chiller blog

Posted Aug 31, 09 02:48 PM

CHILLER Presents Follow That Bird

Most viewers won't recognize the title The Cat and the Canary. But certainly, we all know the story. And it goes something like this.

Cue the offstage howling wind machines...

A long-since expired patriarch. A shadowy mansion on a night of particularly foul weather. Greedy and innocent relatives - mostly greedy - assembled by a shifty estate lawyer to hear the reading of a will. (Incidentally, this stock scene is well spoofed in a deleted scene from Young Frankenstein. But I digress).

Then, during the night...one by one...everyone...begins...to...vanish...

Hidden passageways are discovered Candelabras, not flashlights, are the preferred method of illumination. And that earlier police house call - you know, the one warning about an escaped lunatic, the one nicknamed "the Cat" and bearing those strange, hairy hands that creep up on the mouths of unsuspecting victims who are always looking the other way - welllll. It may be more than a warning.

The first time I ran across this plot was on a re-run of Scooby-Doo (By the way, there's a rumor that in one episode, Fred/Velma/etc. don't solve the mystery. Does anyone know if this is true? I can't sit through all of those "I would've gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for you @#$! kids!" 's to find out).

But some plots are more memorable than the actual films from which they're lifted. Take The Creature From the Black Lagoon. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl to prehistoric aquatic terror. Lose the 3-D and this is a pedestrian piece that hasn't survived the test of time. Likewise to those Edgar Allen Poe adaptations Roger Corman cycled through in the ‘60s - The Pit and the Pendulum and The Fall of the House of Usher. Although they are handsome productions that earn marks for escapism (and pushing writer Richard Matheson to the forefront), none of the entries truly rose to the level of definitive "nailed it"'s.

The Cat and the Canary was adapted first as a silent film in 1927. It's accessible and atmospheric - you can truly sense the unheated gloom. But after a terrific first act, nothing that follows is memorable. And that's always been the biggest shock.

The premise seems to have never let go of it's staginess, a quality that worked far better for Agatha Christie's diabolical mystery weaves of The Mousetrap and And Then There Were None. But as horror, what's required to create suspense is narrative economy and a deliberate, cautioned pace - a weakness of the material not improved by either subsequent version (a vaudeville-cracking Bob Hope head-scratchingly helms the 1939 rendition - out of print; class act Oscar winner Dame Wendy Hiller disappears far too quickly from the 1978 remake - which should be). And all three incarnations stop treating the mansion as a character - especially the startlingly blase corridors of the last film.

So the filmmakers start over-plotting under-developed archetype characters. Always deadly: quickly moving around figures to which we have little connection. And untangling their story threads isn't inherently entertaining. Check out how much fun you're not having with the incessant scurrying around and endless guessing games of the Gothic house send-up Clue.

The closest cigar goes to cinematic cousin The Old Dark House (1932). Certain plot elements spill over: Melvyn Douglas and beau have car trouble in a monsoon of a rainstorm, taking refuge at the lights-out dwelling of one Horace Femm (the drippingly good Ernest Thesiger).

Yes, Horace Femm. If you're born Horace Femm, your options in life are limited to creeping out strangers in need.

Naturally, the host and his sis have ghoulish secrets to spare, including a brother dead-bolted upstairs. Standout credits include Boris Karloff, Gloria (Titanic) Stuart, and Charles Laughton, plus crisp and deliciously sneaky direction by James (Bride of Frankenstein) Whale.

But, ultimately, I don't want cat and mouse. I want cat and canary. Write it down on life's to-do list: Must make definitive version of The Cat and the Canary.