“Ancient traditions, when tested by the severe processes if modern investigation, commonly enough fade away into mere dream; but it is singular how often the dream turns out to have been a half-waking one, presaging a reality.”
-T.H.Huxley; The Book of Beast
“Men! The beasts! God would show wisdom if he took the hands from all of them!” –Nanon Zanzi
or… Mad Love Among the Limbless!
The Unknown(1927 USA 49mins)
Lon Chaney Sr as Alonso the Armless
Directed by Tod Browning with a screenplay by Waldemar Young (Island of Lost Souls, 1932). Story by Tod Browning, based on a novel by Mary Roberts Rinehart. (The Bat 1959). Cinematography by Merritt B. Gerstad (Watch on the Rhine 1943). Edited by Harry Reynolds and Errol Taggart. Art Direction by Cedric Gibbons and Richard Day (On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire) and Lucia Coulter, wardrobe.
Cast: Lon Chaney immortalizes the role of Alonzo the Armless, Joan Crawford plays Nanon Zanzi, Norman Kerry plays the strongman Malabar, John George is Alonzo’s sidekick Cojo, and Frank Lanning plays Costra, Nick De Ruiz as the circus owner and Nanon’s ruthless father, Zanzi.
Lon Chaney’s The Unknown is a dark, poetic ballet of obsession and transformation set beneath the lurid tents of a gypsy circus. In this silent masterwork, Chaney becomes Alonzo, a fugitive who masquerades as an armless knife-thrower, his uncanny dexterity with feet masking both his hidden arms and his criminal past. The heart of the film is Alonzo’s feverish love for his assistant, Nanon (Joan Crawford), whose pathological fear of men’s arms locks her heart away from ordinary affection.
When Nanon’s father discovers Alonzo’s secret and is murdered, Nanon glimpses only a telltale mark, a double thumb, unaware that her protector is the killer. In hopes of forever binding her to him, Alonzo submits to the ultimate sacrifice: the amputation of his own arms. But while he is gone, Nanon’s phobia is cured by the strongman Malabar, shattering Alonzo’s mad delusion. The film’s anguish crescendos in a bravura close-up, as the irony and heartbreak of his irreversible devotion contort Chaney’s face into a silent howl. A story of grotesque yearning and self-destruction, The Unknowndistills the wildest excesses of love into a nightmarishly intimate tragedy, where the boundaries of flesh and feeling dissolve beneath a mask of illusion
The Unknown is a beautifully disturbing film that gains a savage momentum the more you peer into the face of its poetically ugly story. As writer/historian David J. Skal states of the stage contraption at the film’s climax, “the Unknown itself is a perfectly constructed torture machine and arguably Browning’s most accomplished film.”
I want to use the term “Gothic embodiment” from Lina Wånggren’s May 22, 2013 article Gothic Embodiment: Lon Chaney and Affective Amputation because of her astute insight into the overreaching theme of The Unknown, which taps into the fear of castration and the horrific aspect of this bizarrely sensational L’amour Fou, which is both grim and grotesque. a French phrase meaning “mad love” or “crazy love,” referring to an intense, uncontrollable, and often self-destructive passion or infatuation that can be irrational and all-consuming.
Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford.Alonzo and Cojo enter the operating room. The sterile environment envelopes the two men.
Alonzo blackmails the surgeon for the mob into amputating both his arms and showing him his signature double thumbs.
For me, it was an unnerving, disquieting piece of the puzzle when I first watched Alonzo enter the stark surgical room to blackmail the surgeon into amputating both his arms and thereby cutting off his ability to embrace Nanon, his arms an extension of his maleness—the castration anxiety – fulfilled.
Lina Wånggren asks what is a Gothic body? Here she cites a few examples-
“Various scholars have theorized Gothic embodiment and physical difference in Gothic works, such as Judith Halberstam’s Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995) Recently, the collection Demons of the Body and Mind: Essays on Disability in Gothic Literature (2010), edited by Ruth Bienstock Anolik, fruitfully employs the framework of disability studies to study monstrosity in the Gothic. The collected essays focus on the ways in which Gothic texts respond to “˜human beings who are figured as inhuman because they do not align with the physical or mental standards of their society’.
The beautiful Joan Crawford, all of eighteen, and Lon Chaney Sr. in Tod Browning’s striking, disturbing The Unknown, 1927. The circus performer Alonzo the Armless goes to the extremes of amputation so that Joan Crawford’s character Nanon won’t feel threatened by his touch.
Lon Chaney has inhabited so many memorable roles, using theatrically exaggerated Gothic embodiment or characters who are ‘other’ on screen. What quickly comes to mind, of course, is Erik in Phantom of the Opera 1925, Quasimodo in 1925 as The Hunchback of Notre Dame 1923,and of course, the cruel yet redemptive Phrozo in The Penalty 1920.
Lon Chaney as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame 1923.
Chaney possessed the ability to express his innermost desires not only through intuitive emotional expressiveness, alongside his elaborate make-up, but also through the commanding physicality his roles asked of his body.
Alonzo the Armless is showing his arms.
Chaney was heavily inspired by clowns as a young man, fascinated by their personae’s duality. Alonzo is a remarkably complex character as Chaney offers us, with most of his performances, a man who can be simultaneously loathed and yet often wears a complex strata of sympathy as we see into his intricate psyche, A soul torn between tender shadows and stormy wrath. Alonzo is a violent misanthrope, yet he finds tenderness in his love for Nanon, ironically a woman who repels any love from men. The duality of the character exists in this… Chaney deftly balances his ill-spirited belligerence toward the world and his emotional undercurrents within, for the object of his love, the elusive and troubled Nanon.
Side-Kick Cojo is the only one privy to Alonzo’s secret identity, hiding out in the gypsy circus, and the fact that he does, in fact, have two good arms.
Chaney is drawn to these roles like moths to the flame — of men who suffer their differences at the hands of societal norms, exacting a sort of rule of vengeance. While completely cruel, he still manages to convey a deep and abiding pathos.
In one of my other favorite performances, he brings to life the complex Blizzard in The Penalty 1920. Both legs had been amputated as a child by an inept surgeon. This propels his character toward a harsh and unforgiving fate, a descent into a merciless void, one of cruelty, abuse, and a life of crime due to the hardship he endured by being an amputee.
A scene from the hat factory, Chaney as the cruel Blizzard in The Penalty.
His foes refer to him as ‘the cripple from hell.’ Blizzard’s pursuit is to exact revenge on the man who left him a cripple and the absolute objectification of evil. Blizzard’s body has been left imperfect, filling him with a taste for vengeance for those ‘mangled years’ of his childhood, years of being forced to live with his ‘physical difference.’
It is this desire for retribution, a burning ember that fuels the restless heart, seeking justice in the shadows where old wounds bleed, that drives the narrative so strongly. In this story of Gothic difference through the embodiment of amputation, amputation is manifested as a living symbol, a representation of sacrifice, loss, or transformation. Blizzard conceives of a grotesque way of punishing the doctor who rendered him rootless as a broken tree by having him amputate the legs of the daughter’s fiancé, then attach them to his own body.
Ethel Grey Terry and Lon Chaney in The Penalty 1920)- Chaney wearing fitted leather stumps that were painful in order to hide his legs.
While Chaney’s performance as Blizzard cultivates a nuanced portrayal of a criminally unhinged man molded by years of bitterness and an insatiable lust for retribution, it is his performance as Alonzo that truly hits the mark for me.
The Unknown creates a bizarre romantic notion that Alonzo the Armless can choose to have his arms removed for the object of his desire, Nanon, which elevates this Gothic Embodiment into the realm of what contemporary critics and filmmakers like David Cronenberg would cinematically cultivate as ‘body horror.’
Alonzo is also maliciously encouraged by his minion Cojo (John George), who acts like a devil imp, egging Alonzo on, down a more dangerous path of self-destruction. Many classical horror films use the expressly contemptuous ‘little’ evil sidekick as nefarious as the monster itself.
Cojo is the personification of the characteristic little evil sidekick.Cojo reminds Alonzo that he doesn’t have to use his feet in private to do all the things he can do with his two good hands.
The Unknown explores a profoundly unsettling and twisted dimension of love that transcends simple romantic tragedy, entering the realm of grotesque sacrifice and psychological torment. The film’s central act—our antihero Alonzo’s voluntary amputation of his own arms—is not merely a physical mutilation but a symbolic crucible forged by the wild, paradoxical demands of love shaped by fear and desire.
Nanon’s carnal phobia—an intense, almost primal terror of physical touch- renders ordinary expressions of affection impossible. This visceral repulsion creates a cruel paradox: Alonzo’s love cannot find safe harbor within her body unless the very tools of human intimacy, his arms, are rendered powerless. His self-amputation embodies an extremity of devotion, a grotesque mutilation meant to reassure and conquer her deepest fears. It’s a sacrifice that denies his own wholeness in a desperate attempt to claim her love, or at least her presence.
This love story differs radically from The Penalty, which also features physical disfigurement and vengeance but centers more decisively on themes of power lost and regained, and a more straightforward quest for personal justice. The Unknown, by contrast, investigates the darker, more labyrinthine corridors of the human psyche—how obsession mutates love into something both beautiful and horrifying, how the body becomes a battleground for emotional survival.
What emerges is a tale not just of sacrifice but of self-effacement and identity distortion. Alonzo’s mutilation is an anguished corporeal language that speaks to the impossible conditions of loving someone incapacitated by fear. It portrays love as something that can contort, deform, and even destroy the self in its extreme, revealing the grotesque beauty in that madness.
Ironically, he is rejected at the end of this queasy and grim story of unrequited love that turns on itself.
The Unknowncan be considered an allegory of sexual repression and traumatized masculinity. Going all Freudian on the film, one could relate the act of Alonzo’s amputation to that which is Freud’s castration anxiety.
Professor & Author Rick Worland refers to The Unknown and the idea of Alonzo’s amputation, both faked and eventually actualized, as “a fantastic work of psycho-sexual grotesquerie’ its amputation plot presenting a ‘fever dream of phallic symbolism, castration anxiety, and sexual terror.” Alonzo has rendered himself virtually impotent in a sexual way in order to satisfy Nanon’s need to be untouched.
Essentially, the idea of Gothic Embodiment and the fetishistic use of amputation in a psycho-sexual context can not overlook the idea of the act of simple ‘touch.’ The idea of Gothic Embodiment or ‘difference’ is inextricably linked to the act of touching and therefore an indirect link to frustrated intimacy. The human hands best embody this dual nature of touching and the sense of ‘feeling’. Both explore the way we touch and act as tools to explore or express our emotions in kind with another human. What I’d like to call ‘body dialogue.’
The Unknown released by MGM in 1927 and directed by Tod Browning in the horror genre popularly known for (Dracula 1931, & Freaks 1932) takes place at Antonio Zanzi’s ‘gypsy circus’ in old Madrid. The story unfolds as a bizarre love triangle between circus folk Alonzo the Armless, Nanon Zanzi, and Strongman Malabar the Mighty. Alonzo uses his feet to fire guns and throw knives at Nanon as part of their act.
The circus act itself is a destructive spectacle of masochism as Nanon Zanzi assists Alonzo in his death-defying act. Nanon is the daughter of the circus owner, Antonio Zanzi. Alonzo secretly desires Nanon. As part of their dangerously erotic performance that resembles contact, furthermore, penetration. But only in its flair for tease and excitement, the moving target Nanon is strapped to a board that spins. With each shot of the gun, the bullets remove one more article of Nanon’s clothes. Next, with his feet, Alonzo throws the penetrating knives that outline Nanon’s bikini-clad body perfectly.
Alonzo the Armless – the devil to his left side.
Alonzo the Armless can use shotguns to fire bullets that disrobe the beautiful Nanon.
Alonzo is described by the circus owner as “the sensation of sensations!’, and as the“wonder of wonders!”
Chaney collaborated with real-life armless double Paul Dismute, whose dexterity in the remarkable scenes where he uses his feet to handle objects such as strumming guitars, pouring wine, throwing knives, or lighting cigarettes. Tod Browning and cinematographer Merritt Gerstad (who also worked on Freaks) would use Chaney’s upper body and face within the shot frames. It was a brilliant choreography of the body and timing to give the illusion that Chaney was manipulating these objects by himself, while Dismute remained off-camera, handling the objects.
“Reflecting the growing public alarm over the moral tone of films in the late twenties The Unknown was the first film to be frankly and aggressively attacked in the press for it’s melodramatic  morbidity.”The New York Sun assured readers that “the suspicion that the picture might have been written by Nero, directed by Lucretia Borgia, constructed by the shade of Edgar Allan Poe and lighted by a well-known vivisectionist was absolutely groundless….The Sun admitted that The Unknown “may be just what the public wants. If it is- well, the good old days of the Roman Empire are upon us”The New York Daily Mirror suggested that “if you like to tear butterflies apart and see sausage made you may like the climax to The Unknown. … typical Chaney fare spiced with cannibalism and flavored with the Spanish Inquisition.”
The New York Evening Post observed that “Mr Chaney has been twisting joints and lacing himself into strait-jackets for a long time- so long, in fact that there is almost nothing left for him now but the Headless Horseman. The Evening Post called The Unknown ‘a remarkably unpleasant picture.{…} a visit to the dissecting room in a hospital would be quite as pleasant and at the same time more instructive.”
Flesh and Blood- Lon Chaney.
Richard Watts Jr of The New York Herald Tribune said of the film, “The case of Mr. Tod Browning is rapidly approaching the pathological. After a series of minor horrors that featured such comparatively respectable creations as murderous midgets, crippled thieves and poisonous reptiles, all sinister and deadly in a murky atmosphere of blackness and unholy doom… the director presents us now with a melodrama that might have been made from a scenario dashed off by the Messrs. Leopold and Loeb in a quiet moment”
Watts conceded that given cinema otherwise so completely devoted to red blooded values and ‘general aggressive cleanliness’ films of the sort Browning championed might provide a ‘valuable counteracting influence”Obviously he felt repulsed by The Unknown.
The conservative Harrison’s Reports wrote “One can imagine a moral pervert of the present day, or professional torturers of the times of the Spanish Inquisition that gloated over the miseries of their victims on the rack and over their roasting on hot iron bars enjoying screen details of the kind set forth in The Unknown. but it is difficult to fancy average men and women of a modern audience in this enlightened age being entertained by such a thoroughly fiendish mingling of bloodlust, cruelty and horrors. … Of Mr. Chaney’s acting it is enough to say it is excellent of it’s kind. Similar praise might well be given the work of a skilled surgeon in ripping open the abdomen of a patient. But who wants to see him do it?”
Both Tod Browning as a director and Lon Chaney as an actor occupy a unique space in early cinema where grotesque physicality becomes a potent metaphor for deeper human truths. Their films do not merely showcase eccentric or monstrous characters for shock value; rather, they probe the complex interplay of identity, desire, alienation, and the human condition’s darker recesses.
In The Unknown, Browning and Chaney invite us to confront a paradoxical vision of love and sacrifice—a vision that challenges conventional notions of heroism and romantic fulfillment. The physical mutilation (Alonzo’s self-amputation of his arms) is not merely a plot device but a corporeal symbol of profound psychological sacrifice and self-negation. It reflects a profound empathy for the fracture between human longing and the psychological, physical, and social barriers that exclude authentic connection.
Both Browning and Chaney, in all their work together and separately, are fascinated by “the other,” those who are physically marked, emotionally alienated, or psychologically fractured. Their characters embody the struggle of marginalized individuals who live on society’s edges yet possess rich, intense interior lives. The films illuminate how these outsiders grapple with pain, desire, and identity, often through literal bodily transformations or distortions.
Chaney’s mastery lies in translating inner turmoil into visceral, visible form, through prosthetics, makeup, and expressive physicality, to call it a psychological language. Browning’s direction reinforces this by presenting the body as both a site of narrative action and symbolic meaning. Amputation or deformity serves as an allegory for emotional wounds, fractured identity, and the incommunicability between individuals.
Their films portray love as volatile, consuming, and often self-destructive rather than pure or redemptive. In The Unknown, love becomes a force that demands abandonment of self and body, where sacrifice blurs into suffering, and devotion becomes madness. Browning and Chaney dissect the extremities of human emotion—the ways love can turn monstrous when entwined with fear, control, and forbidden desire.
