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THE BLACK CAT. (1934) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

THE BLACK CAT. (1934) FROM THE STORY BY EDGAR ALLAN POE. DIRECTED BY EDGAR G. ULMER. PRODUCED BY CARL LAEMMLE, JR. DISTRIBUTED BY UNIVERSAL PICTURES.

STARRING BELA LUGOSI, BORIS KARLOFF, DAVID MANNERS, JULIE BISHOP, LUCILLE LUND, EGON BRECHER AND HARRY CORDING.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This excellent old vintage horror classic has the distinction of being the first film ever to pair Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff together, so it’s a real case of Dracula versus the Mummy, isn’t? My money’s on the Fanged One rather than Mr. Bandages over there, but you never quite know how these things will pan out, do you?

The story begins on a train. American newly-weds Peter (a mystery writer, ironically enough) and Joan Allison are honeymooning in Hungary when they are asked to share their train compartment with a stranger, a handsome and charming Hungarian psychiatrist with an exotic accent by the name of Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi). They’re put out, naturally, as they wanted to be alone, but graciously invite Dr. Werdegast to sit with them nonetheless.

Dr. Werdegast is not just a stranger, but also a strangely intense man with a dark past. He reveals some of it to Peter while Peter’s wife Joan is asleep. She’s every inch the early ‘Thirties starlet, by the way, this one, and she spends most of the film screeching in fear at everything she sees and swooning elegantly into the arms of the nearest man.

Peter is obviously the love of her life and he shouldn’t have any trouble whatsoever controlling this docile, biddable little woman. I imagine he’d only slap her as a result of extreme provocation and not as a matter of course, which is always nice to know.

Anyway, I digressed there, lol. Vitus, who’s en route to visit a friend, as yet un-named, reveals to Peter that he has spent the best years of his life rotting away in a horrible prison in Siberia.

He was captured as a POW during the Great War of 1914-1918 and incarcerated for nearly two whole decades, thanks to the betrayal of a friend. His physical body may have survived the ordeal but his soul is in pieces, such was the horror of the place. His eyes are haunted with the memory of it all, and maybe other memories too that we don’t yet know about.

The young couple and Vitus and his wordless servant Thamal seem to be travelling in the same direction, so they all opt to share a carriage. In the lashing rain, however, the carriage overturns in a mudslide.

The driver is killed and Mrs. Allison, the frail little flower-petal, is injured a tiny bit. Vitus says, well, the friend’s house that I’m going to visit is just up the road a piece, come with me and my friend will fix us all up. So that’s what they do…

The ‘friend’ isn’t really a friend at all but Vitus’s worst enemy, the man whose terrible betrayal led to Vitus’s imprisonment for so long. Boris Karloff plays Hjalmar Poelzig, or ‘Pigslowe,’ if you prefer. Just ask Mrs. Allison. She knows what I mean!

Anyway, Poelzig is an architect who has built a very strange, rather futuristic-looking house in a mountainy region on top of Fort Marmarus, which he commanded during the war. Dr. Werdegast was one of his men.

The odd-looking house is surrounded by the graves of hundreds of soldiers who died in the war. It’s a weird, mysterious and atmospheric place, and the perfect location for the dark events that are about to play out there.

Causing Vitus to be imprisoned for so long is only half of what this sinister Poelzig fella has done to poor Vitus. There’s at least one woman in Poelzig’s household who can testify to just what wrongs have been done to her and Vitus and one other party, who shall remain nameless. Vitus is here to revenge himself on Poelzig, but not until the very end of the film does he know to what extent Poelzig has wronged him.

There’s a supernatural element to the film, of course, as Poelzig is involved in some very dodgy practices with their basis in the occult. Mrs. Allison is in grave danger, as Poelzig has decided he likes the look of her and wants to use her in an upcoming ritual. Well, if he needs a bird who can do little else but squawk and swoon into the arms of the nearest bloke, she’ll do just fine.

There is a black cat in the film but he seems to be there only to give Boris the chance to remark sarcastically to a bemused Peter Allison that Bela has a terrible fear of cats. It’s not really integral to the plot.

However, a lot of these old movies liked to be able to say at the beginning of the credits that the movie was inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe, whereas in reality the connecting link was often quite tenuous, as it is here. Still, Poe was a popular fellow and, if his name got butts-on-seats, the producers were prepared to use it, see?

The handsome, suave and still young Bela isn’t the villain as such in this one, oddly enough. He wants to avenge himself against the evil Poelzig who is the real villain but, not only that, he’s taken a liking to the pleasant young couple who invited him to share their train compartment and they like him well enough too. (Even though the husband caught Bela stroking the wife’s hair while she was asleep, lol!)

