Here’s a selection of some of Jack’s Greatest Hits, the temper-temper blowups. They are obvious, and perhaps uninspired, highlight reel selections, yet still damned entertaining.
Easy Rider:
Five Easy Pieces:
Carnal Knowledge:
The Last Detail:
Chinatown:
Here’s the ballgame scene in Cuckoo’s Nest.
The Shining:
Terms of Endearment:
Jack Nicholson is stuck in Cuckoo’s Nest/Shinning mode for most of Bob Rafelson’s turgid 1981 remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice. His character, an ex-con in his mid-forties, was 24 in James M. Cain’s novel. Here, he feels underdeveloped and it’s hard to tell if the guy is sinister, a sap, or a heel. It is as if the actor and director never got a handle on who they wanted the character to be.
What’s compelling about Nicholson’s performance is that he doesn’t chew the scenery. He may fall back on his familiar screen persona but he’s restrained, too. Best of all, he’s generous and lets Jessica Lange dominate the movie.
The sexual charge between Nicholson and Lange is undeniable.
She is tough and it is refreshing to see a woman play a femme fatal and not look like a waif. Early on, she shoots Nicholson a look while she pours wine for her husband that’s enough to stop any man–or woman–dead in their tracks.
You can see why she’d drive a person to do crazy things. The pulp is drained out of this version (written by David Mamet, shot by Sven Nykvist)–it’s not nearly as appealing as the John Garfield original–but the electricity generated by Lange keeps you watching, and her sex scenes with Nicholson are savage and hard to forget.
For more, check out this article by Patrick McGilligan in American Film: The Postman Rings Again
Prizzi’s Honor lives that most uncomfortable space – the black comedy. It’s uncomfortable because to set and maintain the proper tone, the entire production operates on a razor’s edge. If any part of the process falters, from John Huston’s direction all the way down to the selection of condiments at the craft services table, the delicate artifice collapses.
Most important of all is the acting. For a black comedy to succeed, the actors must maintain constant earnestness with the comedy not coming from punch lines but from something inherent in the character himself.
When a black comedy fails, it’s almost always easy to pinpoint the culprit. But when it succeeds, it’s possible to glide right past the great performances that made it so. Jack Nicholson’s Charley Partanna in Prizzi’s Honor is just such a performance.
Partanna is gruff, almost monosyllabic. But he’s not stupid, he just knows that talking too much often leaves you overextended. He’s a competent gangster on the way up and he’s centered in that world with a heavy anchor. And as the movie unfolds, and absurd situations ripple the surface, he never strays far enough from the boat to get lost. He surprises us with literacy, curiosity, passion and ingenuity along the way, but without deviating from his solid base.
Bouncing off Jack’s steady foundation are Angelica Huston and Kathleen Turner. Irene Walker (Turner) pretends to be an outsider, but she’s busy trying to run scams on gangsters. Huston took home an Oscar for turning the screws behind Partanna’s back as Maerose Prizzi. Maerose is the one character in the movie that really seems dangerous.
I remember this movie from my childhood because of William Hickey’s strange voice. His Don Prizzi stretches words like hand-pulled noodles until the innocuous is threatening. But Jack’s Partanna isn’t just holding up the tent for these fine supporting characters.
He seems a poor match for Irene on the exterior, but his devotion, shot straight, wins her over. We’re not sure where Partanna fits in the hierarchy of the Prizzi family at first, but his intelligence and resourcefulness prove his worth.
Alex loves Jack’s line, “Marxie Heller so fuckin’ smart, how come he’s so fuckin’ dead?” Not only is it a fantastic reading, an argument ender but spat out of the side of his mouth, it’s also the start of the slow leak leads to disaster for Partanna and Irene. Partanna has killed Irene’s husband, Marxie Heller, before learning of the connection. Irene swears she was going to leave him anyway, but she has enough nice things to say about the guy to get under Partanna’s skin and cause that great line.
Partanna could never trust Irene completely. Did she come with him because she loved him or because all her other plans were turning to crap and he represented her best chance at survival? He couldn’t answer the question satisfactorily so when stab came to shoot, he hurled a knife through her throat.
The movie works because Jack is great. But Jack is great without doing a lot of the things that he’s usually great at. He’s neither hip, cool nor sarcastic. He’s a lug. And he plays the lug straight up and down the edge without ever missing a step.
At first glance, Jack Nicholson and Michelangelo Antonioni would seem a mismatched pair: Antonioni, the gloomy, solemn, European master of existential alienation and Nicholson, all Irish-American brashness and energy — the most charismatic and aggressive movie star since James Cagney. However, with Antonioni’s 1975 film The Passenger, the odd couple proved to be a formidable team. Though the film failed to deliver to producer Carlo Ponti’s box-office hopes in the 1970s and was initially dismissed by many critics as a minor outing for both the director and star, its stature has grown and deepened over the decades, helped by a 2005 theatrical rerelease and subsequent DVD. Over thirty five years later, it stands as an artistic high water mark for both men. However, for those who can only envision Jack Nicholson as a hyper, wild-eyed madman, The Passenger offers an opportunity to see the depth and subtlety of his work, before he became hemmed in by audience expectations.
Nicholson, the quintessential star of 1970s “New Hollywood” spent the first half of that decade on an extraordinary run of iconic roles – including Five Easy Pieces’ Bobby Dupea, Chinatown’s J.J. Gittes, The Last Detail’s Buddusky and, of course One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’s R.P. McMurphy (the part that finally landed Nicholson a Best Actor Academy Award). Nicholson’s performance as David Locke in The Passenger stands up to his work in any of those films, while finding the actor in a far more subdued mode.
Locke is an English born, American educated journalist researching a story about guerrillas in an unnamed African desert country. After a particular hot and frustrating day in the desert, he returns to his hotel to find that he has no soap for a shower. He knocks on the door of his neighbor, looking to borrow some and finds the man lying dead. Through flashbacks and an audio recording made by Locke, we see that the man, Robertson, was a fellow Englishman, roughly the same size and build as Locke, and with a similar hairline. Locke mysteriously and impetuously decides to switch identities with the corpse and disappear from his life, assuming the life of Robertson. While this snap decision to leave his wife and career behind, and start anew as a stranger in a strange land happens easily enough for Locke, he finds himself a pursued man – both by the producer and philandering wife he’s left behind in England and by people who want what Robertson had to sell or want him dead or arrested. It seems Robertson was not simply a travelling businessman, but an illegal arms dealer, supplying the guerrillas.
By evading the narrative of his own existence, Locke now finds himself thrust deeper into the story he was attempting to cover. It’s a set-up that could easily be the plot of a very different sort of film, a suspense thriller made by Hitchcock, Polanski or DePalma; in Antonioni’s hands, it becomes a hypnotic, meandering investigation of identity, destiny and narrative itself. We’re never quite sure what has driven Locke to leave his life behind. Scenes of his wife back in London, and flashbacks to their life together hint that the marriage was unhappy, but his wife spearheads the search for Robertson once Locke is officially “dead.” We watch him have a frustrating time researching his story in the desert, but it’s also made clear that Locke is successful and internationally known as a writer and broadcaster. In “Jump Cut,” Martin Walsh wrote of the film:
“At one point early in the film Nicholson points out that ‘we translate every experience into the same old codes’…Its importance for our understanding of The Passenger is of crucial significance. On one level, it helps make sense of Nicholson’s desire to cease being David Locke, to adopt a new identity, to escape the tyranny of the co-ordinates of his present existence, to re-open his life to new experiences. However, the way in which David Locke attempts to recharge his life proves fraught with unanticipated, uncontrollable dangers…”
Locke/Robertson leaves Africa for Europe, where, in Barcelona, he finds an unexpected travelling companion and lover, played by Maria Schneider (Last Tango In Paris). Together they become a couple on the lam, as Nicholson allows himself to be swept along in this new narrative he’s entered, despite its dangers. The girl follows suit, following Locke on his odd journey as if on some sort of scavenger hunt.
Locke continues along Robertson’s path, using the dead man’s datebook as his guide and talisman, until things meet their inevitable end in a dusty Spanish hotel courtyard, where all the main characters converge and Antonioni pulls off one of the most incredible shots you’ll ever see in a movie.