The central conflict in The Unknown—Nanon’s phobia and Alonzo’s desperate self-mutilation—is an exploration of the limits and conditions of empathy. The film asks: How far will one go to bridge the gulf separating two tormented souls? What price does love demand when confronted with psychological barriers that cannot be easily overcome? Their films suggest that connection is fraught with ambiguity, pain, and sacrifice, sometimes demanding catastrophic gestures.
Rather than reading The Unknown and similar Browning-Chaney collaborations simply as stories of tragic physical impairment or melodramatic love, it is more compelling and accurate to see them as profound meditations on:
The intertwining of flesh and psyche, where the body’s alterations mirror emotional and existential fractures. The agonies of unfulfilled desire, where love is as much about yearning and loss as about possession or joy. The psychology of marginalization, portraying characters who are both monstrous and deeply human, forced to negotiate intense passions within alienating circumstances. The philosophy of sacrifice, not just physical but spiritual and psychological, revealing how identity is mutable and contingent upon the painful choices we make to survive or love.
In their collaborations, Tod Browning and Lon Chaney delve beyond mere spectacle or grotesque spectacle, crafting profoundly unsettling meditations on the human condition where the physical body becomes a vivid language of psychological and existential torment. The Unknown stands as a stark embodiment of this vision, where Chaney’s horrific self-amputation transcends literal mutilation to become a corporeal metaphor for the excruciating sacrifices demanded by love’s darker, often unbearable dimensions. This is not a simple narrative of loss or tragedy but a complex exploration of alienation, desire, and the fractured self.
Chaney’s Alonzo exists on the margins of society, a figure whose bodily disfigurement mirrors his tortured interior world, shaped by obsessive love for Nanon, whose phobia of touch erects near-impossible barriers to intimacy. In response, Alonzo’s radical act of self-mutilation is a desperate attempt to bridge the chasm between two haunted souls, a gesture that enacts the limits of empathy and the monstrous lengths to which love can drive a person. Here, the body is not simply a vessel but a battleground where identity warps and fractures in the torment of unfulfilled yearning and profound psychological strife.
Browning and Chaney do not romanticize this sacrifice—rather, they expose love’s capacity to consume, distort, and defy redemption. Their films reveal the paradox of “otherness”: the yearning for connection shadowed by alienation, the collision of fragile humanity with grotesque exteriority. The characters embody liminality, simultaneously monstrous and deeply human, caught in an agonizing dance where flesh and psyche entwine, and where sacrifice is both an act of devotion and a form of self-annihilation. In this world, love is not merely a source of comfort but an existential crucible, demanding anguish and disfigurement as payment for even the smallest glimmers of tenderness.
Ultimately, Browning and Chaney’s artistry compels us to confront love’s most unsettling demands—the violent, ambiguous, and often monstrous interplay of fear, desire, and identity. Through their lens, The Unknown transcends melodrama or physical spectacle to become a haunting, poetic inquiry into the human soul’s desperate quest for connection amid the shadows of alienation and loss. It is a work where beauty and horror coexist, the body speaks its own tragic language, and the pursuit of love unfolds as a fierce, transformative, and deeply precarious journey.
Joan Crawford eighteen at the time recalled Chaney’s ordeal with wearing the leather harness as agonizing a self punishing behavior. Mr Browning would say to him, “Lon, don’t you want me to untie your arms?” ‘No, the pain I am enduring now will help with the scene. Let’s go!” That’s how he was able to “convey such realism” and emotional agony that made it shocking and fascinating.“Chaney projected the image of physical suffering as both the definition and price of his stardom; exactly why he chose to is not so clear and since he left no revealing journals or correspondence on the matter, may forever remain obscure”Crawford said about Chaney, “When he acted, it was if God were working, he had such profound concentration. It was then I became aware for the first time of the difference between standing in front of a camera, and acting.”
“Armless Wonders” were among the most spectacular and well-paid performers in turn-of-the-century American freak shows who would perform tasks and feats (no pun intended) to entertain the onlookers.
Violetta, the limbless beauty.Frances Belle O’Connor was featured in Freaks.
While Freud had his pseudoscience fix for every mental ailment, Tod Browning favored themes of a visceral, sexually charged plot surrounding resentment and revenge. He screened overt manipulation of disturbing sexual symbolism in order to shock his audience into consciousness. The threat of castration is a particularly violent notion and a repressed emotional impulse. Freud’s Uncanny, the idea of disembodied limbs, severed heads, and hands cut off at the wrists, all have something particularly unsettling about them. Especially when they are shown as capable of independent movement, it all springs from the castration complex. Browning’s fascination with sexually motivated mutilation, like that of Cleopatra being turned into a chicken or ‘duck’ lady in Freaks, annihilating her beauty, that quality which she used to lure Hans.
Olga Baclanova as Cleopatra, the trapeze beauty turned into the Chicken Lady by the avenging Freaks.
In Freaks, Francis is an armless woman, and there are two armless girls- Martha Morris and Francis O’Connor. Richard Watts Jr, film critic for the New York Herald Tribune, said of Browning– “Browning is the combination of Edgar Allan Poe and Sax Rohmer of the cinema. Where every director, save Stroheim, breathes wholesomeness. Out-of-door freshness and the healthiness of the clean-limbed, Tod revels in murkiness… His cinematic mind is a creeping torture chamber, a place of darkness,deviousness, and death.”
After Freaks, “In Browning’s next project, the Freudian theory would be bizarrely literalized into a weird and spectacular circus attraction. Based on an original story by Browning. Alonzo the Armless was a vehicle for Lon Chaney that would prove to be one of the darkest carnivals of the entire Browning canon.”
Boxing Helena is a 1993 modern-day, grotesquely romantic melodrama that was directed by Jennifer Chambers Lynch (daughter of David Lynch). The film utilizes the mechanism of amputation as what I’ll call ‘seductive symbology’. Seductive symbology can animate art, literature, film, or even everyday rituals, stirring the imagination and luring the voyeur, the watcher, the witness, us, into deeper contemplation or desire. The film stars Julian Sands and Sherilyn Fenn as the object of his desire, a surgeon who will keep his love closest to him by any means.
David Lynch’s daughter astoundingly subverted my expectations of horror in Surveillance (2008), weaving an audacious blend of grotesque violence and eroticism that marks a remarkable departure from Boxing Helena—a film I met with unsettling, visceral angst. The haunting image of the little girl in pajamas wandering the desert in Surveillancestrikes me as a deliberate, evocative homage to the iconic scene in Them! (1954), underscoring Lynch’s gift for embedding subtle yet powerful nods within his chilling narrative. Her work pulses with genuinely dynamic moments of horror that defy easy categorization, though the film’s ingenious plot twists and mechanisms demand my discretion to preserve its impact should you want to see the film.
In considering contemporary explorations of eroticism intertwined with physical mutilation, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre (1989) stands as a modern masterpiece. Once again, the Gothic embodiment unfolds within the eerie milieu of a traveling circus, where Concha’s violent amputation of both arms—inflicted by her volatile, sword-throwing, and philandering Neanderthal of a husband, portrayed by Guy Stockwell—becomes a potent symbol of psycho-sexual trauma. The merging of mythic imagery and raw sexual violence, fused with the motif of armless saints, conjures a nightmarish, baroque wonderland through the eyes of their son, Fenix, where horror and desire fuse into a singular, unsettling experience.
Guy Stockwell in Alejandro Jodorwosky’s Santa Sangre.The illusory masterpiece that is Santa Sangre.
The circus features an armless entertainer named Alonzo. He is a knife thrower who could split the hairs on two flies dancing in unison. His claim to fame is that he handles both bullets and blades with his bare feet. In the film’s opening scene, Alonzo performs, showing confidence in his perfect aim by flinging phallic knives at his beautiful assistant Nanon, who is at the receiving end of his knife throwing while seated on a rotating platform. With each delivery, he picks off one more article of Nanon’s clothing that dangles there, boasting of his sexual competence. Through this performance, Alonzo can sublimate his own feverish sexual urges for Nanon.
The secret lies in the fact that Alonzo actually does have two strong, capable arms, a fact that only his dwarf assistant Cojo (John George) is privy to. Each day, Cojo laces Alonzo into a punishing leather corset. Alonzo dons this apparatus to create the appearance of amputation. A disguise he perpetuates because he is on the run from the law, and it also brings him closer to the object of his fixation, the beautiful but sexually constrained Nanon. Nanon is consumed with a phobia surrounding the male anatomy, in particular their hands. She is repulsed by men’s upper extremities, “Men! The beasts! God would show wisdom if he took the hands from all of them!”
What frightens her more is the ‘ideal’ of Malabar’s physique. To Nanon, the object of Gothic horror seems to be the normative body, and strangely enough, not the body that is emphasized as different. Malabar’s body encompasses an extremely forceful ideal of the masculine body. Nanon is traumatized by Malabar’s aggressive touch and grasping hands. She finds him abhorrent.
She finds comfort in Alonzo, who poses no threat to her as he has no arms or hands that can either challenge her desire or harm her.
Although Alonzo possesses arms, he exhibits a freakish anomaly, as he has a double thumb on one hand. In the original story, Browning and screenwriter Waldemar Young had envisioned a claw as his deformity. However, the phallic charge of the double thumb is more in keeping with the influence that Freud’s The Uncanny had made on cinema. According to writer/historians Skal & Savada, ‘doubling’ is viewed by Freud as an imaginative defense against the feared loss of the self, or a part of the self.
Alonzo suffers in silence over his immortal love for Nanon, keeping their relationship strictly platonic, but he still attracts negative attention from Nanon’s father, the circus owner. On a dark and rainy night, Alonzo strangles the man, as Nanon peers outside her window yet does not see the killer’s face. The one thing that she does notice is the unmistakable double thumbs as it grips her father’s throat.
While Alonzo quietly broods over his unrequited love, the strong man Malabar (Norman Kerry) pursues her with all the traditional male prowess of a proud peacock. Of course, this sends Alonzo into fits of irrational jealousy. He blackmails a surgeon into actually removing his arms so that Nanon would assuredly run to him, being the safe male.
Malabar’s sexual advances only push Nanon closer to Alonzo’s friendship. But Alonzo’s sidekick Cojo ( John George, whom Browning used several times throughout his career) warns his friend that he shouldn’t let Nanon get so close as to be able to feel that he truly does have arms that are strapped down.
But when he returns to the circus after the surgery he discovers that Nanon has miraculously overcome her fear of manly chests, bulging muscles, and arms with which to hold her in ecstatic embrace. And the two are also engaged.
There is a sad, ironic scene when Nanon asks Alonzo if he is thinner before she tells him of her love for Malabar. The moment is filled with a typical Tod Browning sense of timely perversity, misdirection, and emotional pain.
She declares to her old friend that she even LOVES Malabar’s hands: “Remember how I used to be afraid of his hands? I am not anymore. I love them now.”
I’ll leave the climax to those who haven’t seen this violently intoxicating film yet.
The film is filled with cruelty, irony, and obsession. While the story is more like a wickedly grotesque fairytale, it observes a journey of its own, nightmarish reasoning, intricate as it is repulsive.
What is Nanon’s strange and horrible fixation on men’s hands? She is terrified by the thought of their hands on her!
“Alonzo, all my life, men have tried to put their beastly hands on me to paw over me.”
Malabar approaches Nanon.
She has “grown so that [she] shrink[s] with fear when any man touches [her]” with their “beastly hands.” Nanon’s fear becomes apparent when she is courted by the circus weight-lifter or strongman Malabar.
When Malabar boasts to Nanon of incredible strength, flexing his arm muscles and grabbing at her hands and her wrists while telling her of how his “hands that long to caress you,” Nanon struggles to get away, experiencing sheer terror.
The surgeon has no choice but to do Alonzo’s gruesome bidding.
Nanon tells Alonzo that he feels thinner.
Nanon’s father, Zanzi, the hard-edged circus owner, grows increasingly suspicious of Alonzo’s presence and motives, repelled by the peculiar intensity of his interest in Nanon. One charged evening, Zanzi’s suspicions crystallize and, by chance, he stumbles upon Alonzo in a compromising moment—witnessing not the spectacle of an armless performer but the shocking reality: Alonzo, unbound and very much in possession of arms, the infamous double thumb unmistakable. The truth arrives with the force of revelation and panic; in that instant, Zanzi realizes he stands face to face not with a broken sideshow oddity, but with a wanted man and a master of deception.
Cornered by exposure, Alonzo reacts with ruthless survival: propelled by fear, rage, and the desperate need to shield both his secret and his last hope for Nanon, he lunges forward and strangles Zanzi with his bare hands, silencing him forever outside the circus wagons. As fate would have it, Nanon glimpses the murder from her window, not the killer’s face, but the damning deformity: a double thumb pressed around her father’s throat, burned into her memory by a bolt of lightning. It is this fragment of a moment, violence half-seen, identity obscured, that sets the final tragedy of the film in motion, leaving Nanon haunted, the crime unsolved, and Alonzo bound even more tightly to a destiny of obsession and doom.
After Alonzo undergoes the gruesome amputation of his arms, driven by the catastrophic logic that this sacrifice will secure Nanon’s love and keep his murderous secret safe, he disappears for weeks to recover, leaving the circus and Nanon behind. In his absence, Malabar’s persistent care and genuine affection for Nanon help her overcome her lifelong fear of a man’s arms. By the time Alonzo, truly armless now, returns to the circus, he rushes to Nanon, uncertain but expectant. Instead of the reunion he imagined, he finds her radiant with newfound happiness; Nanon greets him with the euphoric news that she and Malabar are to be married.
Struck by the cruel irony of his sacrifice, Alonzo is at first hysterical with laughter, then collapses into inconsolable anguish as the reality sinks in: he has maimed himself for nothing. Nanon and Malabar are perplexed by the outburst, Nanon innocently mistaking his tears for happiness at their engagement.
Trying to compose himself, Alonzo discovers that Malabar and Nanon have devised a new circus act: Malabar is tied between two wild horses running on treadmills, each straining in opposite directions, a spectacle of strength and danger. Seized by jealousy and rage, Alonzo, still posing as a friend, secretly sabotages the act. —a horrific fate that mirrors Alonzo’s own self-inflicted mutilation.
During the tense performance, he stops one of the machines, threatening to have the wild horses pull Malabar’s arms from his body—a scene of climactic terror that reflects Alonzo’s own disfiguring obsession.
When Nanon tries to intervene and calm the frantic horses, Alonzo, desperate and unhinged, threatens her with a knife, but instinctively pushes her out of harm’s way at the last instant. In the ensuing chaos, one of the horses knocks Alonzo down. Fatally trampled, he dies as the act is halted, and Malabar is saved from disaster.
Thus, Alonzo’s journey, marked by secrecy, mutilation, and obsession, collapses in a flash of violence and futile longing—a finale as stark and haunting as anything silent cinema ever dared to show.
In this crucible of shadow and flesh, The Unknowninterrogates the paradox of love’s power to both wound and redeem. It demands an almost mythic reckoning with the body’s limits and the emotional scars they inscribe.
The Unknown (1927)-The Armless Wonder.
By MORDAUNT HALL.
Published: June 13, 1927
“Although it has strength and undoubtedly sustains the interest, “The Unknown,” the latest screen contribution from Tod Browning and Lon Chaney, is anything but a pleasant story. It is gruesome and at times shocking, and the principal character deteriorates from a more or less sympathetic individual to an arch-fiend. The narrative is a sort of mixture of Balzac and Guy de Maupassant with a faint suggestion of O. Henry plus Mr. Browning’s colorful side-show background.{…}
“The rôle of Alonzo, who poses as the Armless Wonder with a Spanish circus, is one that ought to have satisfied Mr. Chaney’s penchant for freakish characterizations, for here he not only has to go about for hours with his arms strapped to his body…{…}
“This tale is prefaced as if it were a circus legend, and soon one realizes that Alonzo is not only expert in the use of his feet when serving himself, but he is also supposed to be a crack shot and an unerring knife thrower. The girl who risks her life daily before Alonzo’s bullets and knives is Estrellita, impersonated by Joan Crawford. She becomes interested in Alonzo because most men in the circus without provocation invariably want to caress her.”
You could say that Evelyn Ankers is still the reigning queen of classical 1940s horror fare turned out by studios like RKO, Universal, and Monogram. But there was a host of femme scream tales that populated the silver screen with their unique beauty, quirky style, and/or set of lungs ready to wail, faint, or generally add some great tone and tinge to the eerie atmosphere whenever the mad scientist or monster was afoot. Some were even monstrous themselves…
For this upcoming Halloween, I thought I’d show just a little love to those fabulous ladies who forged a little niche for themselves as the earliest scream queens & screen icons.