He’s damned if he’s going to let the dastardly Poelzig and his queer V-shaped futuristic hairstyle ruin the young couples’ lives by taking the wife to use as a pawn in his deadly Satanic ritual. The stage is set for a terrific battle of wits between Bela and Boris which might just end in a big bang for someone, but we won’t of course say who. Or is it whom?

Either way, this film is a marvellous watch, with up-tempo classical music playing throughout just as if this were a silent film. Bela is wearing dark lippy and Boris is fully made-up in the style of the stars of silent cinema.

We’re only four years into the talkies by this stage, remember, so the film still retains the look and feel of a silent movie. Luckily for us, though, it’s a talkie and so we get to hear Boris’s charming lithp and Bela talking in his wonderful Dracula voice, which was actually his real accent.

Pre-Code but not, I believe, by much, the film features Satanism, the occult and the skinning alive of a human being and it also hints at abduction, necrophilia, rape and domestic abuse. For a film from the ‘Thirties that’s so old as to be almost a silent movie, it really kicks some serious ass.

What a delicious treat this old black-and-white movie is. It’s only one of a handful of films that were all released with the same title, lol, which must have been terribly confusing for the poor flummoxed viewer. Just how many movies called ‘The Black Cat’ were filmed, anyway? Never mind, dear reader. We don’t need to know. Maybe, as Bela himself remarks in the film, there are more things in heaven and earth…

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger, poet and book-and-movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens’ fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

You can contact Sandra at:

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

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SON OF FRANKENSTEIN. (1939) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

son of frankie

SON OF FRANKENSTEIN. (1939) BASED ON CHARACTERS CREATED BY MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY. PRODUCED AND DIRECTED BY ROWLAND V. LEE. PRODUCTION/DISTRIBUTION BY UNIVERSAL PICTURES.

STARRING BASIL RATHBONE, BELA LUGOSI, BORIS KARLOFF AND LIONEL ATWILL.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This vintage black-and-white horror film is an absolute cracker, containing four of the biggest name stars of the day, namely Basil Rathbone, Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff and Lionel Atwill.

It’s a sequel to FRANKENSTEIN and THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN that sees Basil Rathbone arriving in his father’s home town of Frankenstein as his father’s son, Wolf Von Frankenstein. That’s an awful lot of FRANKENSTEINS, as I think you’ll agree.

The setting is somewhere in that sort of ambiguous ‘mitt-Europe’ favoured by Hammer Horror films as well as UNIVERSAL ones. It’s that sort of blurry Germany/Austria area that has men wearing Tyrolean hats and lederhosen while they’re dancing gaily to old folk songs from their native soil or downing the kind of massive tankards of ale that normally come with bratwurst on Oktoberfest. Well, that’s an awful lot of racial stereotyping to begin with, let’s quickly move on to the plot…!

The opening scenes are tremendously atmospheric. Wolf von Frankenstein arrives in Frankenstein by train, via London and Paris, with his attractive wife Elsa and adorable curly-headed young son Peter. It’s dark and lashing rain when they disembark from the train, facing straightaway into a sea of umbrellas owned by the waiting villagers, the welcome committee, as it were.

Except that it’s not very welcoming, lol. They’ve only come along to express their deep dissatisfaction, not to mention disgruntlement, that yet another member of the accursed Frankenstein family is moving into the village to bring more trouble down on their heads. At least, this is what they think.

If they only had the least idea of what was going to happen, they’d have run the little family of Frankensteins outta town on a rail, ‘the same way we got ridda Laura Ingalls Wilder,’ heh-heh-heh. (SIMPSONS reference there!)

Basil Rathbone (the Sherlock Holmes films with Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson) is marvellous as the handome and aristocratic- and neatly moustached- Dr. Wolf Von Frankenstein, who initially has no intention in the world of following in his father’s ultimately murderous footsteps.

His father was, of course, the fantastic Colin Clive’s character in FRANKENSTEIN and THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, the ‘mad scientist’ who created life, ie, the Monster, out of the dead body parts of cadavers which his mad assistant Ygor dug up for him from local cemeteries. What a wholesome thought.

His triumph ended in catastrophe for the locals, however, who don’t even want to hear the word of ‘Frankenstein’ mentioned in their hearing ever again, never mind nestling and nurturing a further generation of mad Monster-creators in its collective bosom.

They don’t even like the idea that the mad scientist’s old laboratory is still there, glowering down at the town from its lofty position on the top of a mountain just across from the Frankenstein’s family domicile, the fabulous old castle. I bet they’d just as soon see it burned down in one big inferno and be done with it.

But when Bela Lugosi (DRACULA, 1931) as the still-living Ygor takes Wolf to view the still-intact but comatose remains of the Monster in the Frankenstein family crypt, Wolf can’t resist Ygor’s suggestion that he use his father’s old notes and records to… You’ve guessed it. Revive the Monster…

Of course, when he inevitably succeeds in bringing Boris Karloff’s superb Frankenstein’s Monster back to grisly life, the Monster predictably runs amok in the town, just like the cookie foretold. (Another SIMPSONS reference there, heh-heh-heh.)

