The Black Cat (1966)

A Cat Above
The Rest

The Black Cat
USA 1966 Directed by Harold Hoffman
Hemisphere/Severin Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Poe faced spoilers.

So the fourth film in Severin’s Blu Ray boxed edition of Hemisphere Horrors is somewhat unusual in that it’s not shot in the Philippines at all. It’s an American movie made by a director who only directed one other feature (under a pseudonym) and that’s a shame because, judging from this thing, he had a lot of potential. It’s yet another film called The Black Cat and also takes its inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe’s story of the same name. However, it’s a cat above the rest, if you will, in that it’s actually, apart from the period (it’s been transplanted to contemporary America), a very straight adaptation of the original tale with almost no trimmings or additions to the ideas in Poe’s text.

Which is a really hard thing to do, actually. There have been many adapations of many of Poe’s tales over the years... heck, I even read an entire book published in the early noughties that was devoted to the tidal wave of cinematic Poe adaptations called The Poe Cinema. But even the most famous ones, which I guess would be the ones that Roger Corman directed for AIP in the 1960s, have added maybe 95% of their own ‘padding’ to these, more than twice told tales. And there’s a very good reason for this... Poe’s short stories are usually very short and don’t have time to tell more than a fleeting impression of a tale or, in some cases, an abstract emotional state brought upon by an internal or external influence. If you’re trying to base a movie on one then you almost can’t help but add to it or you are going to end up with a five minute short instead of a main feature.

This film is different. It’s got an admittedly short runtime at 73 minutes but it’s really done the original story ‘straight’ and, managed to take the main germ of an idea and not really stray too much, other than in terms of slightly more visual ways of getting these same ideas across. And that’s no mean feat to actually do this and still, as in this case, make it fairly watchable and interesting.

The film starts with an opening sequence which is in terrible shape, something which Severin warn you about before the film  starts... that just a few of the shots had to be taken from inferior sources or be lost forever. It’s a silhouette of the main protagonist Lou, played by a guy called Robert Frost (no, not that one) in his only film, as he walks by a lake and his voice reads a poem. I’m assuming the poem he reads is one of Poe’s own poems but I couldn’t figure out which one it was (sorry). This, like the rest of the film, is shot in a really stark, contrasty black and white that I associate with that kind of era of American monochromatic cinema. For me, this film has the kind of feel, due to the stock and the kind of atmosphere it has, of films like Herk Hervey’s original Carnival Of Souls or Leonard Kastle’s The Honeymoon Killers. The feel of something a young Scorcese or even Cassavetes might make.

We then get a credit sequence that absolutely rocks with white type cards with images of a black cat interspersed and splitting the cards with maybe just a half a second of exposure before the next card... so the image of the cat almost goes into the retina at a subliminal level. This is accompanied by some really cool music which, alas, I’ve got no idea how to find. The film has no composer credit on it apart from a rock group performing some songs at a nightclub (technically not in Poe’s original for sure but, used as a stand in for the visual representation of abstract emotions within the text) and the disharmony between various musical choices throughout the film leads me to believe that this must have been a needle drop score culled from a music library. Scores bought by the yard, so to speak. Never mind the quality, hear the width.

These credits also tell us that The Black Cat in the film is played by Pluto. Pluto is, of course, also the name of the cat in both this film and in Poe’s rendition of the tale although, I have to say, the second cat used after Pluto’s death seems to be a totally different feline actor to me.

And the story follows the idea of a rich, playboy type who has a lot of pets and a wife who he ignores. He is presented here as unhinged and Frost does a good job of being obnoxious and also mentally unbalanced, a state of mind which kind of stands in for the peculiar mental state known by Poe and put down in his tale The Imp Of The Perverse. It certainly permeates his original The Black Cat and, frankly, a subtle concept like the mind’s own whim to follow a path of commitment it doesn’t necessarily want to undertake is probably best substituted with an unsound mental grip on reality as it is here.

As in the original story, Lou cuts out the cat’s right eye after it scratches him and begins to obsess about it (a slight inflection added by the writer/director in this version brings in the idea of a cat being a witches’ familiar as a thematic embodiment of his madness). A second scene in a night club, an establishment used earlier to highlight Lou’s frequent neglect of his wife Diana (payed by Robyn Baker in the first of only two films she made... is this movie cursed or what?), shows the live band are all now wearing eye patches on their right eyes and it’s a nice idea for a visual surrogate of the initial guilt Lou feels at his actions.

And, like the short story, Lou ends up hanging Pluto. However, unlike the random fire that follows the next day and leaves the character bankrupt and bereft and acknowledging unnatural forces at work, bringing a kind of karma to the situation... the fire is actually inadvertently caused by Lou’s act of the killing of the cat. In this version, he hangs the cat from a tree with an electrical power cord and, when the cat is hanging, plugs it into a conveniently situated socket, electrocuting the hanged feline. When he’s in bed with his wife a little later, the electricity from the murder of his pet gets out of hand and starts the fire which leads to his financial ruin.

