Strange Climax

The Climax/The Strange Door (1944/1951) is one of those great Boris Karloff double features. I’ll start with the better one.

The Strange Door starts with Richard Stapley getting into a drunken brawl and shoots a man, with a pistol that is suspiciously close to hand. He flees and is lead to a house with a strange door. He is let in and his pursuers are foiled. The house belongs to an odd nobleman, Charles Laughton, who wants him to marry his niece, Sally Forrest. It seems he has a grudge against her, and wants to shackle her with the worst degenerate he could find.

There’s a touch of the Count of Monte Cristo here, and it all ends with the good old walls-closing-in gag. Karloff plays Laughton’s butler, and has some good scenes, but this is really Laughton’s movie. In one scene, he leans on a table and winds up reclining on it with his legs propped up on a chair. It’s a wild piece of over-acting, and not the only one. This is great fun.

The Climax is much stranger. This really does star Karloff as the doctor at a Mittel-Europische opera house. We see him slouch around distractedly - the diva he loved is dead, and he has never been the same. But then he hears Susanna Foster singing, and it reminds him of his dead love. But, guess what? He’s mad. He killed the last diva and now he doesn’t want anyone to share the voice of this one. Her dresser, Gale Sondergaard, is the only one who suspects.

So now he is taking an interest in Foster. Under the pretext of a throat exam, he hypnotizes her into losing her voice. It seems that only her love for her fiancé, Turhan Bey (!!), can save her.

This is a lovely movie, in Technicolor, using some amazing opera house sets. The cast is certainly interesting. The main problem is that there is a ton of light opera in this supposed horror film. It’s worse than Night at the Opera. Since I haven’t seen any version of Phantom of the Opera (except DePalma’s), the combination just seems silly to me. I’m not saying you should skip this side of the double feature, but it’s probably best to watch it as an oddity.