THE BLACK CAT (1934)

This is considered a horror classic of its era, and many critics see it as the high point of director Edgar G. Ulmer's career. An American couple (David Manners and Jacqueline Wells), honeymooning in Hungary, meet up with Dr. Werdegast (Bela Lugosi) who is on his way to visit an old acquaintance, engineer and architect Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff). Their relationship has a long and convoluted backstory, but essentially during WWI, Karloff betrayed his country by giving up a major fort to the Russians, causing the massacre of thousands. Karloff now lives in a huge art-deco house built on the grounds of the fort, which Lugosi calls the biggest graveyard in the world. Lugosi spent years in a POW camp and has come back to confront Karloff and find out what happened to his wife and daughter. During a heavy rainstorm, the bus that Lugosi and the couple are on crashes and the three take refuge at Karloff's home. At first, Karloff seems welcoming if a little stand-offish, but it turns out that he's a Satanist who is about to hold a Black Mass at the dark of the moon and he intends to keep Wells prisoner for use as a sacrifice. We also learn that, in Lugosi's enforced absence, Karloff, claiming that Lugosi had been killed in action, married his wife, and when she died, he married Lugosi's daughter (who, the few times we see her, always seems to be in some kind of doped-up haze). He has kept the embalmed body of the first wife suspended in an upright glass coffin, along with the bodies of other women (ex-wives or lovers? Satanic sacrifices? It's never, like many other plot elements, made clear). Lugosi, knowing Karloff's intentions, plays chess with him for the fate of the girl, but Karloff wins. During the Mass, Lugosi disrupts the proceedings, gets Wells and Manners on their way to safety, begins skinning Karloff alive, then blows up the entire house.

You may wonder about the title; it's borrowed from a Poe story, but aside from a briefly-used plot element about a black cat that skulks around the house, triggering Lugosi's dreadful fear of cats, this has nothing to do with Poe, which is fine. The real problem with the plot is that there is too much of it stuffed into a short (66 minutes) running time. Virtually every element, including the cat, the chess game, the Satanism (the Karloff figure was apparently inspired by the then-current headlines about real-life occultist Aleister Crowley), the embalmed women, and the backstory concerning the war, should have been developed more. The set design is fabulous, and much of the film has a great expressionistic look full of deep and angular shadows. The Mass is quite effective, as are the scenes of the weird wife/daughter (Lucille Lund, who also plays the dead first wife). Lugosi, whose acting is often slighted by critics, is very good here, getting a rare chance to play a sympathetic, fleshed-out character, and he's especially good in the early scenes on the train when he first meets Manners and Wells. While the couple nap, he reaches out and strokes Wells' hair, thinking she resembles his long-gone wife; the move could have come off as comic or perverted, but Lugosi makes the moment a moving one. Karloff is fine and Wells and Manners are OK--Manners, as usual, isn't given much to do as the passive beta male, even winding up out of commission during the exciting climax, but he does get a couple of comic relief lines; in the middle of his miserable honeymoon experience, he sighs, "Next time, I go to Niagra Falls!" The best line, and one that is widely quoted, comes from Lugosi in reply to a man who questions some "supernatural baloney" they're talking about: "Supernatural? Perhaps. Baloney? Perhaps not." Ulmer's directing style is awkward at times, with Karloff's first entrance and Lugosi's attack on the black cat both bungled by choppy editing--which, to be fair, may be the fault of Universal rather than Ulmer. There is also an unfortunate shot of a servant depositing an unconscious Wells on a bed; the camera is low and at the bedside and Ulmer may have thought it was an interesting angle, but it winds up being laughable. Still, despite my qualms about some aspects of the film, its atmosphere can't be faulted, and that is important in horror films. The Universal DVD print, released as part of a single-disc Bela Lugosi collection, is wonderful, not blemish-free, but in much better shape than I've ever seen it. [DVD]