The Old Dark House (1932)
Boris Karloff
Whale’s Eccentric Night In Wales
The Old Dark House (1932)
Studio: Universal • 70 min B&W • AR 1.33:1 • US: 20 Oct 1932
Re-release: Kino Video (Sep 2003)
Starring: Boris Karloff, Raymond Massey, Gloria Stuart, Melvyn Douglas, Charles Laughton
Dir: James Whale
Though Frankenstein had been a huge hit for Universal, The Old Dark House was not. Though it was re-released in 1937, it was soon banished to the vaults and the rights to the story sold to another studio. It was remade in 1963 by schlock-meister William Castle for Hammer films and starred Robert Morley, Joyce Grenfell and Tom Poston playing up the humour over horror. Over the years, the film was thought to be lost but it turned up after an exhaustive search in the late 1960s and was restored from surviving negatives and other pre-production prints. Definitely pre-code, the very sexy 22 year old Gloria Stuart reveals much; Stuart appeared on screen as late as 1997 in Titanic as the elderly Rose. (She also appeared in Whale’s The Invisible Man.)
A relatively unknown actor, Ernest Thesiger, deliciously plays the key role of house host Horace Femm; however, you’ll be hard pressed to think of a more spineless character to reside in a fearsome place like the Femm residence. You may recall him as the Emperor Tiberius in the 1953 bible-pic The Robe, but more likely in yet another Whale horror, as Dr Pretorius in The Bride of Frankenstein. At 81, he made his 2nd last film, The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone. Toronto-born Raymond Massey is one of the hapless travellers; not yet a star (though he appeared in his first talkie the year before as Sherlock Holmes in The Speckled Band), he doesn’t even rate in lead billing. The always wonderful Charles Laughton plays Sir William Porterhouse, travelling with a chorus girl but obsessed with his recently dead wife. In filming order, this was Laughton’s first US film, though Devil and the Deep (with Laughton, Gary Cooper, Tallulah Bankhead and Cary Grant) was released a few weeks ahead of The Old Dark House.
Boris Karloff is the “star”, and simply billed as Karloff; but he has the ungrateful role as drunken homocidal, love-starved Morgan, the mute butler. He makes of it what he can but his talents are much better served up in a number of other pictures. With a remarkable career extending back to 1919, this was already Karloff’s 85th picture! Melvyn Douglas is arguably the true star who, as happy-go-lucky Roger Penderel, has the wittiest, most sophisticated dialogue and eventually gets the girl. Remarkably – for modern day audiences – while playing passenger to Massey and Stuart before their jalopey breaks down not far from the Femm estate, Douglas sings a few lines of “Singing In The Rain”!
There are drawbacks: the story isn’t really convincing; the acting is relatively stiff and the actors are performing as if on stage, throwing their voices to the back of the hall; the Femm’s 102 year old father, living in a room upstairs, is played by a woman!; and the surviving print is pretty murky in spots, even allowing for the bad weather. But then, this isn’t horror in the same sense of the classics Universal turned out in this era – which is probably why it was a disaster at the box office. (It did quite well in England where audiences were more familiar with farce than horror.) The production does have dollops of charm and it is quaint, in a nice way. You won’t be hiding behind the sofa in the scary bits; nor will you be surprised by the actions of any of the characters; yet somehow the thing redeems itself through the artful dialogue, crisply paced action and a genuinely heart-warming innocence.