I’m including Elsa Lanchester because any time I can talk about this deliriously delightful actress I’m gonna do it. Now I know she was the screaming hissing undead bride in the 30s but consider this… in the 40s she co-starred in two seminal thrillers that bordered on shear horror as Mrs. Oates in The Spiral Staircase1945 and a favorite of mine as one of Ida Lupino’s batty sisters Emily Creed in Ladies in Retirement 1941
I plan on venturing back to the pre-code thirties soon, so I’ll talk about The Bride of Frankenstein, as well as Gloria Holden (Dracula’s Daughter, Frances Dade (Dracula) and Kathleen Burke (Island of Lost Souls) Gloria Stuart and Fay Wray and so many more wonderful actresses of that golden era…
Elsa Lanchester as Mrs.Oates in director Robert Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase 1945The Sister Creed in Ladies in Retirement 1941 starring Elsa Lanchester, Ida Lupino, and the wonderful Edith Barrett (right)
the playfully pretty Anne Nagel.Anne Nagel & Lon Chaney Jr in a promo shot for Man Made MonsterAnne Nagel was strapped to the slab and at the mercy of the ever-mad Lionel Atwill. Here comes the glowing Lon Chaney Jr! in his electric rubber suit in Man Made Monster!
The depraved mad scientist Lionel Atwill working with electro biology pins gorgeous red-headed Anne Nagel playing June Lawrence, to his operating slab in Man Made Monster 1941. Lon Chaney Jr. comes hulking in all aglow as the ‘Electrical Man’ which was his debut for Universal. He carries Anne Nagel through the countryside all lit up like a lightning bug in rubber armor. Man Made Monsterisn’t the only horror shocker that she displayed her tresses & distresses. She also played a night club singer named Sunny Rogers also co-starring our other 40’s horror heroine icon Anne Gwynne in the Karloff/Lugosi pairing Black Friday in 1940.
She played the weeping Mrs.William Saunders, the wife of Lionel Atwill’s first victim in Mad Doctor of Market Street 1942. And then of course she played mad scientist Dr Lorenzo Cameron’s (George Zucco’s) daughter Lenora in The Mad Monster 1942. Dr. Cameron has succeeded with his serum in turning men into hairy wolf-like Neanderthal monsters whom he unleashes on the men who ruined his career.
Anne Nagel and Lionel Atwill Mad Doctor of Market Street.
Poor Anne had a very tragic life… Considered that sad girl who was always hysterical. Once Universal dropped her she fell into the Poverty Row limbo of bit parts. Her brief marriage to Ross Alexander ended when he shot himself in the barn in 1937, and Anne became a quiet alcoholic until her death from cancer in 1966.
Dr. Cameron’s daughter Lenora (Anne Nagel) discovers the wolf-like man in his laboratory in The Mad Monster.Glenn Strange as Petro the Hairy man in The Mad Monster 1942.
the sultry Anne Nagel and Bela Lugosi in Black Friday 1940 photo courtesy Dr. Macro.
Martha was in noir favorites The Big Sleep 1946 & Alimony1949. This beauty played an uncredited Margareta ‘Vazec’s Daughter’along side Ilona Massey as Baroness Elsa Frankenstein and the marvelous older beauty Maria Ouspenskaya as Maleva the gypsy! in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man 1943.Then she played heroine Dorothy Coleman in Captive Wild Woman 1943 and Miss McLean in The Mummy’s Ghost 1944.
Originally Martha MacVickar she started modeling for photographer William Mortenson. David O Selznick contracted the starlet but Universal took over and put in her bit parts as the victim in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and in other ‘B’ guilty pleasures like Captive Wild Woman &The Mummy’s Ghost. She was also the pin-up girl for WWII magazines.
Martha also starred in other noir features such as Ruthless 1948 and The Big Bluff 1955. She was Mickey Rooney’s third wife.
Martha Vickers and Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep photo courtesy of Dr. Macro.Martha Vickers and Lon Chaney in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.Martha Vickers and John Carradine in Captive Wild WomanI just can’t resist Vicker’s sex appeal here she is again… Wow!
Though Logan made very few films including Opened By Mistake 1940, her contribution to women who kick-ass in horror films and don’t shrink like violets when there’s a big bald baddie coming after you with a net and a bottle of chloroform, makes you a pretty fierce contender even if you are only 7 inches tall! As Dr. Mary Robinson (Janice Logan), Logan held it all together while the men were scattering like mice from the menacing google eyed Dr. Cyclops played superbly by Albert Dekker.
Fay Helm as Nurse Strand with John Carradine in Captive Wild Woman.
Fay Helm played Ann Terry in one of my favorite unsung noir/thriller gems Phantom Lady1944 where it was all about the ‘hat’ and she co-starred as Nurse Strand alongside John Carradine in Captive Wild Woman. Fay played Mrs. Duval in the Inner Sanctum mystery Calling Dr. Death with Lon Chaney Jr. 1943
Ella Raines and Fay Helm in Phantom Lady.
Fay Helm plays Jenny Williams in Curt Siodmak’s timeless story directed by George Waggner for Universal and starring son of a thousand faces Lon Chaney Jr in his most iconic role Larry Talbot as The Wolf Man 1941
Fay as Jenny Williams: “Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.”
Fay was in Night Monster 1942. Directed by Ford Beebe the film starred Bela Lugosi as a butler to Lionel Atwill a pompous doctor who falls prey to frightening nocturnal visitations. I particularly love the atmosphere of this little chiller with its swampy surroundings and its metaphysical storyline.
Dr. Lynn Harper (Irene Hervey- Play Misty For Me 1971) a psychologist is called to the mysterious Ingston Mansion, to evaluate the sanity of Margaret Ingston, played by our horror heroine Fay Helm daughter of Kurt Ingston (Ralph Morgan) a recluse who invites the doctors to his eerie mansion who left him in a wheelchair.
Fay gives a terrific performance surrounded by all the ghoulish goings on! She went on to co-star with Bela Lugosi and Jack Haley in the screwball scary comedy One Body Too Many (1944).
Irene Hervey as Dr. Lynn Harper –Night Monster 1942.
Fay Helm in Night Monster.Fay Helm with Bela the gypsy in The Wolf Man.
Bela Lugosi as half ape half man really needed a shave badly in The Ape Man 1943, and Louise Currie and her wonder whip might have been the gorgeous blonde dish to make him go for the Barbasol. One of the most delicious parts of the film was its racy climax as Emil Van Horn in a spectacle of a gorilla suit rankles the cage bars longing for Currie’s character, Billie Mason the tall blonde beauty. As Bela skulks around the laboratory and Currie snaps her whip in those high heels. The film’s heroine was a classy dame referred to as Monogram’s own Katharine Hepburn! She had a great affection for fellow actor Bela Lugosi and said that she enjoyed making Poverty Row films more than her bit part in Citizen Kane! And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that she appeared in several serials, from both Universal & Republic like The Green Hornetand Captain Marvel.
Tom Weaver in his book Poverty Row HORRORS! described The Ape Man as “a Golden Turkey of the most beloved kind.”
Louise Currie followed up with another sensational title for Monogram as Stella Saunders in Voodoo Man 1944 which again features Lugosi as Dr. Richard Marlowe who blends voodoo with hypnosis in an attempt to bring back his dead wife. The film also co-stars George Zucco as a voodoo high priest and the ubiquitous John Carradine as Toby a bongo-playing half-wit “Don’t hurt her Grego, she’s a pretty one!”
Pat McKee as Grego, Louise Currie, John Carradine, and Bela Lugosi in Monogram’s Voodoo Man 1944.the outrageous Voodoo Man 1944
Act of Violence 1948 directed by Fred Zinnemann and starring Van Heflin, Robert Ryan and Janet LeighLon Chaney in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame 1923What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? 1962 Directed by Robert Aldrich and starring Bette Davis and Joan CrawfordBedlam 1946 directed by Mark Robson Produced by Val Lewton and starring Boris Karloff and Anna LeeBette Davis and Bette Davis in Dead Ringer (1964) directed by Paul Henreid and co-starring Karl Malden and Peter LawfordJoan Blondell and Tyrone Power in Nightmare Alley 1947 written by Jules Furthman for the screen and directed by Edmund GouldingCabin in the Sky 1943 directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring Lena Horne and Ethel WatersCrossfire 1947 directed by Edward Dmytryk starring the Roberts- Robert Young, Robert Mitchum and Robert RyanThe Day the Earth Stood Still 1951 directed by Robert Wise and starring Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal and Hugh MarloweThe Devil Commands 1941 directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring Boris Karloff and Anne Revere written for the screen by Robert Hardy AndrewsTHE OLD DARK HOUSE, THE (1932) GLORIA STUART and BORIS KARLOFF Dir: JAMES WHALEDr JEKYLL AND MR HYDE 1931starring Frederick March & Miriam Hopkins and directed by Rouben MamoulianThey Live By Night starring Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell. Directed by Nicholas RayJoan Fontaine and Judith Anderson in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca 1940Phantom of the Opera 1925 starring Lon Chaney and Mary PhilbinTod Brownings Freaks 1932Gloria Grahame Odds Against Tomorrow 1959 directed by Robert Wise Josette Day in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast 1946Judith Anderson in Rebecca 1940Janet Leigh and Phyllis Thaxter in Act of Violence 1948Joseph L. Mankiewitz directs Louis Calhern & Marlon Brando in Julius Caesar 1953Fritz Langs’ Metropolis 1927William Castle’s Mr Sardonicus 1961 Starring Guy Rolfe and Audrey DaltonWilliam Wyler directs Shirley McClaine in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour 1961co-starring Audrey Hepburn and James GarnerMary Astor and Van Heflin Act of Violence 1948Odds Against Tomorrow Shelley Winters and Robert Ryan 1959Gregory Peck in Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird 1962 written by Harper Lee with a screenplay by Horton FooteRobert Ryan in Robert Wise’s The Set-Up 1949Sam Fuller’s The Naked Kiss 1964 starring Constance TowersCecil B DeMille’s Samson and Delilah 1949 -starring Hedy Lamarr and Victor MatureRobert Stevenson directed Bronte’s Jane Eyre 1943 starring a young Elizabeth Taylor and Peggy Ann GarnerThe Children’s Hour Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaineJulie Harris and Claire Bloom in Robert Wise’s The Haunting 1963George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead 1968Barbara Stanwyk as Jo in Walk on the Wild Side 1962 directed by Edward DmytrykWhat Ever Happened to Baby Jane? 1962 Bette Davis and Victor Buono
HAPPY FRIDAY THE 13th- Hope you have a truly lucky day-MonsterGirl
Photo of the great William Castle -courtesy of Spine Tingler.
“The film is frightening because it forces us to examine the kinds and bases of belief. We confront the idea that the Christian myth is certainly no more believable that its mirror image, and possibly less so. And beyond this, we are also forced to realize that our mode of believing in Christianity is quite different from the one with which we perceive ‘real’ things –In other words, while Polanski’s film is determinedly realistic, it is at the same time a challenge to realism, locating the ordinary world of plausible social interaction within a wider and more primitive universe of magic, sorcery, and supernatural forces.” –Hollywood Hex, -Makita Brottman
Rosemary’s Baby is my favorite film. I plan on doing one of my long-winded major features on this masterpiece in its entirety but for the sake of celebrating William Castle this week, I’d like to strictly focus on his contribution to an iconic tour de force that would not have been filmed if not for him. Rosemary’s Baby premiered in June 1968.
Roman Polanski on William Castle: “He was an excellent technician who understands filmmakers’ problems and doesn’t have the usual worries other producers have. He made a constant effort to make me happy in my work. I can’t think of a better producer.”
After many years of William Castle slaving over B movies and programmers like The Whistler and The Crime Doctor, he found his niche in horror. He saw Henri-Georges Clouzotle Diaboliquein 1955 and it lit a fire in his belly to create his own Gothic creepy storytelling that would lure the audience under its spell. Thus sung Macabre in 1958. While certainly not Diabolique,Macabre put Castle on the path toward creating engaging & frightening landscapes that would entertain millions!
That same year, thanks to his very successful House on Haunted Hill and his 12-foot plastic glow-in-the-dark skeleton deemed ‘Emergo’ that flew over theatre audiences, he was now dubbed the ‘King of Gimmicks.’Â Castle went on to chill us with The TIngler in ’59, 13 Ghosts in ’60, Homicidal and Mr Sardonicus in ’61, Strait-Jacket in ’64, and I Saw What You Did in ’65 both landing Joan Crawford at the helm.
William Castle’s Homicidal ’61starring Jean Arless (Joan Marshall)
With all the ballyhoo and commercial success, Bill was craving respect. He thought he’d find that admiration in Rosemary’s Baby, a novel by Ira Levin(A Kiss Before Dying, The Stepford Wives, Boys From Brazil) about an unassuming pretty little housewife chosen by a coven of New York City witches to be the mother of Lucifer’s only begotten son and heir.
What is remarkable about the film is the realism. It is so careful to remain dedicated to the naturalistic tone of Levin’s novel showing us a set of ordinary characters in an apparently common world. Then they gradually become introduced to extraordinary elements of dark forces, both magic and fantasy that begin to overwhelm the narrative. We as spectators are now caught up in Rosemary’s plight and her utter sense of powerlessness. This story is less about witches and more about paranoia and the lack of control over our own bodies and destiny. However explained in supernatural terms, it’s still about losing trust with those closest to us, the people we depend on to protect us from harm. We watch as Rosemary’s world turns upside down.
I saw Rosemary’s Baby during its theatrical release in New York in June 1968. It was billed as a double feature with The Mephisto Waltz. We won’t get into how either really enlightened or truly nutty, depending on your perspective, my mom was for taking her 6-year-old little girl to see two very intense horror pictures dealing with adult and subversive themes.
I was an extremely mature child and the film not only didn’t traumatize me, but it also opened up a world of desire for me to see as many intellectual horror stories without fear of nightmares. Although I must admit when I used to watch Robert Wise’sThe Haunting in broad daylight on a Saturday afternoon, I did manage to lock the basement door and shove the large gold (the color of Archie Bunker’s favorite chair) loveseat in front of it to keep any boogeyman from coming up the basement stairs into the den when I was alone in the house.
I also just saw Rosemary’s Baby remastered on the big screen at the Film Forum a few weeks ago. I have to admit, that as soon as Christopher Komeda’s music starts playing and the bird’s eye view of the Dakota emerges on screen the electricity started flowing up my legs, this time not my usual RLS, I began weeping. Not only is Rosemary’s Baby my favorite film, but I also recognize the confluence of perfectionism in each and every scene that makes it a flawless masterpiece, from the vibrant performances to the exquisite storytelling. Every detail is magical and I don’t mean devilish, I mean artfully.
Something else wonderful happened during the screening that day. Amidst all the other film geeks like myself, and aside from the audible pleasure the audience let out when the magnificent Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer walk on the screen where we all laughed and silently cheered for their strolling entrance as the iconic quirky and eccentric devil-worshiping senior citizens. When Bill Castle did his Hitchcock walk on by the phone booth, I realized that it wasn’t only me smacking my partner Wendy’s knee with childhood excitement, “There’s Bill, there he is!!! We both chuckled with glee to see his wide warming grin. Suddenly we heard others in the crowd stirring and murmuring “there he is, that’s Bill Castle!!!” Amidst all the appurtenances Rosemary’s Baby has to offer, so many of us fans were thrilled to catch sight of Mr.Castle with his fat cigar standing by the phone booth. We were collectively excited to see the man who had entertained us all these years. It was heartwarming. I did tear up.
I recognize Roman Polanski as the auteur that he is, but that is not what I want to dwell on here. I want to stress that Rosemary’s Baby would not have been made if it weren’t for William Castle and his perseverance, passion, and eye for intellectual property. William Castle acknowledged that The Lady From Shanghai was a work of art because of Orson Welles‘ direction, however, it was Castle who first discovered and purchased the rights to If I Should Die Before I Wake, only to have Orson Welles turn around and pitch it to Harry Cohn as his own idea.
It was Rosemary’s Baby that Bill chose to elevate his status from B movie maker to respected filmmaker in a very fickle industry. Let’s pay tribute to one certain fact: Rosemary’s Baby would not be the film it is after 45 years without William Castle’s imprint on it.
