by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The final show on Turner Classic Movies’ haunted-house
marathon for Hallowe’en 2017 — at least the last one I stayed up for; they
showed others after that, including a remake of The Old Dark House by William Castle in 1963 (Boris Karloff was offered
the chance to play his original role in this version, but he turned it down
because he didn’t like the script and felt it was too different from the first
version) — was itself a third-time remake: The Cat and the Canary, made at Paramount Studios in 1939 as a horror-comedy
vehicle for their new comic star, Bob Hope. The Cat and the Canary began life as a play by John Willard, staged on
Broadway for 148 performances from February to March 1922; that’s not that spectacular a success but it was apparently good
enough for Universal, which bought the movie rights and filmed it five years
later with German expatriate Paul Leni making his first American film. The film
was a hit despite a weak cast (Laura La Plante as the damsel in distress and
Creighton Hale as the scaredy-cat leading man who tries to protect her) mainly
because of Leni’s elaborately symbolic direction. He brought to this rather
silly tale of a young woman being purposely driven insane to disqualify her
from a major inheritance the same elaborate armamentarium of stylized effects
he’d brought to his German films, notably Waxworks (1924), the first horror film set in a wax museum.
Leni looked like he was going to have a major Hollywod career but in fact he
made only three more films — the second Charlie Chan movie, The
Chinese Parrot, in 1928 (with a real-life
Asian, Japanese actor Sojin Kamiyama, as Chan — The Chinese Parrot, a silent, is lost but Sojin’s performance as a
detective in the 1929 MGM talkie mystery The Unholy Night is probably a good indication of how he would have
done as Chan); the big-budget horror extravaganza The Man Who Laughs with Mary Philbin and fellow German expat Conrad
Veidt in 1928, and a part-talkie called The Last Warning in 1929, about a murder in a supposedly “haunted”
theatre (it apparently survives only in fragmentary for but the quite good 1939
“B” remake The House of Fear
suggests that the original was quite an estimable movie) — and then Leni died
young of blood poisoning. Universal remade The Cat and the Canary as a talkie in 1930 — in fact, they did both English
and Spanish versions, much the way they did with the 1931 Dracula — the English version was directed by Rupert Julian
but, like The Last Warning,
survives only in fragmentary form: a few clips used in the 1932 Universal
documentary short Boo! and
Vitaphone soundtrack records of about half the film in the collection of the
UCLA Film and Television Library (yet one more item in the UCLA collections
whose administrators are sitting on it, Fafner-like, and not letting us mere
peons either see it in theatres or collect it on DVD).
In 1939 Paramount was
looking for new vehicles for their up-and-coming comic, Bob Hope, and they
bought the rights to The Cat and the Canary from Universal and put together a version with Hope as
radio comedian Wally Campbell — who gets a lot of metafictional dialogue in
which his character anticipates important plot developments by comparing the
film’s story to other thriller tales he’s acted in previously — and Paulette
Goddard as the damsel in distress. Goddard was available for a really quirky
reason: she had been one of the leading contenders for the starring role of
Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind but producer David O. Selznick was reluctant to give her the part,
partly because she was his next-door neighbor and partly because she was living
with Charlie Chaplin. Both she and Chaplin claimed that they had got married
but neither could offer documentary evidence of that. Goddard had made a
brilliant screen debut as Chaplin’s leading lady in his masterpiece Modern
Times (1936), but Paramount lured her away
from him professionally and signed her to a contract. When Selznick finally
signed a dark horse for Scarlett — Vivien Leigh, a British actress with
virtually no following in the U.S. — he left a lot of other would-be Scarletts
in his wake, including Katharine Hepburn (who claimed for years that she’d had
a contract to play Scarlett that had an “out” clause that allowed Selznick to
break the contract if he found someone else by the end of 1938 — Selznick
signed Leigh on December 21, just 10 days before the deadline) and Goddard —
and Goddard retreated and took this role at her home studio that had previously
been offered to the two female co-stars Hope had had in his first film, The
Big Broadcast of 1938, Shirley Ross (who
would have been acceptable) and Martha Raye (who would have been terrible: the
part required an ingénue, not a comedienne). Paramount assigned a competent if
not especially inspired director, Elliott Nugent, and had Walter DeLeon and
Lynn Sterling do a fresh screen adaptation of Willard’s old play — no doubt
with some of Hope’s radio writers supplying uncredited one-liners for the star.
