In short: The Cat and the Canary (1939)

You know the drill as well as the audience in 1939 did: a group of relatives is called to an Old Dark House for the reading of a will, trapped there by eccentric stipulations in said will that put a curious emphasis on death and madness, and somebody starts to murder people. Hidden passages, gorilla or “gorilla” costumes and such abound.

Elliott Nugent’s version of this particular classic of the Old Dark House formula recommends itself highly with an ability to keep hokey thriller and comedy perfectly balanced, never leaving the audience hanging without a joke for long, yet also not making the actual business of heir-murdering and heiress-gaslighting silly in itself. Or at least not sillier than it is by nature. This is a particularly remarkable feat since even by the time when this was made this style of film was not exactly fresh and original anymore. Certainly not in the second - or third, depending which movies you count - movie adaptation of this specific play.

The cast is rather fantastic: Bob Hope is at the point in his career when his persona hasn’t hardened into shtick, making for an actually likeable and funny lead, comedically stumbling through and upon a plot everyone around him plays rather seriously indeed without becoming annoying. Paulette Goddard isn’t exclusively there to be driven insane (INSANE! I tell you) and look pretty, but actually is allowed a degree of agency – not a given in 1939 or today – and never comes over as the fainting hysteric so many female leads of this time and sub-genre are. She projects enough personality to convince one she’d get through this whole affair alive and well even without Hope’s help. That these two have actual chemistry does help their romantic subplot quite a bit, of course.

I’m also particularly fond of the performances of genre stalwarts George Zucco and Gale Sondergaard here. The former does his knowing and dramatic lawyer in a most delightful way (and gets a very slasher-style body discovery moment to boot), while Sondergaard hams up her role as spiritualist, melodramatic housekeeper whose middle name must be DOOM to the delight of everyone who enjoys a good doom-laden housekeeper.

All of which turns The Cat and the Canary into a rather delightful example of its genre.

The Spider Woman Strikes Back (1946)

Warning: spoilers ahoy, for some things, you just have to write down!

Jean Kingsley (Brenda Joyce) comes to the small town of Domingo, a place of cattle ranches (which the script calls farms for some reason) and very little else, to work as a companion and occasional secretary for blind Zenobia Dollard (Gale Sondergaard). Zenobia is a charming and kindly woman, knitting many a sweater for the kids in town, and keeping on the dumb and for 40s people apparently very frightening looking Mario (good old Rondo Hatton) as her servant. Why, she’s so nice, she even insists on Jean drinking a nice, warm glass of milk before going to bed each night.

Curiously, ever since she has arrived Jean has begun sleeping very heavily. She is also plagued by nightmares and has problems getting out of bed. It is probably the good country air as Zenobia says. Or is Zenobia slowly draining Jean’s blood to feed it to a giant plant she brought with her from South America and which she uses to poison the local cattle, so the ranchers (which the film calls farmers for some reason) will leave and she can get their lands which once belonged to her family back on the cheap? You decide.

It is rather difficult to not find at least a small place in my heart for a film whose villainess has tried this hard to come up with a needlessly convoluted and ridiculous plan, and thankfully, that’s not the only point on which Arthur Lubin’s Universal production The Spider Woman Strikes Back delivers.

There’s also the sheer chutzpa of a title that tries to sell itself as a sort of sequel to the Rathbone Sherlock Holmes Spider Woman while having nothing whatsoever to do with the Universal Holmes cycle apart from Gale Sondergaard here taking on the role of a different villainess.

On a more practically and less conceptually fun level, this is simply a very entertaining little programmer, surprisingly efficiently plotted by Eric Taylor, and directed with as many flourishes of mood – for example the very nice noirish lighting of Zenobia’s mansion by night – by Arthur Lubin as time and budget permitted. On the plot level, this isn’t at all far from your typical Poverty Row movie, but there’s a pleasant degree of focus and craftsmanship on display here Monogram or PRC directors only seldom rose to, so we get a delightfully silly plot presented with the amount of energy it actually deserves.

Another pleasant surprise is how much Joyce’s Jean is actually doing on her own her. Sure, the painfully boring male lead (Hal Wentley), missing from the plot bit of this post because he’s just that uninteresting, does get to save Jean in the end, but for most of the movie, she’s figuring stuff out herself, making decent plans, and giving off the air of a young woman perfectly able to take care of herself even under difficult circumstances. It’s always particularly nice to see a female character in a 40s movie who is as perfectly capable as she is, yet no femme fatale.

Sondergaard makes a fine villain too, which should come as no surprise since Universal was trying to sell the film on her past Holmes character. She may not be going to the heights of scenery chewing you’d hope for given her bizarre plan, but she’s wonderfully able to present Zenobia’s ability to change from decidedly nice, cultured, poetry-loving woman to cold-blooded killer of secretaries and fondler (there is indeed a somewhat erotic quality in her relationship to her plant) of dangerous plants. And, of course, it’s also nice to see Rondo Hatton, even though I, not coming from the 40s and all, always think he looks like a nice, quiet guy you’d want to have a beer and a chat with, instead of a reason to screech and faint.

What more could anyone want from a cheap Universal programmer from 1946?

The Mark of Zorro (1940)

When young Diego Vega (Tyrone Power) is called back by his father from a life of duelling, making merry and a bit of soldiering in Spain to Spanish California, he finds out his Dad Don Alejandro (Montagu Love) isn’t the governor of the province around beautiful Los Angeles anymore. The just, fair and incredibly law abiding Don Alejandro has been replaced by the cruel, greedy, snivelling and all-around unpleasant Don Luis Quintero (J. Edward Bromberg) who shares the spoils of oppressing the peasantry with his not exactly beloved partner in crime and captain of the local soldiery, Esteban Pasquale (Basil Rathbone).