Bill’s memoirs Step Right Up, I’m Gonna Scare the Pants Off America (which is a fantastic read for any enthusiast about the golden age of Hollywood and just a darn good bit of storytelling) describes how William Castle’s literary agent Marvin Birdt, the person who found the script and insisted Bill read the galleys immediately. Castle looked at the title and dismissed it saying “It’s probably some story about an unwed mother… cheap exploitation. Who the hell wants to make a picture like that?”Â
Bill Castle thought the film just wasn’t for him at that point. It was 1968 and the film industry wasn’t really embracing horror films anymore. He was so overwhelmed with the lousy books and manuscripts that were piling up that he just couldn’t fathom wasting any time with yet another piece of junk. But, it took him all of three hours to finish the story, as he said, ‘bathed in sweat and shaking.’ Castle saw the magnitude of Ira Levin’s story when it was still in unpublished manuscript form: “I made up my mind when I read the novel Rosemary’s Baby that it was the greatest novel that would translate into a screenplay that I had ever read. That just lent itself to a brilliant movie. And I loved the property and I brought the property because I wanted to prove to the industry and my fellow peers that I could do something really brilliant.” (Step Right Up, 2010) He told Ellen, his wife, that it was one of the most powerful books he’d ever read, and that it would be an incredible picture to make. When Ellen finished reading it, she told him “It’s disturbing… frightening and brilliant.”(SRU, 2010) But Ellen also warned that he’d have trouble with the Church.
William Castle and the love of his life, his beautiful wife Ellen courtesy of Spine Tingler.
Castle’s agent Birdt tormented him about other studios and directors interested in the story and making offers. Later, Castle found out that the book had actually been offered to Alfred Hitchcock first. One wonders what it might have looked like if Hitch had been behind the camera, storyboarding Levin’s work.
Bill Castle was worried that he was going to lose the picture, but where was he going to get the quarter of a million Birdt demanded to finance the rights to the film? He asked Birdt to offer one hundred thousand dollars upfront and then fifty thousand if the book became a bestseller with five percent of one hundred percent of the net profits. His agent wasn’t very encouraged that they’d accept the offer. The waiting to hear back was excruciating, but Castle did get the rights to Rosemary’s Baby. Now he had to come up with the money!
In Step Right Up, Bill describes how Robert Evans, in charge of Paramount Pictures, called to check in, not sure William Castle could handle such a serious motion picture. But, Charles Bluhdorn, owner of Paramount, wanted to meet with Castle personally to discuss the picture, saying “I have big plans for Paramount, and they include you.” Castle found Bluhdorn’s persona magnetic. He told him that Bob Evens had informed him about Castle’ obtaining Rosemary’s Baby.“Would you like to make the picture for us?” Of course, Castle told him, yes.
head of Paramount Robert Evans
“Your services as producer, how much would you want?” Bill Castle corrected Bluhdorn by adding the word ‘director’… trying to avoid negotiating with this man without his lawyer. Bluhdorn wasn’t having any of that. He told Castle that he would not negotiate with lawyers on the making of Rosemary’s Baby. It’s either between Castle and him, or Donnenfeld and Castle’s attorney. Castle decided he had the ego to take on this financial genius and told him he’d negotiate with him directly. But first, Bill asked him if he had read the story. Bluhdorn had not. Bill thought that worked to his advantage as the story was intensely disturbing so the less Bluhdorn knew about the story the better.
Robert Evans and Roman Polanski
When Bill Castle finally blurted out that he’d want to produce and direct, Bluhdorn laughed at him and called him a ‘big ridiculous clown.’ He tried to offer Bill only one hundred fifty thousand for the film plus thirty percent of the profits. Bill told him no way. It was a hard bargaining session. Bluhdorn didn’t know what he was dealing for and Bill did, Bluhdorn was also dropping the phony niceties and getting close to bowing out of any deal. “If I walk through that door, Rosemary’s Baby is finished at Paramount. No one -and I mean no one- will renegotiate!” Castle finally composed his inner panic and came back at the austere blowhard with an offer of two hundred fifty thousand and fifty percent of the profits. It was a deal. (Step Right Up, 2010)Â
Bill Castle courtesy of Spine Tingler.
Bill’s daughter, Terry Castle remembers, “He had to do whatever he could and it was his time. Mom and Dad mortgaged the house and they bought the rights for a substantial amount of money.” (Spine Tingler: The William Castle Story)
With that he asked Castle’s age and if he’d heard of director Roman Polanski, or seen any of his pictures. Castle had seen Repulsion and Knife in the Water. Bluhdorn sang Polanski’s praises calling him a genius. He impressed upon Castle that with the director’s youth and Castle’s experience as a producer, they could both learn from each other. Bill Castle started to find his fire, “Look Mr. Bluhdorn, the reason I bought Rosemary’s Baby with my own money was to direct the film… It’s going to be an important motion picture and I’m not going to miss the opportunity of directing.” (Step Right Up, 2010)
Bluhdorn told him that Polanski directs Rosemary’s Baby or no deal, and asked Bill to at least meet the young director. Castle says “I had made up my mind to hate him on sight"¦ and that he wasn’t going to direct the picture I said absolutely no way. I bought the picture, I bought the book. I own it, I’m going to direct it..{…} I worked all my life to get something worthwhile on the screen and so at first sight I hated him.” He’d sent Polanski the galleys to read and if after meeting him he decides he doesn’t want him directing the movie then fine. Bill Castle says in his memoirs that while Bluhdorn was a tough negotiator he was at least an honorable and fair man whose handshake was better than a written contract.
Castle and Polanski courtesy of Spine Tingler
InStep Right Up, 2010Castle describes his first impression of Roman Polanski was that he was a little cocky vain narcissist who liked to look at himself in the mirror a lot. Bill asked if he liked the story, “I like it very much… It will make a great picture.” Polanski spoke in his Polish accent. “You would like to direct Rosemary?”Bill asked. “That’s why I’m here. Nobody will be able to direct it as well as Roman Polanski.” And Bill Castle’ felt that Ira Levin’s book was perfect for the screen, needing absolutely no changes whatsoever in adapting it. This was something he felt passionately about. He posed the question to Polanski.“The book is perfect… no changes must be made,” Bill says that Polanski was so intense about this that it was quite jarring. “It’s one of the few books I have read that must be translated faithfully to the cinema.” (Step Right Up, 2010)
And having read Levin’s book, I can tell you that reading each line of every page is exactly like watching the story unfold on screen. It is the most faithful adaptation I’ve ever read, more like reading the script after the fact.
Then Castle posed a trick question to Polanski to see what his vision was for filming the narrative, suggesting to him that the camera should not only move around a lot but use strange shots to tell the story. Polanski was empowered by his convictions and told Bill, “No, I don’t Mr. Castle. Actors tell a story… like peeping through the keyhole of life. I do not like crazy tricks with the camera… must be honest.” That was exactly how Bill Castle saw the film being made. When Polanski told Bill to start calling him Roman, Bill couldn’t help but start to like this man who truly did share a special vision for a very special story. Polanski went on to tell him, “Bill, we can make a wonderful picture together. I have been looking for a long time for a Rosemary’s Baby. To work with you would be my privilege.” (Step Right Up, 2010)
Terry Castle, Bill’s daughter, remembers: “Polanski came over to the house and he was this young wild guy, just this incredibly wily dynamic man with this very thick accent talking about cameras and light he was just incredibly dynamic himself and my dad totally got him. He wanted to get Rosemary’s Baby made and he wanted to produce it"¦ and yet he wanted to direct it. But I think once he met Roman Polanski I think he understood he could bring something incredibly special to the project. And I think it was okay for Dad to give that up to him because I think he saw the brilliance in this man. […] Even though he wasn’t going to be directing it at least his name was going to be on it as a William Castle production and he was making for the first time in his life an important studio film.” (Spine Tingler: The William Castle Story)
The last thing Bill Castle needed to know was who he’d pick to write the screenplay and why. Polanski told Bill he would do it himself because he would stick strictly to the book. They spent the rest of the time discussing the film, Bill finding Polanski brilliant and extremely open. He immediately called Bluhdorn and told him that he was right Polanski was the only one who could direct Rosemary’s Baby. Bill Castle had the wisdom and grace to understand that Polanski would make a great film, but to be fair to Bill Castle. it’s also only after his careful facilitation and thoughtful know-how that helped bring Ira Levin’s story to life.
Polanski kept his word, he wrote the screenplay and adhered strictly to the book as promised. Polanski asked Bill to help him find a house by the beach to work and that he’d send his fiance over to help him look for one. On a Sunday morning, Sharon Tate was standing at Bill Castle’s door. They found the perfect beach house for the couple, owned by Brian Aherne who was in Europe.
Polanski wanted to use Richard Sylbert to do the set design for the film. Sylbert had just finished working on Mike Nichols’ The Graduate. Roman Polanski thought his work was brilliant. Polanski suggested Tuesday Weld in the lead as Rosemary. Bill agreed that she was a fine actress but said, “I think the role was written for Mia Farrow” Polanski watched her in several episodes of Peyton Place and didn’t agree. He thought Tuesday Weld would be better. Jane Fonda, Julie Christie, Elizabeth Hartman, and Joanna Pettet were also considered for the part. Evans asked about the casting of Rosemary, and they both gave their choices. Evans told them that he didn’t think Mia Farrow was available because she was working with George Cukor, he’d check with Zanuck at Fox and in the meantime try and get a reading with Weld.
Tuesday Weld
Now the buzz was all over Hollywood and every actress in town felt they would be just perfect for the lead role, but Polanski was still stubborn about Tuesday Weld. When Zanuck called Bill and told him the Cukor picture fell through, and Mia was available. Bill set up a meeting with Mia and Polanski over lunch and Polanski wound up being completely mesmerized by her. He finally agreed she would play Rosemary. The rest is history.
Roman Polanski actually developed a wonderful working relationship with Mia Farrow on the set. She didn’t bring any preconceived motivations to her role as Rosemary Woodhouse. Supposedly he had some difficulties with Catherine Deneuve on the set of Repulsion, but he found Mia very amenable to work with. Mia followed Polanski’s directions very well, which might explain some of her childlike and innocent air in her performance of the blithe and charming Rosemary.
In Edward Dmytryk’sWalk on the Wild SideBarbara Stanwyck is no ordinary ‘Jo’
Stanwyck was the epitome of independence and determination. She had a streak of non-conformity, toughness, and resilience.
Stanwyck was born Ruby Stevens in Brooklyn, July 16th 1907. A New Yorker like me and a fellow Cancerian. Her mother died and her father disappeared when she was 4, leaving her and her brother in the care of her older sister Mildred and foster homes where she’d often run away. At age 9 Ruby toured with her dancer sister, a John Cort Showgirl practicing the routines back stage. Watching her idol Pearl White on the big screen inspired her to go into showbiz. She quitt school at age 14, followed her sister’s lead and became a Ziegfeld Follies girl.
Ziegfeld Girl 1924 Barbara Stanwyck.
In 1929 Stanwyck had the lead in the road company production of the Broadway hit ‘Burlesque’ which was a hit in theater. She shared the stage with Mary Tomlinson, a clergyman’s daughter who most likely ran away from home because she was a lesbian. Mary changed her name to Marjorie Main and become the quick talkin’ ‘Ma’ in the raucous Ma and Pa Kettle series from ’49-’57.
Marjorie Main as the unflappable Ma Kettle.
One of her good friends during those years was pianist Oscar Levant who said Stanwyck was “wary of sophisticates and phonies.”
Ruby became Barbara Stanwyck at age 19 while she had the lead in ‘The Noose’ on Broadway. At 21 she was introduce by Levant to Frank Fay star of Vaudeville and ten years older than she, a closet homosexual, alcoholic and abusive husband. They married and moved to Hollywood in 1929 when Stanwyck was on her way to becoming a star of the silver screen. They used her money and bought a mansion in Brentwood. That’s how she and Joan Crawford (married to Franchot Tone at the time) became neighbors and close friends.
At first Stanwyck starred in a few B movies but began getting attention for her roles in Ladies of Leisure ‘30, Illicit ’31, Night Nurse ’31, and Miracle Woman ’31.
Stanwyck in Illicit 1931.
While working with Frank Capra on Ladies of Leisure he taught her that much of acting was conveyed with the eyes and that unless the audience was drawn in, the dialogue didn’t matter. This was her breakthrough movie. Edward Bernds who worked with Capra said “That first take with Stanwyck was sacred.”
Stanwyck’s first Academy Award nomination was for the downtrodden mother Stella Dallas ’37 where her old friend Marjorie Main played her mother-in-law.
Three nominations followed for Ball of Fire ’42 with Gary Cooper,Double Indemnity ’44, and Sorry Wrong Number ’48 with Burt Lancaster.Stanwyck was now on her second marriage to another gay man, the handsome Robert Taylor. Their ’39 marriage was arranged by the studio. The couple had separate bedrooms.
Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor on the cover of Movie Life
Some assert that Stanwyck had a lifelong relationship with her publicist Helen Ferguson. It’s not for me to wager yes or no nor to be concerned with her private life one way or the other. If she wanted us to know it was her choice to share it.
In ’35 she played the rugged farm girl living in a man’s world– Annie Oakley, a masculine woman who was great with a gun.
She did a slew of romantic comedies with charismatic co-stars. Twice with Henry Fonda in the screwball The Mad Miss Manton ’38, and Preston Sturges‘ The Lady Eve ’41. Remember The Night ’40 opposite Fred MacMurray was her first film with costume designer Edith Head.
Some of my favorite films of her’s were: playing opposite co-star William Holden in Rouben Mamoulian’sGolden Boy ’39. Then Meet John Doe 1941, Lady of Burlesque, and the immortal femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson in 1944 Double Indemnity, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers ’46, The Two Mrs. Carrolls ’47, Cry Wolf ’47, B. F.’s Daughter ’48, Sorry, Wrong Number ’48, in 1950 The File on Thelma Jordan, No Man of Her Own & The Furies. Fritz Lang’s tumultuous Mae Doyle opposite Robert Ryan in Clash By Night ’52, Witness to Murder ’56, There’s Always Tomorrow ’56, Crime of Passion ’57 & Forty Guns ’57.
Phyllis Dietrichson is brought to life by Barbara Stanwyck in the noir staple Double Indemnity ’44.Stanwyck and MacMurray Double Indemnity ’44.Stanwyck and Wendell Corey in The File on Thelma Jordan 1950.
Clifton Webb who co-starred in Titanic 53 called her his “Favorite Hollywood Lesbian.” It’s pretty significant that Barbara had finally played her one and only screen lesbian in Walk on the Wild Side ’62. Barbara Stanwyck’s sexual orientation has been called ‘the best kept secret in the movies’ by Axel Madsen who wrote the very engaging The Sewing Circle. It’s a hell of a read!
Three years later shecreated a new image for herself as the gutsy matriarch Victoria Barkley in the television western The Big Valley. Stanwyck loved her character ‘an old broad who combines elegance with guts.’Â
Stanwyck as classy & rugged frontier woman Victoria Barkley in 60s television show The Big Valley 1968.
Walk on the Wild Side was Barbara Stanwyck’s return to the big screen since playing Cattle Queen Jessica Drummond in Sam Fuller’s sexually charged western Forty Guns 1957 which had this fantastic line, `Can I touch it?’asks Jessica referring to Griff Bonnell’s (Barry Sullivan) gun. Griff tells her, ‘It might go off in your face’Â Stanwyck was in love with the Western genre.
in 1962 the film sets this lurid lesbian melodrama and peek at the underbelly of bordello life, down in the midst of the underworld revisiting the archetypes of gays being part of the illicit subculture of society. Revisiting the ‘sexual ghetto’ in quite the same way the briefly liberated films of the early Thirties depicted them. As Vito Russo says in The Celluloid Closet,“The movies simply reflected what little they could identify of a hidden world and, in both pre-Code and post-Code times saw Homosexuals solely in sexual terms because that what had always been sold.”
For over thirty years the subject had not been talked about, so when the ban was lifted, filmmakers picked up where they had left off. The film was able to represent the whore house openly as just that, a house of prostitution.
Walk on the Wild Side is the story of a New Orleans brothel and the seductive melodrama surrounding an obsessed drifter in search of his lost love, the lugubrious courtesan who is ensnared in a tangled web of vice, decadence, and the lesbian madame who desires to possess her.
The bordello is stocked with liquor, a bartender who never quits pouring, and a full jazz ensemble who plays fabulous bluesy melodies that cater to their clients while the employees all seem to suffer from a collective languorous state of mind.
