SEVEN FOOTPRINTS TO SATAN (1929)

Young James Kirkham is something of a playboy dilettante whose latest obsession is practicing shooting so can go off on an adventurous expedition in Africa. (It's not clear how old James is supposed to be; the character would seem to be in his 20s; the actor playing him, Creighton Hale, was almost 50, but with owlish glasses and a smooth face, he can pass for 30-something.) His uncle wants him to give up these foolish ambitions and work for him; James' girlfriend Eve also wants him to settle down with her, but he seems oblivious to their wishes. That night, at an auction of Eve's uncle’s jewels, a gunfight and robbery break out and when James and Eve head out to get the police, they are kidnapped in a car in which steel plates slide down to cover the windows. At gunpoint the two are forced into a dark and creepy mansion where they meet a variety of strange characters including: a dwarf who warns them to "beware the man on crutches"; a wolfish looking man named Moriarty; a pinch-faced woman who claims to be Satan's mistress; a man who looks like Fu Manchu who occasionally rings a gong; and of course a man on crutches known as The Spider. James and Eve soon realize they are prisoners of a figure who goes by the name Satan who will soon enact a sentence on the two (for what reason, they don’t know); a sexy woman tells them that she received a sentence from Satan for 100 lashes. After some chases through the mansion and weird encounters with other weird folks (including a gorilla), James winds up in the middle of a sinister dinner party and is told he must go through the ordeal of the Seven Steps, each step having a glowing digit on it to identify it, leading up to Satan's throne. Four of the steps are of salvation, but the other three are steps of damnation. If he steps only on the salvation steps, he and Eve will be freed; if he steps on two of the three damnation steps, Eve will be freed but James must be enslaved to Satan for three years; if he ends up stepping on all three of the bad steps, he and Eve will die. Is Satan really the devil? Why has James been chosen for this ordeal? Most importantly, how will he fare on the Seven Steps? 

This silent film directed by Benjamin Christensen was based on an occultish thriller novel by A. Merritt, once a popular author of pulp fiction who is largely forgotten today. When I was a teenager, I read it and loved it, but back in the 1970s, the film was considered lost so I seemed to have no hope of seeing it. When prints were found, they were in poor shape with intertitles in foreign languages. TCM put it on their schedule for a Silent Sunday Night showing sometime in the 1990s but pulled it for reasons never revealed. The print I finally saw on YouTube is a 2014 restoration by Serial Squadron with the intertitles translated into English. I'm happy and grateful to have seen this, though the restoration could have been better. Aside from the main plot device of Satan and the steps (pictured above left), the book and movie are completely different. The movie twist is a good one but I won't spoil it here. Things move at a fast pace and rarely bog down, except in the sense that there are so many characters, it's difficult to keep track of them—suffice to say that it's not really important to do so. Creighton Hale (pictured at right), who was mostly known for comedy parts, is OK if, as I noted above, really too old for the part. He has over 300 credits on IMDb, stretching from 1914 to 1958, the vast majority of them uncredited parts; he's probably best known as the leading man in the 1927 comic thriller THE CAT AND THE CANARY. His leading lady here, Thelma Todd, became more famous than Hale partly due to her mysterious death in 1935; it was judged to be an accidental carbon monoxide poisoning due to spending a night in her car in a garage while perhaps drunk, but some still believe it to have been murder. The sets and cinematography are quite good, especially toward the end. Though the plot is interesting, this is a movie to watch for its visuals. There was apparently a Blu-ray release by Serial Squadron but it seems no longer in print. [YouTube]