The Black Cat dir. by Edgar G. Ulmer, and: I Walked with a Zombie dir. by Jacques Tourneur, and: High and Low dir. by Akira Kurosawa, and: The Pumpkin Eater dir. by Jack Clayton, and: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes dir. by Howard Hawks, and: War and Peace dir. by Sergei Bondarchuk

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Black Cat dir. by Edgar G. Ulmer, and: I Walked with a Zombie dir. by Jacques Tourneur, and: High and Low dir. by Akira Kurosawa, and: The Pumpkin Eater dir. by Jack Clayton, and: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes dir. by Howard Hawks, and: War and Peace dir. by Sergei Bondarchuk Jefferson Hunter (bio) Film Chronicle: The Black Cat, directed by Edgar G. Ulmer (Universal Vault Series, 2013; Amazon Prime streaming) I Walked with a Zombie, directed by Jacques Tourneur (Turner Home Entertainment, 2005; Amazon Prime and Criterion Channel streaming) High and Low, directed by Akira Kurosawa (Criterion Collection, 2011; Amazon Prime and Kanopy streaming) The Pumpkin Eater, directed by Jack Clayton (Powerhouse, 2017; Amazon Prime streaming) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, directed by Howard Hawks (Twentieth-Century Fox, 2014; Amazon Prime streaming) War and Peace, directed by Sergei Bondarchuk (Criterion Collection, 2019; Criterion Channel streaming) Edgar G. Ulmer, one of the many Jewish filmmakers who fled Hitler's Germany for Hollywood, had designed sets for Max Reinhardt and collaborated with Billy Wilder and others on the innovative German documentary Menschen am Sonntag, and with those credentials he quickly found work in California. The second feature he made there, Universal's The Black Cat (1934), brought Boris Karloff and Béla Lugosi together onscreen for the first time and no doubt for that reason became a big hit. Viewed nowadays, it seems a rare old piece of hokum, entertaining, sometimes unintentionally funny, occasionally chilling. The screenplay is credited to Peter Ruric, a pseudonym for Paul Cain, one of the most lurid and violent of 1930s pulp writers. At the start his story could scarcely be more conventional. An innocent American couple on honeymoon in the Carpathians—ever since F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu, the location of choice for horror movies—encounters a suave and mysterious European psychiatrist (Lugosi). Then after a road accident they take shelter from the dark and the rain—the weather of choice for horror movies—in the fortress home of a suave and mysterious European architect (Karloff, here wearing heavy eyeliner and a bizarre widow's peak rather than monster make-up). The architect, it develops, is a Satanist. He stores the dead bodies of beautiful white-gowned women in glass cabinets and gloats over the collection while fondling his pet black cat. Furthermore, by magical powers he seems to make the American couple kiss (an action shown in an artful deep-focus shot contrived by Ulmer and his cinematographer, John J. Mescall), then plays Bach on the organ before presiding over a Black Mass with chanted Latin. By this point the film has grown creepy rather than conventional, and the creepiness, in spite of being countered every now and then by the downhome Americanness of the [End Page 281] young husband ("Sounds like a lot of supernatural baloney to me"), stays in effect all the way to the violent final confrontation between psychiatrist and architect, wherein a flaying alive takes place. You will be relieved to hear it is shown in shadow rather than directly photographed. Universal's poster for the film blazons the title as "Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat." Poe did indeed write a story called "The Black Cat," the condemned-cell narrative of a dipsomaniac who perversely kills his pet black cat and then his wife, immures her behind a brick wall, and is finally driven to confess by his hysterical guilt. Clearly, Ulmer's film uses almost nothing of this plot except the black cat, which (as in Poe) is at first caressed, then killed. That business of the cabinet-enclosed female corpses may distantly recall Poe's secret-burial theme, and the overwrought visuals of Ulmer's film look like a stylistic response to Poe's no less overwrought prose ("the image of a hideous—of a ghastly thing—of the Gallows!—oh, mournful and terrible engine of Horror and of Crime—of Agony and of Death!"), but in making The Black Cat Universal was obviously less interested in reworking the story than in borrowing Poe's sure-fire title and co-opting his cultural standing. Karloff, Lugosi, and Poe—What a trio!, the studio publicists must have exclaimed...