Stanwyck’s Jo Courtney’s villainous nature accepts her own lesbianism. Instead of killing herself like Shirley MacLaine’s Martha in The Children’s Hour ’61, Jo decides to declare her power by opening up a brothel and selling sexuality on her own terms.
Jo lusts after and loves her object of desire Hallie, played by model-actress Capucine. But the love that dares not speak its name finds itself disrupted once smooth-talking Texas farmer Dove Linkhorn (Laurence Harvey) comes looking for Hallie. Three years prior Hallie and Dove swam and kissed each other and danced themselves silly til Dove was hopelessly hooked on the lovely divinity that he refers to as his ‘religion.’ Dove had to wait for his ailing father to die before he could come and claim his love.
Jo bitterly resents the intrusion of Dove and feels threatened by this young buck’s presence. The camera frames his coming between Jo and Hallie.
The film was not the huge success they thought it would be despite the adult themes and stellar cast. Probably because of its screenplay which doesn’t allow Algren’s novel to freely express its most provocative and sociological themes. Nelson Algren’s book focused on the seedy underbelly of New Orleans during the Depression Era 30s. Screenwriters, Fante, Morris, and Hecht while synthesizing the essence of the story, their observations gloss over the grittier descriptiveness and atmosphere of Algren’s murky brothels filled with even more vile and violent pimps. A world that showcased fetishistic patrons and sullen whores who wade around in the muck hoping for a better life. While the film has a way of self-moralizing the plot to death at times, Algren’s novel did not show contempt for his prostitutes. It had a real strain of class-conscious angst and didn’t sermonize about the unpalatable people who lived on the fringe of society but rather focused on those in power who exploited them. In some ways the film hones in on the story making it a more intimate venture into melodrama.
When I found out that Rachel from The Girl With the White Parasol was hosting a Barbara Stanwyck Blogathon, I chomped at the bit to participate. I love Stanny, pure and simple. She not only changed the way women demonstrated their power in the film, but she’s also gutsy, gorgeous, and persuasive in a very unconventional way.
Barbara Stanwyck, unlike some of her other vice-ridden murderous roles, plays Sally Morton, an archetypal woman in peril, although not as individuated as ‘hysterical’ or pathetic like Leona Stevenson in Anatole Litvak’sSorry, Wrong Number 1948.
The consummate Woman-in-Peril is Stanny as Leonora Stevenson in Anatole Litvak’s Sorry, Wrong Number 1948.
Stanny brought a unique kind of dynamism to the Suspense and noir landscape. Her face, bred with burning spirit and animal coolness, exudes a subtle psychology, ferocious independence, and dramatic intelligence.
The Stanwyck role was originally performed by Elisabeth Bergner in Martin Vale’s stage play. A suspense-thriller that fits within the realm of noir with Gothic tinges of horror. Humphrey Bogart appeared in the classic horror film The Return of Doctor X 1939. Bogart plays the subdued yet sinister malefactor Geoffrey Carroll. He’s a cynical, eccentric, and alienated artist. Stanny plays Sally, the woman he kills his first wife for, poisoning her with glasses of milk, just like in Hitch’s Suspicion 1941.
The Two Mrs. Carrolls is also the second pairing of Humphrey Bogart and Alexis Smith, who plays Cecily Latham, the ‘other woman.’ She first acted opposite Bogie in Conflict 1945, where he played Richard Mason pursuing his wife’s sister, Alexis Smith’s Evelyn Turner.
Bogart and Smith in Conflict 1945.
Produced by Mark Hellinger for Jack Warner and directed by Peter Godfrey (Cry Wolf 1947 also starring Stanny & The Woman in White 1948) The Two Mrs. Carrolls is a woman in peril, female victim story à la Hitchcock.
Barbara Stanwyck in Peter Godfrey’s noir thriller, Cry Wolf 1947.
Stanwyck’s role diverges from some of her more famous female villains, the noir femme fatale who embodies the unacceptable archetype of the sexually aggressive woman. In this film, she plays the more marginalized ‘good woman’ who is worthy of being a wife and often the victim, contrasted by the lustful and conniving femme fatale Cecily (Alexis Smith), who embodies treachery and a freely expressed sexuality.
The film co-stars Nigel Bruce as Dr. Tuttle, Isobel Elsom (Ladies in Retirement 1941, Monsieur Verdoux 1947) as Mrs. Latham Patrick O’Moore as Charles Pennington (Penny), Ann Carter as Beatrice Carroll, Anita Bolster (The Lost Weekend, Scarlet Street 1945) as Christine, the maid, and Barry Bernard as the blackmailing chemist Horace Blagdon. There’s a welter of melodramatic music by Franz Waxman, plenty of Gothic shadows by cinematographer J.Peverell Marley (Hound of the Baskervilles 1939, House of Wax 1953), and gorgeous fashions by Edith Head.
Barbara Stanwyck looks stunning throughout the film in the costumes envisioned by Edith Head.
Made in 1945, Warner Bros. most likely held back the release of this film as it was very close to Bogart’s role in Conflict that same year. Bogart, the quintessential scruffy cigarette-smoking everyman equipped with a trench coat, fedora, and gritty sneer, is very capable of playing complex characters with a disturbed pathology of inner turmoil. I think of his role as the controlling and ill-tempered script writer Dixon Steele in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place 1950or Captain Queeg in The Cain Mutiny 1954.
Humphrey Bogart as the unstable Dix and Gloria Grahame in Nicholas Ray’s 1950 psychological noir In A Lonely Place.
In The Two Mrs. Carrolls,Bogart is cast as Geoffrey Carroll, a Bluebeardesque psychotic who first feels driven to paint his muse, the object of his desire, only to feel compelled to destroy her once he’s done exalting her essence using poisoned milk as his method of murder. He is not unlike Vincent Price’s anachronism of a Hudson Valley nobleman driven by an insane need for an heir in Dragonwyck 1946, in an extension of the Bluebeard mythos as he kills his wives who are incapable of giving him sons.
Michael Redgrave as the deranged architect married to the object of his desire/destructive force Joan Bennett in Fritz Lang’s The Secret Beyond the Door 1948.
Certain Noir films are the manifestation of psychosis, emerging in the form of the ‘mad artist’, most notablyEdgar Ulmer’s Bluebeard 1944. Franchot Tone was the obsessively deranged sculptor in Siodmak’s underrated film noir Phantom Lady 1944, and Architect Michael Redgrave in Fritz Lang’s incredible depiction of noir psychosis in The Secret Beyond the Door 1947 which had suggestive imagery of a dream-like atmosphere with its overt Freudian fairy tale patterns tied to psychoanalytical interpretations of childhood trauma and sexual significance. Joan Bennett refers to her own ability to purge these ‘repressed poisons’ because she is so chatty and exorcizes her demons by talking too much.
Joan Bennett gazes at her own image in Fritz Lang’s The Secret Beyond the Door- the iconic mirror!
Peter Godfrey’s The Two Mrs. Carrollsand Fritz Lang’s The Secret Beyond the Door 1948 are ideal examples of a leading man portraying creativity and obsessiveness driven to madness. In the former, Barbara Stanwyck plays Sally Morton, who has a whirlwind romance with painter Geoffrey Carroll (Humphrey Bogart), only to learn that he is actually married to an invalid wife. Carroll is desperate to possess Sally, as he claims she has ‘saved’ him so that he can paint again. Before they had met, his work suffered. When Sally finds out that Geoffrey is married, she flees their romantic sojourn, leaving Carroll in a cave, showing dismay and turbulence on his face. Carroll goes to London and sees a chemist, signing a fictitious name. After several glasses of milk, the first Mrs. Carroll is dead, and Sally becomes the second Mrs. Carroll.
Sally becomes his new ‘subject,’ a replacement as the artist’s inspiration and love object. But once the wealthy and decadent tigress Cecily Latham (she wears animal print) aggressively pursues him to paint her and become her lover, Sally’s fate is sealed. Carroll transfers his fixation to his new object, Cecily Latham, played by the gorgeous Alexis Smith (I saw her on Broadway in the 70s. She won a Tony award for her performance in the hit Broadway musical Follies... what a treat!)
The film is an odd and edgy thriller that opens in a pastoral setting in Scotland where Sally and Geoffrey are having a quaint picnic by the lake, while Geoffrey sits upon a rock and sketches her. The initial loveliness and serene atmosphere sets out to misdirect us as a place much like Eden. The couple, we learn, have been dating for two weeks. Everything bears the most ordinary of appearances, as Geoffrey and Sally’s budding romance seems filled with a lighthearted joyfulness in alliance with the surrounding paradisal scenery.
McGregor tells him he’s caught a fish, and Geoffrey yells to him, “Well, from this distance, that takes real talent. Throw that whale back the way I feel today. I don’t want even a fish to be unhappy!”
Geoffrey Carroll tells Sally, “Two weeks of the only real happiness I’ve ever known.” I love you, Sally, I love you.”As soon as Geoffrey utters these words and the couple embraces, the sky begins to well up with uneasy clouds. Accompanied by old man McGregor, who has the typified Scottish accent warning them of the rough weather brewing.
As the foreboding torrential rainstorm quickly breaks the opening serenity, this symbol of strife and disturbance oppresses the joy and becomes a metaphor as the film ends with a similar rainstorm that besets Sally’s world.
This will inevitably turn into a nightmarish landscape for Sally. Still, the serene local diverts us from the darkness to come, as we soon discover that Carroll is a disturbed artist who constantly needs fresh female inspiration in order for his art and sexual gratification to thrive. His art depends on it, and he is willing to kill the women he once desired to sustain himself.
The couple seeks refuge from the rain in a nearby cave. As Geoffrey goes to get his fishing gear and picnic basket from McGregor, Sally remains behind, holding his jacket. As she calls after him, a letter falls out of her pocket. She picks up the small white envelope and is horrified to see it is addressed to Mrs. Carroll. The extraordinary range of emotions Stanwyck is capable of reflecting within a single frame is cogent and palpable as she shifts from content glances to an interior that aches. Her eyes glimmer with a crushed spirit. Franz Waxman’s dramatic score confronts the moment as the dark outline of the cave frames Sally.
Once Geoffrey returns to the cave, he finds Sally suddenly unyielding and in emotional distress.
“This fell out of your pocket; you evidently forgot to mail it when we left the inn. It’s addressed to a Mrs. Geoffrey Carroll.” “My wife.” “Why didn’t you tell me?” ” I tried to from the first day, but I couldn’t. There’s a child, too.” “Are you separated?” “No, that letter was to ask for a divorce.” “Have you been married long?” “We’ve been together for ten years; my wife’s been an invalid ever since the child was born.”“Do you think I’d marry you now? I’m afraid you don’t know me very well.” “I know I love you.” “I don’t want that kind of love.” Why didn’t you tell me before?” “I didn’t want to lose you.” “But it would have saved so much hurt, and now it’s no use.” “I don’t believe that. “Before I found you, I was finished. There was nothing. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t think, I didn’t care. We mustn’t lose each other, Sally, ever. We couldn’t if we tried because our love is.”
Sally breaks down and flees the cover of the cave, crying, ‘No… no.’Not wanting to hear Geoffrey’s excuses, she runs out into the pouring rain.
“Miss Morton, do you hear me, you’ll catch your death,” McGregor calls out to Sally his words echo within the walls of the cave, reverberating in Geoffrey’s mind.
He gives a tortured look as symbolic bars of rain obfuscate his figure. As Waxman’s music acts like a buzzsaw in his twisted psyche, he looks down at the letter lying at his muddied feet and grips his head.
The scene switches to Blagdon (Barry Bernard), the cash chemist, sealing up a package with wax. He’s an unsavory character with a scar that gives him an added edge of sleaziness. Bladgon hands Geoffrey the register, “You’ll have to sign for this, sir.” Blogdan answers the phone; he’s lost a bet on the horses.
“You see this scar, Mr. Fleming, is it?” Well, I got this scar when I was 9 years old. I was kicked by a horse, and I’ve been trying to get even with the ‘orses ever since, but it ain’t quite worked out.”The two walk over to an easel holding a painting. Bea tells her father, “You’re a genius. Wait until you finish this one, Father, The Angel of Death.” “You think it’s good, huh?” “I should say I do. It’s frightening, of course, and makes me shiver sometimes, but so definitely Mother. Do you think she’ll live until we finish the picture?”
Geoffrey Carroll returns home to his London flat where he greets his daughter Beatrice. He takes the little white package from the chemist and puts it in his pocket. Geoffrey asks how her mother is doing, and she tells him about the same.
He says, “What are you talking about, well of course she’ll live. What do you mean?” “Don’t get excited, Father. We both want her to live because we love her so much. That doesn’t mean she will live, does it?”
Bea tells her father that although she spends more time with her mother, she adores him… “I love you, too, and I admire you tremendously.”
A bell rings; it is time for Mrs. Carroll’s milk. Beatrice goes into the kitchen to prepare the hot white liquid for her mother. Geoffrey enters the room and takes the saucepan and glass from his daughter, pouring the milk himself. Standing outside the bedroom door, holding the glass of warm milk, a queer look sploshes over his face like waves of disequilibrium. He suddenly tells Bea that she’ll be going away to school starting tomorrow.
Carroll lurks outside his wife’s door like a fiendish vampire.
Christine, the maid, greets Mr.Pennington at the door, her angular face always an expression of joy!
Bea-“I said it was tremendous. “ Penny-“Yes, but it’s a bit creepy, don’t you think?” “That’s only at first. You get accustomed to it. Then you think it’s wonderful. She was my mother. Died a little less than two years ago.” “I’m sorry.” “You needn’t be. We all die sooner or later.” Bea’s comment is calm and canny. Penny says, “I’ve heard a rumor to that effect.” “It isn’t exactly as Mother was because it isn’t a portrait. Yet it is like her, too. Father says it’s representational.” “Your father took the very word right out of my mouth.”
Two years later, Sally now the second Mrs.Carroll and Geoffrey are living in Ashton in Sally’s Gothic manor house inherited from her father.
Charles Pennington (Patrick O’Moore), or Penny, is greeted at the door by Christine (Anita Bolster), the housemaid. As he waits for Sally, he studies the painting of the first Mrs. Carroll, not noticing Beatrice sitting in the armchair. She tells him the painting is tremendous.
Ann Carter, as Carroll’s precocious daughter Bea, figures prominently in the film as the lens through which the conscience of the story reveals its moral code. Ann Carter exudes a mature seriousness reminiscent of Curse of the Cat People 1944 with her otherworldly air. She possesses a no-nonsense touch to the mixed-up morality she’s surrounded by that contributes to the pervasive despair and instability.
Barbara Stanwyck looks stunning as she enters the room. Sally tells Bea she needn’t leave, that Penny is a dear old friend. Bea tells her they’ve already met, and he’s ‘nice, quite nice.’Penny asks how old she is, “45 or 50?’“She does give that impression, but she’s sweet.”
Penny is kind and obviously still very much in love with Sally. In a very evolved and civil manner, he hasn’t forgiven her for running out on him. She feels terrible about it and says she should have given him some words. But when she met Geoffrey, when he came back, it was as if nothing else mattered. He tells her that all a disappointed suitor needs to do is look at her. He asks if she’s as happy as she looks. Sally tells him, “He’s good to me.”“He better be. Purely out of morbid curiosity, I should like to meet him.”
She tells him that Geoffrey is working upstairs in his studio and that she’ll call on him. Penny tells her that he’s not the only visitor. Mrs. Latham and her daughter Cecily are expected any minute. They’re his friends and clients.
“And Penny, in case I didn’t make myself clear. It’s grand to see you again, really grand.”“Thanks, in case I didn’t make myself clear.” Oh, Sally.”
Sally runs up the staircase, excited about her guests; she addresses the vinegary Christine.
“Christine, there’ll be other visitors. Take them straight to the garden. Tea for five.” “Tea for five! Bread and butter?” “Yes, and some cucumber sandwiches.” “Some cakes, too?” “Well, if there are any.” “We haven’t got any cakes.” “Well then, don’t serve them.” “I will.”
Waxman’s dynamically turbulent score breaks the witty moment as Geoffrey paces his studio. Throwing down his paintbrush and grabbing the canvas, he begins to rub the oil with turpentine, wiping away what he has painted with hostility.
Several frames show Geoffrey bisected by the large paintbrushes. This might be a visual indication of his fractured personality.Sally enters the room and sees him. “What are you doing?” “Something I should have done weeks ago; I’m sick of looking at it. A phony.” “You can’t always paint masterpieces.” “Well, I can always try.” “I don’t understand it, Sally, this fine old house, the most beautiful surroundings I’ve ever known, and you. I have everything here. Then why isn’t my work better? What’s wrong?”
