara Falls," he declares when things get too hectic) and Wells as the wide-eyed young heroine, shaking her head sweetly when asked if she's ever heard of Satanism ; Europeans in the other, Karloff and Lugosi as antagonists but obviously two of a kind, their characters both scarred by the recent war, both prey to morbid thoughts and dark, ancient knowledge : "Are we men or are we children?" Karloff asks his enemy in the film's most poetic sequence (Beethoven's Seventh trembling on the soundtrack as the camera tracks down dark, deserted tunnels) ; "We understand each other too well. We know too much of Life". The film, uniquely, blends melancholy lyricism with a high-camp sensibility, Lugosi in particular sending himself up something rotten in his opening scene - as though disdaining the horror-movie trappings, urging us to look beneath ("Many men have gone there ... Few have returned ..." he intones, eyes bugging out ; "I ... have returned") ; all very interesting, even if it doesn't really add up to much - and anyone who thinks playing chess for souls was an original idea in THE SEVENTH SEAL is in for a surprise. [Surprisingly little to add on second viewing, 7 years later - except that second viewing was on the big screen, offering conclusive proof that an intelligent viewer can watch a film on video, 'get' most of what there is to be gotten, yet miss its iconic power. Final act is a mess - only the brief Black Mass is memorable in the last 20 minutes - but there's a point in the first half when you realise Karloff and Lugosi are giving two of the great stylised, self-aware performances of all time, every glance and tip of the head meticulously telegraphed, as though following a stage direction; the point is to expose the horror-movie trappings - and it's actually more explicit than I thought on first viewing, Karloff actually chiding Lugosi on his clichéd Quest for Revenge in that incredible Beethoven's Seventh speech - and probably, by telling a tale of Americans in Europe, actually make a comment on Europeans in America (specifically Hollywood), stuck on silly horror movies while clouds of War appear over the Old Continent. A film of emigrés mired in unhappy nostalgia, and poetic sensibilities let loose on unworthy material. Also dreamlike and fragmentary (and basically plotless), meaningful looks and quixotic gestures wandering ghostlike through an artificial elegance. Expressive esoterica, indeed.]