1. Lost and Found
Film is the most ephemeral and fragile embodiment of art. It is more mortal than its makers – in the course of single lifetime, 35 mm. film can decompose beyond recognition. Old movies are printed on flammable celluloid. Celluloid itself becomes brittle and readily tears. The mechanical process of projection, involving sprockets that yank the film through a blazing flame of light abrades and destroys the movie even as it is being shown. As a consequence, there are probably more films that are lost, forgotten, destroyed, or simply misplaced than there are those pictures that survive.
I am a witness to how film is ruined by human negligence. In 1983, I hosted a party at my home and we showed a movie that is very important to me and dear to my heart, Wim Wenders’ Im Lauf der Zeit (barely released in this country as Kings of the Road). A friend of mine who was, then, teaching at the University of Minnesota, had access to reasonably good 16 mm. print of the film and he transported it to Austin so that we could screen the picture in my living room. I borrowed a scarcely serviceable projector, probably from the school system – I don’t recall now how that was accomplished – and we showed the movie on a sheet suspended from curtain rods at my living room window.
One important scene in Wenders’ movie involves the hero, a motion picture projectionist, screening the film with the reels scrambled and out of order. In hommage to that concept, we projected the movie out of order, with the reels thread through the old, rattle-trap projector in random succession. People were baffled and, then, became angry. The party moved into the kitchen and backyard (it was a warm night) – most people fleeing the hot living room where the tedious film was being run in a way that made it incomprehensible to the spectators. After awhile, even those who were watching the movie lost interest and wandered off. Everyone was pretty drunk. A couple times the movie tore and, instead of mending the print, we just removed the reel from the projector and threaded another spool into the machine. We were young in those days and could drink a lot and the party became pretty rowdy. In the morning, I found that someone had spilled red wine onto one of the reels that was discarded on the floor. I scrubbed the sticky residue off the movie as well as I could and we boxed up the reels in their tattered condition. My friend, the associate professor, left after breakfast and he drove the movie back to the University.
About twenty years later, I read an interview with the director of Im Lauf der Zeit, Wim Wenders. He was asked why this film, perhaps, the greatest of his works, was not currently available on DVD. Wenders answered: "The movie doesn’t exist in any prints that are really good enough for me to endorse as my work. I love this picture very much, but all the prints that I have seen are in bad shape. I’d rather that the movie be lost than be projected as a mere shadow of itself." To this day, I am not certain whether a properly restored version of Im Lauf der Zeit exists.
I recount this anecdote because James Whale’s The Old Dark House, one of the most important horror films of the early sound era, was thought to be lost. The film was legendary, particularly for featuring Boris Karloff in his first role after Frankenstein but no one knew if there were any prints remaining of this motion picture.
Curtis Harrington was friends with James Whale in his declining years. When Whale died, Harrington, a gay man who admired Whale immensely for being openly homosexual in Hollywood in the thirties and forties, devoted himself to restoring the picture. After many adventures, he found enough fragments of the movie to piece together the KINO version that we are screening tonight.
James Whale was an Englishman born in the coal mining district of the West Midlands in 1889. As a young man, he moved to London to pursue a career drawing cartoons. World War One intervened and Whale found himself on the Western Front. It was his good fortune to be captured by the Germans during the Flanders campaign and he spent the second half of the conflict in a prisoner of war camp. POW camps during World War One seems to have been jolly places – at least compared with the misery in the trenches. Imprisonment probably saved Whale’s life and also showed him the way to a new, and more profitable, vocation. The inmates of WWI POW camps combated the tedium of their interment by various means. Soldiers formed choirs and musical ensembles; there were variety shows, Latin and Greek societies, and glee clubs. Whale came from a tradition that valued amateur theatrics (see, for example, Virginia Woolf’s luminous Between the Acts) and so he participated in plays that the prisoners produced for themselves. Whale said that he learned to act and direct in these POW camp shows.
