Frankenstein (1931)

USA, 70 minutes

Director: James Whale

Writers: John L. Balderston, Mary Shelley, Peggy Webling, Francis Edward Faragon, Garrett Fort, Richard Schayer, Robert Florey, John Russell

Photography: Arthur Edeson, Paul Ivano

Music: Bernhard Kaun

Editor: Clarence Kolster

Cast: Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, John Boles, Edward Van Sloan, Frederick Kerr, Dwight Frey, Marilyn Harris

The original film production of Mary Shelley’s landmark Frankenstein novel (written when she was 19) incredibly is now almost a century old itself. As a kid I used to stay up late to get a look at it whenever I could. The two bridge tables of writers credited at IMDb for the screenplay are a reasonable approximation of the convoluted history of the Shelley property, originally published in 1818 and followed in five years by the first of a long series of stage productions. The most recent before this movie was put on just in 1927—Peggy Webling wrote that. Balderston adapted her play for this script, with story elements by Schayer. It sounds like Faragon and Fort actually blocked out and typed up the screenplay, with uncredited contributions from Florey and Russell. Director James Whale puts his own stamp on it, including hiring Boris Karloff out of the commissary to play the monster. Whale reportedly liked him for the part because he thought Karloff resembled himself. While I’m at it, makeup artist and designer Jack P. Pierce also counts as an auteur on this enterprise. He is responsible for the look and feel of the Frankenstein monster as we think of it today, including the flattop head, neck bolts, and tattered outfit.

The short picture starts in a curious way, often lopped off of the TV broadcasts. The gentle and mild-mannered Edward Van Sloan (who plays Henry Frankenstein’s mentor Dr. Waldman in the movie proper) steps out from behind a theatrical curtain to issue a friendly warning about the movie: “It is one of the strangest tales ever told. It deals with the two great mysteries of creation: life and death. I think it will thrill you. It may shock you. It might even horrify you. So if any of you feel that you do not care to subject your nerves to such a strain, now is your chance to, uh... well, we've warned you.” And then on to the opening titles.

Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931)

USA, 86 minutes

Director: F.W. Murnau

Writers: F.W. Murnau, Robert J. Flaherty, Edgar G. Ulmer

Photography: Floyd Crosby

Music: Violeta Dinescu, Hugo Riesenfeld, W. Franke Harling, Milan Order

Editor: Arthur A. Brooks

Cast: Matahi, Anne Chevalier, Bill Bambridge, Hitu, Ah Fong, Jules, Mehao

It would probably be more accurate to give this picture a subtitle like A Story of Star-Crossed Love. “The South Seas” is merely the setting. The story feels much more rooted in Western or even Hollywood preoccupations, a boy-meets-girl romance in a world too cruel for love. Will it ever change? But Robert Flaherty is also on hand as producer, cowriter, and general exotic documentary influence. He directed Nanook of the North in 1922, an important movie in film history several ways, and he brings a sense of sideshow authenticity to this picture, nearly all of which was shot in the South Pacific. It is duly noted, in the opening credits, that “only native-born South Sea islanders appear in this picture with a few half-castes and Chinese.” Wikipedia calls Tabu “docufiction.”

OK, fair enough. The location and native cast bring a lot of interesting texture to a somewhat ho-hum love story, thwarted by rank native superstition and barbarism. Matahi plays “The Boy,” a skilled young fisherman and diver full of high spirits. He feels like one model for the Tarzan movies that would start in 1932 with Johnny Weissmuller. French-Polynesian Anne Chevalier plays Reri, “The Girl.” They are deeply, passionately in love. Life is good and they are full of happiness. Then Reri is declared a sacred maiden by native elders, subject to the “tabu”: “man must not touch her or cast upon her the eye of desire.” It’s quite a predicament. Stop me if you’ve heard this before.

