Freddy Vs. Jason...Sort of

Film: The Black Cat
Format: Internet video on laptop.

It’s interesting to look at movies that are 80 years or so old. Some of them translate really well and others just flat out don’t. I’ve been told by a few sources in the past that The Black Cat is a film that belongs in the pantheon. It’s the first time that Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff appeared on screen together—sort of like a Freddy Vs. Jason for the Depression set. But I’ve also been told that it brings the creeps in a big way. Maybe it did in 1934, but today, well…

We have a young American couple that is, for some reason, honeymooning in Hungary, because evidently nothing says the culmination of romance like Carpathia. Peter Alison (David Manners) is a writer of detective novels and his wife Joan (Julie Bishop) seems to have no personality aside from him. In fact, through most of the film, she is merely referred to as “Mrs. Alison.” Regardless, they are cuddling close in the train when they are interrupted by the entrance of a new passenger, Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Lugosi). As it turns out, the couple and the doctor are traveling to a similar location.

They later share a cab/trolley/vehicle which suffers an accident. Joan is hurt in the crash, and they are forced to seek shelter at the nearest house, which stands on the site of an old battlefield. Living in the house is Hjalmar Poelzig (Karloff), the man Werdegast holds responsible for his own long imprisonment and a few other tortures as well as the architect of the house they are in. There’s evident bad blood between the two which soon is made obvious. Werdegast belives that Poelzig forced him into imprisonment to steal his wife and daughter. Poelzig doesn’t deny this, and in fact takes his old friend/enemy to see his wife. Naturally, she’s dead, but Poelzig has preserved her, lending a sort of necrophilia vibe to the proceedings.

And a few more things become evident. First, Werdegast’s daughter is not dead. In fact, after marrying the mother, Poelzig married the daughter, Karen (Lucille Lund), but he is not going to share this fact with her father. Second, Poelzig worships the black goat of hell. Yep! He’s a Satanist, because that’s what bad guys do in old movies. We discover this when he goes to bed one night and tucks himself in with a little light reading about a ritual performed to honor Lucifer. Me? I prefer a little non-fiction.

Anyway, everything starts to come to a head when Joan Alison becomes a pawn in the game played by the two men. Poelzig wants to sacrifice her, and Werdegast would prefer that she live, making this a rare film in which Lugosi plays something more akin to a hero than a villain. And through it all, black cats appear at opportune times, particularly because Werdegast is an ailurophobe.

So let’s get down to the nitty gritty on this one. I know this is a film from 1934 and I really shouldn’t judge it on modern film principles, but in some cases, I have to wonder what Edgar G. Ulmer was thinking when he made this. Claiming that this film was in some way connected with the Edgar Allan Poe story is at best a joke. The director’s name being the same as the author’s and the presence of a black cat are all that connect the two.

And there are other problems, too. Lugosi’s character is perhaps the only one who really sounds like he is from the region in question. Karloff’s accent is decidedly British despite his trying to be passed off as Hungarian here. And Karen Werdegast Poelzig sounds like she’s from Kansas despite having spent her entire life in Hungary.

I’ll admit that the ending is pretty good. There’s a real sense of maliciousness and sadism in the last few minutes of the film. It’s surprisingly gruesome for the time. But that’s really about the only thing that works here. When the better of the creepy, scary dudes is willing to torture someone to death for revenge, you know there’s quality involved.

This is a morbid little film, but it’s not one that I’m convinced begs to be watched. Then again, it was the biggest money maker in 1934, so what the hell do I know?

The biggest innovation in the film is that it has an almost continuous musical score, which was rare for the time. That score, though, often feels completely inappropriate for what is on the screen. While Poelzig reads his Big Book O’ Satanic Witchcraft, for instance, the music is rather jaunty and light. Much of the rest of the time, the music feels like it belongs in a Little Rascals short.

Sadly, The Black Cat fails on almost all fronts for me. The male hero is pasty, stupid, and aggressively wrong, his wife is a virtual non-entity, and the two creepy “foreign” guys do little but glower at each other until the end, and then get into a fist fight. I was bored through most of it, and that’s saying something for a film that runs only an hour.

Why to watch The Black Cat: Lugosi and Karloff on the same screen.
Why not to watch: The promise versus the reality is sort of like the promise versus the reality of an old comic book advertisement.

A Real Wrong Turn

Film: Detour
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

I was really excited to see Detour. I love film noir, and I’ve seen in several places that this film is considered one of the formative noirs, one that influenced basically everything that came after it. Finding it streaming was exciting—once I saw it was available, I knew what I was going to watch today. And I’m reminded that sometimes our expectations are there to prepare us for greatness, and sometimes our expectations are there because they’re better than what we expected.

Sadly, Detour is the second of these. Being told that this film is critical for the understanding of film noir led me to believe that it would be a film that I would watch and wished that I had seen years ago. Instead, I’m wondering exactly what about it makes it so damned important.

We start, as with many a noir, at the end. Our sad sack narrator, Al Roberts (Tom Neal) looks like he hasn’t slept in a couple of days. He’s got a day or two’s worth of stubble, and appears as though it’s been a few days since he’s seen a shower. A few people in a diner try to get him to talk a bit, but he’s having none of it, and he completely wigs out when a certain song is played on the jukebox. And then we enter Al’s mind and we get the story of the last few months.

Al was a piano player in a honkytonk in New York. Not a great job, but he got to work with Sue Harvey (Claudia Drake), which made life easier. The two had plans to marry, but Sue nixes them, telling Al that she’s heading out to Hollywood to try her luck. He lets her go, and after a few days or weeks, decides that he’s waited long enough and heads out for the Left Coast himself. Of course, since he’s a poor piano player, he doesn’t have money for a flight or even bus fare, so he hitches his way across the country.

It’s here that he runs into Charles Haskell, Jr. (Edmund MacDonald). It’s evident right away that Haskell is not on the level; there’s something a bit hinky about him. But, he’s got a nice car and he’s happy to take Al all the way to L.A., provided Al is willing to do a little of the driving. He discusses another hitchhiker he picked up—a woman who gave him some nice scratches down his right hand. Eventually, Al takes the wheel of the convertible, and when it starts raining, he stops to put the top up. When he does, he discovers that Charles Haskell, Jr. is now the late Charles Haskell, Jr., evidently dying of a heart attack or something nearly like.

Rather than wait around for the cops, Al steals Haskell’s wallet, money, and car, and continues west. He figures that eventually he can ditch the car and just blend into the big city. Along the way, he offers a ride to a young woman named Vera (Ann Savage). And, in one of those Dickensian coincidences that seem to happen in movies, it turns out that Vera is the hitchhiker who gave Haskell the scratches. In her mind, Al is a killer, and she’s got the drop on him, and now Al has to do whatever Vera tells him.

That’s enough plot, although it’s worth saying that the rising action contains another ridiculous coincidence, and so does the climax. It’s almost as if the writer of this film couldn’t get around the idea of the world proceeding normally, and wanted Al Roberts to be doomed by fate to a terrible existence. Al makes the wrong choices at every possible turn, and the fact that everything he’s done has just made things worse for him in every respect doesn’t change his reality of being a poor dumb clod who makes a lot of bad decisions right in a row.

And that’s one of the problems with this movie; it’s an idiot plot. If Al had reacted the way that almost anyone else would have—stay with the car and the body and allow himself to be picked up right at the start, none of this would have happened. A quick medical exam, even by 1945 standards, would have shown no foul play, and he’d be back on his way to Los Angeles. But no, he immediately acts like a criminal despite the fact that he’s never been a criminal to our knowledge and has never committed a criminal act.

And then there’s Vera. It doesn’t matter that Vera is sort of homely and has a face that looks prepared to become fat in a few years. It does matter that Vera talks like a 1930s movie gangster, complete with the patois of crime and the speed of dialogue that’s hard to keep up with. Strictly from a genre standpoint, it’s difficult to take a femme fatale seriously when she is unappealing on every level. Even the nastiest dame in a noir at least has sex appeal, but Vera brings nothing to the table. She looks like she should be dressed in an offensive t-shirt and yelling at a group of dirty, unkempt kids at Wal-Mart.

The movie turns on its ridiculous coincidences, though, and ultimately this is what does the film in. Without these repeated one-in-a-million occurrences, there is no film, and a film that requires that fate take that much of a hand is a film that needs a rewrite. This is additionally true because every character in the film is about as unappealing as Vera. Even Sue, who is supposed to be this prize that Al is trying to reach is a bit of a gold digger.

Hard to believe that a film with a running time of 67 minutes feels too long, but that’s the case with this one. What a disappointment.

Why to watch Detour: It doesn’t start noir, but it sure as hell goes there.
Why not to watch: It far too stylized to remain effective.