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A dry spot in a storm, an expressionistic trap, a stage for cuckoos. Honeymooners (Gloria Stuart, Raymond Massey) lost during a Welsh downpour, in the backseat the former doughboy (Melvyn Douglas) warbles "Singin' in the Rain." The manse after the mudslide, "wouldn't it be dramatic? Suppose the people inside were all dead." The scarred and bearded visage answering the door is the mad butler's, Boris Karloff as a lurching brute singled out in the opening credits for his post-Frankenstein versatility. Siblings play reluctant hosts, elongated heathen (Ernest Thesiger) and squat zealot (Eva Moore) with a dinner of gin and potatoes. A surreal presentation, the heroine slips into a gown and the fanatic predicts decay for satin and skin alike, the screen takes on a funhouse bulge as she speaks. More guests, the businessman (Charles Laughton) and the showgirl (Lilian Bond): "I'm sorry to barge in on you like this, but needs must when the devil drives." Countless amusements in James Whale's bizarrerie, a rich ghoulish-zany vein that a few years later might have been called screwball comedy. (Hitchcock's Number Seventeen is close in its strange effects.) "Rather a nervous man," Thesiger's camp priss, sniffing a bottle or trembling with lamp in hand while Karloff flips tables and smashes doors. Upstairs the invalid patriarch, "a wicked, blasphemous old man" played by an actress with glued-on whiskers and a wheezing chortle (Elspeth Dudgeon). Marvel of a set, drenched and dismantled and burned over the course of a night, light from the flickering fireplace is always set low to provide looming shadows. The pyromaniac (Brember Wills) is loose, the insane, bloodied embrace of family precedes the dawn. "Madness came. We are all touched with it a little, you see. Except me." Arsenic and Old Lace and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre flow equally from here. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |