Monster Serial: THE BLACK CAT (1934)

By PATRICK McCRAY

Feast your eyes on the Art Deco inferno of Weimar angst and fury!  The scars of the Great War will never heal!  Satanism runs amok, with potential necrophilia skipping not far behind!  Look there, on the screen; it’s THE BLACK CAT!  Boris and Bela at last match wits and share the screen for the first time!

It can reduce/elevate any horror fan to express the passion of a Sam Kinison.

Plot is not the essential element to THE BLACK CAT, but so what?  There’s no plot to a piece of music by J.S. Bach, but that doesn’t stop it from being a compelling and hypnotic narrative journey. So, it’s much the same for Edgar G. Ulmer’s classic, black and white tone poem, THE BLACK CAT. This is a 66 minute feast of strange and wondrous details from a world of secrets too dark for us to completely know.

At least, that’s what it feels like.

Let me get some things out of the way right now, before the Mikes and Joels of the world make hay. (I feel the need to do this since I once had to halt a screening for a group of MST3K-trained adults who thought they were cleverer than the movie. Spoiler Alert: they were not.)

Okay, so here’s the disclaimer.  As horror movies go, it is neither traditionally scary nor impishly charming, although there are bickering police officials who get solid laughs while debating about tourism.  And, come to think of it, David Manners and Julie Bishop seem to have a lot of fun as the American couple who find themselves in the midst of the war on morals and memory that exists between the protagonists.  The writing is sometimes stiff.  Although only sixty-six minutes, there are moments when it drags. (Perhaps because of the reported interference by Universal.)  But none of those things are the point.

The film still remains one of the most compulsively watchable symphonies of amazing details in all of cinema.  It does what movies are supposed to do; it shows you things you never imagined or possible, with people you never dreamed could have existed, in conflicts beyond the reckoning of anything average or mundane.  Although I would not call it “scary,” it is seeped in dread and mystery and sadness and repressed rage.  That’s a trade I’ll take.

The plot concerns Bela Lugosi as Vitus Werdegast, a brilliant psychiatrist and survivor of a POW camp where he encountered his greatest nemesis, Hjalmar Poelzig, played by Boris Karloff. Poelzig is a visionary architect and Satanic leader, somewhere between Gropius and Crowley. He had stolen Vitus’ wife and child, and then married the latter as the former seems to be held in suspended animation.  Yes, in a 1934 movie.  Vitus has “accidentally” arrived at Poelzig’s home with two American tourists in tow, and the film becomes a sometimes quiet, sometimes furious, always intense test of wills between Vitus and Hjalmar, often with human lives at stake.

By the end, a Satanic ceremony has broken out (with worshippers wearing tuxes and gowns beneath the robes in a touch of class that would have made Dok LaVey proud.)  Guns are brandished.  Bela skins Boris alive.  Manners and Adams escape.  And, in a motif that would be echoed in BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, Vitus concludes that they belong dead, too.  The house is demolished in an explosion he detonates, taking the prison camp upon which it was built, with it.

It’s a grim movie, so what makes it work?

I remember when I first saw it on the late movie when I was thirteen (a good year for me to see old films.)  There were Boris and Bela, dressed to the nines and showing class, panache, and restraint as they went about their war of wits.  (And let this be another nail in the coffin of the argument that Lugosi was incapable of subtlety.  Both he and Karloff show a kind of quietly meditative intensity worthy of a Pinter play.)  The set, though, seemed to be from the future.  I asked my all-knowing mother about this, and she explained that it was Art Deco.  I had seen the style before, but usually in recreations or as small, architectural elements.

I had never witnessed an entire world sliced by its severity.  While it should have been a clean, calming, fear-free setting, Ulmer presents it as a Kryptonian Hell.  It is as icily merciless and nakedly decadent as Poelzig, whose makeup and hair seem equally angular and severe.  The architecture is the story.  It is the mechanized and perfected new world, mercilessly ready to highlight>copy>replace the pomp, ceremony, and style of Vitus’ old world charm. You know, basically the Borg Cometh.  The angst of a Europe desolated by one war and then rebuilt for another is made excruciatingly clear… and nauseatingly seductive at the same time.  What a duality with which Germany was faced. Seductive, simple solutions for living, indeed.