"Opening the Door" (1931)

In the anthology My Favorite Horror Story, “Opening the Door” is the pick of Peter Atkins, another writer I don’t know well. As Atkins points out in his lengthy introduction, the story is subtle but deeply mysterious and a little unsettling. As it happens, it involves one of the true-crime types of stories that most intrigue me: disappearances. In “Opening the Door,” a clergyman disappears for six weeks and then reappears again with no sense he’s been away. The flower he picked the day he went missing is still fresh when he’s back. The story is told by a newspaper reporter remembering strange stories he has covered. The clergyman had won some notoriety at the turn of the 20th century for newspaper pieces he wrote. They warned of the inadequacy of roadways in the transition away from horse-drawn vehicles. Strangely banal insight but there it is. Then the disappearance and reappearance happen and the newspaper reporter drops by to speak with him. They become friendly and meet again, trying to sort out what happened or what it might mean. The clergyman knows it happened when he exited the garden door at the back of his lot, which is generally unused (and which, early in the story, he cautions the reporter against using). He doesn’t know how six weeks passed. They kick around a few more things, some of them in Latin. It’s not a long story. In the end the clergyman disappears again and is never heard from after that. This is the detail that hits hardest for me, right at the end. He didn’t use the garden door this time as he was elsewhere. Wikipedia describes the story as involving “some outer faery realm,” which sounds right for the Welshman Machen and for the British Isles more generally. The versatile comedian Patton Oswalt likes this story a lot too, including it in a fancy anthology he edited, The Ghost Box, and focusing on some of the details in the story on either side of the garden door (which I’m glad he brought to my attention). “Opening the Door” is very good at being both low-key and disquieting and that’s what I like about it. Like Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, and Sherdian Le Fanu, Machen balances the rational world with the potentiality for a world or worlds beyond that can’t be explained. His characters are sober and worried by their experiences. Not much happens here—mostly a matter of assembling the facts. We’re the ones left to make sense of them. In many cases, as here, the characters admit they can’t. So this is a bit like depth-charge horror. It hits later, harder. I may not like it as much as “The White People” but that’s a high bar to clear.

My Favorite Horror Story, ed. Mike Baker & Martin H. Greenberg (out of print)

Read story online.

"The Demon King" (1931)

This story by J.B. Priestley is theatrical, funny, and hugely entertaining. With the setting of a traditional holiday performance in a remote shire of England—I kept thinking of community theater in the US—it is thoroughly steeped in backstage friction and show-must-go-on bravura. Bickering and long-simmering feuds mark relations among the players and crew as well as a spirit of camaraderie. For this Boxing Day evening performance, the man playing the Demon King in the supernatural bits cannot be found. He is a journeyman professional hired for the occasion, with a reputation for "lifting the elbow" and thought to be likely drunk somewhere again. But he cannot be found. An impromptu understudy, woefully unprepared, is pressed into service, but at the last minute the actor shows up, in full costume and makeup. "He looked superb.... The face had a greenish phosphorescent glow, and its eyes flashed between glittering lids." During the show, he struts around scaring everybody and gives a great performance. Other players perform better than they ever have—for one it is a lifetime's dream come true. My favorite detail might be that the village audience, typically taciturn and withdrawn, suspicious of paying money for entertainment, erupts in ovations that go on and on. "The stage manager looked at his watch, 'It's holding up the show, that's certain.... If they're going to behave like this every night, we'll have to cut an hour out of it.'" My other favorite detail might be that this is all a production of the Jack & Jill nursery rhyme, with a Fairy Queen and Demon King and supernatural bits. Apparently it's how they did things. For his part, Priestley is cryptic: "[T]hose people who are puzzled to know what demons have to do with Jack and Jill, those innocent water-fetchers, should pay a visit to the nearest pantomime, which will teach them a lot they did not know about fairy tales." The only explanation for the night is when the troupe gets word that the actor hired to play the Demon King, the one they worried about "lifting the elbow," had been detained "knocked down in Boar Lane by a car, but he'll be all right tomorrow." The rest is for us and those in the story to decide, with the help of clonking details such as a smell of sulfur in the theater. It's all a big show, of course, but it works. I like the humor of it, with this evident demon waylaying the other actor and then showing up to goad a big performance and ovation out of the small village for his own entertainment. I love how it just sticks Jack & Jill into the middle of it. It's a Christmas show—shouldn't there be more holiday theme to it? No explanation. Priestley, more of a mainstream novelist and playwright, didn't do much horror and this one feels like he's just having fun. It's infectious.

