Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer
Like a monster from the id, director Edgar G. Ulmer’s morbid jewel—Universal’s top-grossing release of 1934—is a catalog of public fascinations in the 1930s: Edgar Allan Poe (whose story “suggested” the film); megastars Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi (in their first of six Universal collaborations); modernist architecture; postwar trauma; psychiatry, pathology and the occult (personified in the tabloids by Aleister Crowley).
The story is simple: American honeymooners find themselves trapped in the Hungarian mansion of a sinister war profiteer (Karloff) who stole the wife and child of a vengeful psychiatrist (Lugosi) who’s terrorized by cats, the movie’s recurring symbol of evil. But the film’s plot is secondary to its astonishing visual design and increasingly shocking vortex of necrophilia, sadism, and torture. Born in Austria and a veteran designer of Max Reinhardt’s theater and German cinema, Ulmer came to Hollywood to assist F.W. Murnau on Sunrise (1928). His expressionist heritage (and facility with low budgets) fit Universal’s horror cycle like a glove: The Black Cat revels in Bauhaus-inspired decor with a hardedged geometry that reflects the jagged psychology of its characters. Karloff, as Hjalmar Poelzig (an homage to German architect Hans Poelzig, whom Ulmer assisted on 1920’s The Golem), appropriates his mansion’s angularity with his rigid movements, a hatchet hairstyle and v-necked robes. “If I wanted to build a nice, cozy, unpretentious insane asylum,” the film’s hapless protagonist quips, “he’d be the man for it.”
David Manners and Julie Bishop, ostensibly starring in the film’s main roles, play naïve romantics who, rather than resolve narrative conflict, merely try to survive it; the real drama revolves around the studio’s dueling stars. Lugosi’s own performance as the spiritually wounded Werdegast benefitted from lastminute reshoots that emphasized his protective relationship with the American couple. Less a villain than a tragic hero, Werdegast delivers a portentious speech that continually connects the story’s horrors to World War I—another personal note from the film’s auteur, whose own father fought and perished in the trenches.
—Doug Cummings
Universal Pictures. Producer: Carl Laemmle. Based on the short story by Edgar Allen Poe. Screenwriter: Peter Ruric. Cinematographer: John J. Mescall. Editor: Ray Curtiss. Cast: Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, David Manners, Jacqueline Wells, Egon Brecher.
35mm, b/w, 70 min.
