The Black Cat [1934] [DVD]

The great Bela Lugosi has a score to settle. After a car crash,Lugosi
offers to take a stranded honeymoon couple to the house of his friend,
Herr Poelzig. Lugosi has a score to settle with poelzig, as he left him
for dead in a POW camp, and then married his wife.
Poelzig tells him she is dead, but in fact she is still being held prisoner by the sadistic Poelzig,
who also wants to keep the honeymoon couple to offer as a sacrifice in one of his frequent Black Mass ceremonies.
Can Bela save them and find out the truth about his wife before it is too late?
A fine Universal Horror Classic with Lugosi on top form sparring with the equally great Boris Karloff.
Look out for John Carradine in his debut role as the pianist.
A haunting, poetic movie with a solid cast and slowly revealing story. Don't miss.

"I go to visit an old friend," says Dr. Vitus Werdegast to Peter and Joan Alison, the young newlyweds he meets on the train moving through a rain-swept night. Their destination is the small, picturesque village of Vizhegrad that had been the site of a horrendous battle during the Great War. They board a bus and the driver tells them, "All of this country was one of the greatest battlefields of the war. Tens of thousands of men died here. The ravine down there was piled twelve deep with dead and wounded men. The little river below was swollen red, a raging torrent of blood. And that high hill yonder where Engineer Poelzig now lives was the site of Fort Marmorus. He built his home on its very foundations. Marmorus, the greatest graveyard in the world." Then the bus swerves and crashes in the driving rain, leaving the driver dead and the young wife injured, Dr. Werdegast takes them to Hjalmar Poelzig's home...his "old friend." Just who are Dr. Vitus Werdegast and Hjalmar Poelzig?

Werdegast (Bela Lugosi), says Poelzig, "is one of Hungary's greatest psychiatrists," He was captured in the Great War and thrown into a dank prison to rot for 15 years. He lost his wife, his young daughter and, as we shall see, his sanity. Yet he will be deeply touched by the newlyweds.

Poelzig (Boris Karloff), says Werdegast, is "one of Austria's greatest architects." He designed the great monolith of a home that sits atop what was Fort Marmorus. Poelzig has a muscular body and a slab of a face, with cruel, mocking eyes and a widow's peak that would make Robert Taylor cry with envy. We also will learn that he is a traitor, a murderer, a seducer, a Satanist and a talented embalmer.

The Black Cat has nothing to do with Poe's story. It's about evil, madness, love and obsession. That this all takes place in a terrific art deco setting keeps us smiling...but down in the dungeon, where we meet the wives of Engineer Poelzig and watch how a keen scalpel can slowly flay the skin from a man's face...well, we don't turn away.

What makes this movie one of my favorites is the character of Dr. Werdegast and the performance of Bela Lugosi. Werdegast may go mad, but he's been driven mad by terrible injustice, by the loss of those he loved and by the final knowledge that their fate was worse than he ever believed. "Is she not beautiful?" says Poelzig to Werdegast, deep in the preserved caverns of Fort Marmorus. "I wanted to have her beauty, always. I loved her too, Vitus." Though Werdegast tips over the edge to exact a terrible revenge, he still responds to the love the two newlyweds have for each other. He realizes the evil in Poelzig, and he counters it to protect and finally save the young couple. A game of chess, if lost, may lead to death for Peter Alison and a much worse fate for Joan Alison. Lugosi is quite touching in those moments he shows tenderness to young Peter and Joan Alison and in his determination to save them from the equally mad Poelzig. And Boris Karloff? He was a fine actor, and studying his style is time well spent. All this in just 65 minutes, and with art deco, too.

If I had to choose a few of Hollywood's more-or-less classic old horror movies to take with me to a deserted island, this and The Body Snatchers would be among them. Both have a sympathetic protagonist caught up in horror partly of his own making, with just enough cheese to keep the stories entertaining and not so much "human condition" redemption as to make them tiresome.

Edgar G. Ulmer's 'The Black Cat' stands out as a true high point of the 1930's Universal horror films and without doubt here we have a film to haunt and fascinate the imagination and chill the soul, with its glacial and shadowy atmospheres set in the sinister Art Deco/Bauhaus mansion of Engineer Poelzig, played with incredible presence and arresting visual impact by Boris Karloff, who has built his house on the ruins of Fort Marmarus which he commanded during the war. We are taken on a rainswept journey into the darkside of post WWI Mittel-Europa. Bela Lugosi plays his nemesis, Dr Vitus Werdegast, who once served under him and has now returned as avenging angel, seeking Kaarin his lost wife and 'thirsting for his blood' as Poelzig sonorously declares. The foils to all this obsessive darkness, doom and madness are the newlywed couple of novelist Peter Allison (David Manners) and his young wife Joan, played by the exquisite Jacqueline Wells. Many brilliant and striking scenes impress themselves from the Expressionistic appearance of starkly shadowed cats, curious use of angles, light and darkness, Poelzig's necrophiliac shrine beneath the castle where beautiful women are preserved in glass cases so that he might 'possess their beauty for ever', the fraught and intense chess-game which Werdegast and Poelzig play, the strange rites of the Black Mass which Poelzig officiates over at the rites of Lucifer held at the dark of the moon in a wonderfully designed infernal chapel. This ravishingly stylish and unsettling tale breaks all the conventions, succeeds magnificently and perhaps gives a disquieting glimpse at the tenebrous and infernal power which conceals itself at the very heart of modernity, for this film is certainly a kind of meditation upon the multifarious and deathless evil manifest in the ruinous landscape of the 20th century with its relentless war and insane cruelty...apparently Poelzig was named after the famed German architect and designer Hans Poelzig who was also something of a Platonist-tinged mystic and heavily influenced by esoteric concepts. This film is around an hour long - compared to today's overblown and overlong cinematic effusions of mediocrity it's nothing short of miraculous just how rich and powerful an experience can be compressed into such a modest time-window but Ulmer and Ruric's 'The Black Cat' is certainly a darkly elegant, beautifully-realised and truly stylish masterpiece, one of my favourite films.