“Do you hear that, Vitus? The phone is dead. Even the phone is dead.”
~Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff)
Svengoolie (Saturdays, 7 PM Central on MeTV) will be showing The Black Cat on July 19. This was the first time Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi appeared together on screen. Like most of the Universal horrors, it’s a movie I never get tired of watching. I’ll be tuning in to the big broadcast once again. The last time I presented the film was during the “Screen Deco” film series in 2012 at the Park Ridge Public Library. It was part of an Art Deco film program, but of course, it could’ve easily fit into the “Forbidden Hollywood” pre-Code series we did in 2010. The Black Cat was released in early May of 1934. The Production Code was strictly enforced shortly after in July 1934, so it was one of the last genuine “pre-Code” films. The Black Cat has its admirers, but Boris Karloff’s daughter, Sara Karloff–who visited the Pickwick Theatre in 2018– is decidedly not one of them!
The Black Cat goes beyond moral indiscretions into one of the lowest levels of Hell. Evil has a face in a film that offers murder, torture, incest, and a Satanic ritual. It’s one of the most perverse, morbid films to come out of Hollywood. Some of its suggestiveness did get past local censors who didn’t understand exactly what was going on. What’s so fascinating from an architectural perspective is that the atmosphere of death that pervades throughout the entire film is closely associated with its Art Deco set design.
Boris Karloff, David Manners and Bela Lugosi
The Black Cat is the most striking example of Modernist design in 1930s cinema. In many scholarly examinations of director Edgar G. Ulmer’s masterpiece, authors frequently refer to the “Bauhaus” influence. The Bauhaus, or “house of construction,” was a state-sponsored design school in Germany that was prominent in the Modernist movement. It was founded in Weimar, Germany, in 1919 by Walter Gropius. He created an environment that fostered an artistic spirit. Form following function was one of the basic tenets. These designs were often simplified and devoid of ornamentation. Some of the elements in The Black Cat that represent the style include the stainless steel staircase, the neon lights, and the chrome furnishings.
But the spirit of Modernism flourished in other parts of the world besides Germany. There was France, of course, considered the cradle of Art Deco. In America, Modernism reached the public through the medium of motion pictures where audiences could for the first time discover this new architecture. In Hollywood, theatre-goers experienced the Modernist trend in films like 1930’s What a Widow!, which starred Gloria Swanson. But one of the most memorable of all 1930s films that showcased modern decor was Universal’s The Black Cat.
Ulmer was a product of Weimar cinema. He had studied architecture in Germany before entering film and was undoubtedly familiar with the Bauhaus style. He served as a set designer early in his career for stage director Max Reinhardt. In addition, Ulmer was a designer-apprentice to the great German director F.W. Murnau before eventually coming to America. The Black Cat, his second film in the United States, has a strong Germanic influence throughout due to Ulmer’s (uncredited) hand in its set design. Charles D. Hall, a brilliant designer himself, was the credited art director. Besides the gothic look of the Universal monster series, Hall designed the Art Deco nightclub in the 1929 musical Broadway as well as the streamlined factory for Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times.
The Black Cat begins with a honeymooning couple, Peter (David Manners) and Joan (Jacqueline Wells) Alison. On their European train ride, they meet the renowned Hungarian psychiatrist, Dr. Vitus Werdegast, played by Bela Lugosi– a soldier from the Great War with a score to settle. After an accident on a bus in the countryside, Werdegast guides the travelers to a Modernist house built on the ruins of Fort Marmaros. The owner, Hjalmar Poelzig—the Boris Karloff character– is the man Werdegast has sought.
David Manners and Jacqueline Wells
To say any more of the bizarre plot would rob viewers of the element of surprise, and though many of us have seen this film countless times, others have not. The film is about the kind of evil that can be seen and felt– and embodied in one human form. Poelzig is, like the black cat of legend, evil incarnate– a practitioner of the Black Arts who is masked by a veneer of sophistication. The screenplay was by Edgar Ulmer and Peter Ruric (pulp writer “Paul Cain”). The film’s story took full advantage of the public’s interest in the subject of psychiatry. As a result, The Black Cat is considered a psychological horror film.
The classical music arrangements add to Poelzig’s façade of intellectual refinement. Unlike most films of the era, music is heard almost continuously in The Black Cat with selections from such composers as Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, and Liszt. And I haven’t heard Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo & Juliet” theme played this often since I played The Kiss with Greta Garbo.
