Old Dark Capsules X: THE PHANTOM (1931), DRUMS OF JEOPARDY (1930), MURDER BY THE CLOCK (1931), HOUSE OF MYSTERY (1934), THE GHOST WALKS (1934)

What is an old dark house movie vs. say, a mystery or a thriller or a straight-up horror movie? Well, just as all of 'modern' country music stems from a handful of songs by Jimmie Rodgers, Patsy Cline, and Hank Williams Sr. (which stem in turn from old string band reels and traditional ballads) so all of the old dark housers are based on a handful of barnstorming mystery plays that used to tour the country in roadshows, The Cat and the Canary (there are at least four film adaptations, including one lost to time "The Cat Creeps"), The Bat (at least two faithful versions and a zillion spinoffs) and The Gorilla. From these three basic plots spins the entire genre (just as the three in turn spring from drawing room mysteries and barnstorming Victorian melodramas). 

What makes an old dark house movie, aside from the old dark house itself? Usually there are a few recurring sinthoms: a threatening note; the reading of a will; a terrified maid; a shifty-eyed butler; a smart aleck reporter or PR agent; a gorilla; one or more secret passages; a masked madman; incompetent cops or asylum guards who might actually be escaped patients; an imperiled heiress; hidden jewels, greedy heirs forgotten in the will unless the current heir dies or is proven insane; a black cat racing up the stairs, the sound of sheet metal thunder / stock footage lightning cutaways; gnarled or furry hands reaching out towards oblivious heroines as they sleep. One or more corpses! Repeat! 

For settings they fall back to an era long before the dawn of suburban tract homes, when extended families all lived together in big cavernous houses that were passed down through generations. Today they are mostly all cut up into co-ops but some still exist. If you've ever stayed overnight in one then you know ho creepy it is just waking up in the dark and trying to find the bathroom at night. You can easily get lost in the dark, and if you hear a strange noise it's almost impossible to search everywhere; families can live comfortably together without ever seeing one another; guests can fill the rooms for long weekends of creeping around long hallways; and if the cops in the foyer hear a scream somewhere above, they may not even be able to find the one who screamed by the time they get up the stairs and down the cavernous hall; (and by the time they search the next floor, they hear a scream or a shot somewhere else, and it all starts over. Once you split up and search different rooms you may never find each other again).

The secret panels and hidden lairs are what I think most grabs me. The idea people could be watching you through the walls, and you'd never know it. Or more cozily, vice versa. If you don't believe they're real I can tell you from experience: nearly every single old mansion has them, especially if they were built before or during Prohibition; but no one thinks to look for them. They'd rather say you're crazy when you say someone peered out from behind the bookcase. I've been in two rich kid houses that had hidden rooms adjacent to their bedrooms, secret spaces so quiet and isolated you could do whatever you wanted out of sight or smell from parents and staff. Never before had I seen total freedom just a hidden door away from mind-numbing conservative patriarchal bourgeois repression (as in the hidden playroom of Holiday).

But then, in general, the old ultimate patriarch, the dying old codger in the wheelchair symbolizes the extent of social isolation, of both sides, the rich patriarch's alienating inflexibility -driving his children against him until he only sees them when he's on death's door, their hands outstretched, or the children themselves, who've shut themselves away in hidden lairs of excess, the wealth affording them the freedom to wind up utterly alone in a room full of mirrors, in each case, their massive house becomes void of all but a few weird servants who become as disturbed and jaded as the owner, sinister and paranoid, taking on the demeanor of the owner. When forced to face mortality via the old will, only then is this hermetically sealed world of long shadows and empty rooms suddenly thrown open to relatives, cops, and cameras. The cops must pick through the list of suspects in search of where the old man might have hidden the loot or who may have killed him. If you've ever gone through the effects of a dead loved one then you know the weird frisson - like investigating your mother's or father's most private life, everything that was hidden from you all your life. Now, nothing personal is off limits. That's why the number one famous last words of our modern age isn't "forgive me, father," but "hide my porn."  

The saddest eyes in show biz - Niles Welch

One of my new favorites in both the so-bad-it's-good and the old dark house genres, the surreal-comic barnstormer THE PHANTOMs (1931) clearly marked a real departure for the the mightily-titled Supreme Pictures. They made a lot of silent era westerns and serials, and a lot of their cowboy stock can be seen here, amazed and uncertain how to act, as if this isn't just the first time they've spoken out loud on film, but the first time they've been indoors for longer than it takes to rob yonder general store. Consider the opening: while the.... Phantom (the name always comes with pregnant pauses) is waiting is on death row, the chair warming up, the warden talks about the case with a reporter up in his office; someone mentions the plane buzzing the yard. Suddenlhy! Outside the window ''the Phantom" breaks jail and jumps from the big house wall onto the top of a passing train and then a biplane roars overhead and throws down a ladder. The.... Phantom reaches up, grabs the ladder and is lifted away into the air and thus to freedom! Since it has almost nothing to do with the rest of the film, and the stock seems significantly more degraded, we can't but presume the scene is lifted from one of Supreme's silent era serials (a not uncommon practice at the time). Especially if we love bad movies, of course we won't complain! We don't complain at the stock footage Ed Wood uses, it's part of the charm. Anyway, it's hard to know for sure if anything connects in... The Phantom...