Looking back, it’s fascinating to watch Nicholson play this character at this point in his career. He’d played quiet, brooding characters before (e.g. Bob Rafelson’s The King of Marvin Gardens), but the success of Cuckoo’s Nest and relative failure of The Passenger (and of Arthur Penn’s western The Missouri Breaks, which paired Nicholson with Marlon Brando in the following year) may have pushed Nicholson into the relative safety of his more familiar screen persona, which Stanley Kubrick was soon to push to an extreme in his film of The Shining.
Roger Ebert on “The Thin Man”:
Nick Charles drinks steadily throughout the movie, with the kind of capacity and wit that real drunks fondly hope to master. When we first see him, he’s teaching a bartender how to mix drinks (“Have rhythm in your shaking … a dry martini, you always shake to waltz time”). Nora enters and he hands her a drink. She asks how much he’s had. “This will make six martinis,” he says. She orders five more, to keep up.
Powell plays the character with a lyrical alcoholic slur that waxes and wanes but never topples either way into inebriation or sobriety. The drinks are the lubricant for dialogue of elegant wit and wicked timing, used by a character who is decadent on the surface but fundamentally brave and brilliant. After Nick and Nora face down an armed intruder in their apartment one night, they read about it in the morning papers. “I was shot twice in the Tribune,” Nick observes. “I read you were shot five times in the tabloids,” says Nora. “It’s not true,” says Nick. “He didn’t come anywhere near my tabloids.”
And Pauline Kael’s blurb:
Directed by the whirl-wind W.S. Van Dyke, the Dashiell Hammett detective novel took only 16 days to film, and the result was one of the most popular pictures of its era. New audiences aren’t likely to find it as sparkling as the public did then, because new audiences aren’t fed up, as that public was, with what the picture broke away from. It started a new cycle in screen entertainment (as well as a Thin Man series, and later, a TV series and countless TV imitations) by demonstrating that a murder mystery could also be a sophisticated screwball comedy. And it turned several decades of movies upside down by showing a suave man of the world (William Powell) who made love to his own rich, funny, and good-humored wife (Myrna Loy); as Nick and Nora Charles, Powell and Loy startled and delighted the country by their heavy drinking (without remorse) and unconventional diversions. In one scene Nick takes the air-gun his complaisant wife has just given him for Christmas and shoots the baubles off the Christmas tree. (In the ’70s Lillian Hellman, who by then had written about her long relationship with Hammett, reported that Nora was based on her.) A married couple, Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, wrote the script; James Wong Howe was the cinematographer. The cast includes the lovely Maureen O’Sullivan (not wildly talented here), the thoroughly depressing Minna Gombell (her nagging voice always hangs in the air), and Cesar Romero, Porter Hall, Harold Huber, Edward Brophy, Nat Pendleton, Edward Ellis (in the title role), and a famous wirehaired terrier, called Asta here. Warning: There’s a lot of plot exposition and by modern standards the storytelling is very leisurely. Produced by Hunt Stromberg, for MGM.
It’s the most cheerful drinking movie ever and one that is still a pure joy.
Sunday at the Walter Reade Theater gives an evening with one of our heroes: Albert Brooks. Also a screening of his latest movie, the 2011 thriller, “Drive.”
Man, that sounds like a good time.
Over at Retronaut…
…check out this gallery from the set of Graham Greene’s “Our Man in Havana.”
Guinness, Richardson, Ives, Kovacs, O’Hara, Noel Coward…and directed by Carol Reed. It’s not “The Third Man,” but it ain’t half-bad neither.
It was a fine year, 2011. Here’s wishing you and yours a Happy New Year.
See you on the other side. You know how we do.
The Film Forum is showing a beautiful new 35 mm print of Chaplin’s classic, “The Gold Rush” through this Thursday. If you’ve never seen it on the big screen and you have the time, step to this.
In “Hannah and her Sisters,” Woody Allen goes to the Metro movie theater on Broadway and watches “Duck Soup,” the Marx Brothers’ finest movie and it restores his faith in life. I wasn’t have any kind of life crisis last night, there was just nothing on TV that interested me, so I put on “Animal Crackers,” the Marx Brothers’ second movie. It was released in 1930 and based on the stage play of the same name.
I hadn’t watched it in a few years and I laughed a lot. Pressed pause and said to the wife, “Look at Harpo, watch this, watch this,” and then laughed some more.
