Vampyr (1932)

Germany / France, 75 minutes

Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer

Writers: Sheridan Le Fanu, Christen Jul, Carl Theodor Dreyer

Photography: Rudolph Mate, Louis Nee

Music: Wolfgang Zeller

Editor: Tonka Taldy

Cast: Julian West, Sybille Schmitz, Maurice Schutz, Jan Hieronimko, Henriette Gerard, Albert Bras, N. Babanini, Jane Mora

Danish director and cowriter Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Ordet) based his vampire story on the Irish horror writer Sheridan Le Fanu’s essential 1872 collection, In a Glass Darkly, which includes “Carmilla,” the famous lesbian vampire story. It’s an important point of distinction from the more popular vampire source of the time, which, of course, was Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published 25 years later in 1897. Stoker’s epistolary novel was responsible informally (later settled legally) for F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu and then, in 1931, for the kickoff of the Universal horror franchise, Dracula. In fact, Vampyr was required to wait for its release until after Dracula and then Frankenstein. These are all notably slow and very quiet dream movies, perhaps Vampyr more than any of them, which moves like thawing syrup. It often reminded me of Eraserhead, which makes me wonder how much influence it might have had on David Lynch.

The star, Julian West as Allan Grey, was the primary source of funding for the picture in exchange for the role. His real name was Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, a French-born member of Russian nobility. In that way Vampyr is a kind of vanity project—in a way perhaps even more so for Dreyer than the baron. Pursuits into horror literature have traditionally not often won respect and admiration. Dreyer may have been taking a kind of calculated risk with his career, moving from Saint Joan of Arc only four years earlier to these creatures of the night.

“The Thing in the Cellar” (1932)

This very short story by David H. Keller (formally “M.D.” on ISFDB), published originally in Weird Tales, is almost primitively simple. It did not particularly work on me, but comments at one site where it’s reprinted agreed it was the scariest story they had ever read when they were kids (perhaps a version of my experience with George Hitchcock’s “An Invitation to the Hunt”). I love how simple the elements of this story are. The house and the house’s foundation do not fit—the foundation is much older and larger. The door in the kitchen to the cellar is also much older than the rest of the house and more appropriate for an exterior door, as if for protection. A young family lives there. The parents use the cellar and have never felt anything strange about it except the usual creepy stuff about dark cellars and cobwebs and such. Another nice detail is that there’s ancient junk down there that has never been cleaned out. Their son is terrified by it and has been ever since he was a baby. It’s taken as usual childhood fears but an unusually strong and intense case of them. The parents worry he is too morbid and seek professional help. The person they consult suggests forcing the issue by nailing the cellar door open and making the kid stay in the kitchen with the open door. Another professional they consult that same day is alarmed and says that’s exactly the wrong thing to do. So they hurry to the kitchen, but—well, you should read the story for yourself to see if you think the finish is as predictable as I do. Now yes sure there are problems here, such as the convenience of the second opinion leading to further discoveries. But the second opinion is still effective because it confirms our own uneasy sense that the kid is on to something and the first advice was bad. At the same time, absolutely no evidence beyond this boy’s overwhelming fear is ever offered. The parents hear and see nothing. The kid never describes what he’s afraid of. That’s so good—just don’t explain it at all. The story doesn’t particularly work on me. Perhaps I was too old when I read it. But I can see it has worked on others and I think I can see why. Kids are notorious for being carried away by their imaginations and in many ways this one never has a chance. The cruelty of the proposed treatment is good too. I can see why it could all pack a vicious punch.

Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Trouble in Paradise (1932)

USA, 83 minutes

Director: Ernst Lubitsch

Writers: Samson Raphaelson, Grover Jones, Aladar Laszlo, Ernst Lubitsch

Photography: Victor Milner

Music: W. Franke Harling

Editor: unknown?

Cast: Herbert Marshall, Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, Edward Everett Horton, Charles Ruggles, C. Aubrey Smith, Leonid Kinskey

What a difference the Hays Code makes. Until those rules for Hollywood movie decorum came along in 1934, addressing problems that may or may not have existed, the idea in some outraged circles was apparently that anything goes on Hollywood movie sets. Come to find out, it’s “anything goes” for its time, most of it more like knowing and witty, not necessarily coarse. It’s not like there is nudity in Trouble in Paradise or anything like that, just lifelong criminals getting away with it and laughing about it, plus various jolts of sophisticated European adultery (most of it with perfectly conventional values). It’s the Lubitsch touch, more or less, the lightly cynical, lightly romantic take on human affairs of director and cowriter Ernst Lubitsch.