In honor of the 40th anniversary of Robert Ryan’s death July 11, 1973 with a special nod to Karen & The Dark Pages for their spectacular tribute to this incredibly real man!
“Ryan was unfailingly powerful, investing his tormented characters with a brooding intensity that suggests coiled depth. Cut off from the world by the strength of their ‘feelings’ his characters seem to be in the grip of torrential inner forces. They are true loners. Ryan’s work has none of the masked, stylized aura of much noir acting. He performs with emotional fullness that creates substantial, complex characters rather than icons.” –Foster Hirsch-FILM NOIR: The Darker Side of the Screen
ClearlyRobert Ryan’sinfinite presence in film and his numerous complex characters manifest an embracing universal ‘internal conflict’ of masculinity. I tribute certain roles the actor inhabited during his striking career. Though he was cast more often in the part as the imposing heavy, the depth and breadth of Ryan’s skill with his rough-hewn good looks should have landed him more roles as a lead male capable of such penetrating levels of emotion. He had a depth that suggests a scarcely hidden intensity smoldering at the surface.
Robert Ryan as Montgomery in Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire 1947.Robert Ryan in Act of Violence ’48
A critic for the New York Times reviewing Act of Violence (1948)  wrote about Robert Ryan’s persona as the madly driven veteran bent on revenge, Joe Parkson calling him “infernally taut.”
Frank Krutnik discusses ‘Masculinity and its discontents’ in his book In A Lonely Street,“In order to make the representation of masculinity in the noir thriller, there follows a schematic run-through of Freudian work on the determination of masculine identity.” Claiming Freud’s work can be co-opted into film with an emphasis of its relevance to analysis of the cultural machinery of patriarchy.” He discusses patriarchal culture which relies heavily on the maintenance of a gender-structured ‘disequilibrium’ with its roots in the myth of the Oedipal Complex. Involving not only the power-based hierarchy of male service to masculine power but the established normative gender values which inform both the male and female figure.
Act of Violence Robert Ryan as Joe Parkson co-starring Janet Leigh
Many of the characters in Ryan’s noir world are informed by a cultural ‘determinacy of the phallus’ that authorizes toughness and strips the limits of desire as an obligation to masculine identity. The patriarchal power structure predetermines a fixed and limited role that creates a destiny of submission and impotence in Ryan’s characters. But within the framework of these extreme male figures lies an intricate conflict of varying degrees of vulnerability and fragility.
Ryan manifests this duality within hyper-masculine characters. Outwardly physical, confrontational, and hostile, Ryan is a master at playing with men who suffer from alienation and inferiority surrounding their own ‘maleness’ and self-worth. He was never just a dark noir brute or anti-hero but a complex man actualized through layers of powerful dramatic interpretation. His performances suggest a friction of subjugated masculinity bubbling within.
Ryan as Earl Pfeiffer and Barbara Stanwyck in Fritz Lang’s Clash By Night.
The trajectory of the male through the Oedipus Complex encompasses male subjectivity which is a principal issue in the noir ‘tough-thriller.’ The ‘existential thematic’ link to the Oedipus myth concerns questions of male desire and identity as they relate to the overarching law of existing patriarchal culture substituted for the original fearsome ‘divinity.’ This element is one of the driving psychological themes underlying any good classic film noir.
In this post, I put my focus primarily on Ryan’s characters within the framework of each film and while I discuss the relationship between him and the central players I do not go as in-depth as I usually do discussing his co-stars or plot design.
I apply this thematic representation to many of the roles engendered in the films of Robert Ryans‘ that I’ve chosen to discuss here. A patriarchal power structure establishes the tragedy of man’s destiny, a fixed and limited role in the character’s own destiny as there is a predominant power that threatens them into submission and sheds light on their own impotence. So many of the noir characters in a Robert Ryan noir world are shaped by a cultural authority structured through ‘determinacy of the phallus’ that authorizes toughness in the male identity that strips away the limits of desire, as an obligation to ‘masculine identity.’
Ryan’s stoic boxer Stoker in Robert Wise’s The Set Up.
I’m focusing on particular Ryan’s roles within a noir context that depict archetypal hyper-masculine tropes and the problematic strife within those characters. Whether Ryan is playing the deeply flawed hero or the tormented noir misfit, his characters are afflicted with an inherent duality of virility and vulnerability, inner turmoil, alienation, persecution, and masochism. It’s a territorial burden that Robert Ryan so effortlessly explores.
These films show Ryan’s trajectory through forces of menacing restraint and poignant self-expression. Within a noir landscape, the schism of stark virility and tenuous masculinity exposes the complexity of alienation, masochism, and frailty. Robert Ryan’s performances are a uniquely fierce and formidable power.
Within the framework of these ‘extreme’ male figures lies an intricate conflict with varying degrees of vulnerability & fragility within the male psyche. The narratives don’t necessarily flesh out this conflict plainly, but Ryan’s performances certainly suggest and inform us about the friction of this subjugated theme bubbling to the surface as he manifests the duality within his hyper-masculine characters. Robert Ryan was a master at playing men who suffer from alienation and inferiority surrounding their own ‘maleness’ and self-worth.
Ryan is never just a dark noir ‘brute’ or anti-hero but moreover, a complex male who is actualized through layers of powerful dramatic interpretation. A complexity of stark virility and ‘tenuous maleness’ as the narrative witnesses Ryan’s trajectory transforming him through various dynamic forces of menacing restraint and poignant self-expression. Outwardly physical, confrontational, hostile, and ultimately masculine, and the schism that is inwardly emotional, alienated, self-deprecating, masochistic, and fragile within the film noir landscape. Robert Ryan’s performances still maintain a uniquely fierce and formidable aesthetic of the ‘suffering-marginalized man.’
Joan Camden is the hostage, wife Karen Manelli prisoner to jealous, mad, and murderous concert pianist husband Claude Manelli (Francis Lederer)Handsome Donald Buka (Street With No Name 1948) plays an American in Vienna in search of a passport to freedom and happiness. He steals the identity of the dead man in his cab, and fate throws him and Karen together. The film is produced by actor Turhan Bey and directed by Gunther Von Fritsch who co-directed with Robert Wise on The Curse of The Cat People 1944.
“Claude has one great love… himself. His love is like a religion and his God asks for human sacrifices!”
THE BLACK CAT (1934) U.S. (Universal) runs 65 minutes B&W, was the studio’s highest grossing picture in 1934. The film was also ranked #68 on Bravo’s 100 Scariest Movies. Directed byEdgar G. Ulmerand written for thescreen by Ulmer andPeter Ruric.
Also titled: House of Doom; The Vanishing Body (the alternative British title was used in it’s re-release in 1953 as a double bill with The Missing Head an alternative title for the “Inner Sanctum’s” offering Strange Confession.
Tod Browning’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1931) starring Bela Lugosi.Boris Karloff in Jame’s Whales Frankenstein 1931.
With the success that Universal Studios garnered from Tod Browning’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’sDracula in 1931 starring Hungarian-born actor Bela Lugosi, and the equally sensational popularity of Mary Shelley’s adapted Frankenstein1931 directed by James Whale starring Boris Karloff, it would seem only natural for the studio to harness the cult popularity of these two stars, creating horror vehicles to pair them together in. This is the first collaboration between Boris and Bela. Also, both stars were equally billed in terms of their leading roles. In Lew Landers The Raven 1935, Lugosi dominated as Dr. Richard Vollin and in Lambert Hillyer’sThe Invisible Ray 1936, the emphasis was more on Karloff’s complex character Dr. Janos Rukh. The Black Cat was a huge success for Universal and opened up the floodgates for seven more films featuring the collaboration of Karloff and Lugosi;Gift of Gab (1934), The Raven (1935), The Invisible Ray (1936), Son of Frankenstein (1939), Black Friday (1940), and You’ll Find Out (1940).
Although The Black Cat 1934 claims in its opening credits that the film is ‘suggested’ by Edgar Allan Poe’sstory from 1843 the film bares no resemblance to his short story, nor did Poe ever pen a single word about Satanism in all his volumes of the curiously macabre. The film does evoke the spirit of Poe’s fixation with morbid beauty, the preservation or perseverance of love after death, the suggestive ambiance, the conflation of beauty and death, and the unconscious dread of the uncanny. The architectural lines seem to also evoke the nihilistic sensibilities of Jean-PaulSartre‘s ‘No Exit’ or a Kafka-esque fantasy of entrapment, with a mood set forth of futility and hopelessness. It also represents a cultural aesthetic that was emblematic of WW1.
Ulmer’s The Black Cat is melancholy poetry that articulates its substance within a half-light dream world. There are overcast clouds of menace, with modern Gothic gloom and impenetrable dark spaces. A wasteland of lost hope, it is a land of the dead.
Karloff is driven by his profane lust and twisted faith and Bela is a ghost of a man n a deadly excursion into a vengeful rage.
“Don’t pretend, Hjalmar. There was nothing spiritual in your eyes when you looked at that girl.”-Werdegast
‘the beast’ or the wickedest man in the world Aleister Crowley
Karloff’s character Poelzig is actually based on the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley. Ulmer and Ruric were inspired by an odd news story circulating in the world press shortly before the making of the film. Stranger than fiction, it seems a naive young couple who were visiting a remote home of a magician, became entangled in the occult rituals involving an unfortunate animal sacrifice, a victimized black cat named Mischette. The magician was Aleister Crowley, and the isolated location was his Abbey of Thelema in Sicily. The press got wind of this when Crowley accused one of his writer friends Nina Hamnett of libel in a London Court. Hamnett had mentioned Crowley in her 1932 autobiographyLaughing Torso.
The passage that incited Crowley’s vengeful wrath was Hamnett’s description of his days at the Abbey of Thelema “He was supposed to practice Black Magic there, and one day a baby was said to have disappeared mysteriously, There was also a goat there. This all pointed to Black Magic, so people said, and the inhabitants of the village were frightened of him.” Crowley became known in the public’s perception as ‘the wickedest man in the world.” It was from this story that the seed of sensationalism gave rise to the idea for The Black Cat whichemerged as a tale of savagery and horror for Ulmer.
So, in actuality, the title has nothing to do with Poe’s short story at all, as it merely alludes to Dr.Vitus Werdegast’s (Lugosi) all-consuming fear and dread of cats. A more faithful adaption would be The Living Dead (1934) directed by Thomas Bentley, and Tales of Terror (1962). The Black Cat (1941) starring Basil Rathbone was more of an old dark house mystery.
Roger Corman directs Peter Lorre in Tales of Terror 1962.
It is one of the darkest films of the 30s. The Black Cat is an effusive, atmospheric, and brutal masterpiece of decadent horror among some of Ulmer’s other interesting contributions (People on Sunday 1930, Bluebeard 1944,film noir classicDetour 1945,and the wonderfully lyrical science fiction fantasyThe Man From Planet X 1951).
Influenced by the German Expressionist movement, the film lays out a sinister territory, strange and foreboding, unsavory and dangerous, clandestine and provocative. Ulmer worked for Fritz Lang in the early days living in Germany involved in films including Metropolis (1927) and M (1931). He also worked with F.W. Murnau on Sunrise (1927) Ulmer also worked with Max Reinhardt, and Ernst Lubitsch in the 20s, and Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnermann, and cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan, who was responsible for Metropolis’ miniature sky-scapes and vast edifices.
On the set of The Black Cat.Boris and Bela on the set of Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat.
The Black Cat is considered to be Ulmer’s best film, though his career did start to maneuver its way down into poverty row’s fabulous cinematic gutter toiling in low-budget features, after beginning an affair with a script girl named Shirley Castle Alexander who was married at the time to one of Carl Laemmle’s favorite nephews. At the time Laemmle was head of Universal Studios, and so Ulmer was essentially blackballed by the mogul from Hollywood. Another factor might have been Ulmer’s unwillingness to sacrifice aesthetic sensibilities over commercial profits.
Ulmer and Shirley got married and wound up moving to New York City spending many of his years working on low-budget films. He began this part of his career by making bargain-basement westerns under the pseudonym John Warner directing a series of cheap ethnic-market movies incorporating groups like Ukrainian, Yiddish, and African Americans before he moved on to the more stylish low-budget thrillers.
By the 1940s Ulmer wound up back in Hollywood but had already resigned himself to making poverty row productions. All of which I find thoroughly enjoyable, such as his Bluebeard (1944) starring the ubiquitous John Carradine, Strange Illusion (1945), and film noir cult classic Detour (1945) starring Tom Neal and Ann Savage whose battered and desolate characters actually fit the noir cannon with an authentic realism despite the anemic budget. I also love The Strange Woman (1946) and another great film noir Ruthless (1948) with Zachary Scott. Ulmer still remained a very productive director with PRC, even if it was one of Hollywood’s bastard children. Studio head Leon Fromkess never gave Ulmer enough money to fund his pictures, Ulmer wanted to produce high-art films and first-class effects as his origin had come from a place where he was such a ”visual artist as well as a filmmaker. The one good by-product of the deal was that it gave him creative license to run with whatever vision he had for a working project of his.
Director Ulmer also doubled as a set designer on The Black Cat to create a work of visual stateliness, beautifully stylish and elaborate with its collection of modernist set pieces, working with the art direction and set design of Charles D. Hall and cinematographer John J. Mescall’s (The Bride of Frankenstein) vision of the striking, uniquely cold and Futuristic Modern Gothic art deco ‘castle fortress’ and it’s interior shots creating the arresting landscape of luxury belonging to the enigmatic Poelzig’s (Karloff) inner-sanctum.
The eclectically sharp and angular camerawork establishes stylish Machine Age imagery and eerie symmetrical aestheticism. Mescall’s camerawork creates a very non-Hollywood and non-stereotypical horror film, filled with a sense of melancholy responsiveness from the heavily influenced authentic Eastern European films of the period. There’s also a quality of cinematic eroticism with Mescall’s use of muting the focus within the shot to create an added emphasis on suggestive sexuality, as the camera dances through various scenes.
The stark use of light and shadow, the well-defined contrast of light and dark with its cold black spaces, and the diffuse whites constructing margins that pay homage to the expressionistic lighting used by German Expressionists filmmakers of the 1920s and early 30s. The atmosphere is oppressive as well as claustrophobic with an added air of perversity that effervesces within the elegant framework.
Ulmer co-wrote the screenplay with Peter Ruric (who used the pseudonym Paul Cain for his hard-edged detective novelettes for pulp magazines, with screenplays such as–Grand Central Murder 1942 and Mademoiselle Fifi 1944). Their script for The Black Cat deals with a deadly game of chess, ailurophobia (fear of cats) rather taboo and provocative subjects such as war crimes, ‘Satan Worship’, human sacrifice, being flayed alive, drug addiction and the underlying perverse fetishism of necrophilia.
Karloff’s character, Hjalmar Poelzig’s morbid and unwholesome preservation of his deceased wife whom he stole from Vitus Werdegast (Lugosi), having manipulated Werdegast’s wife into marrying him telling her that her husband died in the war, ultimately murdering her and then forcibly marrying Werdegast’s daughter is all very salacious material. Werdegast’s wife’s body is kept in a state of suspended animation like a sleeping doll which is visually shocking and gruesome. He tells Werdegast that his daughter too is deceased but in actuality, she is Poelzig’s new young bride. a drugged sexual slave. The film possesses so many strange and disturbing elements. The allusion to incest, sacrificial orgies, and the heightened presence of music drawing heavily from Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B and Schumann’s Quintet in E Flat Major, op.44, Tschaikowsky and most notably for me, Beethoven’s Movement no.7, a personal favorite of mine.
When Universal executives both Carl Laemmle Jr and Sr. screened the film they were horrified by Ulmer’s rough cut, they insisted that he edit the film and so they hacked it up and toned it down. And actually, Bela Lugosi himself was unsettled at the thought of his protagonist showing lusty desires for the very young American girl Joan. Ulmer reluctantly went back and edited some of the harsher scenes out, including the infamous ‘skinning’ sequence, A comparison to the original script from the final version shows that many of the most disturbing elements, including a more unabashed orgy at the black mass, were quickly snipped away and scenes which were more violent and containing more suggestive elements were exorcized like the devil.
But in a subtle victory of wile, Ulmer added a few more scenes showing Karloff taking Lugosi through his historical dungeon artifacts of the encased suspended beautiful women in glass, the posed dead bodies in perpetual lifelike form as if by taxidermy, collecting them as his fetish, the idea of possessing them eternally as an ‘object’ in a state of death, the theme of necrophilia must have slipped by the Laemmles.
