Black Moon (1934)

 "If I ever find him in the house again, I'll have him whipped."

This is... well, a very racist film. We're not talking a few dated attitudes, we're talking the whole hog. It's not Birth of a Nation or anything: it doesn't emanate hate. It's just... well, first things first.

This film isn't anything special, but for a B kovie of the time it has a somewhat impressive director and cast, starring noless a figure than Fay Wray. It's well shot, with some impressive sequences, but also manages to be both slow and too rushed at the end. If we ignore the implications of the film being about a handful of white people being surrounded by thousands of hostile Black "natives" and their weird voodoo, there's a fairly effective threat.

However, you see the problem. The setting is an island in the Caribbean, based on Haiti, There's a comedy Black American Uncle Tom figure, and every other black character is a creepy Voodoo savage. The white patriarch at the centre of the island lives in a "plantation" and his white underling, killred fairly eaerly on,is an "overseer". It's clear that this family, which takes pride in having ruled the island for two centuries despite six uprisings and "not running away", once ran a brutal slave regime and its morals in 1934 seem little better: Dr Perez actually utters the line quoted above. The Black population of the island are called "natives", glossing over how and whythey came to be on the island. The original sin of slavery, and its horrors, are completely glossed over. Just othering the Black population like this, and treating the white family as virtuous, is extremely problematic. None of this is deliberately hateful, and I'm sure would not have caused the disgust in 1934 that Birth of a Nation did in 1915, but it's impossible to ignore.

The social attitudes of the time permeate everything. FayWray's secretary heroine is besotted with her married boss but "won't live in sin", and spends the whole film acting out all the features of traditional feminine virtue before, it's implied, eventually marrying Stephen. And it's not usual for a film even of this vintage to be so utterly alienating in its attitudes. Still, it's a fascinating curio from a very different time in a way so many films from the same era are not.

The Vampire Bat (1933)

 “You give me apple. Herman give you nice soft bat."

These '30s horror films, by no means all of them Universal, are certainly something to be enjoyed. Not all  of them, alas, can be directed by James Whale. Yet this one is, as the amusingly hypochondriac maid in the film keeps saying, rubbish.

On paper it should at least be fun, if not necessarily good. Fay Wray is the leading lady, albeit in an underwritten role. Yet Dwight Frye, such a cult favourite that Alice Cooper wrote a rather good ballad about him, gets a nice and juicy part which shows how stereoyped he has become as the Renfield figure, but he's bloody good at it. He's the best thing in the film.

And yet... Lionel Attwill and Melvyn Douglas give passable performances, but the burgomeister is shocking. And, while there is some good visual stuff, the film is sloooow and dull, with appallingly functional dialogue. I suppose it's a plus to focus on vampire bats from South Ameirca somehw biting people here in central Europe and turning them into vampire-like people, but the resolution at the end is silly.

And so is the film as a whole, worth seeing only for the sake of the lovely Fay Wray and the splendid Dwight Frye. Not all of these '30s horror films, alas, are any good.

King Kong (1933)

“It was beauty killed the beast."

I’d seen this film before, of course- it’s King Kong- but not for many, many years. It’s an awesome tour de force of stop motion awesomeness, and I don’t care either how jerky it is or, indeed, how stilted the acting is. It’s a film all about the set pieces with Kong and the dinosaurs- so we get a stegosaurus, a plesiosaur and a, er, carnivorous long-necked sauropod that snatches a bloke from a tree and eats him. But even more it’s about Kong vs. the tyrannosaurus, Kong vs. the pterosaur, Kong vs. the snake, Kong going wild in New York and combing up the sparkly new Empire State Building, only to be finally shot down by some state of the art modern biplanes.

All that is what the film is about, and why you have to declare it a triumph, dodgy acting and pulp storytelling notwithstanding. I have to except Fay Wray from the “dodgy acting” comment, though- she’s natural, charismatic and splendidly flirtatious throughout. The other actors are generally outshone by the stop motion models, but that’s ok. It’s not about them.

Of course, there are things that raise an eyebrow, such as casting African Americans as the natives of an island south west of Sumatra, which would more likely be inhabited by Polynesians. There’s the vague racism of the Chinese crewman, not to mention the “savage native” trope but, hey, it’s 1933. There’s Jack’s chat up line “Say, I guess I love you”, which had me laughing out loud. And then there’s the fact that Denham essentially commits genicide upon the native just for the sake of his own glory. There they are, safe from the dangers of the island in their peninsula behind their wall, and then along comes Denham to destroy their only protection and leave them to probably all be eaten, including all those cute little kids.

It’s a bit slow, the acting is a bit stilted, but this is truly a special effect classic with some glorious set pieces that deserves its place in cinematic history.