It's Béla Lugosi versus Boris Karloff in a very loose take on Poe’s The Black Cat
Film Features Horrors Week 2020
Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. Because it’s Horror Week at The A.V. Club, we’re highlighting movies featuring major stars of the genre.
The Black Cat (1934)
Béla Lugosi secured his horror-icon reputation with Dracula, changing the shape of the world’s nightmares on film and stage throughout the early 20th century. But it was The Black Cat, the first of his pairings with frenemy Boris Karloff, that really proved his range. This is the film in which Lugosi utters the immortal words “Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney, perhaps not”—a line later sampled in everything from The Monkees’ Head to Sinbad’s Brain Damaged to Deee-Lite’s “E.S.P.” What the movie really offers, though, is centuries of European history playing out as the subtext of a battle between two Universal monsters in the aftermath of their most famous roles.
Very loosely inspired by the Edgar Allan Poe short story of the same name, The Black Cat casts Lugosi as Dr. Vitus Werdegast, one of Hungary’s great psychotherapists. That he kills a cat (off screen) should make the man unredeemable. But modern audiences, familiar with the concepts of post-traumatic stress, can perhaps overcome that kneejerk reaction. After all, Werdegast is back to a semblance of normal life after 15 years in a Siberian labor camp. He ended up there, as did thousands of other soldiers, because of the betrayal of Hjalmar Poelzig (Karloff), an Austrian architect who spent the intervening years getting into devil worship and low-level mad science. He also married Werdegast’s wife and daughter. So there’s a lot going on between these two well-dressed gentlemen—the grounded and earthy psychiatrist, rolling up his sleeves to save a life or improve a situation, and the glorious aesthete in Satanic finery that matches his widow’s peak, bristling with what comedian James Adomian calls “murdering slippers” energy.
The vast spaces of Poelzig’s castle, subdivided by spiral staircases, circular cells, opulent bedchambers, and the ticking munitions dump below its foundation, are in obedience to the Art Deco sensibilities of its master. Karloff has the showier role, playing a villain who claims women on sight with no regard for the social contract, dabbling in fetishes that there aren’t even names for. (Sexidermy? Generational subterfuge?) But this allows Lugosi to unmake prejudices in the audience and subtly educate about the state of post-WWI Europe. For this film to work, one has to believe that graciousness and concern can thrive even in the weirdest, most physically imposing of gentlemen. And the Lugosi versus Karloff interplay facilitates that, deliciously. An equalizing force born out of PTSD, Werdegast is too damaged—too other—to be the film’s hero. But there’s something endearing about him anyhow, as he instinctively battles every decadent impulse that Poelzig radiates.
A glamorous trip on the Orient Express. A black mass. A flaying. Programmer auteur Edgar G. Ulmer packs more into The Black Cat’s 65 minutes than most prestige shows do in an entire season, allowing the tone of pulp novelist George Carol Sims’ script (written under his Peter Ruric pseudonym) to jerk the audience around as though it were caught in some giant penny dreadful pinball machine. As for the enduring rivalry between the two stars, immortalized in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood biopic, a winner can be declared. It is not a Karloff imitation, after all, that lets Prince get the upper hand in a confrontation with his landlord in Under The Cherry Moon. Nor does Karloff get name-checked in the Bauhaus-composed goth national anthem. If one can even quantify cultural awareness, the modern world gives at least two fucks for Béla Lugosi.
Availability: The Black Cat is currently streaming for free on Classix. It can also be rented or purchased digitally from Amazon, Google Play, YouTube, Microsoft, Fandango, DirectTV, and VUDU.
27 Comments
This movie also lets Lugosi say a line in his native Hungarian, which is quite a treat after his awkward English became such a big part of his image.
Never thought of it before, but he’s kind of like Arnold in that way.
Winner? Damn straight! Karloff does not deserve to smell Lugosi’s shit!
Sidekick?
Even calling this a “very loose take” on Poe’s story is being too generous. It’s an in-name only adaptation which has really nothing to do with Poe.David Manners kept getting cast as drips in Universal Monster movies, so this is one of his least bad roles.
The titles only even try to claim “suggested by”.