After the Great War, Whale returned to London and a career in the theater. He directed a highly renowned production of R. C. Sheriff’s Journey’s End, an important play about the war. Journey’s End premiered in London’s West End in 1928 – Whale cast the then-unknown Lawrence Olivier in a starring role in the play. The show was so successful that it was exported to Broadway in 1929, however, with Colin Clive playing the role originated by Olivier. (Clive was later to play Dr. Victor Frankenstein in Hollywood.) Whale went with the show to the New York, met some Hollywood producers there, and was seduced into traveling to Los Angeles where he lived for the rest of his life. The first film Whale directed in Hollywood was a film version of Journey’s End (1930). He also directed the studio sequences in Hell’s Angels (1930); Howard Hughes produced the film and directed the spectacular aerial combat scenes.
In 1930, Tod Browning had directed a hit movie for Carl Laemmle’s Universal Studios based upon the Broadway production of Dracula. Universal wanted to make another horror film and developed a script for the movie Frankenstein. Robert Florey was hired to direct the film that was to star Bela Lugosi. Film historian’s differ about what happened next. In one version, Lugosi read the script and was disappointed in the characterization of the Monster, the role he was contracted to play. The Monster seemed to Lugosi to be nothing but a murderous automaton. Lugosi is reported to have said: "I was a great actor in Hungary. I am not going to play a mere scarecrow in this country." This account is probably apocryphal. Most likely, Universal wanted to make several horror films simultaneously and simply re-assigned Florey and Lugosi to The Murders in the Rue Morgue. James Whale was assigned direction of Frankenstein. He was close friends with another British expatriate, Boris Karloff, and he suggested Karloff for the role. Whale’s Frankenstein starring Karloff as the Monster was released on December 4, 1931 and is one of the most famous films of all time.
In quick succession, Whale directed three more horror films, all of them excellent: The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man (1933), and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Critics are unanimous that The Bride of Frankenstein is the greatest horror film ever made. Although Universal’s horror pictures had excellent production values and were expensively mounted, the genre remained somewhat disreputable. On the strength of Whale’s work with the monster movies, the director was promoted to big-budget project with A-list stars. He made a number of prestige pictures in the Thirties with mixed results. (By this time, Whale was one of the highest paid directors in Hollywood; he moved to a Moorish palace in the Hollywood Hills with an enormous swimming pool – a mansion that is still a landmark in the Los Angeles real estate market. The place is called the Villa Sophia in Los Feliz near Griffith Park and you can rent the pool-house at the place for $395 a night – stay a month for $9500.)
Whale directed Showboat in 1936 demonstrating his versatility. The musical, with its subplot involving interracial marriage, was another box-office hit and the film is regarded as one of Hollywood’s best musicals. (For many years, the movie was inaccessible; it was withdrawn from circulation in the forties to avoid invidious comparisons with a planned remake, the 1951 version of the musical, a movie that suppressed the miscegenation plot. Paul Robeson, one of the stars in Whale’s version was blacklisted by that time and the movie wasn’t re-released until 2006.) I’ve seen Showboat and it has a harsh quality; it’s stylized and more like a Brecht play than a typical Hollywood musical. Whale directed the young Bette Davis in Waterloo Bridge in 1931, a film made at the same time that The Old Dark House was in production. Two of his films from the thirties, The Kiss before the Mirror (1933) and One More River (1934) are said to be superior melodramas that use a moving camera very similar to the staging that Max Ophuls had developed in German films of that same period (and that Ophuls used later in The Earrings of Madame de –).
It’s not clear exactly what ruined Whale’s Hollywood career. In 1939, he directed a swashbuckler, The Man in the Iron Mask, that was well-received and made good money. A couple of films made in the next two years were failures and, thereafter, Whale retired. Some writers suggest that Whale’s sexual orientation doomed his Hollywood career – the director was openly gay. Whale lived with David Lewis, a producer working for Thalberg, from 1930 to 1952. Some biographers believe that Thalberg’s early death put Whale in a difficult situation. Thalberg had been protecting Lewis who was his trusted aid and assistant. With Thalberg in the grave, other studio bosses were less willing to look the other way with respect to the relationship between Whale and Lewis. This seems unlikely to me. Hollywood is a strict meritocracy based on the most crass economic considerations – you flourish if your films make money; if not, you wither and die. Whale was wealthy and successful in the late thirties and seemed disenchanted with the movie business; he had been Universal’s number one director during that decade and I thing he wanted to retired when he was at the height of his prominence. He was continuously importuned to make horror films, a genre that he disdained, and his direction on his last pictures after The Man in the Iron Mask is said to be disengaged. Probably, he just lost interest in the arduous work of making movies.