The film takes place in an old, moldering house in the Louisiana bayou country,
formerly owned by Cyrus Norton — called “Cyrus West” in the previous versions
of the film. Cyrus was a man who made a lot of money and then got disgusted
with the way his relatives were all bothering him for their share of it, so he
engaged Lawyer Crosby (George Zucco) to write two wills for him — will number
one would name his principal heir and will number two would stipulate what
would happen to his estate in case the heir named in will number one either
went insane or died. What’s more, he told Crosby that the will was not to be
read until 10 years after his death. It’s now 10 years after his death and
Joyce Norman (Paulette Goddard), who was still a child when Norton died, is now
a full-grown woman — and Wally Campbell, a distant relative of hers, is a full-grown
man who’s instantly attracted to her. But he has to compete with two other
handsome young men who are also part of the family, though distant enough that
either could marry her without it being considered incest: Fred Blythe (John
Beal) and Charlie Wilder (Douglass Montgomery). Among the other relatives who
show up at the bayou estate to see if they’re going to inherit are Aunt Susan
(Elizabeth Patterson, who’d played the same role in The Cat Creeps nine years earlier), and Cicily (Nydia Westman).
There’s also an escaped lunatic from a mental institution nearby who thinks he
changes into a were-cat, and a guard named Hendricks (John Wray) who’s skulking
around the Norman estate trying to catch him. Hope sails through the movie in a
blizzard of wisecracks and the sorts of scenes that would become staples in his
films, in which he talks a brave game of trying to protect the heroine but
shies away from any real danger. Eventually the various people stranded on the
Norton estate — which is on an island in the middle of a swamp full of
crocodiles (or are they alligators? There’s actually a gag line in the film
about nobody in it being able to tell the difference either) — come to realize
that one of them is disguised as the lunatic and has also wired the house for
“hauntedness,” including a painting with holes where its eyes should be so the
villain can stand behind it and keep watch on everybody else, and sinister
openings in walls through which hands emerge, pilfer things and then disappear
again.
The Cat and the Canary is
a remarkable and quite entertaining film, though the later Hope-Goddard
horror-comedy, The Ghost Breakers
from 1940 (not to be confused with the original Ghostbusters from 1984, also one of the best horror-comedies ever made), is even better. Hope gets
awfully overbearing at times — some of his lines are genuinely funny, others
less so, but the sheer number of them makes us wish after a while that we could
walk into the screen and get him to shut up — but he still makes a good comic
hero (certainly better than my memories of Creighton Hale in the 1927 film, who
was just as hapless and considerably less amusing), and he and Goddard play
well off each other. She gives her character a much more nuanced reading than
it really needs, but there’s nothing wrong with that, and there are fine
supporting performances from George Zucco (a pity his character gets killed off
way too soon!) and Gale
Sondergaard, who’s playing the Norton estate’s housekeeper in her familiar
glacial style. There’s some bizarre ambiguity about her ethnicity; in his
opening narration Zucco refers to her as “Creole,” which in Louisiana parlance
would mean she’s part-Black, but her name is “Miss Lu,” which sounds Asian.
(The next year Sondergaard would play a half-white, half-Asian character in
William Wyler’s film of W. Somerset Maugham’s play The Letter, starring Bette Davis and Herbert Marshall.) The
filmmakers were deliberately toning down the implications of miscegenation from
the original play and the two previous movies, in both of which the character
had been called “Mammy Pleasant”! — 11/1/17