He’s particularly gunning for Ygor’s enemies, the last of the eight men who sentenced Ygor to hang for his part in Colin Clive’s character’s crimes. They did hang him, in fact, but it didn’t fully take and so now Ygor feels invincible, untouchable, like he’s unkillable or something.

Certainly he can’t be sentenced to death again, as he’s already been declared legally dead by the town council, headed by the Burgomaster, without which no self-respecting town in a UNIVERSAL FRANKENSTEIN movie would be complete. No wonder Ygor feels that he can safely send Frankie out into the streets of the darkened village to kill the last two still-living members of the posse of eight that initially sentenced him to death.

Screen villain Lionel Atwill (SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE SECRET WEAPON, THE VAMPIRE BAT) is brilliant as Inspector Krogh, the local copper who knows full well that there’s skullduggery afoot in Castle Frankenstein but he and Wolf have to play this elaborate game of cat-and-mouse with each other first before he can get to the real truth of the matter.

Inspector Krogh has first-hand experience of the horror of the Monster. When he was a child, presumably during the initial period when Frankie was brought to life by Colin Clive’s character, he bumped into the Monster during one of his rampages. He had his little right arm ripped out by the roots for his trouble. Now he wears a fake arm, and he’s understandably wary when he hears rumours from the worried townspeeps about the possibly monstrous goings-on up at the old castle.

Little curly-headed Peter is the one who gives the game away to Krogh when he talks about a friendly ‘giant,’ wearing a big furry jacket, who comes to visit him in his bedroom at night through a hole in the wall… Sounds well dodgy to me, does that…!

By the way, the chap who plays Peter- Donnie Dunagan- is still alive at the ripe old age of eighty-four. Furthermore, it may interest you film buffs to know that in 1942, this child star was the voice of Bambi in the famous DISNEY film that’s been tugging at heartstrings everywhere for nearly eighty years now, which is no mean feat.

THE SON OF FRANKENSTEIN is so atmospheric, and it brings out a wonderful nostalgia as well in the viewer for the original Frankie films. Basil Rathbone hams it up marvellously as the slightly manic Dr. Frankenstein and Bela Lugosi is deliciously evil as Ygor. And with those fake teeth he’s wearing, he looks like the cartoon character Muttley from the pairing of Dastardly And Muttley, remember, the doggie who was always sniggering? Aw. Such a sweet film. You’ll love it.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger, poet and book-and-movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens’ fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

You can contact Sandra at:

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

bela lugosi headshot

I love everything that the mysterious Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi ever did. If he’d advertised cat food, I would have loved those adverts as much as anything else he ever made. He and Boris Karloff, the two Lon Chaneys (father and son), Christopher Lee, Vincent Price and Peter Cushing are the Kings, the undisputed Kings, of the horror movie genre.

Everything that Bela does, every movement he makes, every word out of his mouth, is fascinating to me. I love the way he’s nearly always playing a mad scientist or a mad doctor who’s trying to take over the world with his eye power or clawed hand power, or maybe by building a monster or some kind of unholy army of the night, and it’s up to a feisty newspaper reporter and his best gal to stop him from attaining the world domination he always seems to crave, lol.

In BLACK DRAGONS (1942), he’s a mad medic once more, a Dr. Melcher, who pulls off possibly the most amazing feat of plastic surgery since, well, since I don’t know when. He travels to Japan to turn six members of the fiendish Black Dragon Society, all Japanese, all in cahoots with the Nazis, into six upstanding American industrialists, all through the magic of plastic surgery.

The real American industrialists will, of course, be killed, leaving the six Japanese impostors to step neatly into their lives in America. It’s the most improbable scheme ever devised and no foolin.’ Dr. Melcher, meanwhile, has to remain imprisoned in Japan so that he doesn’t give the game away.

But, in America, someone is killing off the fake industrialists one-by-one. Who could it possibly be? Nobody knows their true identities, except for Dr. Melcher and the lads back in Japan who commissioned the life-swapping plastic surgeries.

Each of the murder victims is found clutching an exquisite and obviously expensive-looking Japanese dagger, so I say look for the man who owns a Japanese dagger shop or who otherwise has access to an unlimited supply of Japanese daggers somehow.

Good thing there’s a reporter on the trail, and a young lady whom he likes called Alice, whose Uncle Bill is at the centre of the murders. The film contains the most blatant sexism I’ve ever seen in a ‘Forties movie, and ‘Forties movies are already pretty damned sexist. But just wait till you hear this little lot. It’ll make your jaw drop.

The reporter wants to keep Alice safe and away from all the commotion occasioned by the murders. He says something at one point along the lines of: ‘I wish we were married, so I could beat you up and then you’d have to stay home and you’d be nice and safe.’

