This strange, strange curio from the mind of James Whale is more like an exercise in free association than it is a movie. A group of travelers gather in a big spooky house to shelter from a raging storm, and what follows is a bizarre plot in which events and actions occur with no relation to one another, back stories are hinted at but never explained, and characters every once in a while stop to deliver soliloquies with seemingly weighty psychological or philosophical underpinnings (about the horrors of WWI, for example, or about sins of the flesh) that aren't ever fully explored by the script. But in spite of, or maybe because of, all this random kookiness, the movie works a kind of magic spell. Whale's direction helps a lot; he brings a great deal of humor, all very British and dry, to the Gothic tale, and keeps it teetering on the brink between horror film and comedy. This makes the movie uneven, but it also adds a refreshing element of unpredictability.
The cast includes a very young Charles Laughton, Melvyn Douglas and Gloria Stuart, and, at the time the closest thing to a big star thanks to his performance in "Frankenstein" a year earlier, Boris Karloff as a horny, hirsute and menacing butler. He charges around harassing the ladies, and the juxtaposition of his hairy, physically imposing and quite masculine appearance to all of the prim and proper English gentility around him brings a distinctly barbaric and sexual charge to the film.
This one's weird. I liked it, yet at the same time can't bring myself to really call it a good movie.
Grade: B
The cast includes a very young Charles Laughton, Melvyn Douglas and Gloria Stuart, and, at the time the closest thing to a big star thanks to his performance in "Frankenstein" a year earlier, Boris Karloff as a horny, hirsute and menacing butler. He charges around harassing the ladies, and the juxtaposition of his hairy, physically imposing and quite masculine appearance to all of the prim and proper English gentility around him brings a distinctly barbaric and sexual charge to the film.
This one's weird. I liked it, yet at the same time can't bring myself to really call it a good movie.
Grade: B