He remains a titan of his time, though sometimes it seems he is more like forgotten now. Billy Wilder reputedly had a sign in his office which read, “How would Lubitsch do it?” Even before Alfred Hitchcock, Lubitsch was one of the earliest examples of a Hollywood director famous for a uniquely recognizable style. “Lubitsch was always the least Germanic of German directors,” the critic Andrew Sarris wrote of him, “as Lang was the most Germanic.” There’s little question Trouble in Paradise could not have been made even three years later.

“Two Bottles of Relish” (1932)

I know this Lord Dunsany story is a murder mystery because it was another I found in the 65 Great Murder Mysteries anthology edited by Mary Danby, which is chock-full of murder mysteries however offbeat. In 1932 Lord Dunsany was reportedly trying to break into the murder mystery story market, but I prefer to think of “Two Bottles of Relish” as a parody of Sherlock Holmes, tacking on a gruesome and somewhat obvious twist. Dunsany is otherwise doing his basic witty, whimsical, droll, fantastic, weird thing. The story is told by Smithers (or Smethers), a traveling salesman who “pushes” Num-numo, “a relish for meats and savouries.” He needs to get his sales numbers up. Dunsany always did like a traveling salesman. (Later Smithers will mention he has no idea what savouries are.) “Two Bottles of Relish” is not exactly a locked-room situation but something like it, with the disappearance of a young woman that is probably a murder. But there is no corpse and so no evidence. Smithers tells it with a lot of digressions, with the prolix bonhomie of the salesman at his ease over cigars and brandy. There’s a long preamble about renting an apartment with the Sherlock Holmes character, an Oxford scholar. Smethers is apparently the Dr. Watson around here. The suspect, Steeger, was living with the woman at the time she disappeared along with all her money. Around that time Steeger came into an unusually large amount of money. Other seemingly random clues include that Steeger was a vegetarian—extremely suspicious in this story—and also that he chopped down all the trees on the property apparently for firewood. That seemed to me to be more suspicious than being a vegetarian but what do I know. Smethers does the investigatory footwork for his genius roommate and sleuths out this information, including that Steeger bought an unusually large supply of Num-numo relish shortly before the woman’s disappearance. The twist—I’m going to give it away now!—is that he disposed of the body by eating it. He used the trees as an excuse for purchasing an ax. He only bought vegetables from the grocer because he had a supply of meat at home, which is why he needed the extra relish. I mean, this is all patently absurd as murder mysteries go, hardly the stuff of some ultrarational detective using scientific deduction methods. But it’s a pretty good Lord Dunsany story.

65 Great Murder Mysteries, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Listen to story online.

Studs Lonigan (1932-1935)

Young Lonigan (1932), The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1934), Judgment Day (1935)

As trilogies go, it was hard for me to believe the three novels in James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan were actually published separately, especially the first, which is very short and more like a novella or prologue. The whole thing feels like one long novel, but I guess there are lots of ways to do trilogies. And Young Lonigan is actually the first novel Farrell ever published. Studs Lonigan is long but not difficult or too much of a slog. Like a lot of naturalism (think Theodore Dreiser) it's about piling on the details. It's hard to read in another way, however: it's just so bleak. Perhaps the hardest part—certainly what is complained about most nowadays—is the racism and anti-Semitism of Lonigan and most of these characters, rough and tough Irish-Americans making their way in Chicago in the first three decades of the 20th century. No doubt it's an accurate reflection of how people thought and felt at the time about Jews, African Americans, and Eastern Europeans (and still do, this stuff may have diminished but it has hardly gone away). It's so accurate that it's depressing. Compounding that further, Lonigan himself is more reprehensible than sympathetic. He's hard to like—an ignorant fool. I hoped he would do the right thing, but we see soon enough that he won't and never will. At the same time, his comeuppances, when they come, are not satisfying but just more sickening events, so I guess I must have liked him a little. He's also terrible and pathetic with women, no surprise. His idea of being good is doing what the Catholic Church tells him to but even that is hard for him. And Farrell is not giving the Catholic Church a pass. It may have seemed better then than it does now but it doesn't come off well here. I think Farrell fully intended Studs Lonigan to be bleak, an extended study of a spiritual malaise as he understood it, and it's quite convincing that way. But even purposefulness doesn't make it easy to take. Once finished, and taking a step back, it has to be accounted as impressive. Norman Mailer was taken with it in a big way and it's not hard to see why. His own pugilistic instincts are reflected in Studs, a selfish, self-centered git who likes to fantasize about boxing and beating people up. America, this is still your mirror. Enter with a tough skin.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic. (Library of America)

Freaks (1932)

