James Whale (1932)
The source material is a novel by J B Priestley (‘Priestly’ in the credits) called Benighted. Priestley’s choice of title may have had a double meaning – he described his characters as ‘only various forms of post-War pessimism pretending to be people’ – but it would still have been a good enough name for James Whale’s film, for all its comedy. The action takes place over the space of a few hours, under cover of darkness. (It Happened One Night would have been another possibility – the Frank Capra picture didn’t appear until 1934.) The title that Whale and the screenwriter Benn W Levy opted for was the right one, though, referring to the setting of this particular story and recognising a classic location in the film genre that The Old Dark House both celebrates and teases. At first light and cockcrow the next morning, the nocturnal spell is completely broken. The atrocious weather conditions – a gale-force wind, torrential rain – have cleared, leaving hardly a trace even of the landslide that forced five lost travellers to seek refuge in the title domicile, close to the border between Wales and England. The break of day also signals the end of Whale’s interest in the story. The Old Dark House concludes with amusingly perfunctory abruptness.
This afterthought of an ending is typical of the film’s volatility. The changing registers make it sometimes bewildering but compelling too. The frequently camp comic moments, besides being funny in themselves, can be a comforting contrast to frightening ones. The opening sequence is a sarcastic squabble between Philip Waverton (Raymond Massey) and his wife Margaret (Gloria Stuart), as their efforts to drive to Shrewsbury founder. Their car alternately inches and slithers through a mudslide. They vainly consult their sodden road map. The desultory observations of their affable backseat passenger Roger Penderel (Melvyn Douglas) help fan the flames of the couple’s argy-bargy. But when the trio eventually make it to the old dark house, the swarthy, bestial face of the person who answers their urgent knocking on the front door – the face of Morgan (Boris Karloff), butler to the household within – causes a sharp intake of breath. His incomprehensible guttural reply to a question the callers ask does nothing to set nerves at rest. Penderel’s aside to his companions – ‘Even Welsh oughtn’t to sound like that’ – comes as a relief. The soundtrack of an incessantly howling wind is also mostly reassuring, thanks to being so OTT. The unnerving elements include, as well as the continuously menacing Morgan, distorted reflections in the out-of-true surface of a bedroom mirror, which feature in what is perhaps the film’s most richly unsettling scene. The bedroom is that of Rebecca Femm (Eve Moore), the deaf, vehemently inhospitable lady of the house. She insists the unexpected guests can’t have beds but she does allow Margaret Waverton to use her chamber to change out of sopping clothes. Religious maniac Rebecca there subjects Margaret to a tactile jeremiad on the sins of the flesh and the wages of sin.
The domestic arrangements are convoluted. The Femm family includes, in addition to Rebecca and her effete brother Horace (Ernest Thesiger), their hundred-and-two-year-old father Sir Roderick (John Dudgeon), confined to bed on the first floor, and their fire-raising brother Saul (Brember Wills), kept under lock and key in the attic. Horace and Rebecca warn the visitors – who, after a while, also include the bluff businessman Sir William Porterhouse (Charles Laughton) and his chorine companion Gladys ‘Du Cane’ Perkins (Lilian Bond) – that Morgan is dangerous when he gets drunk but essential because he alone can control Saul. Except, that is, when, during one of his drunken episodes, Morgan decides to unlock the attic, which he naturally does on the night the Femms have company. Saul, once he gets downstairs, at first appears mild-mannered and much maligned: he tells Penderel his father and siblings keep him prisoner because he knows the three of them murdered Sir Roderick’s two other children. It’s not long, however, before there’s a sinister look in Saul’s eye and he shows his true pyromaniac colours. James Whale is indifferent to whether the other Femms are as black as Saul paints them: he and Benn W Levy seem to scorn tidy explanation of the mysterious situation.
Nearly thirty years later, Marion Crane, also seeking safe haven in terrible weather, committed to an overnight stay in a place that guarded terrible family secrets: Bates Motel, if not itself an old dark house, stood in the same grounds as one. Between Whale’s film and Psycho, there are doubtless lots more refuge-from-hell horror films that I can’t name. Unlike Marion Crane, though, the guests in The Old Dark House don’t have much in the way of their own guilty secrets; even more unlike her, their temporary lodging has a rather invigorating effect. The Wavertons, who stop bickering as soon as they’re in the house, seem happy together. The relationship between Porterhouse and Gladys turns out to be platonic: she supplies the companionship Sir William has needed since his wife died. Gladys and Penderel fall in love. Porterhouse accepts this with a rueful good humour.
There are ten people in the cast. Each one of them is interesting and enjoyable to watch. Although Roger Penderel describes himself as ‘war generation, slightly soiled’, the role enables Melvyn Douglas to give early evidence of his deft comic skills – this is a performance eighty-six years young. As Gladys, Lilian Bond (whom I don’t remember seeing before) partners Douglas admirably: their banter has a fine rhythm. In his early thirties and his first American film, Charles Laughton, using his native Yorkshire accent, doesn’t seem comfortable. Laughton was a precocious character actor but he’s too young to play a self-made man established enough to be a knight of the realm. Beside Melvyn Douglas especially, he’s a bit stagy. Even so, the combination of gusto and melancholy he brings to his portrait of Porterhouse is fascinating. Ernest Thesiger, also making his Hollywood debut, and Eve Moore, are a splendid double act, as the flamboyantly neurotic Horace Femm and the fiercely puritanical Rebecca. Brember Wills, as the pint-sized Saul, switches from pathos into weirdly energetic devilry. Under aging make-up hardly less extraordinary than the monstrous visage constructed for Morgan, the ancient Femm paterfamilias is, pace the credits, a woman – Elspeth Dudgeon. The resplendent eccentrics overshadow the conventional Wavertons but Raymond Massey and Gloria Stuart (sixty-five years later, the centenarian version of the Kate Winslet character in Titanic) play them very agreeably.
This was the second collaboration between James Whale and Boris Karloff, made straight after Frankenstein, their first. That film made Karloff a star and he’s unarguably the centre of attention, but thanks entirely to the power of his presence. Others have at least as much, if not more, screen time. After those few indecipherable opening words, Morgan is a non-speaking part. (The other actors have the advantage of an abundance of comical, often witty lines – some contributed by R C Sherriff, who helped Levy polish the script.) From the moment Morgan’s eyes appear in the doorway, however, Karloff is riveting: he suggests both a brute and a somehow abused and trapped spirit. The Old Dark House is now being re-released after undergoing ‘a really astonishing 4K restoration’ – according to Jonathan Rigby, in an excellent, widely informative piece in this month’s Sight & Sound. One amusing detail that Rigby doesn’t mention. At the start, as the car lurches along the mountain track in a downpour and the front-seat passengers get increasingly angry with each other, Roger Penderel launches provocatively into ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ (with adapted lyrics). It’s mildly disorienting hearing a 1950s number in a 1932 film until you remember most of the song score of Stanley Donen’s classic musical is contemporary with the early-talkies era in which the story’s set. Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown originally wrote the title song for The Hollywood Revue of 1929.
2 May 2018
