The Sign of Four: Sherlock Holmes' Greatest Case (1932)

 "In such embarrassing matters as fainting women, I must defer to you!"

Let's just come out and say it: this is a truly terrible film. Stilted direction, awful acting all round (except for the ever-reliable Miles Malleson), no incidental music, an action-filled final act that manages to be desperately dull.

Homes and Watson don't even appear until more than twenty minutes into what is only a seventy-three minute film. The first twenty-odd minutes give us Jonathan Small's backstory, the tale of the treasure, the Sholtos and why Mary Morstan is the rightful heiress... why?! This completely removes all elements of mystery and the deductive process from the film, which is sort of the key selling point for Sherlock Holmes, surely?

And yet, it's a fascinating time capsule. It's 1932, and no attempt is made to set the film in the past. But I suppose this makes sense. In 1932, the time of Conan Doyle's original stories was not yet "period": it was within living memory, the novel of The Sign of the Four being barely forty years old. Plot-wise, India was still under British rule, so the story just about works.

Then there's all the moments that remind us how long ago 1932 was. The reference to tiger hunting. Mary fainting. Mary telling Watson that "I think I'll have a good cry." But no... these things still don't make this awful film worth watching. Today, this blog is performing a public service: I've endured this film so you don't have to. And never again...

Vampyr (1932)

 "She must die..."

This is an odd film. It was made in 1932, some years into the sound era. It has music and sound effects, and even some dialogue. Yet it has the grammar of a silent film, which is most odd. It is visually a masterpiece, as one might expect of Carl Theodor Dreyer, yet its visual excellence is that of a silent film. 

It hints at Expressionism in several shots, while not really being an Expressionist film. It is most certainly European rather than Hollywood in feel. It is extraordinary to think that this little artistic throwback is a contemporary of the Universal horror films: it feels utterly unlike them.

I feel bad saying this of a film with such visual excellence, and which generates such an atmosphere... but it feels like style (and the style is truly very good indeed) over substance. The film is short, but feels interminably slow, and I say this as someone who is very much used to slo pacing and, indeed, the grammar of silent cinema. The acting is, well, irrelevant, as the camera tells the story while the cast is asked to do very little. This is a film that very much relies on ots dreamy visuals, and makes no concessions to the audience in terms of follwing the plot.

But there's no subtext beyond the usuall generic sexuality found intrinsically in the vampire as subject matter. This is an artistic film with no real artistic point to make and, given what it is, it can hardly fall back on populism. It's a gloriously made dud, perhaps, but nevertheless a dud.

The Old Dark House (1932)

"Even Welsh doesn't sound like that!"

I've been somewhat remiss in leaving it until now, when I'm forty-two years old, to see this excellent film (who cares about some dodgy attempts at British accents?) which is not at all the different-film-studio-but-pretty-much-Universal-horror type film I expected, in spite of he present of James Whale and Boris Karloff and a fair few chills. This is no horror film.

No; beyond the superficial genre tropes is a substantial script from J.B. Priestley himself, the famed Yorkshire intellectual of the early twentieth century, with fascinating characters and very real-sounding dialogue which now, eighty-seven years after the film was released, brings the past to life in a way few old films can. These people may be from a different age but they feel very real from the argument in the first scene onwards.

The cast is wonderful. Yes, Karloff is wasted as the mute butler in a role similar to last year's Frankenstein, but Ernest Thesiger delights as the extremely camp Horace and Charles Laughton shines as the rich but tragic, and very northern, Sir William. The cast is a collection of grotesques and sympathetic individuals, but it's the characters and cast, rather than the almost non-existent plot, that makes this film sing with atmosphere, pathos, danger and tension, in spite of the Charlotte Bronte madman in the attic. And at the centre of it all is the visionary and magnificent James Whale.

White Zombie (1932)

"I'm too old to go all the way with you!"

Oh dear. I was all set to watch Brighton Rock with Richard Attenborough but, due to a disappointing lack of subtitles on behalf of Amazon Prime, I thought I'd watch this instead. Not my best decision; it's a plodding, dull, poorly shot melodrama that may only last 70 minutes but feels much, much longer. Not very good, to put it mildly, and you can sort of see the slide in Bela Lugosi's career starting here, in a performance that is just repeating Dracula.

Still, bad film though this is, it remains an interesting cultural artifact and not only because it was the name of Rob Zombie's band for a few years before he found himself having far more success with his solo career and sacked the band. It's set, like the later I Walked with a Zombie, in Haiti and sees the zombie entirely through the prism of Haitian voodoo legend. Even the title of the film suggests it was widely seen as a Haitian or, at most, West African thing. The zombie at this point owes very little to the post-Night of the Living Dead concept; here it is implied to be the result of a drug that mimics death, allowing the voodoo baddie to "resurrect" the body as his docile servant. No biting or brain munching here. Indeed, zombies are said to be worked for long hours in plantations and sugar factories, and it's impossible not to see this, in the Caribbean of all places, in the context of slavery. This isn't the apocalypse; it's abuse of workers' rights.