USA, 64 minutes
Director: Tod Browning
Writers: Clarence Aaron "Tod" Robbins, Willis Goldbeck, Leon Gordon, Al Boasberg, Charles MacArthur, Edgar Allan Woolf
Photography: Merritt B. Gerstad
Editor: Basil Wrangell
Cast: Harry Earles, Olga Baclanova, Daisy Earles, Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams, Roscoe Ates, Daisy Hilton, Violet Hilton, Johnny Eck, Rose Dione, Schlitze, Frances O'Connor, Henry Victor, Josephine Joseph, Prince Randian

There's an argument that Hollywood was not racist but helpful to African-Americans in the '30s and '40s, casting them in movies and giving them careers, even if these few lucky ones usually only played demeaning self-humiliations that reinforced racism. A similar argument might apply for the disabled and congenitally disfigured in this strange Hollywood early talkie. The parallel does not entirely bear out but the inherent self-contradictions are similar. In Freaks, the main point seems to be a rejection of stigmatized treatment, with a kind of bleeding-heart case (possibly sincere) about their deserving better than the harrowing life of sleazy traveling carnivals. The de facto case may be that "better" is scraping by instead as grotesques in the movies. In many ways we return to Freaks, which has been perennially popular in midnight-matinee types of venues, to gawk. And in many ways that's exactly what's intended. Director Tod Browning had big success the year before with Dracula, and even if IMDb classifies Freaks merely as "drama," the movie obviously trades in horror as well.

Freaks is here to gawk at and, in the Lumiere tradition looking forward to Diane Arbus, the gawking's not bad around here. The parade of nature's cruel pranks is a steady one. No more than a few minutes at a time go by before we see continuing examples of microcephaly ("pinheads"), conjoined twins ("Siamese twins"), small people ("midgets" and "dwarves"), paraplegics, and quadriplegics. Also a bearded lady, a sword swallower, a fire eater, a stutterer (because why not?), and a "half-man/half-woman" who comes across more like a woman who can't decide how to dress. It's all at least as beguiling and repulsive as a state fair sideshow. I say that as a good thing, but in some ways it's the beginning of all this movie's problems too.

"The Shadowy Street" (1932)

Belgian writer Jean Ray's story has some really nice points, with an inclination he might have for making people vanish physically and permanently. It's only the second story I've read by him and it happens in both. Which isn't to say it doesn't work. I like how it's structured as a portmanteau, and even more I like the alleged source—manuscripts found in the junk from a shipping bale that burst open as it was being hauled off a dock. There's a "German manuscript" and a "French manuscript"—these old horror writers are forever turning up mysterious manuscripts, aren't they? Both detail events in the same town in Germany, in fact even the same section of town. The narrator believes one manuscript may shed light on the other, and so they do, though principally I suspect by being shoved together this way. In the German manuscript a group of women battle an invisible monster of some kind in their home. It's not exactly a ghost, and actually quite a bit like the so-called Horla from the 19th-century story by Guy de Maupassant. The women begin to pop out of existence one by one as the manuscript cuts off. In the French manuscript, a man has found a street no one else can see. Everyone else only sees a continuation of a wall. Down that street, into which the French narrator ventures finally, are houses, and in those houses are items of fantastic value, along with a stairway blocked midway up by a wall. He can take those items, pawn them with an eager fence he finds, and the next time he returns to the street they have been replaced and may be stolen and sold again. Another feature of the street is that it bends and twists sharply, and around each bend is only the same scene again. Nothing in life is ever free or easy, and making money stealing silver that replaces itself was never going to be enough for this guy, who is soon hurtling to a brutal apocalypse. "The Shadowy Street" is world-building fantasy pretty much straight up, but elliptical, churning with suggestion. I like it because I like the bent of Ray's visions. Invisible monsters appeared regularly (so to speak) in horror stories after the Maupassant, maybe not as much as vampires but more in the range of Pan. No version yet has convinced me it's a very scary monster, more like a slight panic irritant, like some ghosts, and so it is here. But I like so many other things about this story: the found manuscripts, the paired narratives, the street that no one else can see, down which is only mindless repetition and redundancy. The story feels like it's working by instinct and it works almost perfectly. It's tempting to lump Ray with a couple of his countrymen (and proximate contemporaries), the prolific mystery novelist Georges Simenon, who could write with the sharp edges of this in his "hard novels," and the Surrealist painter Rene Magritte. The shadowy street in this story, in fact, is reminiscent in its details—quotidian as well as bizarre—of many of Magritte's street scenes, like the one above (The Dominion of Light). Nice one!