There’s a lot I could say to that right now that I’m not gonna say. Just keep telling yourself, ‘that’s the way it was back then, it was the style of the times, all relationships were like that back then, fuhgeddaboutit, things have changed since then…’

BLACK FRIDAY (1940) sees Boris FRANKENSTEIN Karloff performing the almost obligatory surgery as a Dr. Ernst Sovac. This time, he’s transplanting part of the brain of a criminal called Red Cannon into the brain of his friend, Professor George Kingsley, who’s been badly injured in a car accident caused by the criminal. Fair enough, I suppose, lol. And it’s very FRANKENSTEIN-y too, isn’t it?

Anyway, though, the criminal part of his friend’s brain keeps asserting itself over the nice scholarly part of the friend’s brain. It’s like when Homer Simpson from THE SIMPSONS finally gets his longed-for hair transplant, but the thick luxurious quiff of hair has come from the show’s resident criminal and petty thug, Snake, who’s just been killed in the electric chair.

Every now and then, Snake’s thuggish personality comes out in Homer, much to the alarm of Homer’s son Bart, who’s unfortunately on Snake’s to-kill list. In BLACK FRIDAY, Red Cannon’s evil brain vies for supremacy over George Kingsley’s much more moderate one.

Dr. Sovac observes these transitions back-and-forth from evil to good and back again with interest. Red Cannon apparently stashed away a half a million bucks before he died and Dr. Sovac allows greed to get the better of him.

He wants to find that money for himself and use it to further his scientific research, no matter what the consequences for poor old George Kingsley, who’s supposed to be his oldest and closest friend. For shame, Dr. Sovac, for shame…

Bela plays a criminal called Eric Marnay in this film. He’s one of Red Cannon’s gang, even though you might have expected him to play the lead role, that of the mad scientist-doctor. He often was made to play second fiddle billing-wise to Boris Karloff, with whom he doesn’t play any scenes here.

He was included in films frequently just so that the film-makers could say, hey, lookee-here, Bela Lugosi’s in this flick! Sometimes, the roles were actually quite small and didn’t reflect his status as the man who’d played the most famous role of all time, Universal Studios’ DRACULA in 1931.

Anyway, Marnay’s desperate to get his hands on Red’s cash, and when members of Red’s gang start being mysteriously bumped off one-by-one, just like the fake Japanese industrialists in BLACK DRAGONS, Marnay is initially complacent. More dosh for me, is what he’s obviously thinking. But his time will come too, and maybe sooner than he thinks…

SCARED TO DEATH (1947) is the strangest little film I’ve ever seen. It looks a great deal older than it is and it’s filmed in something called ‘natural colour,’ so it has the distinction of being Bela’s one-and-only colour film.

It’s based on a play called MURDER ON THE OPERATING TABLE by Frank Orsino, and at times the film actually looks like a play, but a kind of scrappy one where everyone keeps chiming up at the wrong time and nothing makes a lick of sense.

George Zucco, who’s played Moriarty twice in the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce SHERLOCK HOLMES movies, portrays a Dr. Van Ee, whose daughter-in-law Laura has somehow died of fright and the flashbacks are going to try to explain how.

Dr. Van Ee’s son Ward has been trying to get an unwilling Laura to divorce him and Dr. Van Ee has been treating Laura for mental illness. As she’s a reluctant patient, you can see that a lot of suspicion should really attach to both Van Ees for her sudden death-by-fright. They both want her out of the picture, after all.

Bela plays a visiting cousin of Dr. Van Ee’s called Professor Leonide. Resplendant in a red-lined black cloak (just like Dracula’s!) and wide-brimmed black hat, he apparently used to be a stage magician in Europe. He’s accompanied by a little malignant dwarf called Indigo and, together, they present a source of terror for Laura, the wife of Ward Van Ee. What’s the deal with that, we wonder?

A floating green mask appears to be the main source of horror for the beleaguered Laura, however. Who’s behind these ghostly apparitions, and what does it mean for the three Van Ees, locked together in a ghastly dance of death and mutual dislike?

The plot is further complicated by the intrusion of a nasty newspaperman, desperate for a story, who is absolutely horrible to his ditzy blonde girlfriend. From what I’ve seen of these ‘Forties relationships, I shouldn’t be at all surprised if the ditziness turned out to be caused by repeated blows to the head from her tyrannical newspaperman boyfriend…!

Anyway, Bela is marvellous in all three films, no matter how small or bizarre the roles he plays. I love him in anything he does. He was the best Dracula ever filmed- as well as one of the first- and he’s credited with turning Bram Stoker’s creation into the handsome, suave, sexy, domineering lust-object later perfected by Christopher Lee in the HAMMER HORROR films. Good old Bela. May he never be forgotten.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

You can contact Sandra at:

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com