The insult follows injury as we drift into loving incoherence: Though the Phantom was on all the front pages, a notorious master criminal on death row, once he escapes no one knows what he looks like! It never occurred to his jailers to take a single a mugshot. No one knows who... the Phantom... really is! All they know for sure is that, back at the time of his sentencing, he threatened to get even with the DA (Wilfred Lucas). Enter rock-hard Sgt. Collins (Tom O'Brien) who signs on to protect him and his society reporter daughter Ruth (Allene "Sweetheart of San Antonio" Ray). Her editor--the cool older dude who loves her--is sad-eyed Sam Crandall (Niles Welch -upper left). He's the coolest character in the film, just watching him waft across scenes like he's up to his knees in mud, one wonders many things about this deep-eyed actor. Did he have a death in the family before shooting started? Was he still treating early sound recording like it was 1929, when you had to speak... slowly... and... clearly with many pauses... or is he just too drunk to remember his lines and is being fed them through some whispering off camera prompter? Whatever the reason, he has a distracted, stop-starting melancholy gravitas that perfectly fits being put in the odd position of being asked by Ruth, his one true love, to promote square-jawed cub reporter, Dick (Guinn "Big Boy" Williams) so Dick can be successful enough to marry Ruth! "So... if I give Dick the job," intones Sam, gradually adding it all up for the yokels in the back row, "you and he... will be married?" (she nods, clearly thrilled). 

Just to let you know he's the real hero of the story, Sam puts Dick on the big, career-making story. And guess what that story is... Where and who... is the Phantom?!

it's a mystery this time, pardnuh!

Poor Sam, he's really better off without her. We never get why this  Britt Reid / Lamont Cranston -style man about town would be into an overdressed, "tipsy, nicer Lina Lamont"-voiced square like Ruth, aside from she's the only girl in the movie (aside from her comic relief scared maid). Ray and Williams clearly played Supreme sweethearts of the rodeo many times before this and they fit together well (he's twice her height, it works if she stays on her horse) when Niles was probably the city slicker land grabber. For all that, Williams's hard edges help give him an inscrutable air, like the director wants us to think he might be... the Phantom... (as far as being a reporter, he doesn't give the impression he knows how to hold a pen). Both these guys do all right but Ruth has more of an adjustment moving off the silent ranch and into the sound boudoir, like she's trying to crawl out from under her blonde wave and stacks of fur wraps; her squeaky voice clashes antithetically with the heavy sense of experience she radiates, like she can't quite pick a voice or persona to bring with her into the age of sound recording and is always wishing she could just ride silently back to the saloon. Too bad she couldn't.  The Phantom was her last film until 1949. 

Supreme made naught but a handful of pictures after The Phantom and as far as I'm concerned it's a shame there's not a lot more like it from the same stock cast, as they are all--like the stars--clearly uncomfortable having to remember lines or speak clearly. Everyone plays these stock old dark house characters-- from the terrified maid to the passive-aggressive butler "James"--like they've never seen a sound movie before, lending the whole thing an endearing air of primitivism. As a result, The Phantom becomes to old dark house movies what Luigi Cozz's Hercules is to peplum or The Shaggs'Philosophy of the World to quirky pop music, in short, a kind of primitivist folk-art approximation that's way better than the more coherent but ordinary entries. This extends to Allan James' direction and the camerawork: the framing of each scene is so inept it skirts back around to brilliant. Characters swingle and dingle in corners of the screen during long static shots. Every element is slightly off, even the silence. 

Even more than most of its early sound contemporaries, 'room tone' is is almost a character in itself. Thick and hissy, it's like we're hearing what air sounds like for the first time; it's so thick we're amazed how easily people can walk through it (though speaking is often slowed, careful, as if they don't... quite.... trust... that words will carry through this thick aether). And the way each character deals with it is unique.

There's something cool about cops trusting the adult judgement of civilians (including giving them guns); I like that nearly everyone is armed, like they'd be in a western, and everyone has no problem barging in places, skulking in and out of passageways and swimming through the thick crackling and hissing air; and it's meant to be a mystery, so you can't tell if Dick is... the Phantom, or Sam Crandall, or is it that short guy who runs around with his face covered in a black slouch hat and a cape pulled under his hawklike nose so he looks just like The Shadow crossed with Chico Marx (Sheldon Lewis). Waving his big oogie-boogie hands at either Ray or the terrified maid, one suspects him of being..... the Phantom.... but is he?

The dialogue is weird, too (including the first time I've heard the use of the word "cool" in a behavioral context in any 30s film, allowing suspicion to flood the motivations of nearly every character. the relationships are very vague. For proof, here's one of the great, surreal exchanges of vague dialogue; this between Hampton the DA, and Niles' enigmatic editor: