Eureka Entertainment: The Cat and the Canary (1927) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Eureka Entertainment

Just one year before unleashing the Joker upon the media empire with his 1928 expressionist horror drama The Man Who Laughs starring Conrad Veidt involving a man with a permanent grotesque smile surgically inscribed upon his face, German Expressionist filmmaker Paul Leni at the height of his creative power within the Hollywood studio system at Universal Pictures began in 1927 with an adaptation of John Willard’s 1922 dark comedy play The Cat and the Canary.  Paving the way for such iconic horror-comedy fare as The Old Dark House with airs of the Agatha Christie whodunit, the story concerns a subset of characters who return to their late uncle Cyrus West’s desolate haunted mansion during a dark stormy night to resolve his last will and testament intended to be read twenty years after his passing only to encounter a murderous figure with sharp furry claws while news breaks a local maniac dubbed ‘the Cat’ has escaped the confines of asylum and takes refuge in the mansion intending to pick its patrons off one by one.

 
In Leni’s 1927 film, his second film in the same year precluding The Chinese Parrot, the silent picture stars Laura La Plante of Silk Stockings as Annabelle West the deceased uncle Cyrus West’s beautiful niece who upon arrival to his decaying mansion on the outskirts of the Hudson River learns she is to be the sole inheritor of her uncle’s estate.  Much to the chagrin of his lawyer Roger Crosby (Tully Marshall) and fellow family members Harry (Arthur Edmund Carewe), Charlie (Forrest Stanley), nebbish scaredy cat Paul (Creighton Hale) and his sister Susan (Flora Finch) and niece Cecily (Gertrude Astor), Annabelle accepts the responsibility and quickly finds herself being targeted by a physically deformed stalker with sharp claws that steal her necklace as well as a craggy looking doctor who comes to judge Annabelle’s sanity.  Though frequently funny, the film has the structure and design of a horror film with long shots of cave-like corridors and hidden labyrinthine passageways that can swallow you up never to be seen again.

 
Produced by future Frankenstein, The Man Who Laughs and The Old Dark House guru Carl Laemmle and directed with scalpel technical precision by Paul Leni who transforms John Willard’s play into a modern gothic fable with elements of Agatha Christie including but not limited to grand reveals ala Scooby Doo, The Cat and the Canary is perhaps the earliest known-to-be horror comedy in cinema history.  Mixing frightening confrontational scares of actors pressing their faces right into the camera which sometimes moves depending on the action (unheard of at the time of inception), it manages to both threaten and tickle the audience, sometimes parodying itself even like when an ice cream man scared of ghosts races to the police in his night carriage.  While not quite going the full distance of slapstick ala Laurel and Hardy who also parodied The Cat and the Canary at one point or Abbott and Costello, it finds a tightrope balance between snickers and screams with some still relatively gruesome makeup and stunningly creepy set pieces.

 
Lensed exquisitely and presented in multiple sepia tones by The Man Who Laughs cinematographer Gilbert Warrenton, the camera transforms the already gothic asymmetrical sets and foreboding corridors hiding a monster at the end of them into an almost alien funhouse of horrors, capturing in wide-angled vistas the spooky interiors while also utilizing a wide variety of nifty superimpositions on the film itself.  The score by Wings composer Hugo Riesenfeld, recreated for this blu-ray disc release and 4K restoration by Eureka Entertainment does a good job of exemplifying the comic and horror aspects without completely telegraphing them for the audience.  Performance wise, Laura La Plante makes a good scream queen damsel in distress under threat from conniving forces all around her while Creighton Hale’s easily frightened scaredy cat who gets into some compromising scenarios is hilarious.  Special attention goes to Martha Mattox as the caretaker Mammy Pleasant whose frumpy exterior and sunken eyes suggest anything but pleasantries.

 
An instant box office success that later became canonized by the American Film Institute for its 100 Years…100 Thrills list, The Cat and the Canary would go on to spawn a total of five adaptations including unofficial ones like The Cat Creeps in 1930 (remade in 1946) or Will of the Dead Man in Spain.  In 1939 there was another sound version with comedy actor Bob Hope in the role of the comic relief played by Creighton Hale.  Obvious comparisons will be made to the numerous films this paved the way for with some judging whether or not one version is meritorious over the other, but judging it on its own terms Paul Leni’s The Cat and the Canary is a fabulous mixture of Old Hollywood and German Expressionism as one new cocktail.  Without it, many if not all of our favorite horror movies and/or comedies or sometimes both would never exist.  Judging from Kenneth Branagh’s recently released A Haunting in Venice, this subgenre of spooky scary funny whodunits in an old dark house isn’t about to disappear from pop cultural consciousness anytime soon, certainly not if the folks at Eureka Entertainment can help it.

--Andrew Kotwicki