Poelzig is an architect. His name is Ulmer’s homage to German Expressionist designer Hans Poelzig, whom he had met on the set of The Golem back in his silent days. The home, built on the ruins of a World War I battlefield, is heavily influenced by the geometric asymmetry of the Bauhaus tradition. Despite having the “old dark house” trappings of stranded guests and secret rooms, The Black Cat is unique because its horror is set in a thoroughly modern and brightly-lit setting–not a shadow-filled castle. Illumination contrasts with the moral darkness of Poelzig. Modernism is also equated with European decadence resulting from the First World War—a new style built upon the buried past. A sense of entrapment and doom pervade the house as though the souls of the dead soldiers reside within. His home, stark and industrial, becomes a prison for those that represent normality. The Black Cat is a superb example of how set design can establish the mood and tone of a motion picture.
“The house is a cold and glossy marvel of glass brick, Bakelite floors, and curving metal staircases,” write Howard Mandelbaum and Eric Myers in Screen Deco. “Furnishings include glass tables, Breuer chairs, and digital clocks. ‘When one sees The Black Cat today,’ mused Ulmer in an interview, ‘one realizes that the set could have been conceived by Poelzig twenty years after the film was made.’” Ulmer himself was ahead of his time in designing it.
Concerning the film’s origins, I’d like to quote Ulmer himself. In Peter Bogdanovich’s Who the Devil Made It, which is a collection of his earlier interviews with legendary Hollywood filmmakers, he asked Ulmer where the idea originated for the house being built on the graveyard of a battlefield: “That came out many years before,” Ulmer said. “I had been in Prague, as I told you, and had worked on The Golem. At that time I met Gustav Meyrinck, the man who wrote Golem as a novel. Meyrinck was one of those strange Prague Jews, like Kafka, who was very much tied up in the mystic Talmudic background. We had a lot of discussions, and Meyrinck at that time was contemplating a play based upon Doumont, which was a French fortress the Germans had shelled to pieces during World War I; there were some survivors who didn’t come out for years. And the commander was a strange Euripedes figure who went crazy three years later, when he was brought back to Paris, because he had walked on that mountain of bodies. I thought it was an important subject, and that feeling was in the air in the twenties.”
Director Edgar G. Ulmer (left) and Bela Lugosi.
The Black Cat was the first of eight pairings of the two titans of terror of the 1930s: Karloff and Lugosi. For those who’d like to read more about their respective careers, turn to author Gregory Mank, who has written profusely on the subject. The most detailed examination of their films can be found in his Karloff and Lugosi: The Story of a Haunting Collaboration. (Every monster kid should have this volume on their bookshelf.) Karloff, of course, was best known for playing the Frankenstein monster three years earlier, and Lugosi would remain forever the definitive Dracula.
For those of us who admire Lugosi, it was rewarding in this film to see him play the hero for a change. Aside from movies like The Return of Chandu, which was a Poverty Row movie serial from the same year, he never got to be the romantic hero. He was mostly typecast as a villain. In fact, in an earlier cut of The Black Cat, Bela’s character, consumed by madness, vengeance and lust, veered into the familiar territory of villainy. Bela was discouraged with what he had once again become. But in the retakes that Ulmer shot, he made Bela more a protector and less a predator.
Even with his heavy Hungarian accent, some of us know Bela could’ve been a great character actor in Hollywood if given the right material. His role in Son of Frankenstein is considered his overall best performance. But even in non-horror films, he could’ve tackled parts that went to actors like fellow Hungarian Paul Lukas. In his prime, long before the days when Ed Wood came knocking, Lugosi was one of the most captivating stars with a magnetic screen presence.
Some critics have labelled Lugosi a ham and not much more… although his reaction to the black cats in the movie is less than subtle! But some of his best acting is also found in The Black Cat. He effectively captures a sad longing for his deceased wife when he meets the newlyweds on the train. Later in the film, he gently underplays his reaction to seeing her preserved body in Poelzig’s gallery. These are qualities of his acting that were rarely exploited in the following years.
A game of death…
Karloff’s performance as the demonic architect, on the other hand, is quite more understated than Lugosi’s role, but it’s no less potent as his expression of emotion comes mainly through body movement, like a cat toying with chessboard pawns. It’s one of the most disturbing roles he ever played and likely the reason his daughter prefers not to watch it again! The Poelzig of Ulmer’s scenario may have been inspired by the real life exploits of British occultist and Satanist Aleister Crowley, a character once called by the press, “the wickedest man in the world.”
Boris Karloff was certainly one of the great character actors from the Golden Age of cinema. Karloff the Uncanny immortalized himself by playing some of the most ghoulish characters on screen, but in real life, he was the opposite of that image. He was an English gentleman, respected and admired by the industry. He did not have Lugosi’s ego, and because of that, directors like Ulmer enjoyed working with him.
Boris Karloff
“Karloff kept insisting that he didn’t want to make any more horror pictures,” Ulmer once said. “One of the things he found most exciting in the film was the wardrobe. He knew he would be playing ‘Karloff,’ but also felt in these duds, he could employ a sort of ‘out of this world’ appearance. That, as you know, was exactly as he appeared.”