Whale traveled extensively after his retirement. He sold the immense Alhambra of a house in Los Feliz and moved to Pacific Palisades. (His home there at 788 S. Amalfi Drive is large, but not as ostentatious as the palace in the Hollywood Hills; it looks like the kind of house that a Hormel executive would purchase.) Although he didn’t swim, Whale had a pool installed on the property in 1952 and reportedly hosted all-male pool parties.
Whale liked playing Bridge, apparently a kind of card game. He hosted card parties and smoked expensive cigars. He enjoyed painting and collected art. (In the twenties, he had been engaged to an artist, Dorothy Zinkelstein, who is well-known in England, and he collected her works.) In 1952, while traveling in Europe, he met a Parisian bartender named Perry Foegel. Whale fell in love with Foegle, brought him home from Europe, and installed him in his home in Pacific Palisades. This ended Whale’s relationship with David Lewis who, of course, moved out of the home. (Whale owned a gas station of all things and he had Foegel work at that place, pumping gas.) Lewis and Whale remained friends, however, and it was Lewis who discovered Whale’s suicide note after the director’s death and kept it from publication for many years.
Whale was sick and possibly depressed in 1956 and the Spring of 1957. He was 67, although customarily he gave his age as seven years younger. On May 29, 1957, Whale wrote a note "To All I Love" in ballpoint pen and sealed it in an envelope. He had a couple drinks, took some sedatives, and, then, pitched himself face-forward into the shallow end of his pool, striking his forehead on the cement. His maid found him unconscious in the water. She called for an ambulance and Whale was transported to the Santa Monica Hospital but he was dead on arrival.
Whale’s note reads in part:
Do not grieve for me. My nerves are all shot and for the last year I have been in agony day and night – except when I sleep with sleeping pills – and the only peace I have by day is when I am drugged by the pills....The future is just old agae and illness and pain. Goodbye al and thank you for all your love. I must have peace and this is the only way.
The note is signed "Jimmy." It’s interesting that he uses old World War One parlance to describe his condition – "(his) nerves are all shot." Whale was afraid that his nervous condition would require that he be hospitalized for mental illness, an ordeal he was not willing to face. There has been speculation that Whale died as a result of foul play, but this does not seem to have been the case.
According to manifests for Transatlantic cruises, Whale was between 5 foot 9 and 5 foot 11. He had blue eyes and was rail thin. Those who knew him described Whale as "dapper" and a "dandy." He spoke with a pronounced upper class British accent that was apparently affected – he concealed his West Midlands accent from the coal mines of his youth. He was generous and everyone that knew him liked him immensely. The only exception seems to have been Elsa Lanchester, another expatriate Brit married to the homosexual Charles Laughton. She worked with Whale on The Bride of Frankenstein and said that he looked "curiously like a monkey." Curtis Harrington, who was a close friend of Jimmy Whale, attributed Lanchester’s comments to spite and bitterness over her own unhappy marriage to Laughton. On the later shipping manifests, Whale identified his profession as "painter."
Whale’s ghost haunted the Pacific Palisades house for a number of years and caused all sorts of mischief, suggesting, perhaps, that his suicide had not brought him rest. His spirit was exorcized before Goldie Hawn acquired the property in the 1980's. Whale’s final years are the subject of a conventional if distinguished film, Gods and Monsters starring Sir Ian MacKellen as James Whale and Brendon Frasier as his gardener and fictitious love interest.
