Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Year:  1934
Rating: 8.0

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The Black Cat was Boris Karloff’s return to Universal as well as Bela Lugosi’s return to the good graces of Universal and his emergence from personal bankruptcy. At the time the film was released it was a big hit for Universal but was trashed by the critics. Over the years it has gained notoriety as one of Universal’s most bizarre and creative films – and this was the film studio that gave the world Frankenstein, The Mummy, the Wolfman and the Invisible Man. It is a wonderfully baroque and stylish film with these two horror icons playing off each other like a game of truth and dare, but nothing compared to what it was intentionally meant to be. If the director’s original vision had been permitted, it would have been put in a vault, chained up and never seen again.


The director is Edgar G. Ulmer, who was later to become a cult fan favorite of his very low budget Poverty Row films such as Detour, Blackbeard, Strange Illusion and a ton of films you have never heard of. But before his fall from grace, he had been involved in the making of a number of famous European films (he was from Hungary) as a set designer – some of these being Golem, M, Metropolis, Spies and after moving to the USA to work, the classic Murnau film, Sunrise. But he wanted to direct and became good friends with the son of the owner and founder of Universal Carl Laemmle and apparently when Carl Sr. was out of town Carl Jr. gave Ulmer the go ahead to make this film with a deadline of two weeks and a budget of $95,000. Even in those days that was a not a lot of time or money to make an A film with two huge stars. With a minimum of sets that Ulmer designed and paying even Lugosi only a few thousand dollars, the film barely went over budget and two days past the deadline – and that was because reshoots had to be done after Carl Sr. saw the finished product and almost freaked out – but even that was tame compared to the original script.


The script was written by Ulmer and Peter Ruric based ever so slightly on a tale from Edgar Allan Poe. Ruric is an interesting character – better known to us hard-boiled detective fans as Paul Cain who wrote what are considered some of the best short stories in that genre for Black Mask – Fast One being considered a classic. They are very good and can be found in a collection. The two of them must have been on drugs to think their script could get made as it was. First it had to be submitted to the Breen Office which forced a number of changes and then Carl Sr. ripped it to shreds. Even so there is some for its time pretty interesting material that snuck through.


For example, in the script (this from the book Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff by Gregory Mank) a character is skinned alive and the film only shows it briefly in silhouette while the script called for his skin being pulled up over his head and then the character crawling on the floor all bloody moaning. That not too surprisingly did not make it to the film. Another major change done in the reshoots was that Bela’s character was changed from a rather evil character who also wanted to have the woman as did Karloff’s character into the good guy! There was also supposed to be a Satanist orgy that sadly never made it. What an insane and wonderful film this would have been. Audiences would have gone berserk and set fire to the theater. This was just after the pre-code days but it was after. Could it have been made a few years earlier I wonder – maybe over Carl Sr’s dead body.


The décor and style is very European and expressionistic in nature – clearly influenced by Ulmer’s time in Europe – with not much of a script by the time all the changes took place. It feels a bit crammed into its 65 minute running time which is admittedly not that much less than Frankenstein at 70 minutes and The Mummy at 73 minutes but it feels like it could have been fleshed out much more. A young couple are on their honeymoon (Julie Bishop and David Manners, who also was the straight man in Dracula and The Mummy) traveling through Europe on a train as happy as larks and very much in love. By necessity a man intrudes into their train car and introduces himself as Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Lugosi), who has just gotten out of prison after fifteen years when he was fighting for the Kaiser in WWII. He is going to visit a friend he says with a baleful eye as he stares out the window. Due to an accident the three of them are taken to the eerie evil house of Poelzig (Karloff). Vitus and Poelzig knew each other during the war and hate one another and Vitus has come to kill him. Poelzig realizes this but decides they should play a game to the death. Poelzig is also fascinated by the young wife and being the head of a Satanic cult, the time is coming for a human sacrifice and his leer indicates who he has in mind.


It plays out very strangely – almost in slow motion at times with the two men giving speeches, making threats, playing chess – like scorpions waiting for the moment to strike. There are some lovely cinematic moments – the first time we see Poelzig the camera wanders into a darkened bedroom with only a glimmer of light allowing us to see a young beautiful blonde woman (Lucille Lund) lying there with her décolletage showing. Next to her in the dark a figure suddenly sits up in the bed straight as an arrow and turns on the light that is behind a curtain only showing us his silhouette like a shadow as it crosses the room. When he enters another room Karloff is strikingly malevolent – his hair in an extreme widow’s peak as if aimed for your throat. Later he wanders through his gallery in the basement as he passes preserved dead women suspended in glass cages still looking lovely. Best and most sexual may be when he sees the wife come into the room stoned on narcotics that Vitus gave her and in a negligee and gives her husband a deep kiss and Poelzig grips a small statue of a naked woman and holds on for dear life.


Lugosi gets his moments as well – a number of his famous stares and his reaction whenever he sees a black cat – one of total terror – he suffers from Ailurophobia – and he picks up a knife and kills it. The final fight between the two is one of incredibly expressive gestures and facial grimacing that Ulmer captures perfectly.


Karloff had left Universal as he saw himself being tied down into doing horror – he made three films away from them, two that did very well at the box office, The House of the Rothschild and The Lost Patrol – but was to go on to make a number of more horror films for the studio – The Bride of Frankenstein the following year. Lugosi for whatever reason had fallen into the cracks at Universal even with his huge success with Dracula – he had made a few films at other studios but nothing at Universal for two years. Now he was being paired with Karloff for the first time – more were to come.


It seems that Lugosi was not fond of Karloff who he thought was a two-bit actor when he was chosen to be in Frankenstein. Lugosi thought he had the role and that it was stolen out from under him and he stayed mad at Karloff probably all his life. Ulmer looked like he was set at Universal, but he had an affair and eventually married an already married woman to a cousin of Laemmle Sr. He did not take kindly to this and basically did one of those you will never work in this town again threats – and Ulmer in fact spent the rest of his life in C movie hell. There have been other films made based on Poe's story but they all pretty much go far from the source material and are very different from this one.