Swinging the Classics

As we approach Halloween, we decided to go for some classical scares. Believe it or not, we’d never seen any of these.

Or so I’d thought. Ms. Spenser told me we has seen The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) together. I doubted her until we got to the carnival scene, when it started to come back to me. This is the one where Quasimodo is played by Charles Laughton, in truly grotesque makeup. Maureen O’Hara is Esmerelda, the gypsy dancer that everyone is in love with. First, Quasimodo, because she gives him water when he is whipped. Then the slimy Frollo (Cedric Hardwicke). Then Edmond O’Brien as idiot poet Gringoire stumbles into the Court of Miracles, where the blind see and the lame walk - that is, where the sham beggars drop their disguises. The beggar king decrees he must die or marry a gypsy, and Esmerelda volunteers. But she’s really after Captain Phoebus, a handsome playboy type.

We get to see a lot of Notre Dame sets and backdrops, some great spectacle, and Laughton (or his double) ringing the bells with his feet. Gringoire is less of an idiot than in that book, and actually saves the day and gets the girl. In the book, he winds up with the goat.

Hollywood's Legends of Horror Collection: Mad Love / The Devil Doll (1935/936) is a great and odd double bill by Tod Browning. Devil Doll stars Lionel Barrymore as French convict. We meet him escaping with another aged prisoner, Henry B. Walthall. Walthall takes him to his secret laboratory, where his wife is waiting for him. His wife is played Rafaela Ottiano, with wild, bulging eyes and a bride of Frankenstein skunk stripe in her hair. Walthall has been working on reducing living beings to one-sixth size. He hasn’t gotten the brain to work, but the miniatures can be controlled by his mental willpower. After shrinking their halfwit maid, he dies. So Barrymore decides to use the process and the widow to carry out his own plans.

He was a banker who was framed by his three partners, who are now worried that he has escaped. They have put up a big reward for him, so he goes about disguised as an old lady (!). Madame Mandalip (not to be confused with Mandalit del Barco) has a toy store where she sells lifelike dolls. She uses them to get her revenge.

Seeing Barrymore playing a little old woman is a lot of fun, the special effects were fine, and the little touches, like having the dolls dress as Apaches (French gangsters) and do the Apache dance made it great.

But Mad Love was even better. It starts at a Grand Guignol sort of theater in France. Francis Drake is the star, Yvonne Orlac. Her husband, pianist Stephen Orlac (Colin Clive) is off playing a concert, which she listens to on the radio. After her show, an admirer drops by - Peter Lorre as Dr. Gogol. He looks amazing by the way - with a shiny bald head and coat with a big fur collar. Gogol is a famous surgeon, known for treating children and never worrying about payment. He clearly dotes on Drake, and is crestfallen when he discovers that she is married. On his way out of the theater, he sees that they are throwing out her wax statue, and buys it, calling it his Galatea.

On the way back from the concert, Clive meets a famous American knife murderer, Ed Brophy (fireplug shaped character actor), on his way to the guillotine. When the train derails, Clive is badly injured and his hands, which are his profession, are crushed.

Lorre attends the execution of Brophy along with American reporter Ted Healey (the Three Stooges first straight man). When Drake contacts him to get him to save her husband’s hands, he gets the idea to use Brophy’s hands.

Soon, Clive finds that though his hands can’t play piano, they can throw knives. That will come in handy (no pun intended).

We get Key Luke as Dr. Gogol’s assistant, May Beatty as Gogol’s drunken, parrot-toting housekeeper, and a scene with Drake pretending to be the wax Galatea. When she comes alive, Gogol goes really mad! Lorre is wonderful in this. He plays a man of great skill and compassion, a man of taste, and an odd kind of beauty, but with something repulsive at his core, which bursts forth in madness. This may have been a better role than M, maybe even better than Joel Cairo. Not sure about Sr. Ugarte.

The Phantom of the Opera (1925) may be the only silent movie that I’ve blogged about - not counting Guy Maddin. It starts with an amazing scene at the grand staircase at the Paris Opera. Young Raoul (Norman Kerry) is hoping to hear his belove Christine Daae (Mary Philbin) sing - she has been understudy for the prima donna. He professes his love for her backstage, but she insists on putting her career first. Her star is rising since she started working with a mysterious mentor.

The opera has been haunted by rumors of a threatening Phantom. The prima donna gets a letter threatening her if she goes on, so her understudy gets her chance to sing the part of Marguerite in Faust. But this can’t go on. Finally, the prima donna decides to do a show whether threatened or not, and the great chandelier in the hall falls, killing a bunch of people. The work of the Phantom!

When Daae finally meets her mentor, she finds him in a mask. He takes her to his underground lair, deep in the sewers and catacombs below Paris. He promises her he will make her the greatest singer in the world, as long as she doesn’t touch the mask. But of course, she takes it off and discovers Lon Chaney in his famous make up. And it is spectacular.

There is a lot of underground hugger-mugger, and a mob of Parisians (torches, but unfortunately no pitchforks - not too common in Paris) that seem to take forever to show up. Will they be too late?

I was pleasantly surprised by how exciting this silent feature was - the opera quite grand and the underground labyrinth was suitably Piranesian. My main regret is that the score they used was pop classical piano, and there should have been some Faust.

So that was a fun set of classic movies, coincidentally all set in France. In the next few weeks, we’ll do a few more horror theme sets, then back to regular programming.