One of the finest (and strangest) American films of the thirties, The Black Cat owes nothing to Edgar Allan Poe generally, or to his short story “The Black Cat,” despite the title. The Poe-thing is a marketing gimmick announcing a creepy thriller, but in fact the film, grim and remorseful, is more a meditation on the human cost of the First World War, the “war to end all wars” that seemed instead to end illusions as well as lives. The war cast a psychic shadow, that is, creating a group of survivors who regarded themselves, to evoke the term the film uses, as “the living dead.” (Hence the spate of vampire and quasi-vampire films in Germany, France and the U.S. in the 1920s and early 1930s.) From his and (under the pseudonym of Peter Ruric) George Sims’s screen story, and Sims’s script, The Black Cat is one of the two best works by Viennese-born Edgar G. Ulmer, the other being his third film in Yiddish, The Light Ahead (1939), taken from stories by Mendele Mokher Seforim, about an impoverished, uprooted, hence essentially homeless Jewish community. The world’s most poignant film until Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961), The Light Ahead summons frayed hope in looking back in time and, from there, ahead, implicitly reflecting on the gathering darkness in Europe, and creating one of the most moving cinematic instances of young love. During the Second World War, Ulmer made Bluebeard (1944), which beat by three years Chaplin’s mordant satire Monsieur Verdoux analogizing war and serial murder. (Indeed, already in The Black Cat one of the two main characters is a Bluebeard.) However, it’s not until after the war that Ulmer achieved the Langian film noir that has become his signature work: the grim, fateful, deterministically circular Detour (1945). By then, Ulmer had lost his own illusions; like many other Jews, now he bore a conscious guilt of survival. This is the feeling underpinning his protagonist’s odd odyssey on the lam and into the arms of the law.
Unfolding in a mountainous stretch of Eastern Europe, The Black Cat is a film of storm and darkness. Its protagonist is Hungarian psychiatrist Vitus Verdegast (Bela Lugosi, brilliant), a prisoner of war who since his release from the Russian imprisonment that—these are his words—slowly killed his soul has been seeking throughout the world his former commander and friend, Hjalmar Poelzig, for two reasons: it was Poelzig, a traitor to the Austro-Hungarian cause, who sold his company to the Russians in the war; and it was Poelzig who appropriated Verdegast’s young wife. Fueled by the revenge he is after and hoping to retrieve his wife, Verdegast has tracked down Poelzig to the very site of the fort that became a battlefield of slaughter once the Russians bought from Poelzig the ambush that further ripped Verdegast from his life, his career having already been interrupted by three years of war. An architect, Poelzig, haunted, has built a twisted, modernist mansion on the site, in whose basement the beautiful women he has murdered for the religious rites of the satanic cult he heads are preserved, each suspended in a glass case. Verdegast’s wife is one of these, and now her and Verdegast’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Karin, is, also unbeknownst to her father, Poelzig’s wife. A bus from the train depot overturns in the rain, killing the driver. Verdegast and his mute bodyguard-servant lead Joan and Peter Alison, honeymooning Americans Verdegast met on the train, to Poelzig’s home in the dead of night so that Verdegast may attend to Joan’s slight injury.
What follows is a battle of wits (including a game of chess, for you Bergmaniacs looking for sources!*) between Poelzig and Verdegast for the lives of the young couple, Joan having caught Poelzig’s eye as a perfect candidate for his satanic ritual at the dark of the moon. Verdegast bides his time to exact his revenge, but after rescuing Joan from the double-cross stake at the altar (you Chapliners looking for sources, take note!**) and discovering Karin’s brutalized corpse in the basement he can wait no longer. Verdegast and his servant tie up Poelzig in a standing position so that Verdegast can skin Poelzig alive. (The image of his doing this, in ghastly shadow-silhouette, recalls Ulmer’s friend Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and other expressionistic German silent cinema.) The Alisons escape just in time to see the mansion blow up from the detonated dynamite that is rigged underneath. The image is of a World War I battlefield. Ambiguous: on one level, this finish seems to remove the hangover from that war by killing the two rivals, Poelzig and Verdegast, representing it; but now we have joined the ranks of the haunted, along with the innocent Alisons.
The black cat of the title is Poelzig’s pet. Verdegast early on flings a blade into it, killing it; Poelzig explains to his guests, the Alisons, that Verdegast has cat phobia. Soon after, there the cat is, alive, in Poelzig’s affectionate arms; indeed, at a strategic instant the cat reappears to terrorize Verdegast afresh. Poelzig has explained that the cat, according to legend, is eternal—this, the origin of the superstition that a cat has nine lives. The animal warrants occupying the title of the film, Poe or no Poe, because it perfectly symbolizes the “living dead” condition of the arch-enemies Poelzig and Verdegast, who in turn, together, embody the horror of the war, its opened Pandora’s box of inhumanity and almost inconceivable cruelty, and its profound shadow haunting Europe, out of which, of course, Adolf Hitler has emerged. I think “Hitler” with every one of Poelzig’s charismatic appearances. It’s scarcely possible that Ulmer did not have this monstrous Jew-hater in mind. For the record, though, the character is more directly based on occultist Aleistar Crowley.
