No 92: The Black Cat
1934, 15, Second Sight
Directed by Edgar G Ulmer
Universal was the home of horror, and this film brought together the studio's two great horror stars, Boris Karloff, the definitive Frankenstein monster, and Bela Lugosi, the definitive Count Dracula, for the first (and best) of seven joint appearances. The result proved to be an outlandish picture that cast Karloff, with his precise English diction, as a great Austrian architect and secret Satanist and Lugosi with his thick middle-European accent as a great Hungarian psychiatrist. Once friends, now sworn enemies with scores to settle from the First World War, they meet for the first time in 15 years, not in a gothic castle or old dark house but at a dazzling Art Deco mansion that the demonic Karloff has built on top of a fort destroyed in one of the bloodiest battles between the Austro-Hungarian army and the Russians.
Death and evil, spiritual and moral corruption are in the air, and the benign Lugosi, seeking revenge on the man who destroyed his life, calls the house, 'a masterpiece of creation built upon a masterpiece of destruction'. A colourless American honeymoon couple are stranded in the house following a car crash and are in peril, but it is Karloff and Lugosi who compel our attention as the movie unfolds like a nightmare that involves necrophilia, ailurophobia (Lugosi collapses at the sight of a cat), drugs, a deadly game of chess, torture, flaying, and a black mass with a human sacrifice.
This bizarre, utterly irrational masterpiece, lasting little more than an hour, has images that bury themselves in the mind, and is essentially the creation of the legendary Viennese writer, designer, producer and director Edgar G Ulmer (1904-1972). He worked at various times with Max Reinhardt, Stroheim, Murnau, Lang, Wilder and Siodmak, but his own work, which included films in Yiddish and Ukrainian and quickies aimed at black audiences, was made on low budgets. His masterpieces are The Black Cat, People On Sunday (the classic silent precursor of neo-realism), and Detour, a 1945 film noir shot in six days for less than $20,000.
The film's screenplay (based on Ulmer's scenario) is by Peter Ruric, the film-writing pseudonym of the mysterious George Sims (1902-1966) who, under another pseudonym, Paul Cain, wrote short stories and a single novel, Fast One (1932), which Raymond Chandler called 'some kind of high point in the ultra- hard-boiled manner'.
Next week: Ermanno Olmi's Tree of the Wooden Clogs. See the archive at observer.co.uk/dvdclub