It all seems so clear after World War II. What’s amazing is that the film was sending such a resonant warning and, perhaps, plea for action prior to the war. Of course, Hollywood inherited so many refugees from Germany that it’s also not surprising.

Ironic.  The horror genre is so often marginalized, and yet, had it not been a horror film, would we be looking at it, today?

And was I the one talking about the film being more style than substance?

I take it back.

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Patrick McCray is a comic book author residing in Knoxville, Tenn., where he's been a drama coach and general nuisance since 1997. He has a MFA in Directing and worked at Revolutionary Comics and on the early days of BABYLON 5, and is a frequent contributor to The Collinsport Historical Society. You can find him at The Collins Foundation.

The sordid criminal history of JONATHAN BREWSTER

Once and future Jonathan Brewsters.

 By WALLACE McBRIDE

There’s a certain joy to be had from watching Jonathan Frid murder people.

It’s no coincidence that almost every story arc on DARK SHADOWS ended with Barnabas Collins killing half the cast. It might have looked like narrative laziness had it not been so goddamn satisfying. Be honest with yourself: Did you feel sorry for the Rev. Trask when Barnabas opened up a cask of Amontillado on his ass? It’s OK to admit your bloodlust here. You’re among friends.

It’s been almost 30 years since Frid went on tour with a stage production of ARSENIC AND OLD LACE. Considering the roster of actors who’d previously played the part, casting Frid seems almost inevitable. Oddly enough, he wasn’t the first choice for the role of the villainous Jonathan Brewster in the national tour. While one or two of his co-stars might have been better known, it's his performance in the play that’s still being discussed today, though.

ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (originally titled BODIES IN OUR CELLAR) is a black comedy that debuted on the New York stage in 1941. The story centers on Mortimer Brewster, a drama critic who returns home to find his aunts have been poisoning bachelors and burying them in the basement. His two brothers are both maniacs: Teddy Brewster believes himself to be Theodore Roosevelt, while the estranged Jonathan Brewster is a career criminal and wanted killer. It's funnier than it sounds.

Boris Karloff as Jonathan Brewster.

Boris Karloff was cast as Jonathan Brewster in the original stage production. According to Greg Mank’s book, BELA LUGOSI AND BORIS KARLOFF: THE EXPANDED STORY OF A HAUNTING COLLABORATION, Karloff only agreed to take the role because of the character’s supporting status. He hadn’t tested his stardom against the stage and feared he might be setting himself up for a public embarrassment that would adversely affect his film career.

The year ARSENIC AND OLD LACE debuted on stage, Warner Bros. put a feature film into production. Cary Grant was cast as the lead, co-starring with Priscilla Lane and Peter Lorre. Raymond Massey, who played the title role in ABE LINCOLN IN ILLINOIS in 1940, played Jonathan Brewster. Director Frank Capra enlisted in the U. S. Army Signal Corps during the production of the film, but was issued an extension until after shooting wrapped.

Still, legal restraints kept the film from release for several years. The studio was contractually obliged to keep the film in its vaults until the end of the Broadway production’s run. Much like Iggy Pop, the Broadway production of ARSENIC AND OLD LACE survived longer than anybody could have guessed, closing in June, 1944, after more than 1,000 performances. Warner Bros. wasted no time and releasing the long-finished film just a few months later in September.

Raymond Massey in Frank Capra's 1944 adaption of ARSENIC AND OLD LACE.

As with the stage play, Jonathan Brewster remained the film’s scene stealer. “The picture serves to welcome back Raymond Massey after an extended leave,” a review published by The New York Times in 1944 observed. “While it is a little breath-taking to hear ‘Honest Abe’ shambling around sounding like Lincoln but looking like Boris Karloff, that's the condition that prevails.”