Later, she looked up from her book and said, “Wait, so that’s where you got that line from?”
Yup.
Watching the Marx Brothers makes life better.
Any goldbrickers out there? Got something for you.
White Heat, which to my mind is Cagney’s greatest gangster movie, is playing at the Museum of Modern Art this week, Wednesday through Friday at 1:30 in the afternoon.
He adored New York City. He idolised it all out of proportion.
Great shot of Yankee Stadium in this sequence.
Sunday and Monday on American Masters:
Watch Woody Allen: A Documentary on PBS. See more from AMERICAN MASTERS.
Adaptations…
From The Age of Movies, here’s Pauline Kael on The Iceman Cometh (1973):
The Iceman Cometh is a great, heavy, simplistic, mechanical, beautiful play. It is not the Eugene O’Neill masterpiece that Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the finest work of the American theater, is, but it is masterpiece enough–perhaps the greatest thesis play of the American theater–and it has been given a straightforward, faithful production in handsome dark-toned color in the subscription series called the American Film Theatre. A filmed play like this doesn’t offer the sensual excitement that movies can offer, but you don’t go to it for that. You go to it for O’Neill’s crude, prosaic virtuosity, which is also pure American poetry, and, as with most filmed dramas, if you miss the “presence” of the actors, you gain from seeing it performed by the sort of cast that rarely gathers in a theater. John Frankenheimer directly fluently and unobtrusively, without destroying the conventions of the play. The dialogue is like a ball being passed from one actor to the next; whenever possible (when the speakers are not too far apart), the camera pans smoothly from one to another. We lose some of the ensemble work we’d get from a live performance, but we gain a closeup view that allows us to see and grasp each detail. The play here is less broad than it would be on the stage, and Frankenheimer wisely doesn’t aim for laughs at the characters’ expense (even though that O’Neill may have intended), because the people are close to us. The actors become close to us in another way. Actors who have been starved for a good part get a chance to stretch and renew themselves. In some cases, we’ve been seeing them for years doing the little thing passes for acting on TV and in bad movies, and their performances here are a revelation; in a sense, the actors who go straight for the occasion give the lie to the play’s demonstration that bums who live on guilt for what they don’t do can’t go back and do it.
And The Dead (1987):
The announcement that John Huston was making a movie of James Joyce’s “The Dead” raised the question “Why? What could images do that Joyce’s words hadn’t? And wasn’t Huston pitting himself against a master who, though he was only twenty-five when he wrote the story, had given it full form? (Or nearly full–Joyce’s language gains from being read aloud.) It turns out that those who love the story needn’t have worried. Huston directed teh movie, at eighty, from a wheelchair, jumping up to look through the camera, with oxygen tubes trailing from his nose to a portable generator; most the time, he had to watch the actors on a video monitor outside the set and use a microphone to speak to the crew. Yet he went into dramatic areas that he’d never gone into before–funny, warm family scenes that might be thought completely out of his range. He seems to have brought the understanding of Joyce’s ribald humor which he gained from his knowledge of Ulysses into his earlier work; the minor characters who are shadowy on the page now have a Joycean vividness. Huston has knocked the academicism out of them and developed the undeveloped parts of the story. He’s given it a marvelous filigree that enriches the social life. And he’s done it all in a mood of tranquil exuberance, as if moviemaking had become natural to him, easier than breathing.
I wonder what they used for the Bantha fodder?
I was too young to appreciate Fisher in the gold bikini. Even to this day, that outfit does nothing for me. But this one…
I know this movie sucks in a lot of ways. But when Luke started wreaking havoc on the skiff with that green light saber, I’ve never been more thrilled in a movie theater.
Check out this guy who stumbled on them in Buttercup Valley.