Realms of Darkness, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Story not available online.

"The Black Stone" (1931)

Robert E. Howard is likely more famous now as the creator and original author of Kull and Conan the Barbarian tales, though he missed out on the action figure market by several decades, dying in 1936. Sword and sorcery (for which Howard is arguably responsible) is too pulpy for me but Howard was also a devotee of and correspondent with H.P. Lovecraft, an early result of which is this tale set squarely in the Cthulhu universe. Howard has his own interesting biography as a lonely Texan, detailed in the indie movie The Whole Wide World with Vincent D'Onofrio and Renee Zellweger. I haven't seen it since it was new in 1996, but remember liking it in a kind of pastoral indie way, while mixing up Howard in my mind with Lovecraft (who hailed from Rhode Island, not Texas, for one thing). Howard can be an awkward writer, making mistakes like confusing "gleam" and "glean," even as he strains after the dense Lovecraft poetics. The line between fan fiction and its sources can be thin in these circles. With "The Black Stone" (published in Weird Tales so arguably not fan fiction at all), Howard chipped in a mythical text that quickly became Cthulhu canon, along with Lovecraft's Necronomicon by the "Mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred. Howard named the author of his book Friedrich von Junzt and the book Nameless Cults (or "the Black Book"). Leave it to Lovecraft to later apply the German (appropriately, of course) for an altogether better and more ominous title (because German), Unaussprechlichen Kulten. "The Black Stone" is based on a familiar Sherlock Holmes type of investigator figure, the unnamed first-person narrator, who depends less on observation and deduction and more on library research and good luck. Indeed, conducting investigation in the field (a remote Eastern Europe setting), he is at once extraordinarily unprepared and lucky. In other words, "coincidence be thy name, plot development." For example, this guy knows things happen on Midsummer Night but somehow he forgets that he is traveling at that time of the year. How fortunate, come the night in question! Despite its quasi-Transylvania setting, the story feels very much like American horror, like Washington Irving or Nathaniel Hawthorne, with its shock troops of devil worshipers in the moonlit wilderness. One nice detail is that even though there is a horde of them, they are silent. A sacrifice is nearly as vivid as one in the movie Midsommar, and pumping mist all over it as ghostly and unreal and dreamlike somehow only makes it more disturbing. And then there is one of those Lovecraftian reveals of stupendously enormous scale as the Black Stone, the giant obelisk in the wilderness that draws forth the ghosts to worship on Midsummer Night, is revealed as ... well, I would let you find that out. For me "The Black Stone" is fan fiction, but for all that it's not a bad romp.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos

Read story online.

At the Mountains of Madness (1931)