Before he finds another cat as a replacement for Pluto, there is a sequence where Lou is hospitalised for his increasingly aggressive mental condition and it’s revealed he is having shock treatment and insulin injections. There is a scene where Lou is injected with an obviously painful chemical as he writhes and thrashes on the bed and I can only assume that this is a zealous writer/director using this as another, stronger visual metaphor for the guilt that Lou is suffering from his own, nasty actions. It’s a tough call because, in Poe’s tale it’s written in the first person so the audience is not at a distance from the character and can, therefore, feel a little sympathy from the writer in the situation. In this cinematic version, however, it’s hard to call upon any sympathy for the male lead (who nevertheless does a terrific job and, again, I’m surprised this guy never worked again in the business... at least not under the name Robert Frost).

The film continues to follow Poe’s short description of the character’s downfall when, after going after the second cat in the basement, he (not accidentally in this version) splits his wife’s head open with an axe and then walls her up in the basement. Now, this is impressively done here and the stark black and white photography really helps with the impact of the blood as, in a quick cut from motion to aftermath, we see the axe head buried in Robyn Baker’s skull and blood spurting from the wound to splash the wall and, in another aftermath shot with less motion, its path down her face and clothes. It’s a skillfully timed and edited series of shots and I imagine it must have been quite strong stuff for its day. A similarly strong aftermath shot comes earlier in the film, where we see Lou’s blood coated hand with the cats eye sitting in the centre of his palm.

When the FBI come knocking at his door, the story plays out the same as the source and, when he bangs on his new wall to proudly demonstrate to the inspectors how solid his house is, we hear the sound of the wailing cat which he has accidentally walled in with the corpse of his wife and the two FBI men tear down he wall so we are treated to a shot of the cat jumping out to freedom from the top of the wife’s bloody head. One of the few additions to the original tale, which is now over and which, in a way contradicts the existence of the opening poetry shot, is where Lou tries to escape in his car and the two officers give chase. However, at the last minute (as you kind of know is going to happen), Lou swerves when he sees the black cat in the road and crashes his car in a quite violent piece of editing which really makes the crash feel more than it is (I think a toy car was probably used for one of the rapidly edited together shots). Our last shot of Lou is of his mangled and dead body where, we see, his right eye has also been knocked out from the crash.

The Black Cat is low budget and feels like one of those movies where the director was struggling against finances at every turn but still gave it his all and managed to make, well... a really interesting film for sure, if nothing else. If you are a fan of Poe’s tale then this rendition of it is definitely worth checking out because I’m convinced it’s one of the straightest adaptations of a Poe work in existence. I’m really grateful to Severin for putting this one out there as part of their Hemisphere Horrors box because there’s probably no way I would have bothered to pick this one up as a single edition and I would have missed out. Highly recommended for a certain kind of low key horror aficionado, I think.

The Black Cat (1934)

Werdegastly
Delight

The Black Cat
USA 1934 Directed by Edward G. Ulmer
Universal/Eureka Masters Of  Cinema
Three Films of Bela Lugosi
Blu Ray Set Zone B

While it’s nowhere near the first ‘Edgar Allan Poe’ movie to do so, the 1934 version of The Black Cat certainly continued and upheld the tradition of being almost nothing of consequence to do with Poe’s short tale, despite the opening credits heralding it as being “Suggested by the immortal Edgar Allan Poe classic”... well, you can suggest and you can certainly lead a black cat to milk but, you can’t make it drink. I don’t blame the writers and director here for making something which has barely any relation to the so called source material... they weren’t the first and they surely won’t be the last. You see, if you’ve read Poe’s tales you’ll know that his short stories rarely lend themselves to having any of the kind of substance that would lend well to a cinematic retelling. They’re moody, short slabs of atmosphere and attempting to extract a screen story from them must prove almost impossible for some writers. That being said, one of the Poe inspired versions of The Black Cat put out by Hemisphere in the 1960s (which I’ll review on here this week) is pretty darned close and shows just what can be done with an enthusiastic approach.

This version was the first of eight films to team up Universal’s newest horror superstars, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. The film also features a freshly married couple as protagonists, Joan and Peter, played by Julie Bishop and David Manners. Manners himself, of course, already had experience playing the leading, male romantic interest opposite both Lugosi (in Dracula, reviewed here) and Karloff (in The Mummy, reviewed here). After a coach wreck on their wedding night, en route to their honeymoon, the two newly weds find themselves pitched up, along with Lugosi’s Dr. Werdegast, in a fine looking mansion built on the grounds of an old fortress where Werdegast and the man who built it, architect Poelzig (played by Karloff), both served in the first war, 15 years prior. The two have a score to settle but the young couple keep them polite before Poelzig makes his play to sacrifice young Joan in a satanic ritual with his friends and add her perfectly preserved body to the ones he keeps in his cellar... along with Werdegast’s dead wife who he killed, while also having married Werdegast’s daughter. Yeah, it’s all very strange since she can only be 15 - 17 years old (as opposed to Karloff’s 47 years at the time) but the 'grudge keeping' Werdegast, who is mostly portrayed in a sympathetic and heroic way here, doesn’t find out any of this until the three of them are forced by circumstance (Joan is injured in the crash) to stay the night.