[Photos by Mike Davis]
From “The Age of Movies,” here’s P. Kael on History of the World, Part I:
When I saw History, there were hisses and walkouts during this number, and the film has been attacked as a disgrace by reviewers in the press and on TV. I bet nobody hissed or walked out on Candide. When Prince and Bernstein do it, it’s culture; when Brooks does it, there’s a chorus of voices saying, “He has gone too far this time.” Earlier in the film, the dancer Gregory Hines, who makes a breezy film debut as Comicus’ Ethiopian pal, Josephus, tries to convince the slavers who are sending him to the circus to be eaten by lions that he’s not a Christian but a Jew. With his loose-limbed body–his legs seem to be on hinges–he does a mock-Jewish dance, and then a shim-sham, and the racial humor didn’t appear to bother the audience. But during the Inquisition, when nuns toss off their habits, and a giant torture wheel to which pious Jews are attached is spun in a game of chance, there were mutterings of disapproval. Yet it’s Brooks’s audacity–his treating cruelty and pain as a crazy joke, and doing it in a low-comedy context–that gives History the kick that was missing from his last few films. The Inquisition is presented as a paranoid fantasy, with Jews as the only victims, and when Torquemada whacks the knees of gray-bearded old men imprisoned in stocks–using them as a xylophone–you may gasp. But either you get stuck thinking about the “bad taste” or you let yourself laugh at the obscenity in the humor, as you do at Bunuel’s perverse dirty jokes. The offensive material is a springboard to a less sentimental kind of comedy.
If Mel Brooks doesn’t go “too far,” he’s nowhere–he’s mild and mushy. It’s his maniacal, exuberant compulsion to flaunt show-biz Jewishness that makes him an uncontrollable original. At his best, he is to being Jewish what Richard Pryor is to being black: wildly in love with the joke of it, obsessed and inspired by the joke of it. What History needs is more musical numbers with the show-biz surreal satire of the Inquistion section; it’s the kind of satire that makes the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup a classic farce. Brooks goes wrong when he pulls back to innocuous loveability–when he has Gregory Hines say to him, “You’re the first white man I even considered liking.” (Now, if that had been “the first Jews…”) Hines’ dancing–the movie could have used more of it–deserves better than a suck-up line.
When Brooks has a hot streak on a TV talk show, you can see his mental process at work, and amazing things just pop out of his mouth. He can’t get that rhythm going on the screen with prepared gags. Some movie directors can give their material that surprise. Altman has often done it, and in Hi, Mom! DePalma did it, with a highly inflammatory race-relations subject. But Brooks isn’t a great director–far from it. He’s a great personality though, and he moves wonderfully; his dancing in his Torquemada robes is right up there with Groucho’s lope. Wearing a little mustache and with his lips puckered, Brooks as Louis XVI bears a startling resemblance to Chaplin in his Monsieur Verdoux period. I kept waiting for him to do something with this resemblance, but he didn’t. Was he unaware of it? Lecherous Louis did, however, make me understand why women at the French court wore those panniers that puffed out the sides of their skirts; we see those ballooning bottoms through his eyes. (Brooks may be wasting his talent by not appearing in other directors’ movies while he’s preparing his own.) As a director-star, he has the chance to go on pushing out the boundaries of screen comedy, because, despite the disapproving voices in the press and on TV, he can probably get away with it. Like Pryor, he’s a cutie.
Too bad for us, Mel’s movies never got better, but he sure did score a hit with the play version of The Producers.
From “The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael,” here’s Kael on Robert De Niro.
First, in Mean Streets:
While an actor like Jeff Bridges in The Last American Hero hits the true note, De Niro here hits the far-out, flamboyant one and makes his own truth. He’s a bravura actor, and those who have registered him only as the grinning, tobacco-chewing dolt of that hunk of inept whimsey Bang the Drum Slowly will be unprepared for his volatile performance. De Niro does something like what Dustin Hoffman was doing in Midnight Cowboy, but wilder; this kid doesn’t just act–he takes off into the vapors. De Niro is so intensely appealing that it might be easy to overlook Harvey Keitel’s work as Charlie. But Keitel makes De Niro’s triumph possible; Johnny Boy can bounce off Charlie’s anxious, furious admiration.
