Past Misdeeds: The Black Room (1935)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

The olden tymes, in an Austria situated right next to the countries of Universal's backlot gothic Europe, where various accents, curious costumes and customs, and dubious temporality take on the appearance of a dream of the past. An old prophecy pronounces that the house of the de Berghmans will fall when the younger of two twins will kill his brother in the Black Room of their ancestral castle, repeating the founding sin of the house.

Consequently, reigning Baron de Berghman (Henry Kolker) is full of pronouncements of doom when his wife gives birth to twins. On suggestion of Colonel Hassel (Thurston Hall), one of those movie military members who never actually do anything military, de Berghman seals up the Black Room so that the prophecy will never be fulfilled.

Twenty years later, with the elder de Berghmans dead, the older of the twins, Gregor (Boris Karloff), is now the Baron. He's not exactly well-loved by the local populace, what with his habit to indulge in his darkest impulses, and the surprising number of disappeared peasant daughters last seen with him. Gregor has also found a secret door to the Black Room, where he now hides the rotting proof of his indiscretions, but that particular of his vices remains unknown to everyone.

Gregor's younger brother Anton (of course also Karloff) has spent the last fifteen years or so away from home, trying to put distance between himself and the family curse story, and living an actual life. But now, Gregor has begged for Anton's return, and Anton - the nicest guy ever prophesied to become a murderer - can't help himself but return.

Unfortunately, Anton's return home is only the first step in the elder brother's fiendish plan to get the increasingly lynch-mob-y peasants off his back, take Anton's place, and marry a particularly boring girl named Thea (Marian Marsh), who just happens to be Hassel's daughter. One hopes the prophecy will still come to pass one way or the other.

In his thirty year career, The Black Room's director Roy William Neill made a lot of movies for the b-movie (in the initial sense of the word) arms of various studios. Going by the parts of his filmography I'm acquainted with, Neill was a particularly deft hand at squeezing a lot of gothic mood out of comparatively little resources (not so little when compared to what directors working for something like PRC had available to them, obviously). Some years after the movie at hand, Neill would go on to direct most of the Rathbone/Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies which were at their best whenever the director indulged in the unholy cross of gothic and pulp sensibilities (something that happened quite a lot in print in the pulps at the time as well).

Unlike the Holmes movies, The Black Room has no Nigel Bruce as the worst Watson on screen (or imaginable) ruining everything. In fact, there's not bumbling comic relief in the movie at all; if there's any laughter to be had here, then it's of the grim sardonic kind that appreciates the subtle humour of the way Karloff plays Gregor impersonating his good brother Anton.

In tone, The Black Room is pure gothic melodrama with a hint of the supernatural but also more than just a small hint of the idea that prophecies of murder of the kind presented in it could really turn out to be rather self-fulfilling. The script by Arthur Strawn and Henry Myers adds an additional flourish to its suggestions of psychological pressure shaping children's minds by turning Anton, the twin who would actually have a reason to envy his brother and is prophesied to become a murderer, into the socially acceptable brother of the two, yet also hinting that knowledge of the looming prophecy itself is at least in part responsible for Gregor's nasty turn of character.

The film never discusses this theme, or the tension between the idea of fate as a an actual working power (in this case, the hand of fate is a dog, by the way) and the concept of self-fulfilling prophecies overtly. However, I think it is this tension that gives the film's intensely melodramatic tone actual power, for without it, this would just be the usual gothic tale of fate (or rather Fate) indulging in its ironies.
On the visual front, Neill, in often inventive ways, emphasises the idea of twins being mirror images of each through the frequent use of mirrors. The titular Black Room's walls, for example, are made of - now dusty - polished obsidian, heavily suggesting that Gregor very literally kills his better half in the Room, yet also that he is showing his full, corrupt self only there.

In The Black Room, mirrors are not only a way of seeing one's true self (like in the scene where Gregor, shortly before his wedding, indulges in his old self for a moment in front of a mirror), they are also objects revealing one's true self to others (see the earlier scene where Hassel realizes Gregor-impersonating-Anton isn't Anton by accidentally watching him in a mirror). That's pretty interesting and complex for what probably was a quickly shot entertainment without open aspirations to artistic merit.

On the other hand, Neill is rather good at that "entertainment" bit as well, turning out one of the faster paced gothic melodramas I know, a film where not a single second seems wasted on anything not pertinent to plot, theme, or mood - characters are of course archetypes. It's quite an achievement in a genre tending to the slow and ponderous, and in an era of filmmaking where scenes of odious comic relief "breaking the tension" (why would you want that?) were nearly mandatory.

Neill - and everyone else behind the camera - does get quite some help with his efforts by Karloff - I can't help but add "of course". At first, the great man's performance seems rather too on the nose, the brothers a bit too good or evil, respectively, even when you keep the very different ideas the 30s had about acting in mind, but further study reveals a layer of subtlety below the obvious that enables various elements the script only touches on, and gives these gothic stock characters dimensions beyond excellent scenery-chewing, suggesting some degree of psychological depths in the archetypes.


Karloff's performance is emblematic for The Black Room as a film where much more is going on below a highly polished surface than it at first seems.