I was always blown away by the music on this thing since it was tracked in a few years later and reused for the second of the Flash Gordon serials, Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars, including the striking title music by Heinz Roemheld. The film is a very short 65 minutes but it’s a delight, with the director making use of the wonderful house by using ample vertical lines built into the design of the interiors to contribute to some lovely  shot compositions, compartmentalising his actors in their own, allocated portion of the frame space. Later, in a satanic cult scene, he makes full use of a wonderful diagonal, double cross set of beams to further enhance his beautiful black and white photography.

Everyone does a great job here in terms of performance too, with Lugosi playing slightly off type (for him, he would soon become more associated with villanous roles) although, his heroism is somewhat compromised when his character makes good on his promise to skin Poelzig alive, which we see him doing in silhouette in a sequence which suffered many censor cuts in various countries. There’s also an interesting moment, when Werdegast’s man servant is shot, that we see blood coming out of his mouth... I’m not sure if this was the start of that particular cinematic cliché but blood was in short supply in terms of being show in movies at that time (unless it’s a pre-code thing and I’ve just not seen enough of them... certainly it's an element which was less enhanced in the various Universal classic monster movies of the time).

Poelzig, in an iconic looking role from Karloff with his big widow’s peak and stylised features (it’s this version of Karloff which was used as a caricature on the bag design for the second branch of Forbidden Planet, which opened in London in the 1980s, along with James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Clint Eastwood, Jane Fonda, Mick Jagger, Debbie Harry, David Bowie and Robby The Robot), was partially based on a famous Austrian architect of the same name and, it would seem, partially based on the famous British satanist Aleister Crowley. Indeed, it’s been reported that this is the first film to feature the idea of satanic cults but, honestly, I don’t think so. Surely satanism must have been mentioned, at the very least, in the 1922 classic Häxan... so maybe ‘first American made movie’ might be a more accurate description.

Either way, although Poelzig as played by Karloff is certainly the more charming of the two starring roles, he’s definitely the more villanous in this one. He must be the villain because, at one point, he is seen playing Bach’s Toccata And Fugue In D Minor on a pipe organ so... he must be bad, right? Whether that choice of instrument and specific piece of music was a cliché at the time this was made is unknown to me... but it’s certainly become one over the years, for sure.

Fans of The Monkees’ amazing cinematic excursion Head will be interested to know that this is where the famous “Supernatural perhaps... baloney, perhaps not.” exchange between Lugosi and Manners takes place. The film is grim but never drags and, frankly, the use of various bits of music which would go on to become staples in the three Flash Gordon serials means that, someone like myself is always going to be tapping their toes as the film plays out anyway. So that’s me done with the 1934 version of The Black Cat, which is a film I can’t help but recommend to those who love the old, black and white horror classics. Edgar Allan Poe might disapprove of being associated with this, since the only shout out to him is Werdegast’s fear of the black cat who wanders around Poelzig’s house, but with great, stylised acting to match the great, stylised sets, good music and perverse things going on in the cellar... what more would you require?

Feline Groovy

The Black Cat
1981 Italy

Directed by
Lucio Fulci

Shameless Screen Entertainment

DVD Region 0

I always have mixed feelings about Lucio Fulci. Sure Zombie Flesh Eaters (aka Zombi aka Zombi 2 depending on which country’s print you happen to be viewing at the time) was an okay movie in that some of the shot compositions are nice (visually it’s like the spiritual cousin of Breakfast At Tiffanys) and in that it never really takes you out of your comfort zone so it’s one of those films you can just relax to. But he also did what I consider to be the truly dullest and most unwatchable spaghetti western ever (and I’ve seen a fair few), Four of the Apocalypse.

On the other hand, he also directed Lizard In A Woman’s Skin which is easily one of the finest giallo movies ever committed to the screen.

So I’m never really sure whether a new Fulci movie is going to bring me something really great, something totally dreadful or something in between the two. But I picked up a DVD copy of his Poe “adaptation” The Black Cat and decided to settle down and watch it because I’ve not seen a great deal of his work.