The Godfather Part II:
Brando is not on the screen this time, but he persists in his sons, Fredo and Michael, and Brando’s character is exteneded by our seeing how it was formed. As Vito, Robert De Niro amply convinces one that he has it in him to become the old man that Brando was. It’s not that he looks exactly like Brando but he has Brando’s wary woul, and so we can easily imagine the body changing with the years. It is much like seeing a photograph of one’s own dead father when he was a strapping young man; the burning spirit we see in his face spooks us, because of our knowledge of what he was at the end. In De Niro’s case, the young man’s face is fired by a secret pride. His gesture as he refuses the gift of a box of groceries is beautifully expressive and has the added wonder of suggesting Brando, and not from the outside but from the inside. When De Niro closes his eyes to blot out something insupportable, the reflex is like a presentiment of the old man’s reflexes. There is such a continuity of soul between the child on the ship, De Niro’s slight, ironic smile as a coward landlord tries to appease him, and Brando, the old man who died happy in the sun, that although Vito is a subsidiary character in terms of actual time on the screen, this second film, like the first, is imbued with his presence.
…De Niro’s performance is so subtle that when he speaks in the Sicilian dialect he learned for the role he speaks easily, but he is cautious in English and speaks very clearly and precisely. For a man of Vito’s character who doesn’t know the language well, precision is important–sloppy talk would be unthinkable. Like Brando’s Vito, De Niro’s has a reserve that can never be breached.
Taxi Driver:
Robert De Niro is in almost every frame: thin-faced, as handsome as Robert Taylor one moment and cagey, ferrety, like Cagney, the next–and not just looking at the people he’s talking to but spying on them. As Travis, De Niro has none of the pleasant courtliness of his Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II. Vito held himself proudly, in control of his violence; he was a leader. Travis is danger in a different, cumulative way. His tense face folds in a yokel’s grin and he looks almost like an idiot. Or he sits in his room vacantly watching the bright-eyed young faces on the TV and with his foot he slowly rocks the set back and then over. The exacerbation of his desire for vengeance shows in his numbness, yet part of the horror implicit in this movie is how easily he passes. The anonymity of the city soaks up one more invisible man; he could be legion.
…Some actors are said to be empty vessels who are filled by the roles they play, but that’s not what appears to be happening here with De Niro. He’s gone the other way. He’s used his emptiness–he’s reached down into his own anomie. Only Brando has done this kind of plunging, and De Niro’s performance has something of the undistanced intensity that Brando’s had in Last Tango. In its own way, this movie, too, has an erotic aura. There is practically no sex in it, but no sex can be as disturbing as sex. And that’s what it’s about: the absence of sex–bottled-up, impacted energy and emotion, with a blood-splattering release. The fact that we experience Travis’s need for an explosion viscerally, and that the explosion itself has the quality of consummation, makes Taxi Driver one of the few truly modern horror films.
And Raging Bull:
As Jake La Motta, the former middleweight boxing champ, in Raging Bull, Robert De Niro wears scar tissue and a big, bent nose that deform his face. It’s a miracle that he didn’t grown them–he grew everything else. He developed a thick-muscled neck and a fighter’s body, for the scenes of the broken, drunken La Motta he put on so much weight that he seems to have sunk in the fat with hardly a trace of himself left. What De Niro does in this picture isn’t acting, exactly. I’m not sure what it is. Though it may at some level be awesome, it definitely isn’t pleasurable. De Niro seems to have emptied himself out to become the part he’s playing and then not got enough material to refill himself with: his La Motta is a swollen puppet with only bits and pieces of a character inside, and some semi-religious, semi-abstract concepts of guilt. He has so little expressive spark that what I found myself thinking about wasn’t La Motta or the movie but the metamorphosis of De Niro. His appearance–with his head flattened out and widened by fat–is far more shocking that if he were artificially padded.
Raging Bull isn’t just a biography of a genre; it’s also about movies and about violence, it’s about gritty visual rhythm, it’s about Brando, it’s about the two Godfather pictures–it’s about Scorsese and De Niro’s trying to top what they’ve done and what everybody else has done. When De Niro and Liza Minnelli began to argue in Scorsese’s New York, New York, you knew they were going to go from yelling to hitting, because they had no other way to escalate the tension. Here we get more of these actors’ battles; they’re between Jake and Joey, and between Jake and Vickie. Listening to Jake and Joey go at each other, like the macho clowns in Cassavetes movies, I know I’m supposed to be responding to a powerful, ironic realism, but I just feel trapped. Jake says, “You dumb fuck,” and Joey says, “You dumb fuck,” and they repeat it and repeat it. And I think, What am I doing here watching these two dumb fucks?