In short: Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)

Boy, do Universal horror films from the monster mash era make me cranky. I’m not even going to get into my usual synopsis here, seeing as the film’s plot is a pretty strained exercise in pointlessness despite the script being written by Curt Siodmak, who really could do better. Not only are character motives utterly incoherent, they’re illogical actions are not even setting up anything that’s all that interesting to watch. It’s one thing to use “It’s in the script!” as a motivation when it at least gets a film somewhere interesting or exciting, but you don’t really need to go into any contortions of this sort when your film isn’t planning on going anywhere of note anyhow.

I suspect it’s that legendary disinterest of the Universal higher ups in using their horror franchises as anything more than an unloved money making machine that’s responsible for how little of interest or dramatic impact is actually happening in Roy William Neill’s – who also could do so much better - film. This certainly is not a film made by people giving much of a crap about making a good movie; to my annoyance, though not to my surprise, it’s not even one terribly interested in at least giving its audience what its title promises. Sure, Frankenstein’s monster (Frankenstein himself being dead and all, and his daughter Elsa alas isn’t a mad scientist because that might have been entertaining) and the Wolf Man do meet, and even have a thirty second fight without any reason the script actually bothers to set up for it in the end, but that leaves us with a film mostly dragging its feet for seventy minutes, particularly once Lon Chaney Jr.’s Larry Talbot leaves beautiful Wales and goes on an odyssey of very little interest.

To add insult to injury, Bela Lugosi’s (whom I love dearly) performance as the Monster that somehow – for a reason the film of course doesn’t bother to explain but just treats as a given – has lost much of its strength is absolutely dreadful, lacking the physical presence as well as the pathos Karloff gave the role. He’s a good aggressive grunter, though.

And you know what? That’s really the kindest thing I have to say about this thing.

On Exploder Button: The Black Room (1935)

Karloff! Roy William Neill when Nigel Bruce isn't around! Karloff again! A script with depth!

Might this be the best gothic melodrama you haven't heard about? Click on over to my column on Exploder Button to find out!

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Black Angel (1946)

When bar singer Mavis Marlowe (Constance Dowling) is murdered, quite a bit of circumstantial evidence points to her lover Kirk Bennett (John Phillips) as the murderer, enough so that the glorious American justice systems sees fit to sentence him to death.

Ironically, the only one who believes Kirk's insistence on his innocence is the one he's been lying to all along, his wife Catherine (June Vincent). After the sentencing, June decides to put all her energy into finding the only piece of evidence that could exonerate Kirk, a heart-shaped broach Mavis's killer took with him. Her investigation leads Catherine to Mavis's estranged husband, the pianist and composer Marty (Dan Duryea). Something about June pulls Marty out of the alcoholic stupor that is his usual state of mind, and convinces the alcoholic to help the desperate yet gutsy woman.

The trail leads the new partners to bar owner Marko (Peter Lorre, obviously having a lot of fun with his pasted-on cigarette). Marko may or may not have had good reasons of his own to kill Mavis. Catherine at least is convinced Marko is hiding the broach in his safe, so she and Marty develop a plan to get closer to the man and his safe 70s Bollywood would approve of: they turn into a singer/pianist duo (quite like that of Mavis and Marty once were) and hire on in Marko's establishment. Things don't go as planned, of course.

Ray William Neill's Black Angel (based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich, like so many other noirs) is a very fine, b-list Universal noir that contains so many elements typical of what we now think of as part of the noir genre, listing them may make the film sound like a parody, or at least as a pretty dumb series of clichés. Thanks to Neill's atmospheric direction and a script that contains quite a few moments of cleverness and hidden depth, nothing could be further from the truth, for if you do it right, you can make clichés sing like the truth, while certain improbabilities of plotting always seem to be rather the point of film noir anyway.

Of course, when it comes to helping me ignore improbabilities and clichés in a movie, a nice ensemble of actors like the one working here is useful too. Duryea, Vincent and Lorre in a good mood - like they are here - would be more than able to convince me of much less believable things, like politicians not in the pocket of big media corporations.

While the film contains more than enough inventive visual moments - Neill sure loves transitions that are more than just cuts to the next scene, and does put an equal amount of effort in meaningful framing of scenes, which gives the whole affair a pleasant visual flow that only breaks when it is supposed to break - this isn't one of those noirs where the emphasis truly lies on the visual side of things.

Neill seems more interested in the subtextual load his script offers, and the way it plays with and sometimes against certain noir stereotypes. Just to take an obvious example, this isn't a film where a male main character is seduced or beset by a femme fatale (though one could argue that the typical male lead in these films really seduces himself), but rather one where the absence of the femme fatale creates a void at least one of the male characters needs to fill.

From a certain perspective, Black Angel is a film exploring its lack of a living femme fatale. It is certainly no accident that Marty seems to attempt to turn Catherine into a woman very much like his dead wife, nor will it come as a surprise that Catherine loses more of her scruples the longer she stays in the role men seem to want her to play. The film's not so crass as to have her turn "bad", but it's still a clear part of the set-up. I'm of the opinion that the femme fatale in most noirs isn't so much the deadly and infinitely ruthless monster the films pretend she is, but a useful foil on which the genre's male main characters can project their own weakness, and Marty's creation of his own private femme fatale here looks like a point in favour of that idea to me.

 

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