This weekend, I watched The Cat and the Canary (1927) (Image DVD release), by Paul Leni, German expressionist and eventual Hollywood expatriate. Leni has a lighter touch than similarly categorized peers Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau, and often combines grim themes with whimsy in ways that allow him to use stark lighting and experimental camera work while avoiding heavy-handedness. (Waxworks is a particularly good example of Leni's strengths.) The downside is that his films often lack the definitive style and precision of Murnau and Lang.
This particular film, which makes the most ostentatious use of dust, moths and cobwebs I've ever seen, is the prototype of the haunted mansion horror-comedy flick. Taken from the eponymous stage play by whoever (not important), it uses what has become a familiar palette: the prophetic will executor, the morbidly repressed crone, feuding cousins, the dishy innocent, the bespectacled cringer who must eventually show courage and the faceless murderer; pointy-nailed hands layered with hair and warts are ever-ready to turn the necessary tattered page or moldering curtain. The plot features all of the chestnuts you've come to expect, but it has more nuanced irony than any Lemony Snicket fiasco. Sample dialogue:
"You must have been lonely these past twenty years, Mammy Pleasant."
(Scoffing) "I don't need the living ones."
The DVD has two soundtracks, one of which is a wretchedly produced synth-only transcription of the early original score. This was a huge mistake. I feel for the person whose budget and equipment resulted in such a ring-tone-unworthy effort, but the final result still should not have been used.
The other soundtrack isn't great, but neither is it putrid: Its combination of real strings, woodwinds, through-composed form and chromatic modulation are exactly what a silent flick needs. This means the music isn't down to American DVD production house low-to-the-ground, phone-call-to-John-Zorn's-nephew-and-his-sampler standards, which meant in turn I was spared the urge to either swallow glass or take out random subway passengers with a 1915 Parabellum MG.
Before his death, Leni was slated to direct the original Dracula. Among his surviving films, Waxworks and The Man Who Laughs are available on DVD and well worth seeing. (If only his German films, such as Hintertreppe, were available as well.)
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Last week, I watched Juliet of the Spirits (1965) (Criterion release), which was perhaps the only Fellini film I'd always meant to see. The art direction and color cinematography were masterful, and Giulietta Masina was perfect, as always. Only, I haven't the stomach for 145 minutes of the usual 60s-specific phantasmagoric half-improvised tale of a minor character's quest for self-actualization. In this genre, the satire and metaphors usually become laborious because formal proportion and good writing aren't there to keep them in check. And the theme lends itself too easily to vanity's excesses.
Juliet has sublime moments, of course, and I enjoy its being in the female protagonist's voice. Even so, this film far too flawed to be one of Fellini's few masterpieces.