The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

Brave New World (1932)

One thing that strikes me about so many of these popular novels taught in high school which I have been looking at recently, including Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, is how much more poorly written they are than I remembered—but not without impressive features, of course. Like Fahrenheit 451, the story and characters in Brave New World are all but throwaway. It's the imaginative vision of a future that's compelling. What's ironic for me is that this future vision doesn't look so bad, for a dystopia—except for the requirements to socialize, which would represent an entire ring of hell for me. Beyond that: good drugs, plentiful sex, and endless consumer goods for all, not to mention jobs and suitable work. What's to complain about? I went back to this novel originally because I thought there might be a comparison between its "soma" drug and today's antidepressants. It doesn't work entirely. Soma is more a recreational, high-making drug taken usually in casual social situations, whereas antidepressants have more of a pharmaceutical aura, as "meds" taken by regimen, and its most enthusiastic adherents swear its mood-altering effects are not specifically noticeable. That wasn't my experience, but that's another story. Ecstasy (antidepressants' chemical cousin) is probably the more apt comparison with soma, because it tends to be more intermittently used and is more of an all-consuming experience. Also, ecstasy culture leans heavily toward socializing—it's not an alienating drug but an affection-making one. Still, I have to admit, as the isolating individualist crank I have become, I would probably not be happy in the "brave new world" described by Huxley.

As with Fahrenheit 451 and its plasma TVs, Brave New World gets points for prescience. The genetic engineering seems more likely than ever, we are nearly there now in fact, but the elements of mass production that so rightly worried him seem less likely as applied here. At the same time, I'm really not sure it's all such a bad idea: human beings mass produced to specification, and defects destroyed as soon as they are discovered. The destruction of the biological family unit as a foundation of society. Schools that steer students to foreordained roles and positions. Conditioning for adjustment. I did not find any of it extremely discomfiting, though certainly the potential for abuse is obvious, attempting to take natural selection as we understand it now out of the equation. The cliché of the Stephen Hawking example remains useful: would Hawking's value have been recognized in this novel's society, or would he have been discarded and destroyed early? Would humans even continue to entertain aspirational visions, such as exploring space and understanding the universe? There's little doubt that the world of mass production and Skinnerian-style conditioning envisioned by Huxley would flatten out the highs with the lows, which could lead to mere pleasure-seeking and survival, the mediocrity of a society in stagnation. But I have to admit that the stability of Huxley's world appeals to me. Instead of war, people go on empty vacation jaunts and have sex with one another, before returning to work again. That sounds like an improvement to me. And I don't know why aspiration would be necessarily taken out of the picture, unless someone with access to the production process nefariously and deliberately programmed it out—clearly one of the abuses that would have to be risked, and may indeed have occurred in Huxley's novel. But does it really have to be that way? The problem, as always, is the one of getting from here to there. The devil is in the details, and all that. But again, for a dystopic novel, I think Brave New World often paints a surprisingly pretty picture, caste system and all. Viewed from certain angles, it is as if humanity has purged itself of the seven deadly sins, addressing their sources and providing adequately for the human needs they represent. Tweak it a little more and you might have something.

In case it's not at the library.

Light in August (1932)

Of the handful of great William Faulkner novels (and keeping in mind that even the second tier of his work is well above the top of all but a select few others), Light in August is probably the most pleasure to read, a big juicy pulp-fiction style of melodrama that swoops about among its elements like a bird of prey feeding on carrion—and thus, cautiously, I will suggest it as starting point if you have not yet read him. There are elements of this degree of storytelling power in The Sound and the Fury, but then there is also that novel's first hundred pages. As I Lay Dying is studied experiment. And both "The Bear" (probably more accurate to call a novella because so short, so make that Go Down, Moses) and Absalom, Absalom have long passages in which the language must be parsed slowly and patiently. By contrast, Light in August tends more toward simply introducing its themes and players and briskly setting them in motion, working everything with such facility and seeming ease into the kind of lurid gothic template into which he wanted so badly to fit Sanctuary (which, I will say, nonetheless remains very nearly one of his great ones too). To be sure, Light in August is not without the Faulkner trademarks of ornate brooding passages and elliptical structures, with long sentences and some tendency to favor the Latinate. The flashback, for example, to the troubled childhood of protagonist Joe Christmas (one of the great literary names) starts Chapter 6 with: "Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears." But that kind of thing is generally more for the effect here, and doesn't constitute the bulk of it. Me, I find this language utterly hypnotic, particularly once fully under Faulkner's sway, but I certainly understand that YMMV. As a study in racist anxiety, a continuing underpinning theme all through Faulkner's work, of course, Light in August veers more toward the clinical (not to say Freudian) understandings of "hysterical"; but also toward the connotation of "very funny," in which regard it may sometimes seem almost badly dated. On the other hand, some days I look around at things happening all the time in Southern politics even now and I have to wonder how dated after all that the kind of grotesque, deep-seated racism documented here really is.

In case it's not at the library.