The Old Dark House (1932)

Film: The Old Dark House (1932)
Stars: Boris Karloff, Melvyn Douglas, Charles Laughton, Gloria Stuart, Raymond Massey, Lilian Bond
Director: James Whale
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

This month we are devoting all of our classic film reviews to Golden Age Horror films that I saw for the first time this year.  If you want to take a look at past titles (from this and other seasons of this series), look at the bottom of the page for links.

We shall rejoin the Sound Era today with The Old Dark House, an early pre-Code film, one from James Whale that in many ways anticipates his later picture The Bride of Frankenstein, which also stars Boris Karloff.  The film mirrors it in that it's kind of funny, and feels like it's supposed to be played for laughs even though it's relatively straight-faced in its approach.  The Old Dark House has a strange history as a film, and a happy one if you look at the ending.  The movie was considered lost for decades, but after William Castle remade it in the late 1960's, there was a concerted effort to find a copy of this all-star movie & bring it back to audiences, and eventually a copy was found, which is what we're enjoying today (I'm a film preservationist in my soul, so this makes me smile-all movies deserve to be seen!).

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is prototype of the classic haunted house motif.  A group of strangers are brought during a storm to a house: a married couple Philip (Massey) & Margaret (Stuart), their handsome bachelor friend Roger (Douglas), and later on in the film a chorus girl Gladys (Bond) and her companion William (Laughton, in his first Hollywood movie).  When they get there, they meet the Femm family, a gothic crew, complete with Morgan (Karloff), their near-mute, scarred butler, whom they seem to have a strange reluctance toward, and keep warning the visitors about.  It turns out that Morgan becomes rash & violent when he drinks, and he starts drinking with them trapped in the old house, and in the process he frees Saul (Brember Wills) from being trapped.  Saul is the true Femm family member to be afraid of (Morgan feels a combination of bad decisions & misunderstood), and is a murderer obsessed with fire.  Before he can kill the group & burn down the house, Roger is able to throw himself into danger, nearly killing himself by falling off of the balcony, but in the process saves all involved.  In the end, everyone (other than Saul) lives, and because it's Hollywood, Roger & Gladys end up engaged before the credits pull.

The movie is quite enjoyable, if completely silly.  The film plays the villains, with the possible exception of Morgan, as truly comic figures.  Saul is meant to be ridiculous, as are his relatives Horace & Rebecca (who resembles in some ways Grandmama from The Addams Family), and strangest of all is Sir Roderick, their 100-year-old father in the attic, who is played for some reason by a woman rather than a man (other than Whale's penchant for challenging heteronormative culture in his movies there's no explanation as to why the clearly female actor is playing the part, which may have been the point).  All of this makes the movie more fun, and with Stuart, Douglas, & Laughton all game for laughs, the movie is a delight.

The movie doesn't feature one of my favorite Karloff performances.  This was his first role to receive top-billing after his star-making work in Frankenstein (The Mummy would be released a few months later), and he's kind of playing the same character he would in his breakthrough part.  Morgan is mute, misunderstood but on some level a monster (he does unleash Saul on unsuspecting guests knowing the potential for danger, and seems to have a kind of rabid lust for Gloria Stuart's Margaret), but there's not as much soul in this character as Frankenstein's monster, and it feels like a carbon copy.  We're going to get to a less typical Karloff role later this month, but I'm curious if you've seen this movie where you'd rank this performance, as I think it's the rare film where the perpetual scene-stealer gets washed out in the movie.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, Freaks, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, Son of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Ghost of Frankenstein, The House of Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Masque of the Red Death