Review: The Old Dark House (1932)

As I write this review on a late October evening, showers flow down the length of the Lake Michigan shoreline, wind-driven droplets tapping irregularly, but frequently, against the northernmost windows and walls of La Casa del Terror.

A cold night. A raw night. An inhospitable night. A perfect night to watch James Whale's The Old Dark House.

Many films in the first few years after sound films became the standard suffer from the lack of a musical score. Tod Browning's Dracula, for example, seemed lethargic and much longer than it actually was until the late 1990s, when Universal added a score composed by Philip Glass and performed by the Kronos Quartet; the newly scored version plays much better (though, for the sake of purists, the version without the score was included on the DVD).

No such problem afflicts The Old Dark House. It doesn't have a musical score either, but Whale--perhaps as a consequence of having a theater background, rather having made the transition from silent pictures (like Browning and so many other directors working in Hollywood at the time)--fills in the audio gaps with ambient sounds to be found on nights such as this, when howling winds, pounding rain, creaking doors, rattling windows, banging shutters, and, of course, the occasional blood-freezing, soul-curdling scream, make their own kind of music.
It's on such a night that three travelers--husband Raymond Massey, wife Gloria Stuart and friend Melvyn Douglas--try to make their way across the Welsh countryside. After they come to the conclusion that not only are they lost, but the roads behind and before them are blocked by the storm, they pull up to the isolated, desolate abode of the title, only to find Morgan, a mute, disfigured butler (Boris Karloff, who received top billing even though he only has a supporting role here) and the exceedingly odd Femm family: Bitchy, fearful Horace (Ernest Thesiger); cranky, hard-of-hearing-when-it-suits-her Rebecca (Eva Moore); and 102-year-old patriarch Sir Roderick (John Dudgeon, whose real name was Elspeth--yep, "he" was a "she"). Two more travelers--blustery Charles Laughton and petite Lillian Bond--show up, soaked to the bone, and they all try to ride the night out as the lights blink off and on and off again, shadows grow long on the dreary walls and Morgan gets absolutely smashed, which causes him to turn loose the one family member Horace and Rebecca neglected to mention--their psychotic, homicidal brother, Saul (Brember Wills).

Even though the action is held off until the very end of the movie--which differs from the novel by J.B. Priestley on which it's based, but not to the detriment of the film--The Old Dark House isn't slow or dull by any means. It follows the basic blueprint of many a "haunted house" thriller--like The Bat (or its sound remake, The Bat Whispers), The Cat and the Canary or The Monster--but differs from those films in a number of ways. It carries the dry wit that you would expect from a Whale movie, but here it not only lampoons the material at hand, but also hides the genuine scares along the way that much better.

The cast is extraordinary, with early appearances by actors (Douglas, Massey, Laughton) who would go on to be stars for decades to come and character actors like Theiseger to add saltiness and vinegar to the mix, and the performances are uniformly good, with Douglas excelling as a disillusioned veteran of World War I and Wills matching him as a madman perfectly capable of killing without even a twitch of conscience.

The sets are wonderfully large and gothic, with shadows painted onto the walls, just like in German Expressionist classics like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Whale makes great use of the space he's given, moving his camera and characters about as he wishes for surprises both pleasant and frightening. And Whale may have been among the first directors to realize that "talkies" could be so much more than the voices of actors--that carefully orchestrated sound effects could do as much to establish and sustain mood as sets or actors ever could.

In fact, the only bad thing about The Old Dark House is its relative obscurity. Even with a prominent director and top-of-the-line cast, this movie vanished for decades--it was even thought to be a "lost" film (i.e., a film for which no print is known to exist) for a while. But it isn't lost. It exists. And it should be sought out and treasured by anyone who appreciates movies best viewed when the skies are foreboding, colorful leaves spin down from dark branches to the damp ground below, and there's an appropriate chill in the air.