The casting of Karloff in the stage production of ARSENIC might also have set into motion a series of events that shook up Universal’s monster movies during those years. Bela Lugosi, who famously declined the role of the monster in James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN in 1931, got a second shot at the role, perhaps thanks to Karloff’s commitments to the ARSENIC AND OLD LACE play.

Lugosi later took over the role of Jonathan Brewster for several tours as Karloff returned to Universal, just as John Carradine took over the role of Dracula in the studio’s HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN. The 1944 film also featured Karloff, in case you weren't already confused. He played neither the monster, nor a Frankenstein.
 

Bela Lugosi as Jonathan Brewster.

Fred Gwynne.

Since then, ARSENIC AND OLD LACE has never really gone away. The story would be adapted all over the world in just about every venue you could imagine, from stage to screen to radio. Karloff would reprise his role in 1962 in a television performance opposite Tony Randall, while one-time “Herman Munster” Fred Gwynne played Jonathan Brewster in a 1969 TV movie opposite Bob Crane.

The play was dusted off again for the New York stage in 1986. Abe Vigoda played Jonathan Brewster in the Broadway production of ARSENIC AND OLD LACE from June, 1986, until January, 1987. When the decision was made to take the production on a national tour, Jonathan Frid was tapped to play its villain. (It’s worth mentioning that Vigoda appeared opposite Frid in 1968 in a handful of episodes of DARK SHADOWS.)

Jonathan Frid as Jonathan Brewster.

Frid was partnered with Gary Sandy (of WKRP IN CINCINATTI), Larry Storch (F-TROOP), Marion Ross (HAPPY DAYS), and Jean Stapleton (ALL ON THE FAMILY.) For a handful of performances, James MacArthur of HAWAII FIVE-O filled in for Sandy as Mortimer Brewster. The collection of former television stars prompted critics to accuse producers of stunt casting, something that Stapleton refuted in a 1987 interview with the Chicago Tribune.

“There is a prejudice and a belittling of television actors,” Stapleton said. “These people have all been trained for many years. And those people up there, whether they`re on the stage or on the tube, are actors.”

Frid, whose own anxiety issues are well documented, would have sympathized with the first actor to portray Jonathan Brewster. Karloff was the only actor genuinely considered for the role in the original Broadway production, but reportedly came to regret his decision. An inexperienced stage actor, Karloff spent the week leading to the debut of ARSENIC AND OLD LACE looking for ways to graciously bow out of the production.

Boris and Bela in dueling promotional images for the ARSENIC AND OLD LACE stage play.

Frid has similar fears, bringing this relationship of actor and role full circle.

“The day he was to open (replacing Abe Vigoda) in the role he went to the theater very early,” recalls Nancy Kersey, one of Frid’s creative partners for much of his later career. “He was nervous, I could tell.  I had a beeper for work and Jonathan also used it to contact me. After telling me he didn't need me for the rest of the day (he opened that night) he wound up beeping me several times for this and that and I finally convinced him to just let me stay at the theater.  He was uptight, nervous — and that always manifests itself in his being snappy and overly picky.”

For Frid, playing Jonathan Brewster was a matter of finding a balance in the story’s conflicting tone. There were a lot of competing personalities on stage, making it easy to tip the scales toward accidental farce. Frid concentrated on making the character frightening, but took opportunities later in the tour to explore the show's comedic elements.

“In ARSENIC AND OLD LACE, I had to play comedy, and I had to play horror … and really be horrible,” Frid said in a 2008 interview for the Archive of American Television. “I had to be a threat … we had too many comedians in this show already.”

Jonathan Frid and Larry Storch

Marion Ross, Jean Stapleton, Jonathan Frid and Larry Storch

(Note: I know a lot of you got to see Frid in ARSENIC. I missed it, myself, but would love you hear your thoughts about the play in the comments below.)