Diego is not at all happy with this sort of thing but he knows his father won’t approve of any extra-legal attempts to get rid of Quintero, Pasquale and their minions, so he decides to pretend to be the wimpiest fop ever to have spent time in Spain and secretly fight them under the guise of the masked rider Zorro in a campaign of finely placed needle pricks. If all goes to plan Zorro’s activities should bring Quintero to resignation, and get him to name Don Alejandro as his replacement to avoid having one bad apple replaced by another one. While he’s at it, Diego also finds the time to romance Quintero’s niece, the extremely virginal Lolita Quintero (Linda Darnell) out of love, as well as Quintero’s wife Inez (Gale Sondergaard) as part of his plans.

Rouben Mamoulian’s movie version of Johnston McCulley’s pulp character Zorro is pretty much the epitome of a great old-style Hollywood swashbuckling film. It’s crisply paced – having already established its characters and situation and started its hero on his mission by minute twenty-one – going from sharp, genuinely funny dialogue scenes to still exciting action to a cute romance and back again with aplomb and a generous spirit that should put a smile on everyone’s face.

Power is the perfect Zorro as well as the perfect Don Diego, diving in the pretend-foppishness with the same verve he shows when he (well, or his fencing double) is donning his costume, milking every fun little barb the script gives him for the best effect and – obviously, giving the sort of film this is and the time it comes from – cutting the appropriately dashing figure. I also find him genuinely likeable because he gets the rather difficult balancing act between charming and rogue just right and therefore never comes over as a self-loving prick. And we all know how Basil Rathbone excelled at being the villain in this kind of piece, as well as at the fencing.

Mamoulian is a director I really more connected with musicals, and wouldn’t have expected to be quite this good at letting the swash buckle. Though swashbucklers and musicals do of course share an emphasis on elegant movement, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been too surprised by how perfectly Mamoulian handles the material here. There’s a joyfulness of movement (and therefore physicality) not only to the action scenes but also to much of the dialogue sequences, with little in Mamoulian’s direction that seems routine or in the least bit willing to ever look boring or bland. The director’s hand is so strong, he even gets away with a central fencing match between Diego and Pasquale that doesn’t take place in an open space or very large room but in what amounts to a somewhat larger office room. The strong choreography by Fred Cavens - responsible for a lot of the more impressive looking fencing you’ll see in classic Hollywood films – for that decisive duel is pretty remarkable, too, using the cramped space brilliantly and inventively.

The whole thing’s also beautiful to look at, with sets that are certainly not authentic to the time and place they are supposed to belong to but which feel like the proper environments for the story taking place in them.  Arthur C. Miller’s photography is shadow-rich and atmospheric, never looking anything less than perfect for any given moment.

If all this sounds as if I enjoyed The Mark of Zorro a lot, and think it’s one of the best swashbucklers and adventure movies ever to have come out of classic sound film Hollywood, then I’ve done my job here exactly right.

In short: The Cat Creature (1973)

A thief (Keye Luke) breaking into the sanctum sanctorum of a recently deceased collector of antiques and occult stuff steals a curious amulet carrying the head of Bast from the neck of a mummy. Little does he know that this awakens a rather grumpy priest with the ability to turn into a murderous little kitten who then proceeds to kill everyone who even comes near the amulet.

Curiously, the priest's activities concentrate around the occult shop of Hester Black (Gale Sondergaard), despite Hester not having bought the amulet off the thief when he offered it. At first the cat-shaped priest only kills Hester's shop assistant, but soon it - and various cat-shaped phenomena - seem to threaten Hester, her new shop assistant Rena Carter (Meredith Baxter), and everyone around them, too.

The police in form of Lt. Marco (Stuart Whitman) is on the ball, and even clever enough to call in Professor of archaeology Roger Edmonds (David Hedison) for academic help, but except for Rena and Roger falling for each other, there's really not much happening with these two until a lot more people have died.

The Cat Creature is one of the lesser movies Curtis Harrington directed during his creative TV movie making phase, with a script that is certainly one of Robert Bloch's weaker efforts too, even though Bloch returns to Egyptian pseudo-mythology of a type he used in some of his best pulp stories a few decades earlier (though, alas, there's no Cthulhu Mythos connection in this particular case).

The film's mythology and the nature of its supernatural threat are some of its strengths, actually, with some fun not-actually-Egyptian made up mythology and a pretty cool monster conception. The problem lies in the execution, particularly in the slowness of the film's middle part where Roger and Marco are "investigating", which is to say, do little beyond arriving too late when somebody has been killed off, and Roger and Rena have a romance that needs to be a core part of the film but never feels like it at all.

Harrington for his part rides some of his hobby horses, so there are the expected appearances of Old Hollywood actors (with Sondergaard's performance as the clear high point), and the children of Old Hollywood actors, as well as many an atmospheric scene that attempts (and often succeeds) to use techniques of Universal horror and Val Lewton productions in the context of 70s TV. The latter approach gives the film some quite effective scenes, but again mostly gets lost in the film's middle part where one can't help but get the impression nobody involved really knew what he actually wanted to do with the film.

Where the moody scenes of cat-shadows are sublime when they do happen, Harrington also delivers something ridiculous. The scenes of what science terms catnosis are incredibly ill-advised, pre-dating a particularly ridiculous scenes from Harrington's later Devil Dog in all the wrong ways. For most of the running time, it's also quite impossible to see the rather adorable black cat at the film's centre as threatening at all, all the loud yowling on the soundtrack notwithstanding. It's also an old truth that cat attack scenes aka cat wrestling never work, a rule that still holds true.

Given all these problems, The Cat Creature still provided me with enough fun for an unassuming TV movie, if not always the fun it was probably meant to provide me with.

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