3. Production Notes
Hollywood is a company town and, particularly in the thirties, films were produced on the basis of personal associations between artists. You made movies with the same folks with whom you socialized. This is particularly true of The Old Dark House. Ben Levy was imported from London to write the script based on J.B. Priestley’s bestselling novel Benighted – the book was published in the United States under the same title as the movie. Levy was a prominent playwright in London and Whale had directed several of his theatrical works in the mid-twenties before traveling to America. Levy was a close friend to Charles Laughton and recruited him for the film. In London, Whale had directed Ernest Thesiger in a number of plays and cast him as Roland Femm, the signature role for the film. Karloff, as noted before, had worked with Whale in Frankenstein, only a few months earlier. Similarly, the actor playing the demented Saul Femm, Brember Wills, was a British thespian, also one of Whale’s friends and a man he had directed on stage. Raymond Massey, a Canadian native, was also familiar to Whale on the basis of London theater-work, including plays for which Whale had designed sets or directed. Accordingly, The Old Dark House is a reunion for a number of prominent British stage actors. (Sound films had replaced silent movies in Hollywood two or three years earlier. Many silent era actors and actresses spoke with thick foreign accents or had voices that sounded unpleasant when recorded – silent film stars were cast on the basis of their luminous physical beauty. With the inception of sound, Hollywood, not surprisingly, turned to the London stage and its wealth of Shakespearian-trained professionals for performers who were not only handsome but could speak with perfect diction.)
The female performers in The Old Dark House are equally accomplished and similarly connected to the London Theater scene. Eva Moore (playing the deaf religious fanatic Rebecca Femm) was a well-known British character actor and renowned for her Shakespeare work. Moore had been feted as the most beautiful woman in London around the turn of the century and photographs taken of her at the time that The Old Dark House was made reveal that she retained her stylish glamor in the thirties. She had appeared in Whale stage productions in London as had Lilian Bond, one of the two ingenues in the film. Gloria Stuart (who plays Mrs. Waverton) was from Santa Monica. She was nominated for an Academy Award when she was 87 for her role in James Cameron’s Titanic. She died when she was 100 years old in 2010 and provides a commentary track on The Old Dark House DVD as released by KINO, recalling her work on the movie seventy-five years earlier.
Whale’s brilliance in casting the film, based to some degree on contacts with Levy, is shown by the fact the Old Dark Film is the Hollywood debut for Melvyn Douglas, Ernest Thesiger, Raymond Massey, and Charles Laughton, all men who would be ubiquitous in American films for decades. (Melvyn Douglas won an Academy Award for his role in the Paul Newman movie, Hud released in 1963). Although the film was virtually impossible to see after 1940, the movie has cast a long shadow in another respect: Charles Addams, the New Yorker cartoonist, has acknowledged that he based his sinister butler in the Addams family cartoons on Karloff’s brutish Morgan.
In 1927, the German emigre Paul Leni directed The Cat and the Canary for Universal. This film is the prototype haunted mansion picture, a comedy-horror movie about travelers stranded in a sinister Gothic structure replete with hidden passageways and eyes peering through holes cut in moldering portraits on the wall. Many of the pictorial elements prominent in The Old Dark House seem to derive from Leni’s picture. Leni had made a name for himself directing expressionist horror movies in Berlin, most notably Waxworks (1924), an omnibus film in which famous villains depicted in a wax museum (including Jack the Ripper) lurch into eerie life. Leni’s last Hollywood film was The Man Who Laughs (1928), one of the greatest silent films and, although made in Los Angeles, generally regarded as the last fully realized German expressionist classic. Leni would undoubtedly have directed Frankenstein and other Universal horror films but he died of blood poisoning in 1929.
Movies were made quickly in the early thirties. Photography began on the film in April 1932 and the movie was ready for release in mid-summer of that year. (The picture was one of four movies directed by James Whale is the period of twelve months – the others were Waterloo Bridge, Frankenstein, and The Impatient Maiden.) Release of the film was delayed until October 1932 on the basis of contractual agreements with Paramount. Paramount had loaned its contract actor, Melvyn Douglas, to Universal for the The Old Dark House and Universal had agreed to defer release of Whale’s film until after a Paramount picture starring Douglas was shown beginning in August of 1932. It is estimated that the film cost about $250,000 although budget and accounting information relating to the movie has been lost.