Poelzig’s women in glass cases preserved. The imagery is reminiscent of Poe’s fixation with death and beauty, and the conflation of the two
The subject of contemporary Satanism had only been dealt with on the screen once before by Lugosi in his supporting role in the long-forgotten and believed to be lost The Devil Worshipper (1920 German) Die Teufelsanbete.
Universal’s marketing department downplayed the aspect of Satanism in the picture, nervous that the idea of devil worship might not be acceptable to the public theatergoer as entertainment. So in actuality, the original version must have really pushed the boundaries further and been even more sinister. British censors found the film so offensive and unacceptable that the British print of the film, entitled House of Doom replaces any reference to black magic, using less disturbing references to ‘sun worshipper’, (silly) which essentially obliterates the entire transgressive significance and its impact.
Carl Laemmle had given Ulmer free rein on the story’s content but kept a close eye on the director in other respects. Ulmer had not been given the larger budgets that either Dracula or Frankenstein had been endowed with. He was also given a very short span of time to shoot the film, a mere fifteen days. This did not deter or side-track Ulmer at all who was used to working with small budgets and knew how to construct a film that looks as elegant as any largely budgeted project. He began imagining the story, scrapping many scripts that Universal had been collecting. Any pretext associating the picture with Poe’s short story was cast to the wind. And so he created an entirely new vision. At the core, the film works thematically as a revenge piece. But of course, there is so much more bewitching the film’s narrative.
Prague Jew Gustav Meyrink novelist The Golem.Paul Wegener in the adaptation of Czech writer Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem
In the 1960s Peter Bogdanovich interviewed Ulmer in ‘The Devil Made Me Do It‘ who recalled another theme that influenced The Black Cat. He had been in Prague”¦ and met novelist Gustav Meyrink the man who wrote The Golem as a novel. Like Kafka, Mayrink was a Prague jew who was tied up with the mysticism of the Talmud. They had a lot of discussions, contemplating a play based upon the Fortress Doumont which was a French fortress the Germans had destroyed with their shelling during World War I. There were some survivors who didn’t come out for years.The commander who ultimately went insane three years later was brought back to Paris, driven mad because he had literally walked on a mountain of bodies and bones. “The commander was a strange Euripides figure.” Ulmer told Bogdanovich. (Euripides is an archetypal figure as a representational mythical hero, an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances. Also, Euripides voluntarily exiled himself, rather than be executed like his colleague Socrates who was put to death for his perceived dangerously intellectual influence.)
Much of the ambiance of this historic incident is reflected in Bela Lugosi’s dialogue in The Black Cat.
Vitus Werdegast– “I can still sense death in the air.”
“And that hill yonder, where Engineer Poelzig now lives, was the site of Fort Marmorus. He built his home on its very foundations. Marmorus, the greatest graveyard in the world.” – Vitus Werdegast
Within The Black Cat is there an aesthetic tension between Expressionist Caligarism and The New Objectivity movement or Neue Sachlichkeit, which begin in Habsburg Central Europe at the dawn of the Nazi era? The New Objectivity espoused a new attitude of public life in Weimar Germany with it’s art, literature, music, and architecture created to adapt to the changing mood of the culture. It was characterized by a practical engagement with the world, which was regarded by Germans to be an inherently American style or the cult of objectivity, functionalism, usefulness, essentially- Americanism. While the film injects a modern wholesome American couple into the plot, they are mired down in the decaying ghosts of the past atrocities and sins perpetrated not only on the land but by the presence of the vengeful and malignant atmosphere. An atmosphere represented within the framework of a very Caligarian milieu. This creates friction or contrast by injecting the fresh American presence into the plot, surrounding them within an environment of an arcane and non-naturalist landscape.
The Expressionist Caligarism wasstarted by director Robert Wiene whose surreal masterpiece Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or Das Cabinett des Dr. Caligari will always be remembered as the iconic ultra-expressionist watershed moment of the genre. ‘Caligarism’ Painters turned set designers Walter Röhring and Walter Reimann was responsible for the brilliant expressionist style which influenced other films with both the ornamental patterns transfixed in the dysmorphic repertoire of shapes and configurations that permeated the set designs for 20s science fiction films like Andrew Andrejew’s AELITA – Queen of Mars 1924.
AELITA- Queen of Mars 1924
The use of the color black or more accurately, the absence of light, can also be seen as part of the symbolism in The Black Cat: We are the voyeurs to this claustrophobic madness, as spectators we see the horror as highlighted by the stark blackness of the clothes, the black trees which are filmed in silhouette against a blackened sky. Poelzig is often silhouetted in distinctive blackness. This use of the color black or again more accurately in lighting it with the absence of any color or ‘light’, is used thematically as a way of installing a sadistic marker of the imagery.
The cast of Characters:
Boris Karloff is Hjalmar Poelzig
Bela Lugosi is Dr. Vitus Werdegast
David Manners is Peter Alison
Julie Bishop is Joan Alison (as Jacqueline Wells)
Egon Brecher is The Majordomo to Poelzig
Harry Cording is Thamal Werdegast’s faithful servant
Lucille Lund is Karen Werdegast
Henry Armetta is Police Sergeant
Albert Conti is Police Lieutenant
John Carradine plays the Organist (uncredited)
Boris Karloff playsHaljmar Poelzig who is perhaps one of his most impressively darker characterizations. His all-black attire, strangely androgynous hairstyle, and exaggerated use of make-up accentuate his features giving him the appearance of extreme and austere wickedness. Karloff’s eyebrows arch, his eyes flare and the use of his black lipstick make him almost deathly. Jack Pierce (The Man Who Laughs 1928, Dracula 1931, Frankenstein 1931 White Zombie 1932, The Mummy 1932 Bride of Frankenstein 1935 ) was responsible for the subtle yet dramatic make-up.
Karloff’s voice, his wonderfully lilting voice is typically modulated within the drift of his dialogue. He is remarkable as the incarnation of profane evil, with his icy cold reserve and detachment from the world.
Both protagonists are enigmatic, Karloff’s Poelzig’s utter malevolence and Lugosi’s hero Dr. Vitus Werdegast who is sympathetic yet also damaged, callous, and obsessed by his lust for revenge, make both these disparate figures, magnetic archetypes that are equally compelling.
Boris and Bela in a high-stakes chess match, a game of death
The film takes place in Hungary, starting out with scurrying masses boarding the grandeur of the Orient Express. The Allisons are on their way to Budapest, Visegrad for their honeymoon. American Newlyweds Peter a mystery writer and his new bride Joan Allison board the opulent train. David Manners who plays spare hero Peter Allison portrayed Jonathan Harker in 1931’s Dracula opposite Lugosi and again appeared as the leading man with Karloff in The Mummy 1932.Jacqueline Wells plays Joan. At first, the young love birds have their compartment all to themselves until Dr. Vitus Werdegast, psychiatrist and veteran of World War I, a captive who has just been released from a prisoner of war camp after 15 years imprisonment, (Ulmer himself was a refugee of Hitler) enters the compartment due to a mix up needing a place to sleep. He tells the young couple that he is on his way to visit an ‘old friend.’
Vitus Werdegast -“So you are going to Visegrad” Peter Allison- “Yes to (sounds like) Gaermbish by bus.” Vitus Werdegast– “Gaermbish is very beautiful, I too am going very near there.” Peter Allison– “For sport?” Vitus Werdegast (raising his eyebrows, looking down, and speaking more to himself) perhaps”¦ I go to visit an ‘old friend'” (spoken with a dark unpinning of hatred)
While Joan and Peter fall asleep the gentle yet peculiar Werdegast becomes fixated on her, stroking her hair while her husband Peter who is now awake watches silently for a moment. Werdegast explains that his wife and daughter were left behind when he was sent away to prison.
Vitus Werdegast- “I beg your indulgence, my friend. Eighteen years ago I left a girl, so like your lovely wife”¦ To go to war. Kaiser and country you know”¦ (serious look, deeper inflection) She was my wife. Have you ever heard of Kurgaal? (Peter quietly nods ‘no’) It is a prison below Amsk. Many men have gone there”¦ Few have returned. (taking in a deep breath) I have returned. After fifteen years”¦ I have returned.”
In a premonitory monologue, the driver had spoken of ancient malevolence in Marmorus during the years of the war. “the ravine down there was piled twelve-deep with dead and wounded… the little river below was swollen, a red raging torrent of blood”
When the honeymooners get off the train, it is pouring rain… they agree to share a bus ride with Werdegast, but there is a storm and the desolate rain-soaked roads are treacherous, causing the bus to crash. The bus driver dies, and Joan is injured in the wreck. Needing to seek shelter Dr. Werdegast recommends that they join him at his friend’s home, the Castle Poelzig, so he can take care of the young bride. Werdegast treats Joan’s injury, injecting her with a powerful hallucinogen called hyoscine.
The name Poelzig is an homage to Hans Poelzig set designer/architect of the 1920s whose version of Der Golem was stunning. Real-life Poelzig was responsible for the astonishing Prague set that underpinned the mythic mood of The Golem.
In Hans Poelzig’s own words, “The effect of architecture is magical.”And he meant that literally as he believed that every building was a living thing, had its own musical rhythm and a mystical sound that could be ‘heard’ by those who were initiated into the world of magic. Though a very private man it was known that Poelzig dabbled in magical arts, holding spiritualist seances with his wife at their home and using their daughter as a medium.
According to Poelzig’s biographer, Theodor Heuss, his library was “filled with the works of mystics, the occult sciences and astrology“ he was in the pursuit of the mysteries of eternal forms that he erected and revered through his sacred work constructing his grand style architectural designs as his ‘magic’ medium. Poelzig also found cinema to be an environment for his magical sensibilities, jotting in his notebook “Film”¦ the magic of form-the form of magic”¦ Devil’s Mass”¦”Â
Architect Engineer Hans Poelzig indulged in the magical arts and believed that buildings had a soul…
Poelzig intrigued a lot of people with his mysterious persona. Director Max Reinhardt hired Engineer Hans Poelzig to build sets for his theatrical stages. Ulmer was one of the architect’s junior assistants who later worked on the set of The Golem as a silhouette cutter for Paul Wegeners monumental production. Ulmer had studied architecture in Vienna and so carried that knowledge with him which sheds light on his sense of set design.
Hans Poelzig had a grand imagination, a creative fortitude, and a host of eccentricities, one of which was to be at times a very overpowering presence and domineering personality.
This left an impression on Ulmer, who took those memories from Germany to Hollywood and created a cinematic resurrection of designer Hans Poelzig’s persona in the image of Karloff’s shadowy devil worshiper Hjalmar Poelzig, creating the shades, shadows, and the template for Ulmer’s mystical engineer sadist of The Black Cat’s.
F.W. Murnau’s Faust 1926 too, definitely bears its influence on Ulmer who worked as a crew member on the film. Faust, in terms of the cinema of the Satanic, was a major studio production whose main protagonist was the Devil and who was a complex character, and not merely a vehicle for a simple horror-themed picture, it sprung from a confluence of intellectualism and metaphysical ponderings.
Murnau’s Faust (1926).
DEVILS OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION IN CLASSICAL FILM
Stefan Eggeler-illustrations for Gustav Meyrink-Walpurgisnacht-(1922).Dante’s Inferno
The Black Cat does seem to be one of the earliest illustrations of the Satanic cult film. While the era of Silent Film had a slew of films that dealt with the devil and black magic, (Dante’s Inferno 1911, The Student of Prague 1913, Henrik Galeen’sThe Golem 1914Thomas Edison’sThe Magic Skin 1915, The Black Crook 1916, The Devil’s Toy 1916, The Devil’s Bondswoman 1916, Conscience 1917,Murnau’sSatanas 1919, Der Golem 1920, The Devil Worshipper 1920, Dreyer’sLeaves of Satan’s Book 1920, and 1921’s Häxan, Nosferatu 1922. The Sorrows of Satan 1926 and F.W. Murnau’s Faust 1926) After the economic crash of 1929 these very recognized landmark films seem to disappear. The 30s had The Black Cat 1934 and The Student of Prague (1935), both of these films might be the protracted essence of the Satanic Expressionism of 20s German cinema.
The ‘devil worship’ film or ‘Satanic’ cinema evokes our primal fears, paranoia, and unconscious dread that is implicit toward the ‘Other’ As was in Rosemary’s Baby, Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Ira Levin’s brilliant portrayal of this very paranoia. Satanic films trigger our fears of the intrusion of an outsider who infiltrates society, or rather the comfortability of our moral landscape. It also signposts our secret pleasures which are derivative or surrogate as catharsis by way of the horrors of satanic power. In the 40s the few offerings were William Dieterle’s The Devil and Daniel Webster 1941,Maurice Tourneur’sCarnival of Sinners (1943), and Mark Robson/Val Lewton’s literate and intensely woven The Seventh Victim (1943) and Thorold Dickinson’s imaginative masterpiece The Queen of Spades 1949.
Director William Dieterle’s The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941).The 7th Victim (1943) is a shadow play about a devil cult by Val Lewton.Thorold Dickinson’s story about a pact with the Devil – The Queen of Spades 1949.
While Universal had successes with both Dracula and Frankenstein, The Black Cat is a more intensely layered film with its hidden and not-so-implicit meanings. It has a depth that explores the undercurrent of the 1920s aestheticism and fascination with magic. There are heterogeneous elements that run through both compelling performances by Karloff and Lugosi’s characterizations.
“Next time I go to Niagra Falls.”
Werdegast“You sold Marmorus to the Russians”¦ scurried away in the night and left us to die. Is it to be wondered, that you should choose this place to be your house? A masterpiece of construction built upon the ruins of the masterpiece of destruction”¦ the masterpiece of murder. (he laughs) The murderer of ten thousand men returns to the place of his crime. Those who died were fortunate. I was taken a prisoner to Kurgaal, Kurgaal, where the soul is killed”¦ slowly. Fifteen years I rotted in the darkness. Waited”¦ not to kill you, to kill your soul”¦ slowly. Where is my wife Karen and my daughter?!!!!”
Poelzig–“Karen? Why what do you mean?”
Werdegast –“I mean you told Karen I had been killed, I found out that much in Budapest. I mean you always wanted her in the days at Salzberg before the war, always, from the first time you saw her. I mean that after you saved your own hide and left us all to die in Marmorus, you took Karen and induced her to go to America with you. I traced the two of you there.And to Spain and to South America and finally here. Where is she?”
The film is also powerful in its evoking of the horrors of World War I, which was still a very haunting specter in the public psyche. Most Universal films offered escapism, in contrast, The Black Cat confronts the viewer with a bit of historic retelling of the nightmares of war, more penetrating than the usual concocted monsters the studio was proffering.
“Where is she?”Poelzig- “Vitus.. you are mad” Poelzig “She died two years after the war” Vitus Werdegast -“How?” Poelzig “Of pneumonia, she was never really very strong you know.” Vitus Werdegast- “(crying) And the child”¦ our daughter?” Poelzig “Dead…”
Karloff’s aloof and restrained malevolence guided by the subtle intonations of his melodious voice tethered to Lugosi’s sympathetic and often poignant performance as the broken Vitus Werdegast, in particular the scene when he first sees his dead wife Karen exhibited as if in a museum, suspended in death, evoking authentic tears, “Why is she like this?” All set to the maudlin Ludwig Van Beethoven’s ‘Symphony No. 7: Second Movement.’
Beethovin’s symphony no. 7 often used in films and a most powerfully contemplative piece underscores Karloff’s soliloquy as the camera glides through the dark and dank dungeon of Marmorus taking us on a tour of the decaying deathly oxygen of the place.
Poelzig leads Werdegast through the subterranean enclosures of Marmorus. It is here that Werdegast sees his wife who had died two years after he was in prison, and that his Karen (Lucille Lund) is now encased in glass.
Poelzig reveals the perfectly preserved body of his wife in necrophilic stasis, that he’s encased in glass like an immoral specimen of his unholy fetishism. This might be the only other reference to Poe and his morbid preoccupation with beauty in death. He reveals the dead body of ‘their’ beautifully angelic wife, encased in her crypt-like glass vessel. Poelzig lies to Werdegast telling him that his daughter is also dead.
