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Dis­cov­er the film that brought togeth­er two of horror’s great­est stars

05 Apr 2021

Words by Anton Bitel

A black and white image showing a man in a suit and tie, standing indoors and facing the camera with a serious expression.
A black and white image showing a man in a suit and tie, standing indoors and facing the camera with a serious expression.
The Black Cat was the first of six Uni­ver­sal pic­tures to star Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.

Cen­tral to Edgar G Ulmer’s The Black Cat is a house built over an ancient grave­yard. It is a clas­sic goth­ic set-up, yet the house, far from con­form­ing to the usu­al stones, fire­brands and cob­webs of Uni­ver­sal Pic­tures’ cas­tle hor­ror, is a state-of-the-art mod­ernist edi­fice, cus­tom-designed by its own­er, the renowned Aus­tri­an engi­neer and archi­tect Hjal­mar Poelzig (Boris Karloff, billed sim­ply as KARLOFF).

For it is all pan­els and glass, met­al and elec­tri­cal light­ing, min­i­mal­ism and curves, lat­er described by one vis­i­tor as a nice, cosy, unpre­ten­tious insane asy­lum”. If the house’s loca­tion, near the small town of Vide­grád in Hun­gary, comes with a long, accu­mu­lat­ed his­to­ry of death, Poelzig him­self has con­tributed to it. For over a decade and a half ago, towards the end of World War One, he had betrayed the area, which was then under his mil­i­tary com­mand, to the Rus­sians, thus ensur­ing that the num­ber of locals buried there was increased by tens of thousands.

One of Poelzig’s sur­viv­ing vic­tims, the psy­chi­a­trist Dr Vitus Werde­gast (Béla Lugosi), has spent the last 15 years in a Siber­ian prison camp, and is now return­ing to seek his long-lost wife and daugh­ter, and per­haps some revenge too. On his way by train to Poelzig’s home, he shares a com­part­ment with new­ly­weds Peter and Joan Ali­son (David Man­ners, Julie Bish­op), an Amer­i­can cou­ple hon­ey­moon­ing in Hungary.

Peter is some­what wary of Werde­gast – per­haps it is the way he catch­es the doc­tor secret­ly stroking Joan’s hair while she sleeps, and then telling of his long stint in jail – but nonethe­less the three trav­el togeth­er, along with Werdegast’s manser­vant Thamal (Har­ry Cord­ing), in the same small bus, and when there is an unfor­tu­nate acci­dent in a rain­storm, they all end up at Poelzig’s pad. As Werde­gast and his old friend” Poelzig engage in a bat­tle of wits to set­tle some old scores, the Alisons find them­selves trapped on the side­lines, with their very lives at stake.

Two people in black-and-white; man embracing woman, with pensive expressions.

The Black Cat was the first of six Uni­ver­sal films to bring togeth­er two of the pro­duc­tion house’s most icon­ic hor­ror actors: Karloff, who played the Mon­ster in James Whale’s Franken­stein, and Lugosi, who had the title role in Tod Browning’s Drac­u­la. This is a clash of the genre’s heavy­weights – as mon­u­men­tal in its own way as Godzil­la vs King Kong. And when Poelzig sug­gests to Werde­gast that they are like the liv­ing dead”, the descrip­tion is not with­out a cer­tain sophis­ti­cat­ed kind of self-con­scious­ness, inevitably evok­ing both actors’ most famous roles as, respec­tive­ly, undead vam­pire and res­ur­rect­ed corpse.

Indeed, Ulmer’s film is full of self-aware nods and winks to the audi­ence. Of what use are these melo­dra­mat­ic ges­tures?” Poelzig will ask, prac­ti­cal­ly defin­ing (and ques­tion­ing) the very mode of the film in which he is appear­ing. And lat­er, after a plot that offers a heady, not entire­ly coher­ent mix of ail­uro­pho­bia, mum­mi­fi­ca­tion, uxo­ri­cide, Satan­ic wor­ship, human sac­ri­fice, a live skin­ning and an ear­ly instance of clue­less com­e­dy cops (Hen­ry Armet­ta, Albert Con­ti), the author Peter, who is a mys­tery nov­el­ist, reads out a news­pa­per review of his lat­est pot­boil­er which also serves, reflex­ive­ly, as a cri­tique of The Black Cat itself:

Mr Ali­son has, in a sense, over­stepped the bounds in the mat­ter of cred­i­bil­i­ty. These things could nev­er by the fur­thest stretch of the imag­i­na­tion actu­al­ly hap­pen. We could wish that Mr Ali­son would con­fine him­self to the pos­si­ble instead of let­ting his melo­dra­mat­ic imag­i­na­tion run away with him.”

The screen­writer Peter Ruric, bet­ter known by the pseu­do­nym Paul Cain under which he wrote nov­els, was him­self, like the char­ac­ter in the film who shares his fore­name, an author of pulp fic­tion – and these lines know­ing­ly pre-empt crit­i­cism of the improb­a­ble nar­ra­tive in his own script.

The title of The Black Cat is tak­en from an 1843 short sto­ry by Edgar Allen Poe, but like the oth­er two Poe adap­ta­tions’ in which Lugosi would star for Uni­ver­sal (Mur­ders in the Rue Morgue, 1932; The Raven, 1935), and indeed like the lat­er film also called The Black Cat in which he would appear in 1941, Ulmer’s film has only the flim­si­est con­nec­tion to its source mate­r­i­al. Werde­gast may share with Poe’s pro­tag­o­nist a patho­log­i­cal fear of cats (although he is no alco­holic), and Poelzig may keep his dead wife in the base­ment (although per­verse­ly pre­served in a dis­play cab­i­net along­side oth­er dead women, rather than buried behind bricks).

But oth­er­wise, Ruric has tak­en Poe’s dead text as his basic foun­da­tion, and built upon it a very tricky house” that accom­mo­dates all his own wild con­ceits. Like the pot­pour­ri of arbi­trary, entire­ly innocu­ous Latin phras­es (“with a grain of salt”, to err is human”, remem­ber to keep a clear head in dif­fi­cult times”) that the po-faced Poelzig stitch­es togeth­er, Franken­stein-like, in his solemn rites to sum­mon Lucifer, The Black Cat is a wit­ti­ly self-iro­nis­ing affair, mix­ing and match­ing its incon­gru­ous parts to pro­duce some­thing thor­ough­ly Poe-stmodern.

The Black Cat is avail­able in the Blu-ray set Three Edgar Allan Poe Adap­ta­tions Star­ring Bela Lugosi, as part of Eureka!’s The Mas­ters of Cin­e­ma Series, from 12 April.

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