By Steven Goldman
Many elements of “The Old Dark House” come courtesy of the Brits: the original novel by J.B. Priestley, director James Whale, and a good chunk of the cast including top-billed Boris Karloff (born William Henry Pratt) and Charles Laughton. Yet, the very idea of an old dark house has deep resonance in America’s very DNA, more than the idea of the “haunted house,” which goes back in time as long as there has been a tradition of literature and found its first modern expression in Horace Walpole’s 1764 novella The Castle of Otranto.
The American version, the one that belongs to us, arrived with Edgar Allan Poe’s 1845 “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which is not a ghost story but, with its themes of corruption, decay, insanity, and incest, embodies a more primal American fear than the angry dead, one built for the wide-open spaces of an entire continent, that if you knock on any door down one of our isolated country roads you will discover that the people living behind it have been left alone for so long that they have become perverse and dangerous. Every quaint farmhouse harbors a family of demented maniacs who want to fuck you and put you in the soup, as does every shotgun shack and even Hamptons mansion, although motivations and order of operations may vary. Europeans fear ghosts, Americans fear the living.
That’s largely the situation in “The Old Dark House,” which contains the blueprint for every “the car died on a cold and rainy night and there is nowhere to seek shelter except that place up the road” story that followed, including “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” “The Old Dark House” is basically “Rocky Horror” without the stockings and the songs, although Whale’s movie is funnier in that the picture winks at its grotesques rather than simply parodying them. When Rebecca Femm (Eva Moore) the puritanistic, sex-obsessed crone who makes up one half of the inevitable brother-sister pair that lives in the house, compulsively repeats that her unexpected guests can stay but, “No beds! You can’t have beds!” her single-mindedness is laughable, but also frightening in that you wonder what her fixations portend—no one denies sex so insistently if they’re not harboring kinks too disturbing to be faced.
Let’s backtrack: Raymond Massey, Gloria Stuart, and their dissolute pal Melvyn Douglas are tooling around the rain-darkened countryside when the road gets washed out. Whaddya know, there’s a light on at the Femm place. They are greeted at the door by a servant, Morgan, a shuffling, drunken mute played in heavy makeup by Boris Karloff. Karloff was coming off of his great success in “Frankenstein,” and the makers of the film really want you to know that yes, that is him playing Morgan—before the credits roll, even before the Universal Studios card appears, there is a note from the producers saying, yes, damn it, that’s Karloff. Trust us. “We explain this to settle all disputes in advance, even though such disputes are a tribute to his great versatility.”
The Massey-Stuart-Douglas trio is soon joined by two other wayward travelers, an unrepentant capitalist played by Charles Laughton in an early American role, and his flighty mistress, portrayed by Lillian Bond. There are some soap opera-ish interactions among these characters and a “Lost Generation” characterization for Douglas (the actual point of the Priestley novel, rather than horror), but like the songs in Metro-era Marx Brothers movies, these are just annoying changes of pace—the real interest of the film is in the Femm siblings and the other family members they’ve got stashed away upstairs, including an ancient pater familias so old that he had to be portrayed by a woman credited as a man (actually the wonderfully-named Elspeth Dudgeon) and the ominous Saul, who is locked in the attic.
Director Whale, the subject of “Gods and Monsters,” leavened his scare flicks with a bit of ironic detachment, puncturing frightening moments with jejune actions that are somehow still disturbing. There is a moment in “House” when the various guests are sitting down to dinner with the Femms, and the atmosphere is so heightened that when brother Horace Femm says, “Have a potato,” it is momentarily frightening, then quickly comic, because, damn it, it’s a potato.
The dinner scene is a good example of the way the film expertly veers in tone. Horace and Rebecca are played for laughs in that scene, with Horace’s pushing of the potatoes and Rebecca loading her plate with vinegared onion after vinegared onion, but it is preceded by a scene between the attractive young Stuart and Eva Moore that begins with Rebecca’s comic eccentricity—“It’s a dreadful night. I’m a little deaf. No beds!”—and then quickly becomes serious as it shows how the obsessive fear of sin can become sinful. The drenched Stuart needs to change her clothes, and Moore takes her to an isolated bedroom dominated by a cracked mirror.