This very long H.P. Lovecraft story, arguably his masterpiece, bears interest for a number of reasons. The sweeping vision it presents counts as horror, if only because it's creepy and gets squishy, but Theodore Sturgeon reportedly called it "first-water, true-blue science fiction." It works perhaps best as an impressive example of the "lost world" story, like Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, the King Kong movie, or Wakanda. It was written when it was possible to entertain features like an undiscovered mountain range in the Antarctic whose peaks (plural) put "Everest out of the running." It was rejected for publication for five years as too long (indignities of the overlooked genius). Last but not least, it's nearly perfect Lovecraft, grinding away at its premises until they are well fixed in the brain and provide context for adventure, confrontation, and characters losing their minds due to excessive boggling. Strains of Cthulhu, the Necronomicon, and the usual sinister documentation are heard as well. Lovecraft kept up with the science of his day (not to mention the pulp fiction), so his descriptions of this strange land in the Antarctic are informed by a sense of the Earth's history in terms of geology and a scope that breaches epochs. What he describes his small party of two encountering is hundreds of thousands and millions of years old, even as much as a billion, and he knows enough about the theories of planetary development to make it credible enough to fool a rube like me. He's all over plate tectonics, for example. The preservation of the architecture and structure of his massive dead city is another matter but apparently the dry and cold conditions in this Antarctic accommodate that. So, uh, OK, I'll buy that. Never mind the high winds. It's not perfectly preserved. In general, as so often, it's just better to agree to believe. So we get Lovecraft's usual infinitely detailed description done up in scientific drag and dipped in a sauce of art history pseudo-erudition—the Russian painter Nicholas Roerich is name-checked repeatedly in this one—and it's good as always to enter with a modicum of patience. Give him an inch and he will blow your mind a mile, but it's not always an easy inch. The plot, even such as it is, tends toward the busy and a little beside the point, also as usual, with various Antarctic expeditions and two or three alien races and/or supernatural forces, plus some giant friendly penguins. The Cyclopean horrors that drive men mad happen in a big rush at the end, almost too fast. "Too fast" is a strange thing to say about Lovecraft. I estimate At the Mountains of Madness as 85% scene-setting and description and 15% plot execution, which is all right when you remember that the 85% part is what he's best at doing. He always kept a foot planted in the Sherlock Holmes style of first-person investigation too, which brings some odd comfort of familiarity to his tales. I do admire his ability to imagine. At the Mountains of Madness is heady stuff, one of his best, and not a bad place to start on him. If you're really ambitious, read it with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, its spiritual cousin.

H.P. Lovecraft, Tales (Library of America)

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Sanctuary (1931)

The first and only other time I read this novel was in the '70s, so I was surprised that I noticed the difference between it and this "Corrected Text" version, which came along in 1981. Mostly what I noticed was the absence of William Faulkner's "misleading" introduction, written a year after the original publication, which he then changed his mind about and did not want included in later printings. But there it was in 1975 or so, a heaving disavowal of Sanctuary as a potboiler, "the most horrific tale I could imagine," written for the money and ultimately failing even at that. I suspect at bottom it's an issue of embarrassment—Sanctuary is a profile of a mindset of which Faulkner evidently was not entirely in control at the time of writing. The basic story is about a white college girl of 18 in Oxford, Mississippi—Temple Drake—and her coercion into prostitution. It's a solid foundation, even classic Zola style naturalism, but from that point on we are hard into Faulkner-land, and he's straining remember. The man who turns out Temple is known as Popeye. He is impotent and sickly, though lethal and dangerous. Faulkner thinks Popeye thinks he can do the job with a corncob. This is sufficiently lurid, yes, but I think we're losing track of believability, never mind taste. There is also a scene no doubt beyond lurid for its times, but far more graphic displays of it can be found by the hundreds now in the "cuckold" section of your favorite porn site. In a word: eww. But one word won't do: eww, eww, eww. Thus my fair warning to you, gentle reader, and too late now for spoiler warnings. I'm a little embarrassed myself by this overheated funk, but that's not really my main complaint. I've seen worse. At the same time, with its insistence on the poetic concrete—to the point I'm not always certain what is going on except on a base experiential level—he seems to want to have it two ways, writing a potboiler and maintaining his literary dignity. He is often examining light and shadow closely, and people and scenes slip easily into affects of oil paintings. He has a particular fascination with the texture of eyes, describing them as soft black rubber, knobby, and utterly black. In the Faulkner universe, this novel is slightly to the side. We run into a couple of the Snopes brothers, who I tend to enjoy though obviously they are a stereotype of poor white trash. I know the name Horace Benbow too—he is the attorney and knock-kneed moral compass here and has appeared elsewhere in Faulkner's work. Sanctuary is an interesting curiosity but I don't think it ranks with the best of his work. For its raw action it's not much fun to read either, though the language as always has its points.

