In July of 1934, the Motion Picture Production Code went into full effect. A strict set of guidelines, the Production Code, or Hays Code as it's more commonly called, dictated the content that could be shown in American Hollywood films, and more importantly, what could not.
Overtly sexually suggestive themes were forbidden. Clergy and religion could not be mocked. Criminals and evildoers must be punished before a film’s end.
Countless classics would be made under the Hays Code before its demise in 1968, but on the whole, American films got simpler, cleaner, safer. It’s perhaps some small miracle, then, that “The Black Cat” was released just two months before the Code went into effect.
Released in May of 1934, “The Black Cat” starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff at the height of their fame, is a hidden gem of pre-code horror films among classics like “Dracula” and “Frankenstein.” A haunting treatise on war and the all-too-real monsters it creates as well as a B-movie chiller, “The Black Cat,” playing at Woodmere Art Museum on Tuesday, Oct. 29 as part of its Tuesday Night at the Movies series, is a thrilling product of Hollywood’s daring early years.
The film starts in familiar enough horror movie territory. After a car accident strands a young married couple in the Hungarian mountains, they are forced to accompany fellow traveler Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Lugosi) to seek shelter in the home of the eccentric engineer Hjalmar Poelzig (Karloff) and they soon find it very difficult to leave the sinister estate. From there, it goes in strange directions.
Though released by Universal, the studio famous for the likes of Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolf Man, “The Black Cat” feels a world apart from its contemporaries. “The Black Cat” might be best described as a work of Gothic Modernism. Rather than a crumbling castle, Poelzig’s sprawling home of glass and steel has more in common with Frank Lloyd Wright than Frankenstein. Poelzig’s monstrosity, too, is far closer to home. As a commander of an infamous fortress during World War 1, his treachery led to the death of the soldiers under his command, and the imprisonment of Werdegast in the wastes of Siberia. Even as his plans turn to cults and dark rituals, Poelzig’s evil feels entirely, chillingly earthbound.
Written and directed by Hungarian immigrant Edgar G. Ulmer, the lingering scars of World War 1 haunt “The Black Cat” as surely as any ghost. Ulmer, who was left homeless as a youth by the war, concocts a story steeped in an eerie atmosphere, a world of shadows deeper and darker than the newlywed American protagonists at the center can fully comprehend.
Sustaining the uneasy atmosphere are Karloff and Lugosi doing some of the best work of their careers in their first picture together. Both men play against type, with Karloff, then best known as the shambling monster in “Frankenstein” playing an erudite but quietly menacing man, and Lugosi in one of his rare protagonist roles is, in turn, warm, tragic, and dangling on the edge of madness. Werdegast’s quest to avenge himself against Poelzig for landing him in jail, and he suspects, spiriting away Werdegast’s wife and daughter, leads him to darker places than the heroes of classic horror films usually ventured.
With its murky morality, dark twists, and musings on what humanity remains in the aftermath of war, “The Black Cat” feels like it is expressly the kind of film The Hays Code was enacted to prevent from releasing. Even 90 years from its release, its striking imagery and challenging themes still have the power to unnerve. Age has made “The Black Cat” into something that Ulmer, Lugosi, or Karloff could not have foreseen when the movie hit theaters in the spring of 1934. “The Black Cat” has become an emblem of an older, wilder Hollywood, a Hollywood where you could never be certain just what lurked in the deep shadows.
“The Black Cat” will screen at 7 p.m. at Woodmere, 9201 Germantown Ave., on Tuesday, Oct. 29. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and light refreshments are available prior to the screening. Tuesday Nights at the Movies screenings are free, but donations at the door are greatly appreciated.
