The Cat and the Canary: Paul Leni's Winning Template for the “Old Dark House" Subgenre

THE CAT AND THE CANARY 

(Paul Leni, 1927, USA, 82 minutes) 

"You're like your uncle–in a cage surrounded by cats."--Roger Crosby 

Though The Cat and the Canary, from a 1922 play by actor and novelist John Willard, was filmed six times between 1927 and 1978, German emigré Paul Leni (Waxworks, The Man Who Laughs) got there first. 

The horror edition of the Overlook Film Encyclopedia goes on to claim it as "the most famous of all the haunted house spoofs," but I believe James Whale's 1932 The Old Dark House, which borrows the same tropes, has overtaken it. Whale had the benefit of sound, in addition to stars--Gloria Stuart, Boris Karloff, Charles Laughton, Melvyn Douglas, and Raymond Massey--who remained stars for years to come. Leni's silent predecessor features actors who were well known at the time, but who did not survive the sound era as successfully. A few kept working, albeit on a smaller scale. 

The film begins with the death of Cyrus West, who stipulates that his Will be opened in 20 years, so he's long gone by the time the family gathers in his spooky mansion to see who gets what. As it transpires, pure-hearted Annabelle (Laura La Plante) stands to inherit her uncle's entire fortune.

Naturally, her relatives are less than pleased. Cyrus's estate attorney, Roger Crosby (Tully Marshall), prepares to carry out his wishes, except the safe contains a second Will to be unsealed only if something goes awry with the first, like, say, Annabelle going insane, so Roger hires a psychiatrist, Dr. Lazar (Lucien Littlefield), to determine the heir's mental fitness on the following day. As an estate gift planning professional, I found the idea of a second Will just as suspicious as the West family. I guess ol' Cyrus wasn't familiar with the concept of the codicil. 

If Annabelle can't hack a night in his haunted house, the fortune will go to the secondary heir, so that mysterious individual plots to make the sanest among them seem unhinged. An already-fraught situation is complicated by the news that a dangerous lunatic, known as the Cat, is on the loose. 

The guard (George Siegmann), who bursts in to make the announcement--"He's a maniac who thinks he's a cat!--is just as freaky-looking as the doc. Until he nabs the Cat, no one is allowed to leave the Hudson River home. 

The captives include Cyrus's nephews Paul Jones (Irish actor Creighton Hale), Forrest Stanley (Charley Wilder), and Harry Blythe (Arthur Edmund Carewe), sister Susan (Flora Finch), and niece Cecily (Gertude Astor). Hale, who had the longest career, worked steadily from 1914 to 1959, and yet most every role after 1933 was uncredited. I'm glad he kept his hand in, but his Harold Lloyd-like timing is so good, I'm surprised the roles got smaller--and stayed small. Though his role here isn't as significant, Littlefield had a much more robust career.

Like Cyrus before her, Annabelle is the Canary, which makes everyone else a Cat. Similarly, the screenplay posits that family greed drove Cyrus insane. 

Universal Pictures contract player La Plante, with her kewpie doll face, is quite good as the young innocent. Her task to remain sympathetic and believable, while spending most of the film's run time looking worried and frightened, isn't exactly the toughest, but she aces it with ease. Though La Plante's acting career fizzled out in the 1930s, she married well, lived a long life, and raised a son, jingle writer Tony Asher, who would go on to cowrite Beach Boys classics like "God Only Knows" and "Wouldn't It Be Nice."

Old Dark House movies don't tend to waste their time, and The Cat and the Canary is no exception.

The housekeeper, Mammy Pleasant (the severe-looking Martha Mattox, who recalls Margaret Hamilton) believes Cyrus's ghost placed the second Will in the safe, so she's already planted a seed that could grow in Annabelle's mind.

No one knows for sure, but it's certain that Cyrus hid a diamond necklace for his heir, so Annabelle sets out to find it, and though she succeeds, a creepy-looking hand swipes it while she's sleeping. Around the same time, Crosby, who had been planning to share some life-saving information with her about the secondary heir, is snatched–Will in pocket–by the same weird hand. 

Altogether, only one character ends up dead before Leni reveals the culprit, though The Cat and the Canary would inspire more heightened narratives in which multiple characters meet their maker, from Joseph Kesselring's 1939 play, Arsenic and Old Lace, and Agatha Christie's novel, And Then There Were None, right up to Rian Johnson's more recent Knives Out series (the third Benoit Blanc Mystery, Wake Up Dead Man, arrives this December). 

In 2022, my friend, Aaron Hillis, arranged for Johnson to introduce 1928's The Last Warning, part of his virtual Playtime series, so I think it's fair to say he's a Leni fan. It's another excellent comic mystery, and definitely recommended to anyone who enjoys this one. Or the subgenre in general.

In this case, Leni's fast-paced conclusion involves a milkman, a cat-monster costume, and a secret passage, and it's no spoiler to say that Annabelle emerges triumphant at the end. She doesn't do anything especially heroic, unlike the cousin who grapples with the Cat, but she never loses her head. 

Along the way, Leni imbues his first American film with Expressionist flare, like the surrealistic black cat montage of the opener, the winding hallway with billowing curtains–which reminded me of the Beast's lair in Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête– and that hairy hand with claw-like nails, which predicts the costuming of Universal's Wolf Man series with Lon Chaney Jr. 

Though I was unable to determine who provided the makeup for The Cat and the Canary, Universal's Jack Pierce, who designed the creature effects for 1941's The Wolf Man, also worked on The Man Who Laughs, another Leni triumph. (The Chinese Parrot, a Charlie Chan mystery featuring Japanese actor Sōjin Kamiyama, is the only American Leni film I haven't seen yet.) 

I quite enjoyed the director's take on John Willard's play, though I found it a little confusing at times, which may have more to do with my attention span than the writing of Alfred A. Cohn and Walter Anthony, so I decided to watch Radley Metzger's 1978 UK-set version to see how the two compare. 

The other adaptations include 1930's The Cat Creeps with Helen Twelvetrees, 1939's The Cat and the Canary with Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard, and 1961's Swedish take Katten och Kanariefågeln, but only Metzger's version features Wilfrid Hyde-White, Honor Blackman, Wendy Hiller, Olivia Hussey, and Carol Lynley, who plays the heroine, so I started there before moving backward. Sadly, the 1930 version, which includes a Spanish-language companion made simultaneously with the same sets and different actors--much like Todd Browning's 1931 Dracula--is believed lost. 

It was helpful to watch more modern interpretations of the play, and though Metzger's saucier update has its moments–he sets it in 1934 while imbuing it with post-code morés, including spicier language and a lesbian relationship–it only made me appreciate Leni's original more, which I found both funnier and scarier, despite the fact that Metzger, who remains best known for his efforts in the erotic realm, was working with bigger stars. 

I feel much the same about Elliot Nugent's 1939 version, which relocates the story to swampy Louisiana, and leans harder on Hope's skills as a standup. Like Metzger's film, it's worth a look, but the first guy did it best (both films can be found on free streaming services Plex and Tubi).

Paul Leni, who died at the age of 44 in 1929, had recently scored a hit with his final film, The Last Warning.

Though we'll never know how he would have fared in the sound era, which was already underway, the ease with which he segued from German to American filmmaking suggests he would have continued to conjure up enchanting visions, like this eminently enjoyable, wildly influential picture that marked the start of his brief, but brilliant English-language career. 

The Cat and the Canary is available on Blu-ray in a 4K restoration from Eureka! Extra features include two commentary tracks, one with Kim Newman and Stephen Jones and the other with Kevin Lyons and Jonathan Rigby, video essays, a play extract, a collector's booklet, and much more. 

Images from San Francisco Silent Film Festival (Laura La Plante), the IMDb (Old Dark House and Tully Marshall, Laura La Plante, Arthur Edmund Carewe, Gertrude Astor, and Flora Finch), Horror Cult Films (Martha Mattox), Cinema Cats (the cat montage), screen shot (Honor Blackman with on-screen lover Olivia Hussey), and Cinema History (full-color poster).