Captain Applejack

I'm watching this antique Old Dark House mystery on TCM right now and it quickly became evident to me that the film, its first silent incarnation ("Strangers In The Night") or the play it was adapted from were the first kernel of inspiration for Belgian comic book artist Hergé (Georges Rémi)'s "Secret of the Unicorn" and its sequel "The Treasure of Rackham the Red" (1943-1944). More proof that a large part of the inspiration for Hergé's melodramatic adventures were from sometimes second-rate Hollywood movies and plots that were very creaky to begin with. What he did with them of course was sheer genius and entirely original. But the basic idea was this: An ordinary man discovers that he is the descendant and inheritor of a famous pirate's treasure hidden somewhere in an old house. In the process, he has flashbacks of being the pirate himself, which is just what happens to Captain Haddock in those comic books.

Of course, not all of Hergé's inspirations were "second-rate". One might also reflect on the similarity of the ending of Sacha Guitry's "Les Perles de la Couronne" (The Pearls of the Crown, 1936, finally available on DVD in the US) and the ending of Hergé's "L'Oreille cassée" (The Broken Ear, published as a serial starting in 1935 and ending in 1937).