None of that makes this film worth seeing, though. You have been warned!

Freaks (1932)

"One of us. One of us..."

I can see why this film has been so controversial for so long. It may be a straightforward morality tale about the exploitation of those who look different, but in its very existence in parading its "freaks" as performers it exploits them itself. This is a film that could never be made today, a relic of the "freak shows" of the early twentieth century. Still, morally dodgy though it may be, it`s hard to look behind Freaks the historical curiosity and see Freaks the film.

 There`s nothing particularly exciting about the script or the way it`s shot and made by Tod Browning, a rather uninspired director here as he was with Dracula. The subject matter, and the freaks on screen, are the movie`s only selling point. And the straightfowrard plot means that a film of only sixty minutes feels over-long. I dread to think how it would have dragged with the thirty minutes of excised footage, now lost.

We are introduced to thevarious freaks one by one, all of them real and most using their "real" names. The film revolves around Cleopatra, the trapeze artist, and her cruelly cynical seduction of the dwarf Hans, mockingly marrying him for his money and then trying to kill him. Her comeuppance is suitably horrific, and I smiled at the clever way the meaning of the first scene is revealed at the end, after what the "freaks" have done to Cleopatra. The pursuit scenes, and especialy the "one of us" chants are genuinely scary, but is it right to portray the "freaks" as something to fear?

This isn`t a particularly good film, and it is somewhat troubling to watch, but as an historical document it is ghoulishly fascinating.

The Mummy (1932)

“Maybe he got too gay with the virgins in the temple?”

More Firefly tomorrow, but tonight is Hallowe'en. I couldn't resist a classic horror film!

Wow. This is so much better than the later Hammer version. The story’s a lot more coherent, for a start, even if the plot is borrowed straight from Universal’s Dracula from the previous year, with Ardath Bey as the Count (he even pays a social call on our heroes!), Helen as Mina, and Muller and Van Helsing. It even contains some lavish location scenes. I’m sure I recognised the Tomb of Hatshepsut (I’ve been there, you know!) and I was amazed to read that it was all filmed in Southern California.

Boris Karloff is great as the sinister Ardath Bey (that’s an oddly Ottoman title for 1932, surely?), an intelligent and eloquent villain so different from Frankenstein’s Monster and so much more interesting than a lumbering mummy with arms outstretched. Also interesting is that Imhotep’s background should hinge so strongly on the idea of being alive- very evocative of Poe. Mercifully, unlike the later Hammer film, there are no horrible scenes of tongues being removed.

Excellent as Karloff is, though, and good though it is to see him being so brilliant in a speaking role, there’s something more than a little uncomfortable about seeing Karloff, with his Anglo-Indian heritage, playing the part of the ethnic “other”. Yes, it’s a mummy film, and made in 1932 to boot; it’s hardly surprising to see sinister foreign characters in a film like this, but it’s a little awkward to watch in this day and age. Also raising an inevitable eyebrow is the moment where Helen, the only woman in the film, is simply told to go to bed by all the men!

Still, 1930’s social attitudes aside, this is a well-paced thriller with a real sense of threat, and none of the campness of James Whale’s stuff. The plot is far less convoluted, and makes far more sense, than in the later Hammer film (even if it owes an awful lot to Bram Stoker). Setting the whole thing in Egypt makes the whole thing much more evocative, although of course such a thing would be far easier for a film made at the height of the British Empire than for one made during Nasser’s rule!

There are a few moments which particularly stand out; the young man’s laughter, as he is driven mad by the sight of Imhotep coming to life, is hard to drive from the mind. So is the hilariously blatant “as you know, Bob” exposition, as two random blokes whom we never see again see fit to introduce Helen to us at the party! But for the most part the film is taut and tense. There’s a powerful sense of the Gothic, with an ancient magical power from the past threatening to return to the present, and set against the modern world of science and reason. Ardath Bey even has a rather fab scrying pool, which he uses to cause heart attacks in people who get up his nose. Brr.

The ending is quite hilarious in how closely it follows Dracula, with the film’s very own Van Helsing using the film’s very own Mina as bait in a trap for the film’s very own Count Dracula. But there’s a rather pleasing departure from this at the climax, as Helen (well, Ankhenesamun), rejects Imhotep and destroys him by magic. His centuries of suffering out of “love” for her are all for nothing!