Old and Dark

The Old Dark House (1932) was sort of leftover from Halloween. Since we've seen it more that once, we didn't prioritize. But, since it is very good, we got around to it.

It was a dark and stormy night. Raymond Massey, his wife Gloria Stuart, and their friend Melvyn Douglas are lost in the wilds of England, in a leaky car. They find an old dark house and take shelter. They are met at the door by a creepy butler - a mute Boris Karloff, with a beard and scarred face. The master of the house, Ernest Thesiger, lets them know that he is dangerous when he drinks. Thesiger is the nervous twittery type.

His sister, Eva Moore, is the fiery religious type, who condemns everyone as sinners, and lets them all know they can stay until morning, but "no beds!" These two, and their 100-year-old father, in bed in the attic, are the unfortunately named Femms. 

While they are sharing a meager and unappetizing dinner of potatoes and some kind of meat, two more uninvited guests arrive: Scottish entrepreneur Charles Laughton and his chorus girl companion, Lilian Bond. This completes the set, unless there is someone hidden behind that locked door that Thesiger seems so afraid of...

There is a little something for everyone here, but our favorite is Laughton. He's a successful man, who's living large, but really just mourning the wife he lost. His chorus girl confides to Douglas that he never tried "anything." You know what she means by anything? I've seen this discussed as gay-coding for Laughton, who, like director James Whale (and Thesiger and maybe Karloff, too) was gay. But also he is just a man dealing with his sorrow the best he can. 

Douglas is a bit that way as well - damaged in the war (WWI), he leads a frivolous life, since nothing really matters. At least until he finds out that Bond isn't really Laughton's girl.

All of this is full of Whale's beautiful black-and-white direction. There are some sweet scenes, like Bond dancing to cast a great shadow on the wall. There are also scenes full of tension and even mayhem, although this isn't much of a horror movie. 

We enjoyed it so much that the next night we watched The Suspect (1944), which I had purchased but not watched. Charles Laughton played a mild, kindly tobacconist in 1902 London. His wife, Rosalind Ivan, is a shrieking shrew, who even drives their grown son out of the house by destroying the research he had been doing for his law firm. Laughton meets up with Ella Raines, who is looking for work. He takes her out for dinner, helps her find a job, generally has a good time with her. But he doesn't tell her that he is married. 

When Ivan continues to nag Laughton and refuses to get a divorce, she turns up dead - an accident on the stairs, Scotland Yard determines. But what if, asks Inspector Stanley Ridges, someone, like her husband, tripped her? He finds out that Laughton had been seeing a younger woman. But Laughton lets him know that she could not testify against him - they had just been married.

So Laughton is now happy with a beautiful young wife - and Raines is radiant here, as always. But their drunken rotter of a neighbor Henry Danielle unsubtly starts blackmailing Laughton, well, what if he winds up dead? No one will feel bad about it. 

I had sort of expected Laughton to be sexless again, with a platonic friendship with Raines misconstrued. They actually only strongly hint that he murdered his wife, so I kept up that expectation for a while. But that wasn't the story. Still, Laughton isn't a villain here, truly, and there's a nice twist at the end.