The set is another part of the film’s visual bounty. Architect Poelzig’s mansion, with its sharp angles and geometric designs, expanses of glass, and narrow circular staircases*** expresses Poelzig’s twisted soul and the tormented soul of Europe. (Although someone else may be credited, Ulmer himself, a former art director, designed the set.) Indeed, the entire film is steeped in a sense of the past, a former time; the classical music on the soundtrack—Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt—helps evoke this. The modernist, constructivist set design, however, isn’t mere ironic counterpoint. Rather, it represents visually a denial of horrific experience, the attempt to bury this experience, the attempt to build over it. (In the film, false and moving walls also contribute to the sense of this attempt and its illusionary and delusionary nature.) The beautifully suspended bodies in the basement, a transfigured catacomb (each glass case is lit from below to render the preserved corpse “spiritual”), become the film’s most entrancing visual disclosure of Europe’s doomed attempt to repress, transform and transcend a horrible past. The eerily forward-moving, seemingly floating camera as Poelzig takes Verdegast on a tour of this lowest level of the mansion, with Poelzig’s disembodied grave voice directing the tour, precedes the disclosure of Verdegast’s dead wife in one of those upright, transparent tombs. For me, Ulmer (who, incidentally, invented the dolly shot that Murnau would make part of his artistic signature) mesmerizingly captures the agonizing sadness of a Europe unable for all its attempts to break free of ghosts of the past—the shadow that the experience of the Great War has attached to those who participated in and survived the event. It was left to Hitler to stir up those ghosts for the sake of power.
What about the Alisons? What are they doing there? They are, after all, only the slightest bit attached to Europe. (Presumably part of their honeymoon will include a visit to Joan’s parents in Austria.) The Alisons represent the rest of us, those too young, too uninvolved in a past that has blighted so much of the world. Ulmer has wrought a perfect metaphor for that, too: through most of the film both these characters are unconscious either from having passed out or from having been knocked out, by fist or narcotic. Poor Peter Alison seems perpetually out cold on some floor!
Boris Karloff had some year that year. In 1934 his two best films, John Ford’s The Lost Patrol, in which he is excellent as a Christian fanatic, and this, appeared. He is memorable, too, in Alfred Werker’s The House of Rothschild, his character telling Rothschild (George Arliss, the first Jewish actor to win an Oscar, as Benjamin Disraeli, and Bette Davis’s mentor) that he will not do business with him “on the technicality that [Rothschild is] a Jew.” A stunning line, and Karloff’s reading chills to the bone. He is not in The Black Cat, though, as wonderful as Lugosi, whose cry of intolerable anguish and pain when he discovers his murdered daughter pierces. Everyone, though, is good, including David Manners—he played the blind boy with whom the evangelist falls in love in Frank Capra’s splendid The Miracle Woman (1931)—as Peter, a mystery writer, of all things. But something else must be mentioned about the cast. It includes two of the most beautiful girls in Hollywood: Jacqueline Wells (a.k.a. Julie Bishop), who plays Joan, and Lucille Lund, who plays Poelzig’s wife and Verdegast’s daughter.
The Black Cat was beseiged by post-production tinkering owing to the studio’s (Universal’s) qualms about the film’s violence. In addition to commandeering the trimming (otherwise, Ulmer had edited the film himself), Universal recalled Ulmer to re-shoot a bit, and the experience greatly affected Ulmer, who pursued as a result a path of independence by making B-pictures on “poverty row.” He took the road less traveled on, and it made all the difference.
* Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1956) finds Death and the knight Antonius Block playing chess to determine if the former will claim a young couple and their infant.
** Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) finds the dictator of Tomania, Adenoid Hynkel, ranting and raving under the insignia of his fascist rule, the double cross.
*** I have read that the design is Bauhaus-inspired, but I know too little about schools of architecture, much less German ones, to know how this fact contributes, if at all, to the film’s thematic development. However, I am informed by a friend, Mindy Aloff, the following: “As for the Bauhaus, you’ve seen plenty of buildings (at least in photographs) that are its legacy: the (old, original) Museum of Modern Art, the United Nations, and so forth. International Moderne style—the impersonal rectangles of the towers in mid-town Manhattan, especially along Sixth Avenue, for instance—are a watered-down version. Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Oskar Schlemmer—there were geniuses at the Bauhaus. [The 1919 film] The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, with its listing angles and ominous shadows, is a prototype of its dark side: had the Doctor been prescribed, oh, lithium, he might have ended up as a Bauhaus artist or architect, with all the angles righted, all the spaces widened and cleared, and light streaming in through roof-to-floor windows. But in its economically reduced form, the legacy of the Bauhaus loses its point (a reaction to the overwhelming coziness, darkness, and mandarin complications of Victorian and Edwardian buildings) and becomes, alas, all the housing projects of the Rust Belt.”
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