In case it's not at the library.

City Lights (1931)

#1: City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931)

I realized later that I probably could have put Citizen Kane here and maybe even pulled it off. I got kind of cute with these last five picks—an embedded Top 5 for my #5, a four-hour movie for #4, a made-up trilogy for #3, and a matched pair of stellar performances for #2. I wanted my #1 to represent a singular, multifaceted talent at the top of his form, and that's Orson Welles and Citizen Kane without a doubt.

But it's also Charlie Chaplin and City Lights. The guy wrote it, directed it, edited it, stars in it, and he wrote all the music too. And it's great music. The talkies had already arrived and his moment was slipping away, but Chaplin still had a few good ones in him—his best, in fact—along with some strikingly innovative ideas about the place and purpose of sound. This is not a silent picture; it is, as billed, "a comedy romance in pantomime," and sound is a significant part of it even if dialogue isn't, for which he still uses (sparingly) the intertitle cards. It is original in ways that few pictures not done by Chaplin are.

M (1931)

Germany, 109 minutes
Director: Fritz Lang
Writers: Egon Jacobson, Thea von Harbou, Fritz Lang
Photography: Fritz Amo Wagner
Editor: Paul Falkenberg
Cast: Peter Lorre, Otto Wernicke, Gustav Grundgens, Ellen Widman

Back when I started watching late-night movies on broadcast television, shortly after getting out of high school, this seemed like a natural—I loved Peter Lorre from his iconic supporting roles in Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon, and I appreciated Fritz Lang particularly for Metropolis, which I read about avidly and eventually had the opportunity to see at a nostalgia film club in the suburb where I grew up. That film club occupied the space above a storefront, furnished with folding chairs and a tiny screen, and it showed Max Fleischer cartoons and old movies in 16-millimeter—Freaks, Reefer Madness, White Zombie, and, eventually, M, which by that time had assumed something of the role of a holy grail for me.

Thus I have to count M as the most disappointing movie I have ever seen, an experience I replicated a couple more times (for purposes of verification as much as anything) over the decades. More than once it has worked as a soporific on me, literally putting me to sleep. I've come to have more appreciation for it—the commentary track by Anton Kaes and Eric Rentschler in the Criterion DVD was helpful in pointing out its many virtues on my most recent look at it—but it remains one that frankly mystifies me. It seems so promising with Lorre and Lang and especially with all its accolades: greatest German movie of all time (according to the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?), "the best of all serial-killer movies" (Jonathan Rosenbaum), and way high on any number of lists of greatest pictures.

City Lights (1931)

USA, 87 minutes
Director/music: Charles Chaplin
Writers: Charles Chaplin, Harry Clive, Harry Crocker
Photography: Gordon Pollock, Roland Totheroh
Editors: Charles Chaplin, Willard Nico
Cast: Charles Chaplin, Virginia Cherrill, Florence Lee, Harry Myers, Al Ernest Garcia, Hank Mann

I was involved over much of the past six months with a couple of other friends in a Facebook project, just concluded, in which we counted down our 50 favorite movies in a group dedicated to the purpose. A few dozen people were along for the ride and chipped in with their own remarks, criticisms, praise, alternative selections, and talk about the weather and such as we went along. I have plans to port my list and write-ups over to this blog in a kind of meta anatomy of how I approach these kinds of countdowns, which I have been doing more in recent times than I ever thought I would have. More on that down the road.

Meanwhile, I'm just going to go ahead and give away the store here, partly because it's what's next on my ongoing project of writing about the pictures ranked in the essential They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? survey of critical consensus, partly because it surprised me how elusive my #1 proved to be not only to the two I was doing the countdown with, but also to friends of mine who were following along—I had really thought it was more or less common knowledge by this point, or at least somewhat readable from the picks I was making—and partly because the point of my exercise next year is not really going to be driving toward the big reveal of a top 10 and #1, but more looking closely at how I get there.