THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1932)

THE Dark & Stormy Night film of all Dark & Stormy Night films . . . and surely the funniest.  Not in the nudge-nudge/wink-wink manner of a typical comic-horror pic, but playing out like some cocktail party gone madly wrong.  Fresh off the original FRANKENSTEIN/’31, eccentric British director James Whale gives a lunatic spin (especially in the first half) to macabre doings as five travelers (Charles Laughton, Lilian Bond, Gloria Stuart, Raymond Massey, Melvyn Douglas) find unwelcome shelter from a fierce storm & washed out roads at the first manse they spot.  A once great house, now in reduced circumstances, Boris Karloff (in a role that inspired Chas. Addams’s ‘Lurch’ the butler) reluctantly lets them in to meet elderly siblings Eva Moore and Ernest Thesiger.  Fey & proper, Thesiger functions as tonal alter-ego to director Whale, spinning the enterprise toward dry comedy.  Upstairs, 102 yr-old Dad and crazy locked-up brother make later appearances.  Surprisingly, given the sheer oddness of the first two acts, Whale generates real scares in the third, simultaneously running three or four lines of dangerous action at a pace.  Whale’s technique always a bit bumpy on the editing, but here, lack of flow probably a plus.  And the film is simply too enjoyably nutty to pick at.  Instead, note the substitution of an old-fashioned hand-cranked wind machine for musical underscoring which Universal had yet to add to their films.  (They’d be last of the majors to do so.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Uncredited cinematographer Arthur Edeson (partnering Whale on FRANKENSTEIN and WATERLOO BRIDGE/’31) moved to M-G-M after this before he went on to his best known work at Warners (MALTESE FALCON/’41; CASABLANCA/’42; et al.).  Here showing an infinite charcoal grey scale and striking candle-lit portraiture a la Georges de la Tour.