I Taut I Taw a Puddy Tat

Films: The Cat and the Canary (1927)
Format: Internet video on Fire!

For as much as I purport myself to be a cinematic snob, I can really struggle with silent movies. While silent comedies are often still funny (a guy falling on his ass is a guy falling on his ass, after all), dramas are a lot less accessible. Horror movies tend to fall somewhere between. There’s a lot of possibility for some interesting visuals at the very least. Horror movies are where a lot of the early cinematic language was created. Superimposing one piece of film over another, camera tricks, odd angles, and more came in part from horror movies because there was a need to keep the audience in suspense and fright. That makes a film like 1927’s The Cat and the Canary an interesting one.

This is a haunted house story and a murder mystery as well as a mildly comic film, although not all of the humor really translates to a modern audience. The plot is one that isn’t going to be that shocking. Variations of this have existed for as long as there have been contested wills and continue today in movies like Knives Out. This should give you a solid idea of the direction we’re going and at least the general tenor of the story.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Cat and the Canary (1939)

Films: The Cat and the Canary (1939)
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

Like any genre of film, horror has a number of subgenres. Many films hit on one of these while others, like The Cat and the Canary attempt to blend multiple subgenres. This is a film that is one part standard horror movie, one part comedy, and two parts creepy old house mystery. There’s a great deal of films like The Old Dark House or The Black Cat here, where the location is a large part of what happens and the creation of the scares. And, like many a haunted house mystery for a modern audience, The Cat and the Canary plays like a long episode of Scooby-Doo.

As the film opens, it’s ten years to the day after the passing of Cyrus Norman. Cyrus was an eccentric millionaire who lived in a giant corroding house in the Louisiana bayou. Now that he’s been dead for ten years, it’s time to read his will in the library of his old house. The lawyer Crosby (George Zucco) has arrived and met the caretaker, Miss Lu (Gale Sondergaard), who has been the sole occupant of the house for the past ten years. Over the next few minutes, our other guests arrive. These are Cyrus Norman’s surviving relatives. They are Fred (John Beal), Charles (Douglass Montgomery), Aunt Susan (Elizabeth Patterson), and Cicily (Nydia Westman). The final two, and the two for whom we’re going to be mainly concerned, are Joyce Norman (Paulette Goddard), the only person to still carry the family name and Wally Campbell (Bob Hope), a radio actor who is distantly related and knew Joyce in high school.