Werdegast is devastated and demands retribution but Poelzig insists that fate must wait until the ‘outsiders’ are gone. Of course, Poelzig intends to kill the Americans, sacrificing Joan, but forces Werdegast to play a diabolical game of chess the outcome for which the lives of the young couple hinge upon. Werdegast loses and Joan is then taken to another room to await Poelzig, as she is to be his next sacrifice at the black mass ritual during the dark of the moon, in his Bauhaus ceremonial inner sanctum of worship, his sepulcher of debauchery, his sadistic sanctuary, the archaic shrine to the devil.
“Very well Vitus I shall take you to her.”The camera focuses on the darkened spiral staircase heading downward toward the dungeon and then again as Poelzig and Werdegast ascend from the subterranean nightmare.
Poelzig “Come”¦ Vitus”¦ come are we men or are we children? Of what use are all these melodramatic gestures? You say your soul was killed, that you have been dead all these years. And what of me”¦ did we not both die here in Marmorus fifteen years ago ?”¦ Are we any the less victims of the war than those whose bodies were torn asunder? Are we not both, the living dead? For now, you come to me playing at being the avenging angel”¦ childishly thirsting for blood. We understand each other too well. We know too much of life. We shall play a little game Vitus. A game of death if you like. But under any circumstances, you shall have to wait until these people are gone. Until we are alone.”
“You will find her almost as beautiful as when you last saw her… Do you see Vitus I have cared for her tenderly and well.” “Is she not BEAUTIFUL… “ “I wanted to have her beauty always.”-
“Why’s she”¦ why’s she like this…?”-Â
Poelzig has finished his nihilistic sermon. The camera as spectator angles back on the two men walking slowly again. Whatever remained of the man, Vitus Werdegast has now been annihilated.
The essence of this makes the film as disturbing and queasy as any in this contemporary age of violent horror films. Ulmer convinced Laemmle Jr to let him make a film in the European Caligari style, surreal, post-modern, and artistic. The one condition was that he use Poe’s title for the picture. The storyline is hallucinatory, dream-like, and nightmarish, framed within the architecture of a set that becomes part of the character of the plot. Poelzig is revealed is the High Priest of a Satanic Cult, there is a scene where we catch sight of him reading a book entitled The Rites of Lucifer, which promotes the customary sacrifice of virgin blood while Werdegast’s beautiful blonde daughter Karen is believed to be dead, sleeps next to him most likely kept in a drug-induced cataleptic state, to maintain her appearance of a morbid deathly slumber in order to feed Poelzig’s penchant for conflating sexuality with death.
“The dark of the moon, this tonight.”
Hjalmar Poelzig owner, engineer, and designer of the castle is an intense and eccentric man whose castle rests upon the bloody ruins and remains of Fortress Marmorus and the slew of graves where the dead betrayed soldiers, victims of his treason during World War I are buried. Poelzig is as removed from his treacherous past as is his Modern castle which denies its bloody legacy.
Werdegast accuses Poelzig of betraying the Hungarians to the Russians, while he was the commanding officer of the Fort during the war. Telling him that he was responsible for leaving him and the other soldiers to die or be captured. He also believes that Poelzig stole his wife and child when he was sent to prison and that they must still be in the fortress somewhere. Poelzig has a room secretly hidden especially for his satanic black masses. As the conflict unfolds, the young couple becomes the unwitting hostages of these two men.
One of these men is an unorthodox heretic who is consumed with power, death, sublimation, and perverse sensuality. The other is blinded by revenge and hatred for the man who destroyed his life. He also has an all-consuming fear of cats, and early on in the film kills Poelzig’s black cat, although Poelzig is seen carrying around a black cat with him while he glides around his house as he revisits the women he has encased in glass.
We are first introduced to Poelzig as he is laying on a bed with his young wife Karen, a quite provocative image by 1934 Hollywood standards. The vision is sterile and hypothermic, surrounded by glass, chrome, and steel. As the camera moves into Poelzig’s bedroom lair, we see him as he rises up from a prone position emerging in silhouette like a wraith.
Once Joan enters the castle Poelzig is drawn to her, as she is young and attractive possibly bearing a resemblance to his dead wife. As the narrative progresses, it becomes even more strange and uncanny, as Poelzig’s dead wife is revealed to have been married to Werdegast, who believed he died during the battle of Marmorus. She marries Poelzig but he murders her soon afterward, raising their daughter, and then in an imbroglio of incestuous lust, marries the ethereal young girl, it’s so creepy and blasphemous.
“Please child, listen to me we’re all in danger, Poelzig is a mad beast I know.”“I know… I’ve seen the proof-‘He took Karen my wife murdered her and murdered my child.”
Werdegast tells Joan “Did you ever hear of Satanism, the worship of the devil of evil? Herr Poelzig is the great modern priest of the ancient cult. And tonight at the dark of the moon, the rites of Lucifer are recited. And if I’m not mistaken, he intends you to play a part in that ritual. a very important part. There child, be brave, no matter how hopeless it seems. Be brave it is your only chance.”
“‘I’m Karen… Madam Poelzig.”“Karen do you understand me, your father has come for you.”
When Poelzig wins the chess game, Peter Allison is chained up and locked away in the dungeon below. Werdegast is spiraling into madness now and has his loyal servant Thamal merely pretend to be loyal to Poelzig in order to help his true master Werdegast. Joan meets Werdegast’s daughter Karen who wanders into her room like a lithe spirit. She introduces herself as Madam Poelzig. Joan tells her that her father is actually alive and in the castle waiting to rescue her. When Poelzig finds out he brutally kills Karen and leads Werdegast to find her body in order to torture him further.
Poelzig ascends the grand staircase as his cult guests begin to gather around him. The image is pictorial and impressive. as they ready themselves for the Satanic ritual. The soulless expressions on their faces is quite chilling.
Poelzig begins his intonations to the dark master as Joan is led toward the altar.
Karloff improvises giving a compelling invocation to Satan yet actually consists of a few harmless Latin non- sequesters, phrases he used from his college Latin, like Vino Veritas which basically means ‘In wine there is truth’. Cave Canum, ‘Beware of the dog’ and Cum grano salis which is ‘With a grain of salt.’
Werdegast and his servant Thamal (Harry Cording) stop the ceremony, interrupting the sacrifice, and eventually avenge his wife’s death and the plundering and despoiling of his beautiful daughter. They rush Joan away from the ceremony and hide her from Poelzig.
This is when Joan tells him that his daughter is quite alive and has now been forced to marry Poelzig. Joan’s screams alert Peter who can not enter the barred room. He thinks Werdegast is assaulting her when he is trying to help her find the key to the door and so Peter shoots him, but he lets them escape.
Thamal has been wounded by Poelzig’s servant but rushes to help his master. The two men strap Poelzig to his Art Deco-inspired contraption, an embalming rack that looks like an angular cruciform, while Werdegast rips away Poelzig’s shirt, grabbing a scalpel he begins to skin his adversary alive.
I’ll leave it here. It’s enough that you’ve seen Poelzig flayed alive. The film deserves a fresh re-viewing. I hope you’ve enjoyed my little overview of this striking masterpiece of Gothic horror featuring two of the most iconic genre stars Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Please let me know what you think, and please… be kind to black cats…
Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965) (British) is director/producer Otto Preminger’spsychological thriller, considered to be part of the noir cannon or Post-Noir yet embraces the suspense thriller sub-genre. A thriller about a little girl who may or may not exist! The film deals with the dread of losing yourself, not being believed, and childhood nightmares that are rooted in the sense of lack of safety in the environment where they should be protected.
Starring Carol Lynley (The Cardinal 1963, Shock Treatment 1964, The Shuttered Room 1967) as Ann Lake and Keir Dullea (2001: A Space Odyssey 1968, Black Christmas 1974) as brother Stephen Lake, the Americans who relocate to London and exude a mysteriously emotionless manner even when they act frenzied, enraged or frantically distressed.
The film also stars Laurence Olivier as Superintendent Newhouse, Martita Huntas retired head schoolmistress Ada Ford, Anna Massey as the uptight Elvira Smollett, Clive Revillas Sergeant Andrews, playwright Noel Coward as Horatio Wilson, the lewd, drunken, seedy and lecherous Landlord who is creepy and inappropriate as he carries his little dog Samantha around with him everywhere. He’s also got a wicked whip collection… one which was once owned by the ‘master himself’ the Marquis de Sade.
Otto Preminger and Laurence Olivier on the set of Bunny Lake.Otto Preminger and Noel Coward who plays the lascivious Horatio Wilson on the set of Bunny Lake Is Missing.
Preminger filmed Bunny Lake Is Missing in stunning black & white using a widescreen format on location in London, hiring Director of Photography and cameraman Denys Coop (The Third Man 1949, Saint Joan 1957, Lolita 1962 and Billy Lair 1963) and Production Designer Don Ashton.
The story is based on the mystery novel by Marryam Modell using the pseudonym Evelyn Piper (who also wrote the novel, The Nanny 1965 brilliantly adapted to the screen starring Bette Davis as a very sympathetic yet disturbed nanny) With a screenplay by John and Penelope Mortimer, Preminger adapted Piper’s original novel and reoriented the story taking it out of New York and placing it in heart of London.
Seth Holt directs my favorite- Bette Davis in The Nanny- a 1965 adaptation of Marryam Modell’s novel.
The incredibly striking, simplistic, and evocative score was composed by Paul Glass (Lady in a Cage 1964) and used not only in the opening titles designed effectively by the great Saul Bass but the theme is used frequently as a childlike refrain, poignant and moving. The British group The Zombiesalso appear in a television broadcast, featuring three of their songs, “Remember You”, “Just Out of Reach” and “Nothing’s Changed.”
No one designs a title sequence like Saul Bass… each one evocative, primal… yet simplistic at its very core.
Hope Bryce (Anatomy of a Murder 1959, Exodus 1960, Advise and Consent 1962) was responsible for the Costume design.
A standout performance is Martita Hunt, the wonderful British character actress who was in Boris Karloff’s Thriller episode as the batty aunt Celia Sommerville in The Last of The Summervilles. Here, she plays the school’s eccentric retired old headmistress Ada Ford who listens incessantly to recordings of little children who tell their nightmares and dreams recorded on her reel-to-reel tape machine.
The fabulous Martita Hunt as the batty Celia Sommerville co-stars Phyllis Thaxter as the cunning cousin Ursula Sommerville in one of the great episodes of Boris Karloff’s anthology television series THRILLER.
Columbia Pictures actually wanted Otto Preminger to cast Jane Fonda as Ann Lake, and Fonda was very anxious to play the role, but Preminger insisted on using Carol Lynley.
Carol Lynley as Ann Lake.
Much like the hype of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, audiences were not allowed to tell the film’s ending. The film’s poster promoted the tagline “No One Admitted While the Clock is Ticking” I will also choose not to reveal the film’s coda in this post, so as not to give away the culmination of the film’s secrets or its finale.
This was one of Preminger’s last films with a Noir milieu, since The Man With The Golden Arm 1955 starring Frank Sinatra.
Preminger and Frank Sinatra on the set of Man With The Golden Arm (1955).
Within the film’s openness, and its various environments, it appears that several of the frames are cluttered with visual odds and ends and bits and pieces, the sequence with the unbroken view of dolls, Wilson’s African masks, and whips all evidence of the film’s sense of Fetishism.
Bunny Lake is Missing has a visual openness and fluidity which gives the film a striking dimension. The sweeping camerawork is familiar from the noir days of Preminger’s epic Laura (1944), although here it breaks away more completely from the enclosed environs of the 40s noir film.
Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney in Preminger’s iconic noir classic Laura (1944).
Denys Coop’s diligent camera seems to peek into corners, moving through doors and up and down those iconographicSTAIRS becoming part of the film’s fretful and apprehensive rhythm. Coop uses peculiar camera angles and lights his subjects from below in order to distort the mood, and throw odd uncomfortable shadows on their faces.
An odd angle as the camera catches Ann Lake coming up the iconographic noir stairs. The visual Images are often a little skewed in Bunny Lake.While Ann talks with the quirky Ada Ford, her face is lit from underneath giving her an ethereal, fairytale-like glimmer.
BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING: THE SYNOPSIS
A single American mother Ann Lake (Carol Lynley relocates to London England to live with her journalist brother Stephen (Keir Dullea), Ann drops off her four-year-old daughter Felicia nicknamed ‘Bunny’ on the first day at her new nursery school “The Little People’s Garden.” When Ann returns to see how Bunny is getting on in school, she can not find a teacher or administrator present, except for a cranky German cook who is complaining about serving Junket (which is essentially gruel) played by Lucie Mannheim. Ann is forced to leave Bunny unsupervised in the building’s ‘first-day’ room under the promise by the cranky cook that she will look after the child. Ann must rush to meet the movers who are awaiting her at the new apartment. When Ann returns in the afternoon to pick up her little girl, the cook has quit, and she becomes distressed when Bunny is nowhere to be found and the school’s employees Elvira Smollett (Anna Massey) and Dorothy (Adrienne Corri) who are left in charge fervently obstruct Ann’s attempts at locating Bunny even denying that the little girl was ever at the school in the first place. No one remembers having seen her. This creates a mood of distrust and paranoia.
Ann desperately calls her brother Stephen for help. Ann and Stephen were raised without a father, and Ann never married the man who got her pregnant. She and Bunny have depended on Stephen to take care of them. Brother Stephen becomes enraged by the carelessness of the school’s staff, but Scotland Yard begins to investigate the matter. In walks, police superintendent Newhouse acted thoughtfully by Laurence Olivier assisted by Sergeant Andrews played by Clive Revill. Newhouse begins searching through the Lake’s belongings and the details of their lives trying to uncover what seems to be a mystery as to whether the child ever existed at all. He discovers that Ann once had an imaginary childhood daughter named Bunny, but even odder is that there seems to be no presence of Bunny’s belongings at the Lake’s residence.
Little Bunny’s hair brush and comb are set out on the bathroom shelf…
Where are Bunny’s things? A taste of female hysteria and maternal paranoia. Does the curious headmistress Ada Ford know more about Bunny’s disappearance than she’s telling or is she just one of the plot’s red herrings?Retired headmistress Ada Ford has a fantastical grasp of the inner workings of a child’s nightmares. Inhabited perfectly by the wonderful character actress Martita Hunt.
There are several red herrings that are inserted into the plot to divert us away from the truth. One such red herring involves retired headmistress, the eccentric Ada Ford played by the marvelous Martita Hunt who seems to have an odd sensibility about children and an acute understanding of childhood motivations which is quickly picked up on by the plasticine yet cold-blooded Stephen Lake. Yet another odd character in the mix is the lecherous landlord Horatio Wilson an aging writer and radio actor played by Noel Coward who revels in his African Fertility Masks and lets himself into the Lakes apartment at will, in a perpetual state of inebriation lurking about making lewd gestures and propositions to Ann. He also has a collection of whips, exhibiting signs of his sadomasochistic proclivities.
Horatio Wilson (Noel Coward) is a peculiar sort… as he intrudes on Ann’s world.
All these strange characters give Inspector Newhouse a lot to digest, as he tries to eliminate all the possible suspects while trying to find a trace of Bunny that proves she actually does exist, not discounting the idea that Ann Lake is a delusional hysterical woman.
Ann and Stephen tell Inspector Newhouse that Bunny’s passport and all her belongings have also gone missing, assumed stolen during the mysterious burglary in the apartment. Another odd detail that doesn’t support Ann’s truly having raised this missing child, is that the school’s authorities claim that they never received a tuition check for a Bunny Lake.
Ann shows Stephen the voucher for the Doll Hospital where Bunny’s doll is being repaired. Proof that she exists? Traces of an incestuous bond from the bathtub…
Ann finally remembers that she has a ticket for the Doll Hospital where she took Bunny’s doll. She remembers this during a scene where Stephen is taking a bath, and brother and sister are both just smoking and talking like a married couple. The film constantly hints at traces of a very incestuous relationship, creepily manifested in several scenes, Stephen’s physical contact with Ann when he tries to comfort her, and one other such overt scene while Stephen is taking his bath…
Ann runs out into the dark and ominous London nightlife to try and get the doll from the repair hospital so she can show the police that Bunny owned a doll, reasoning that this will prove she exists.
![Title: OLD DARK HOUSE, THE (1932) "¢ Pers: STUART, GLORIA "¢ Year: 1932 "¢ Dir: WHALE, JAMES "¢ Ref: OLD005AA "¢ Credit: [ UNIVERSAL / THE KOBAL COLLECTION ]](https://i0.wp.com/thelastdrivein.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/the-old-dark-house.jpg)
