Famed director James Whale, in his first production in which he was granted complete creative control, brings together a renowned ensemble cast to produce one of the greatest, as well as earliest, horror comedies by presenting perhaps the most eccentric aggregation of characters under one haunted roof.
Due to a cataclysmic thunderstorm in rural Wales, the Wavertons, Philip (Raymond Massey) and Margaret (Gloria Stuart), and their cynical, playboy friend, Roger Penderel (Melvyn Douglas), find themselves forced to abort their trip to Shrewsbury. They arrive at the Femm house, run by diametrically opposed siblings, Horace and Rebecca (Ernest Thesiger and Eva Moore respectively). To their dismay, as the storm continues to rage, it is revealed by Sir Roderick Femm, the 102 year-old master of the house (Elspeth Dudgeon), that the butler, Morgan (Boris Karloff), has a propensity to become intoxicated during such weather and that he may unlock his confined, psychotic brother, Saul (Brember Wills), whose condition is further complicated by pyromania. This is exactly what ensues once Yorkshire dandy William Porterhouse (Charles Laughton) and his mistress, a failed chorus girl named Gladys DuCane (Lilian Bond), arrive at the old dark house as they too seek shelter from malicious weather.
While Whale masterfully juxtaposes comedy with horror, intertwining the two to the point of near inseparability, he toys with this audience, first and foremost, in his casting of Karloff (his first film in which he was allotted top billing). Being cunningly cognizant of his audience’s awareness that Karloff would be viewed as the threat within the house, Whale ups the anticipatory ante in not only inserting a prefatory notice confirming the actor’s identity as Frankenstein’s monster, but presents his star as a scarred, mentally-deficient alcoholic. He permits our bias to persist through three-quarters of the film before usurping our preconceptions in this regard.
Whale’s trademark wry humor in The Old Dark House is seconded only to his work in The Bride of Frankenstein. From the beginning, we watch as Roger coolly relaxes, legs extended, in the back of the Wavertons’ car as the couple fret over having nearly been killed by a mudslide. It is Roger, with his playboy demure who, as only Whale would attempt, offers marriage to another man’s mistress only hours after meeting the couple. To compound the lunacy of the relationship, William, after confirming Roger’s intentions, bids his new friend luck in his endeavor, never batting an eye as he nonchalantly dismisses his lady-in-arms. Also a Whale trademark is the dichotomy between Horace and Rebecca, Thesiger foreshadowing his role as the atheistic man of science in his role as Doctor Pretorius in The Bride of Frankenstein, as he effeminately dismisses his sister’s zealous, evangelical ramblings (“my sister’s strange tribal habit”) by the mere reiteration of “Have a potato” to any guest within earshot. (Similarly, Horace agrees with electric lighting while Rebecca refuses to utilize the technology as the Femm house, one of evil, is sardonically said to be built on rock, which is the fabled foundation of churches.) Whale refuses to allow Rebecca be so easily sedated in that he presents her as aurally impaired, thus permitting the character to engage in such linguistic buffoonery as:
Margaret: It’s a dreadful night.
Rebecca: What?
Margaret: I said it’s a dreadful night.
Rebecca: Yes, it’s a very old house. Very old.
Margaret: It’s very kind of you to let us stay.
Rebecca: What?
Margaret: I say, you’re very kind.
Rebecca: Yes, it is a dreadful night. I’m a little deaf.
In the same vein, after Rebecca rehashes that “there are no beds” to be had, Horace wryly utters to his guests, “As my sister hints, there are, I’m afraid, no beds.”
Whale continues his laughfest by positing the man of the house, Roderick (which echoes Edgar Allan Poe’s insane character of the same name who is likewise trapped within a “haunted house”), as an intentionally poorly veiled woman in disguise who nonetheless is in drastic need of shave. Perhaps most amusingly, Whale delightfully dances around the censors by having Gladys and Roger, after dashing to the car to take liberal sips of whiskey using the alibi that it will warm them up, return to the house only to be confronted by William. Noticing that her friend is suspiciously eyeing her bare feet, she comments to William, “My feet were wet–among other things” after she and Roger agreed to “make a go of it.” The absurdity of the chaotic events within the Femm household is best represented in Margaret’s refusal to come out of hiding from a closet, diligently refusing by way of “No, I won’t” before whimsically reneging with a jovial “Oh, alright.” Lastly, as he would do with The Bride of Frankenstein, Whale mocks his own work by having Gladys announce, “He’s alive,” upon discovering that her new lover has survived a one-story decent (which likewise satirizes the forced happy ending of Frankenstein amid presenting an obviously fabricated sunrise to begin the “new day”).
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Whale film if we didn’t have one subverted homosexual running around. Just as easily as William releases his weekend mate into the hands of another, Gladys relays that “We [William and herself] get on, but . . .” and, modestly, “Bill likes people to think he’s gay.” Could we expect anything less from a director who names his most robust character “Porterhouse” and his resident playboy “Penderel” (i.e. “pending”)? A handful of graduate essays await the assessment upon whether the method in which William ruined the business that caused the death of his former wife was via a series of sexual indiscretions with the owners.
Obviously, James Whale entered the production of The Old Dark House with the intention of leaning more toward the comedic elements of the script as he wryly juxtaposes while simultaneously supercedes the staunch atmosphere in which he surrounds his characters with their over-the-top personalities. What results is one of the funniest horror comedies of all time at the hands of one of the most ingenious filmmakers ever to set images to celluloid.
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