Who says a horror movie has to be scary? 1932’s The Old Dark House sure isn’t. Any horror is purely coincidental. Any real plot is purely coincidental as well. But danged if it isn’t fun as all get-out.
It all opens on a dark and stormy night, of course, with Philip Waverton (Raymond Massey), his wife, Margaret (Gloria Stuart), and their friend, Roger Penderel (Melvyn Douglas) driving through the countryside in a deluge. They know they’re somewhere in Wales, they know that they’re on a hillside, they know it’s extremely wet, dark and muddy, but beyond that, they’re clueless. It’s only a matter of time before they go off a cliff. At least Roger singing at the top of his lungs from the back seat keeps everyone in good spirits or at least annoyed enough to keep driving.
When the group sees a house, it’s like salvation. Sure, it looks lonely and rundown, but as the saying goes, “Any port in a storm,” and anyway, the road is blocked by a mudslide. There’s nothing to do but knock on the door and see what’s what.
“What” turns out to be Morgan (Boris Karloff), the house’s mute butler, who greets Philip, Margaret, and Roger with a few monosyllabic grunts before letting them in, and soon the party meets Horace Femm (Ernest Thesinger), a pleasant enough fellow who warns them that his sister, Rebecca (Eva Moore) owns the house and she’s not the most amiable sort. She’s also selectively deaf.
As if to illustrate his point, Rebecca herself comes thundering down the stairs, annoyed that the Femms have houseguests. She might not be too happy, but at least she lets them stay.
Margaret goes off to change out of her wet clothes, and for some reason her only option is a blindingly white, low-cut evening gown with plenty of cleavage. Rebecca, who hangs around the bedroom the entire time Margaret is changing, warns Margaret that her sister died in the house. In that very room on the bed, in fact. The whole Femm family is wicked. And oh yeah, Rebecca and Horace’s 102-year old father is an invalid in an upstairs bedroom. Margaret, Phillip, and Robert picked quite a house to shelter in.
Now sufficiently freaked, Margaret joins Rebecca and the others for a roast beef supper that includes both steamed and mashed potatoes (or are they mashed turnips?). Whatever else can be said about the Femms, they like their root veggies.
They’ve all barely finished when there’s another knock at the door and Sir William Porterhouse (Charles Laughton) and a chorus girl named Gladys Perkins (Lillian Bond) stumble in. They’ve been stranded too, only their car’s been crushed by a falling tree. Sir William doesn’t seem to be an unkind sort, and while his knighthood seems to be of the Emperor Norton variety, he does have enough money to pay Gladys a little bit for simply existing. Yeah, not for services rendered. She’s not that kind of woman.
Anyway, everyone settles in for the night. Mostly. Roger and Gladys get stranded in the stables for a bit when Robert goes outside to the car to have a brandy. He and Gladys take a liking to each other. Meanwhile, Morgan hits the bottle hard and lurches a bit around the house, plus there’s the matter of the invalid father upstairs.
Oh, and lest we forget, the top floor of this house, which by the way, doesn’t appear to be more than three stories but has four flights of stairs, houses Saul (Brember Wills), the Femm family’s resident schizophrenic and pyromaniac.
Seriously, The Old Dark House is fun. Based on a novel by J.B. Priestley and directed by James Whale of Frankenstein fame, it’s both a send-up of the horror genre while providing a few minor scares, and it doesn’t take much for any of it to happen. I’d say more but I don’t want to ruin it. Suffice it to say, these actors don’t have to do much but play their parts well and have a good time.
And the gags are perfectly timed, as well, with the bulk of the one-liners going to Melvyn Douglas, who always more than proved he was a good hand at comedy. Oddly enough, the part that gave me the giggles was when he points in another direction and says, “What in the world can that be?” and the character sitting next to him actually looks. It’s one of the oldest bits in the book, yet seeing Melvyn Douglas pull it in a movie that’s over ninety years old is hilarious.
The reviews, of course, objected to a few things, although the critics generally seemed to like the movie. Universal Weekly called it “a stunning scare film,” and “great fun for the less timorous.”
Gloria Stuart’s evening dress made a huge impression, of course. Variety said, “Gloria Stuart gives excellent account of herself, although that extreme decolletage is rather uncalled for considering the locale.”
The New York Times agreed: “Gloria Stuart is both clever and charming as Mrs. Waverton, but her evening gown for such a scene is perhaps a trifle out of place. Be that as it may, it is a stunning creation.”
Overall, the whole movie worked very well for Miss Gloria, who, besides putting in a fine performance, spends a few minutes in one scene making shadow puppets on the wall. She netted quite a lot of publicity from the film as a promising new up-and-comer, and legend has it that The Old Dark House helped her land the role of the elderly Rose DeWitt Bukater in Titanic.
Boris Karloff got plenty of buzz as well, mostly to assure people that Karloff was really Karloff and to praise Jack Pierce’s makeup job. Writer Allan Saunders wryly noted that Karloff’s face looked “as if he had tried to kiss a wildcat against its will.”
How did the public like The Old Dark House? Well, it’s been kind of a slow burn. Despite Motion Picture Herald and other industry papers advising theater owners to promote it as a “surprise melodrama,” the film didn’t do all that well at the box office and the movie was pulled from theaters. When it was reissued in 1939 at the Rialto in New York, the same thing happened and the film was shelved until 1968.
Seen today, The Old Dark House has aged well. Today’s film auteurs could learn a thing or two from this film.
A special announcement is coming up tomorrow, and I hope everyone is as excited about it as I am. Here’s a hint: Eight years. Anyway, thanks for reading, all, and I hope to see you then…
The Old Dark House is available on Blu-ray and DVD from Amazon. It can also be streamed on YouTube.
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