The streaming service Shudder recently dropped a documentary on the life and career of horror movie legend Boris Karloff. To go along with this, Shudder also added a number of Karloff’s classic movies, most notably The Mummy and various Frankenstein films. However, there was also a curio called The Black Cat, and all I knew about that, besides the fact it was listed on two of my “must see” posters (yes, I have more than one) was it was a brisk 66 minutes. Hey, I can knock that out in an evening!
Plus, while Karloff got top billing, the movie is also his first onscreen collaboration with Bela Lugosi. True, it was apparently something of a bomb when it came out, the first for Universal’s horror movies, but if nothing else, I got something with two horror icons doing their thing.
American honeymooners Peter and Joan Alison (David Manners and Julie Bishop) are traveling through Hungary when a booking error gets them a companion in what they thought was a private train car. This would be psychiatrist Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Lugosi). He is returning home from a Siberian POW camp he has just left since being captured by the Russians during the first World War. A series of accidents has the couple and Werdegast stop at the home of architect Hjalmar Poelzig (Karloff), built on the ruins of the fort that was both where Poelzig commanded troops during the war and where Werdegast was captured. There’s some bad blood between these two men, mostly dealing with how Werdegast suspects Poelzig may have had something to do with the disappearances of his wife and daughter, both named Karen and both played in the movie by Lucille Lund. Yes, there’s a good reason for one actress to play both women, and it’s kinda nutty. But this is a nutty movie.
It’s nutty, in part, because while the opening title card says the movie was “suggested” by the Edgar Allen Poe story of the same name, the actual plot is very, very different. The short story had a man, the typical Poe narrator, claim he is perfectly rational while thinking his wife’s cat is somehow out to get him until he kills his wife and walls her corpse in the house, only for the authorities to be notified by the sounds of the cat in the chamber with the corpse meowing loudly. Here, well, Poelzig has a cat or two and Werdegast has an irrational fear of cats. That’s about it. The rest of this fever dream of a movie is all original.
That may be the best way to describe this movie. It exists mostly as a showcase for Lugosi and Karloff, allowing them to share the screen and spar a bit on opposite sides of a conflict. Lugosi, though he performs more acts of straight-up violence, is actually the heroic half of the pair with Karloff’s character being the leader of a satanic cult with plans for Joan. In fact, the most horrifying act of violence is committed by Lugosi, off-camera, but he does state out loud what he’s going to do before he does it. As a showcase for Lugosi and Karloff, this movie works very well.
Where it doesn’t work is with the characters of Peter and Joan. The plot seems to make it so one of them is always in some way incapacitated somewhere for most of the movie. It starts with Joan’s injury, putting Peter on screen to interact with Karloff or Lugosi as needed, and when the pair try to leave, Peter is knocked unconscious, but done so in a way that his fate was unknown for the longest time. I was actually wondering if he’d died as the movie didn’t seem that interested in him as Joan’s peril increased only for him to wake up in a dungeon cell in the last few minutes to try and rescue his wife from the cult, not knowing that the hard part was mostly done by then. I get that these are not really important characters in the grand scheme of things. This movie really exists only to put Karloff and Lugosi on screen together. Everything else is more or less incidental. But it’s hard to care for the fates of these two people if we don’t see enough of them to get to know them at all. That’s a rather common problem for horror movies of this era, but at the same time, a plot this bonkers in execution probably needed to do a little more to make their fates interesting.
Grade: B-
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