Audiences initially flocked to the picture, primarily to see Karloff. However, word of mouth was poor – Karloff’s role disappointed his fans and box-office receipts for the movie collapsed in the second week of its release. In the United Kingdom, however, the film was an enormous success. Critical reception was mixed – Variety and the LA critics panned the movie but it was praised in New York.
The film was re-released in 1939 and played briefly as a secondary feature in double and triple bills. Then, the movie was lost.
4.
Resurrection
Curtis Harrington began his career as an experimental film maker. Later, he worked in Hollywood and made several highly regarded, if obscure horror films, most notably Nighttide (with Dennis Hopper in 1961) and What’s the Matter with Helen?, starring Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters in 1971. (Harrington is a remarkable figure – he knew literally everyone in Hollywood and his affiliations span the not-inconsiderable distance between the Hollywood demi-monde such as Forrest J. Ackerman, the editor of Famous Movie Monsters magazine, and his girlfriend Vampirella, to people like Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier.)
Harrington was fascinated by the Hollywood horror films that had been made in his youth. He recalled seeing an enormous billboard when he was a little boy on Sunset Strip for The Bride of Frankenstein that terrified and attracted him in equal measure. Harrington, who was gay, had friends of friends who knew Whale – particularly Christopher Isherwood – and, in the early fifties, wheedled his way into an invitation to one of the director’s pool parties in Pacific Palisades. (Isherwood’s boyfriend, Paul Bachardy, was a close friend of Gloria Stuart and she often went to Whale’s house to play Bridge with him.) Harrington was very handsome, athletic, and charismatic (and seems to have been a very affable fellow) and Whale was immediately attracted to him. For several years, Whale was a mentor to the young film maker and gave him career advice.
Around 1955, Harrington encountered Whale in Paris. Harrington was living hand-to-mouth and Whale generously gave his young protegee a significant amount of money to help him out. Harrington knew that there was a single surviving print of The Old Dark House maintained by the British Film Institute. He went to London and persuaded BFI officials to screen the movie as part of a retrospective of Whale’s films. The movie was well-received and Whale’s reputation, which was in decline, began to revive. Whale attended the retrospective and was pleased to be recognized again for his work completed 20 or more years before. Later, however, the BFI print of The Old Dark House went missing and by the mid-sixties the film was deemed irretrievably lost. Of course, films that can’t be seen can’t be criticized and the reputation of The Old Dark House increased dramatically during the years when it was inaccessible. Indeed, the two most famous "lost films" in the horror genre were Tod Browning’s London After Midnight (1927) starring Lon Chaney as a hideous vampire and The Old Dark House.
Harrington suspected that a negative of the film existed somewhere in the Universal vaults. He personally explored the Universal collections in Hollywood but couldn’t locate a negative. Some documents that he discovered suggested, however, that the negative for the film had been shipped to New York for storage. (Universal maintains film repository in New York City.) Harrington made inquiries and persuaded a clerk who was a casual acquaintance to search the inventory of negatives kept in New York. The clerk contacted him and said that he had been unable to find the film. Harrington thought that the clerk’s search had been desultory. He demanded that the man make another search for the negative. A couple of weeks passed and the clerk contacted Harrington and said that he checked through most of the material in the vault, all of it uncatalogued, and that the movie was, indeed, lost. "Make one more check, please," Harrington demanded. He told the clerk that all records led to the conclusion that the film’s negative was in the New York repository: "I just know it’s there," To his surprise, the clerk said he would search the vault one more time. A week later, Harrington was told that a nitrate negative of The Old Dark House had been discovered.
Harrington traveled to New York to examine the negative. The footage was a "track negative" – that is, a camera negative with the soundtrack recorded. The first reel was decomposed and could not be used to make a print. The remaining reels were in reasonably good condition. Fortunately, Harrington located a so-called "lavender print" – sometimes called a "fine-grain master". A "lavender print" or "protection print" is a positive print of the movie with very fine resolution used to dupe additional prints. (The prints have a purplish grain in the emulsion and so are nicknamed "lavender prints.") Using the "lavender" or protection print, Harrington was able to duplicate the entire film with its soundtrack.