David Manners, who died in 1998 at the age of 98, is a familiar face to horror fans, having starred in two of the defining films of the genre: Dracula in 1931 and The Mummy in 1932. Manners was a reliable leading man, bringing an affable quality to roles that could’ve otherwise been quite thankless or perfunctory. Though he’s rendered ineffectual in The Black Cat, it’s still one of his best films. I’ve always liked David Manners for simply being a likeable presence on screen– a beloved leading man for those who grew up on Universal horror.
In a shortened movie career, he appeared in The Last Flight, Frank Capra’s The Miracle Woman, and A Bill of Divorcement— all excellent films. But he considered Hollywood to be what he called a “false place.” He became bored with it and left the screen in 1936. In the 1940s, he returned to the theatre and apparently made quite an impact on one young stage actor. “I owe him my entire career,” Marlon Brando once said of him. David Manners was also an artist and author of several novels as well as a book on philosophy. For more on his life, there is a wonderful tribute page at www.davidmanners.com.
Actress Jacqueline Wells, better known as Julie Bishop, was never a big star. But she did appear in several major films during the second half of her career. In the early 1940s, the Warner Brothers studio offered her a contract but asked her to change her name. Up until then, “Jacqueline Wells” had been associated with B-movies like Tarzan the Fearless. She began as a child actress in the early 1920s and starred in some early Laurel & Hardy shorts– later appearing in their 1936 feature, The Bohemian Girl. After the name change, she starred in such memorable productions as Action in the North Atlantic, The Sands of Iwo Jima and The High and the Mighty. And like David Manners, in her years away from Hollywood, she became a painter. She died on her birthday in 2001 at the age of 87.
Lucille Lund, who plays the angelic Karen Werdegast, broke into Hollywood on the basis of winning a Universal Studios-sponsored magazine contest for the most beautiful college girl. Lund had actually studied acting at Northwestern University. She debuted onscreen in 1933 and worked at various studios. Ironically, she would cross paths with Julie Bishop in several films. On the set of The Black Cat, she had to resist the advances of director Ulmer. Author Steven Warren Hill writes that in retaliation, Ulmer treated her terribly. He called for a lunch break “as she hung helpless by her neck in her glass coffin in one case, and another time constricting her blood supply to the extent that she lost consciousness and began bleeding from the mouth.” Actor Harry Cording, who plays Lugosi’s servant, saved her life. Lucille Lund did not have a long career at Universal.
“Most of the pressbook ballyhoo recommended that theatres exploit the black cat angle. Typical of the feline-infested showmanship were recommendations that two men in a giant black cat outfit roam the streets, that a sidewalk projector beam the image of a black cat, that the theatre sponsor a black cat contest, and that an art contest be held for the best black cat drawing, and that an illuminated cat’s head be employed…” ~ author Don G. Smith
The film had a 15 day shooting schedule and was made for less than a hundred thousand dollars. As time would prove, Ulmer was a B-movie maestro and has earned a cult following to this day because of films like 1945’s Detour– a film noir which was made with even less money. The studio attached Edgar Allan Poe’s name to the material, but aside from the title and the symbolic use of the black cat, there is no direct connection to the original material. Poe’s name, as Ulmer would attest, was used strictly for publicity. Nevertheless, it is very much in the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe. The film runs just over an hour, but more footage had been shot, such as an opening wedding scene. The Black Cat did have some censorship issues which resulted in cuts, such as a shot of a cat licking blood off Joan Alison’s shoulder. Some European countries banned the film outright, but in the United States it became Universal’s biggest hit of 1934 –despite taking a beating by critics.
The Black Cat remains a favorite among genre fans and Karloff-Lugosi admirers alike. Many recognize the film as a masterpiece with many things going for it: there are so many memorable lines of dialogue; the cinematography by Illinois-native John Mescall fluidly captures the set design; and the cast is absolutely perfect. Author Greg Mank summed it up best: “The Black Cat would be their most glorious teaming. Karloff’s Lascivious Lucifer versus Lugosi’s Avenging Angel makes The Black Cat transcend the horror movie genre, and become a grand, lunatic fairy tale, sparked by a wickedly imaginative director, a bewitched camera and a properly epic romantic score.”
But if repeated viewing is any measure of a film’s impact on one’s life, then surely The Black Cat was my favorite film from the “Screen Deco” film program. It’s Hollywood’s best example of the Bauhaus influence. You don’t have to look hard to find it because its presence is as important as any of the human characters. It’s a landmark film of modern architecture because it shows the concepts of a European style in practice in American cinema. Where horror and the Bauhaus meet, you have The Black Cat. Enter at your own risk.
~MCH
