Is there a German in the house?

There’s nothing better than a really good Old Dark House movie and silent Hollywood embraced the genre enthusiastically.

The recipe:

Take one Old Dark House, preferable isolated and on a hilltop. Creepy housekeeper is optional but recommended.

Add six to ten movie stars in eccentric roles.

Sprinkle liberally with violent storms and washed-out roads.

Now (and this is the most important part) add one killer, preferably masked.

Allow to simmer for one and a half hours before blowing the lid off.

Bon appétit!

Now add to that the talents of Paul Leni, the gloriously talented German director of Waxworks and The Man Who Laughs. If that isn’t enough to send your fingers flying to your Netflix queue, there is also a liberal dose of macabre humor.

Tasty!

The setup is as follows:

Old Cyrus West was a wealthy man. So wealthy, in fact, that his grasping relatives would not leave him alone. Sick of being hounded for money, West ordered his will sealed until twenty years after his death. After that, his entire extended family would gather at his hilltop manor for the reading.

Twenty years pass and it is, naturally, a dark and stormy night. Roger Crosby (Tully Marshall), Cyrus West’s lawyer, arrives at the manor and is greeted by Cyrus’s creepy housekeeper (Martha Mattox), nicknamed Mammy Pleasant.

But all is not right. The will has been unsealed. One of the relatives must have gotten impatient. But who?

The extended family files into the manor and a suspect list quickly forms.

The Suspect	The Question
Annabelle West (Laura La Plante)	Is she as innocent as she appears?
Paul Jones (Creighton Hale)	The Milquetoast with a crush on Annabelle. An ideal cover for a clever murderer, don't you think?
Mammy Pleasant (Martha Mattox)	Means, opportunity, and a bit too too interested in the proceedings, eh?
Charlie Wilder (Forrest Stanley)	Seems to wander the place in the dark an awful lot. Plus the glowering. Lots of glowering. But to what purpose?
Harry Blythe (Arthur Edmund Carew)	Ditto. Plus, didn't he play that creepy undercover cop in The Phantom of the Opera?
Cecily Young (Gertrude Astor) & Aunt Susan (Flora Finch)	The motive is there. Is their helpless Hannah demeanor a clever ruse?
The guard (George Siegmann)	Claims to be looking for an escaped lunatic. Are we sure he’s not the lunatic?
Roger Crosby (Tully Marshall)	Hey, would you trust a lawyer?

Crosby gathers the family and reads the will. The fortune of Cyrus West will go to the most distant relative who bears the surname of West.

Annabelle West is a rich woman. With conditions. Because his family questioned his sanity in order to get at his fortune, Cyrus has ordered that the beneficiary be examined to make sure that their mental health is beyond reproach.

It seems an easy task for the thoroughly normal Annabelle. But that’s before Crosby the lawyer is murdered by a monstrous figure, a deranged murderer escapes from a nearby lunatic asylum, a clawed hand creeps out of the wall and tears a priceless necklace from Annabelle’s throat and, oh by the way, the rest of the family is more than willing to see Annabelle locked in the loony bin.

With only Paul Jones to help her, Annabelle rushes to solve the mystery before she is eliminated from the line of inheritance—one way or the other.

The entire cast, especially Laura La Plante, seem to be having the time of their lives. La Plante was a humor veteran, receiving her first comedy role at the age of 15. The supporting cast is made up of experienced character actors. Some, such as Flora Finch and George Siegmann, were veterans of the nickelodeon era. Others, like Creighton Hale and Tully Marshall, had been in films since movies had gone to the feature-length format.

With the decades of acting experience and the spry direction of Paul Leni, The Cat and the Canary was a cut above the other horror films and comedies of its time.

With eerie billowing curtains, dust, cobwebs and flickering lamps, Leni created an atmosphere that was genuinely scary. And with a cast with the talent to pull it off, he created humorously over-the-top reactions that served as counterpoint to the creepy sets and reminded the viewers that, yes, this is a comedy.

This old dark house is menacing but it is also nutty.

Paul Leni’s unique talent for creating atmosphere would have been an asset to the horror films of the early sound era. Sadly, he made only three more films, one of which was a part-talkie. An infected tooth caused blood poisoning and by the end of 1929 he was dead.

It’s a testament to Leni’s talent that The Cat and the Canary can still frighten us and make us laugh.

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