Dry Ice Factory

'I'm never more witty than when I've had a little nip. I see better, I hear better, and I feel much better.'

-- Elsa Lanchester as Mrs. Oates in The Spiral Staircase (1946). I've got a thing for Elsa. She is mostly comic relief in this film, and she's perfect in that niche, wearing big clothes to make her seem plumper, a kindly clown. The beautiful girls are murdered in the dark, but Mrs. Oates just gets drunk on stolen brandy and passes out by the kitchen fire. There's also a strange scene where the mute girl gives out a strangled cry that sounds remarkably like Elsa's iconic screech as the Bride of Frankenstein.

Roland West is one of the earliest American directors to show the influence of those Weimar films of the '20s with a dark, shadowy, gothic, dreamlike style that is frequently referred to as German Expressionism. He's not very well known today, but his old dark house film, The Bat (1926), was credited by Bob Kane as an influence on the Batman. I've seen four of his films so far, including his 1930 talkie remake of The Bat, The Bat Whispers, and the 1929 crime film, The Alibi. All four are visually stylish (two of them with marvellous sets by William Cameron Menzies), although all are also on the creaky side.


Caliban

The Monster is another old dark house movie, based on a play by Crane Wilbur. It opens on a dark and stormy night. We see a monstrous figure in a roadside tree setting up a trap to cause a car to crash. From an underground lair another menacing character emerges to grab the unconscious driver. After this effective mood-setter, we switch to daylight scenes in town where we are introduced to a comedy love triangle, including a goofy shop clerk named Johnny Goodlittle who is trying to learn how to be a detective from a correspondence course. The comedy is all a bit aw-shucks cliche and tiresome. Eventually our love triangle is dumped into the supposedly-abandoned sanitarium in the woods, where we discover that it is actually inhabited by the scary Dr. Ziska (Lon Chaney Sr) and his trio of menacing hoods. The usual old dark house combination of comedy hijinks and thrilling mystery ensues.


Prospero

This movie isn't nearly as good as The Bat, which gets off to a corker of a start and never lets up, but it's still plenty entertaining once it gets past the set-up scenes in town. Chaney is given only a secondary role, but he is perfectly oily and serpentine as the mad scientist. The sanitarium is turned into a labyrinth of secret passageways, chutes, cells, shadowy statues, attics, rooftops, trapdoors, and stairways. In an old dark house story -- as in classic gothics -- the house is a major character, so an effectively creepy house can make up for a myriad of narrative and character sins. The action builds to a satisfying climax involving an electric chair and derring-do on a powerline. Dr. Ziska's evil plan, when revealed, is suitably twisted and science fictional.


What's on the slab

I'm not sure what other Roland West films still survive, although I surmise by the fact that F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre is the only reviewer of the science fiction film The Unknown Purple (1923) on IMDb that it is in fact lost. West stopped making films in 1931. He was in a relationship with the actress Thelma Todd when she died in 1935 under mysterious circumstances at the Pacific Highway roadhouse (and popular gangster hangout) they ran together. Many have suspected that West killed her, and he is said to have confessed as much on his deathbed in 1952. Nothing has ever been proved.