Murder by Invitation

Welcome to the Denham Sanity Trial, where the relatives of eccentric Aunt Cassie are hoping the judge will have her committed so that they can get their hands on her $3m estate and house in the mountains... At least, that's the plan - and that's the motive - for a MURDER BY INVITATION!  

I'm a little wary of Wallace Ford. I love The Rogues Tavern but its leading man is absolutely not the best thing about it. Here he is again, as a journalist who smarms his way into the middle of a murder investigation. And, just like in Tavern, it's one of his sidekicks doing the bulk of the detective work... Not that I'm complaining - I'd rather spend time with the sidekick, after all. But does that save the film? I'm afraid I'm going to have to say no. This 1941 flick starts out funny, with enough zingers peppering the aforementioned court case I expected Hepburn and Tracy to pop up, but once we arrive at the Old Dark Greylock House itself, the enjoyment drains away like it's controlled by some kind of faulty fun faucet. And who needs one of those?

Once it's been established that Aunt Cassie (an impish Sarah Padden) is indeed playing with a full set of marbles - in the eyes of the court, at least - her greedy relatives find themselves summoned to Greylock for a midnight meeting. None are keen to make the trip - in fact, several suspect the giggly old bat has murder in mind - but being a no-show means being cut out of her will for definite, so they grudgingly head up into the hills. 

And there we have it. The stage is set for lashings of backwoods backbiting, as Cassie descends the staircase on the stroke of twelve, announcing she's going to study them all for a while and leave her money to "the worthiest of an unworthy lot". It's only a matter of time (1am in the library, to be exact) before one of the gang turns up dead, and the backstabbing descends into actual stabbing. Enter gossip columnist Wallace Ford (he's not even a news reporter) to put an end to the murders, accompanied by his secretary (Marian Marsh), who gets all the funniest lines, and crime scene photographer (Herbert Vigran), who does all the dog work. (Remind me why Ford is in this again?)

In an annoying touch, while the killer is likely to be a member of the family (i.e. someone named in the will), Ford spends most of the time pompously suspecting the servants. There's talk, talk, talk as it emerges that literally everyone has an alibi but, eventually, a secret passage is discovered, leading to an amusing bargain between Aunt Cassie and another character that provides some much-needed relief from all the interrogating. 

Released in the wake of 1939's The Cat and the Canary (which is even name-dropped at one point), Murder by Invitation tries to emulate that film's self-awareness by having Ford spout things like, "This has all the elements of a swell murder mystery!"... Only this time it's not, and the constant reminders don't help. What I will say, however, is that the whodunit angle actually plays out fairly; it's just a shame it's not delivered in a very entertaining way. I rolled a sympathetic eye when Mike the mechanic declared: "If these murders don't stop, I'm never going to get this car greased!"

Enjoy the lively opening credits, which juggle the story's motifs (eyes, clocks and flames) with James Bondian glee, but don't expect too much else from this sub-par effort, which really should have brought more to the table. This ain't the Thirties anymore, Monogram!  

RATING: 🕸

Bulldog Drummond's Secret Police

By Jove! Some rotter's made a dash for the secret treasure of Rockingham Towers! It's upper-class twittery all the way in this 1939 entry in Paramount's gentleman-adventurer series, BULLDOG DRUMMOND'S SECRET POLICE... 

Here's a jolly jape that sneaks onto many Old Dark House movie lists but, to be perfectly honest, is more of a British country house comedy with elements of intrigue. Still, it's an entertaining watch and, as someone who hasn't seen any other Bulldog Drummond films, I'd even say it serves as a good introduction to the series. 

John Howard stars for the sixth time as the dashing toff, Drummond, who's in the midst of wedding preparations at his sprawling estate, Rockingham Towers, where he's due to marry sweetheart Phyllis (Heather Angel) the next day. Cluttering up the supporting cast are an assortment of colonels, constables, maiden aunts and butlers, including Hitchcock fave Leo G. Carroll as a newly-appointed manservant, and Forrester Harvey as a visiting professor. The latter is keen to share his discovery that Rockingham stands atop a network of catacombs containing buried treasure, as recorded in a coded journal he just happens to have brought along. My goodness... what a wheeze it would be if the documents were to fall into the wrong hands, setting off a desperate hunt for both a devious criminal and the legendary fortune itself!    

Operating on the level of a Hardy Boys adventure, B.D.'s S.P. actually does what it does quite well... You just need to be clear what you're signing up for. The plot is simple but pleasingly paced, taking place over the course of an eventful night and morning, with a climactic descent into the subterranean passages providing dungeons, deathtraps and derring-do that plays like The Goonies in smoking jackets. 

The plentiful humour is largely of the Jeeves and Wooster variety, highlighted by E.E. Clive as Drummond's butler, Tennyson, a droll character very much in the Alfred Pennyworth mould ("Pardon me, Sir, but we're in for a spot of trouble," he remarks as a ceiling covered in spikes begins to descend). But, oddly enough, most of it finds the funny bone - even a rickety bit of slapstick involving a Ming vase destined to end up in pieces. I guess even this kind of upper-class twaddle is preferable to the noxious treatment of Black servants you'd likely end up with as the equivalent 'comic relief' in an American-set film. 

Not one for chill-seekers, then, and it'll probably play better to Anglophiles, but a spiffy spot of spoofery to mix up your Old Dark House viewing on a slow day. 

RATING: 🕸🕸

The Cat and the Canary

Originally staged on Broadway in 1922, first filmed as a silent movie in 1927, then again with sound in 1930 (but since lost)... Super-funny and super-scary, it's 1939's THE CAT AND THE CANARY!  

We open on the misty waters of the Louisiana Bayou, as lawyer Crosby (George Zucco) is ferried to his next appointment. "Anyone else living around the old Norman place?" he asks his guide. "Not people," the boatman replies, tracing a portentous circle in the air with his hand. In our first hint of the chills to come, the background music swells into a eerie, drawling squeal...

By the end of the 1930s, the Old Dark House genre had fallen into a predictably silly and largely parodic pattern, but The Cat and the Canary hit the reset button - and hard. Here was a film from Paramount Pictures that stole a sidelong glance at the still-successful horror films of rival studio, Universal, before pouncing over and dragging back a handful of real fear to sprinkle liberally into the Old Dark House formula. Don't let anyone tell you that the humour of The Cat and the Canary outweighs the horror, because this cat has claws! 

The structure follows the classic suspense pattern, later exemplified by Hitchcock, who liked to pace his films around three crescendos, or 'bumps' as he called them. Greasing the wheels of the roller coaster is the comedy - of which there's plenty, and it's plenty funny - provided in the form of witty, fast-paced dialogue. Most of the zingers come from leading man Bob Hope, who, as actor Wally Campbell, is familiar with the mystery genre and even comments on the three-act nature of the nightmare unfolding around him. 

Wally is one of six relatives gathered for the reading of a will at the aforementioned Old Norman Place, now occupied only by former housekeeper Miss Lu (Gale Sondergaard) and her black cat. Needless to say, not all of the relations are going to come away from the meeting satisfied, meaning that, when the sole heir is revealed (in this case, Paulette Goddard) several others will be left with a motive for murder.

Adding to the atmosphere of peril is the news that a dangerous maniac nicknamed 'The Cat' has escaped from a local asylum and may be prowling the area... In fact, it's a glimpse of this frightening villain that provides the first big 'bump' at the end of the film's first act. This is a masterful scene - one of my favourites in all of Old Dark House horror - in which Paulette Goddard, reading The Psychology of Fear in a darkened room, senses she's not alone. As the audience, we know full well she's not, having seen a secret panel behind her slide silently open and a claw-like hand appear. Most scare scenes involve either sustained low-level tension (the 'anticipation' before a jolt, say) or full-on suspense (a threat hurtling ever closer) but this isn't quite either. On the surface, it's simplicity itself - nothing really happens - yet the way it works, escalating towards a feeling of utter panic as Goddard bolts for the door, makes it one of the best-constructed scares in classic horror.   

Bump #2, arriving at the end of the second act, involves the surprise discovery of a body and is again innovative, with the corpse falling towards and yet past the camera. (There's an 'impossible' shot of a body seen 'through' the floor in Robert Zemeckis's What Lies Beneath that always reminds me of this.) And, finally, the story's tortuously extended chase climax provides the ultimate crescendo, pulling no punches whatsoever and featuring a killer with an absolutely massive knife.  

Production values are off the chart, with sets and lighting creating an almost three-dimensional space - a distorted funhouse characterized by contradictions: towering ceilings and confined corners; elegance and decay. The longer the characters reside within its walls, the more they too warp into untrustworthy ciphers. In the small number of scenes set beyond the confines of the manor, we discover a tangled, expressionistic jungle that's even more dangerous, and it's here that, naturally, the terrific climax occurs. 

The Cat and the Canary is iconic - one of those delicate alignments of fate that results in a sweet perfection. Unusually, the studio was able to repeat the trick the following year, gathering many of the major players and reshuffling them into the more overtly supernatural The Ghost Breakers. I only wish they'd tried for a hat trick, but the fact that the lightning struck twice thankfully left us with a couplet of quintessential scare-comedies. 

RATING: 🕸🕸🕸🕸🕸