I
finally got around to watching THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1932), one of the
Universal classics that I had somehow missed during my formative years,
and I have ti say that I do not think it has aged well. That's a shame,
because it had a great director in James Whale and a game cast featuring
Boris Karloff, Ernest Thesiger — immortalized as Dr. Pretorius in BRIDE
OF FRANKENSTEIN, a mad scientist so mad that he comes off as quite sane
— and Charles Laughton, while the whole look and feel of the film
fairly drips with eerie gothic atmosphere. Unfortunately it suffers from
the staginess of many films made just out of the silent era, and in
fact the film looks and feels like a silent and plays about the same
with the sound off and subtitles on.
It's an early attempt at
blending horror and comedy in which five innocents are forced to take
shelter for the night in the titular location due to impassable rains,
the roads flooding, and collapsing hillsides blocking the roads. Once
within the old dark house, our travelers meet a creepy family that is
quite obviously insane, and the rest of the running time features the
quintet being menaced in assorted uninteresting ways. I expected more
edgy material from a pre-Code James Whale film, but the only items of
such note were Karloff's mute and hulking alcoholic butler's clearly
"ungentlemanly" intentions toward the heroine, and sugar daddy
Laughton's character's relationship with his platonic chorus girl
girlfriend letting those in the audience with a knowledge of such things
read their arrangement as likely being a beard for his homosexuality.
For
a horror comedy, the film is neither all that funny or all that scary.
It's just atmosphere with little else to recommend it. Or at least that
is how I absorbed it. Your mileage may vary, especially if you are a
fellow classic Universal enthusiast. And to be 100% blunt, I fell asleep
on it halfway through, eventually returning ti it a few hours later. I
could have skipped it altogether.
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