Now Poe is a hard deal when it comes to adaptation because, frankly, he wrote mostly short stories which, if they were done faithfully on screen, would leave you with movies which are only ten minutes long at most... so most movies which “say” they are adapted from his work use that term very loosely. Most of the plot lines to Poe movies are created from air by scriptwriters in an anemic attempt to give a narrative structure to whatever key moments happen in the original short (if you’re lucky and they bother to even read the original Poe before embarking on the script... for example Roger Corman’s movie Edgar Allan Poe’s The Haunted Palace is actually an uncredited adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward).

I’ve now seen at least five different adaptations of Poe’s The Black Cat and I have to say that this version is no exception to the above rule. Fulci’s version certainly goes off on it’s own tangents throughout the course of the movie but I also have to say, in all fairness to him, that he manages to hit more of those elements which were part and parcel of the original story than most versions I’ve watched.

This is basically how the Poe version goes...

The story is about a man who hates a cat so much he gouges out its eye. After a while he kills it by hanging it but after a fire in his house the shape of the hanging cat is etched on the wall in the soot. After being haunted by the presence of an identical, one eyed cat which one is to presume is the original cat reincarnated, he goes to kill it with an axe but accidentally kills his wife instead. He walls her body up in the cellar and nearly gets away with his crime when the police investigate but just as they are about to leave a wailing from behind the wall is heard. The police knock down the wall and find the corpse of the wife with the wailing cat on it. To quote Poe, “I had walled the monster up within the tomb!”

Most of these elements from Poe are in place in the Fulci movie (I was impressed by the inclusion of the spectre of the hanged cat on the wall after a fire) although a lot of other stuff is thrown in to the mix to make it a full length feature. Like the fact that the cat in this one seems to be a killer cat of death and is going around causing the murders with it’s slinky feline antics. And the fact that it somehow seems to be able to control the minds of others, including that of a spiritualist who “owns “the cat, played by Patrick Magee (The Final Programme, A Clockwork Orange) a year before his death, in his own unique manner as always.

The cast is rounded out by some familiar names to people who like to watch gialli and horror films. Such luminaries as Mimsy Farmer (Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Autopsy), David Warbeck (Twins of Evil, Razor Blade Smile) and Dagmer Lassander (Femina Ridens, Werewolf Woman, Forbidden Photos of a Woman Above Suspicion) grace the movie with their presence and their collective presence is one of the main factors in helping to lift the movie above the expectations of a jaded audience.

Another factor is the absolutely superb lighting and framing which one would normally expect to find in a giallo more than a horror movie. There’s some really nice things going on here and, from what I’ve seen of the Shameless label so far, they seem to have a bit of a knack when it comes to picking out films which have a very strong and memorable visual flair. People tend not to think of Fulci in this light but in some of his films he certainly does some groovy things with shape and colour and this is one of the better examples.

The way the whole film is leisurely shot and paced gives a certain sense of atmosphere which is not always easy to credibly create in these kinds of movies but it’s certainly the case here that you get a definite feeling of unease and foreboding from the way certain scenes are handled. The DVD case itself makes a comparison to Hammer in terms of the mood conveyed in this picture but I think, in this particular case (or even on this particular case ;-) they are doing the Fulci movie a disservice since it gives off way more dread than the average Hammer movie (with one notable fumble which I will highlight in a minute).

Also thrown into this artistic stew of a movie is a vibrant and jaunty score by Pino Donnagio which is at times reminiscent of some of his earlier work, notably the score he provided for Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. I say jaunty because there is, perhaps, a certain sense of some scenes being either notably overscored or, perhaps, inappropriately scored. The point of view shots taken from the cat’s perspective are maybe a little bit “over jolly” and are feintly reminiscent of some of his later works, most notably the theme associated with the little boy in Dario Argento’s Trauma. But mostly it’s pretty good Donnagio and he’s always worth a listen and can always be relied upon to bring a Hermmannesque sensibility to proceedings when it is called for.

The only real major fumble in the whole movie (apart from an unexpected “oh-he-wasn’t-killed-after-all” moment with one of the characters) is when the tension is building as Mimsy Farmer explores Patrick Magee’s house and is transfixed by the gaze of the cat... the cat unexpectedly teleports to another place in the room with a Donnagio musical flourish, reminiscent of the way Mr. Benn used to change clothes in the fancy dress shop on children’s TV. This may well kill the atmosphere for you and leave you to erupt in fits of laughter... you’ve been warned on that one!

The transfer and print quality is everything you’ve come to expect form a Shameless release (with the usual choice of a reversible sleeve). It’s worth checking out this and other releases because there are some real gems in their black cat-alogue (err... sorry, I meant back catalogue... getting carried away again).

This is probably not the most enthralling adaptation of Poe’s work that you’ll see but it is unique in some of the elements of the original story it gets up onto the screen and it’s a more atmospheric side of Fulci that you might not have glimpsed before. Definitely one to add to the pile for late night, alcohol fuelled viewing this Halloween. Give it a shot!