“My sister Rachel had this room once,” Moore says, “She died when she was 21. She was a wicked one, handsome and wild as a hawk. All the young men used to follow her about, with her red lips and her big eyes and her white neck. But that didn’t save her… On this bed she lay, month after month. Many is the time I sat here listening to her screaming. She used to cry out to me to kill her, but I’d tell her to turn to the Lord. But she didn’t. She was godless to the last.”
Stuart changes into a sleek gown, because if you have Stewart ’32 in your film (as opposed to the aged version James Cameron had portraying the elderly Kate Winslet in “Titanic”) you show her off a bit. Moore notices her 21-year-old body. “You’re wicked, too… You think of nothing but your long, straight legs and your white body and how to please your man. You revel in the joys of fleshly love, don’t you?” As Stuart pulls on her gown, Rebecca grabs the hem and says, “This is fine stuff, but it will rot!” Then, pointing at Stuart’s chest, “That’s finer stuff still, but it will rot, too, in time!” Then Stuart looks into the mirror, and sees that it is true.
In many ways, “The Old Dark House” is just a play, with a few darkened sets and a lot of talking, but it’s an effective one. The cast is very good. Laughton would go on to have a long, Hall of Fame career, and it’s foreshadowed in his smallish part here. If Massey is remembered today, it’s probably for the 1960s medical series “Doctor Kildare,” in which he supported Richard Chamberlain, but he had a gift for playing messianic figures, notably in two Civil War pictures he made in 1940, Robert Sherwood’s “Abe Lincoln in Illinois,” in which he took the title role, and “The Santa Fe Trail,” in which he plays John Brown against Errol Flynn’s Jeb Stuart and Ronald Reagan’s George Custer. Yes, that Ronald Reagan, yes, that George Custer.
Karloff doesn’t have a lot to do, but as an actor he was a lot more than a man in makeup. Douglas would have a long career, winning two Academy Awards (though not until roughly 30 and 50 years after “House” was made).
In the end, a few things that shouldn’t come creeping down the stairs and there’s a desperate struggle, but no Usher-like fall happens to the House of Femm. The picture ends with Horace beaming as his guests depart. “It’s a pleasure to have met you,” he smiles. A night of madness is just a bit of diversion for the Femms, and you get the sense that they’ll quickly get to work straightening up the place so it can all happen again the next time it rains.
Subsequent iterations of freaks-in-an-old-house (as opposed to “haunted house”) template, including a risible 1963 remake directed by William “The Tingler” Castle, have upped the level of violence, fear, and insanity far beyond anything in the house that Whale provides here, but I prefer the Femms because they’re knowable. There is nothing supernatural at work here, just some loosely-alluded to debauchery in the distant past and a moralizing streak that wouldn’t stand out in some quarters of the Republican Party.
That’s why I like “The Old Dark House.” It’s planted squarely on our soil, haunted only by a little sex and a little violence and the knowledge that if there’s a light on at the place up the road, it’s probably because someone needed to illuminate something dirty. It’s that animating Puritan spirit of paranoia that Hawthorne wrote about so brilliantly in stories like “Young Goodman Brown.” Whale’s “House” is the rare film that has fun while exploring this concept, the knowledge that, as Sartre wrote, hell is other people—or in the American case, the other people just up the road.
I don’t go for horror movies. Sure, I watched a mess of them when I was a kid–“The Exorcist,” “The Omen,” and “Rosemary’s Baby.” I also saw “Halloween,” and “Friday the 13th,” “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” “I Spit On Your Grave,” all that stuff and more. I had a stronger constitution then. Now, I just don’t like being scared.
I even worked on a “horror” movie, was the assistant film editor on “The Blair Witch Project II,” although the scariest part of that project was the silence in the screening room after the executives saw the first cut. Scary for the director, I should say, I thought it was pretty funny.
Anyhow, horror movies aren’t the only ones that are scary. Heck, you could argue that “The King of Comedy,” is Scorsese’s scariest movie (and that “Taxi Driver” is his funniest). I’ll never forget the final shot of “Planet of Apes,” when I was little and hiding under the covers wondering about the big questions of life.
The movie I can’t get over, though, is “Mad Max II,” aka “The Road Warrior.” Scared me as a kid and makes me jittery when I watch it today. It’s a comic book but an effective one. Watch this scene and tell me you don’t get nervous in spite of how silly it all is.