LOVE this movie. Edgar Ulmer would go on to direct the best ‘Z’ movie Noir “Detour” which is just so perfect despite it’s very, very limited budget. You have to wonder what he could have made with a budget (like this film) instead of being blackballed from the major studios. Edited to add: the chess scene in this film between Lugosi and Karloff is the best, and would be one of the most famous until Ingmar Bergman’s…
I watched this back-to-back with “The Raven”. I believe this one to be superior. I like that there is some moral ambiguity to Lugosi’s character. (My favorite film he was in is “Island of Lost Souls, but he’s barely in it.) The production design is excellent. Definitely a good one to watch on Halloween.
If you haven’t already, check out Murders in the Rue Morgue and White Zombie. Lugosi is tremendous in both.
I believe I have those back-to-back on the same tape.
#VerusBattle!
Great film. Also one of the great lines and great readings (by Karloff) in horror movie history: “Did you hear that Vitus? The phone is dead. EVEN THE PHONE IS DEAD.”
A favorite line from Bela, one that my friends and I always try to work into conversation, is when his overhead bag almost brains the heroine;“…after all, it’s better to be frightened, than to be CRUSHED…”
I’ve always been fascinated by that modernist castle–it’s the opposite of what you’d expect for a spooky movie set in a castle in Hungary.
I seem to remember that Karloff could pull levers and make rooms in the creepy castle switch places. They don’t make them like that anymore
I think one of the biggest disappointments of adult life is that there are so few moving walls/revolving bookcases.The set design for interiors until maybe the mid-30s was stunning. There’s one Ruth Chatterton movie where the foyer of a mansion has a balcony with a guy playing a pipe organ in it. No apparent way to get in there, just an extrusion in the wall with a built-in pipe organ. Nuts.
I can see why homeowners would decline to pay extra for that feature, though, in our more value-conscious times
Well, maybe people should lay off the avocado toast and save up for the important home features like secret passages and mid-wall pipe organs.
Pre-code Hollywood can be uncomfortably brutal but this one really got to me on a visceral level. The unrelentingly cold, cruel tone just permeates every frame of the movie like a disease. I find this film much creepier than any of Todd Browning & Lon Chaney’s sado-masochistic melodramas and far more disturbing than “Freaks.” Both Karloff and Lugosi give intensely calculated performances, potent enough to border on camp but overall quite effective.A lot of the credit has to go to Ulmer, a former production designer with an architecture background, who here creates a thoroughly realized, truly weird landscape, forgoing the usual dark castle for a wildly expressionistic but soulless art deco tomb of a mansion. It’s the very spectre of cold modernism that makes the movie so chilling. Ulmer had a wildly uneven career. He had a few major studio successes like “The Strange Woman” with Hedy Lamarr but much of his career was spent on Poverty Row although some of his low budget efforts are surprisingly good such as “Detour” and the terrific “Bluebeard.”
Yeah – there’s lots and lots of cruelty in horror pictures (more obvious words were never spoken), but there’s not actually that many films that capture the true emotional horror of cruelty. It’s often the stock in trade, but it runs through the fabric of this film.
Not to mention the creepy henchmen
…Ian McKellen and Leonard Nimoy?!
This is an enjoyable movie and a disturbing one. It really brings the horror of the Great War’s often neglected Eastern Front to bear and Karloff is a necromancer reveling in all of that death. It is a snapshot of the interwar years in Europe and an unfortunate premonition of the hatred and violence that still simmered there.
I loved this movie. It was one of the first Dvds that I ever bought.The art style was called ‘Futurism’ with a bit of ‘Bauhaus’ ( ‘Art Deco’, perhaps not).There is a book on the making of the film by Philip Riley and Gregory Mank. The whole film was very much a screw you to his studio bosses. That’s why it was so endlessly perverse. Great fun.
I saw this a few years ago at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago as part of a horror retrospective and remember it vividly for its utter weirdness. Disagree about who is the “winner” though, as Karloff was clearly the superior actor.
Yeah, this one is a gem. It always gets me, tough when Lugosi pronounces the “ow” in slowly like “kowtow” instead of “low” or “mow”
To say this is “based on” The Black Cat is untrue. The Black Cat is grafted onto this story, really. The film doesn’t even claim to be an adapation, the credit is “Suggested by”, not “based on”.
Fantastic film though, rich and chilling.