Restoration of the film was accomplished at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. Four master-prints were made: one was given to the Museum of Modern Art in recognition of its role in financing the restoration; the second print was delivered to the AFI (American Film Institute), an agency also participating in funding the project. The other prints were provided to Universal and the Eastman House.
Universal no longer owned the rights to the film. It had sold the story-property to Columbia in the fifties. (And Columbia had made a substandard version of the movie in 1963 directed by William Castle.) Harrington obtained legal clearances for the film and since 2008 it has been available on KINO Dvd.
5.
Influence
The Old Dark House is a striking film that has attracted a cult following. Its influence, direct and indirect, has been substantial. Pictures as disparate as The Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre assemble motifs invented by Whale and company in the 1932 picture. The concept of travelers forced to gather for the night in a sinister mansion inhabited by a grotesque family harboring a terrible secret seems singularly productive. The perverse Femm family are the ancestors of the gender-bending characters in Rocky Horror Picture and the cannibal clans in Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes. In particular, the concept of a reclusive family that combines savagery, gentility, and strong, if warped, affection between its members has spawned both innumerable comedy and horror films. Of course, the premise is so powerful and appealing that if Whale had not invented the Femm family (with the help of J.B. Priestley), surely some other film maker would have discovered characters like them.
Like another notable picture made around the same time, Edgar Ulmer’s bizarre The Black Cat, Whale’s picture preserves some of the nightmarish atmosphere of the Great War. Indeed, it can be argued that parts of The Old Dark House indirectly invoke World War One and its consequences. Priestley’s bestselling novel, Benighted referenced World War One explicitly. It’s male characters (with the exception of the Femms) were all battlefield survivors and their attitudes were toward life (and death) were formed in the trenches. The opening scenes of The Old Dark House showing the sedan plowing through mud in a heavy rainstorm invokes Paeschendale and Ypres, albeit very indirectly. (The shocking image of the landslide also seems to suggest some sort of awful muddy catastrophe only narrowly averted.) The Femm family in their rotting house suggests allegorically the decaying mansion of Europe, it’s surface gentility concealing madness and nihilistic destruction. In a hidden chamber in the mansion, a madman lurks who is ready to light the whole place on fire and who will delight in the conflagration. A brutal servant, who seems to be a villain, is merely the assistant of a more deadly madman who remains concealed until the film’s climax. While all this mayhem is underway, the lord of the house hides and, when he appears the next morning, cheerfully greets the guests as if nothing untoward has happened – it’s business as usual with all the old customs and traditions, seemingly, intact after the corpses have been removed from the battlefield. An embittered religious fanatic recites prayers while a demented 102 year-old patriarch giggles in his bed, apparently relishing the prospect of the destruction of the whole enterprise. These figures seem to embody the dismay felt by intellectuals and former soldiers at the post-war state of the world. Horrific violence had only made Europe more dangerous – lunatics were lurking in the attic ready to light the whole place afire once more.
Some critics claim The Old Dark House as a precursor to the film movement known as New Queer Cinema. This claim arises from two factors – first, the film implicitly raises gender issues in a way that anticipates the concerns of later gay cinema; second, The Old Dark House was made by an openly homosexual director with several gay actors and, perhaps, qualifies as
"Queer Cinema" for that reason. Certainly, there is something odd about the family name conferred on the reclusive and sinister family occupying the old dark house –they are the Femms. Ernest Thesiger, who plays Horace Femm, was the Queen of Camp and there is no doubt that he lends homosexual inflections to his role. And the actor playing the 102 year-old Sir Roderick Femm, although credited as John Dudgeon, is clearly a woman. (The role was played by a British character actress, then, only 62, Elspeth Dudgeon). Not much attempt is made to disguise the fact that Roderick Femm is, in fact, an old woman. Morgan seems to have a deep affection for Saul Femm and, perhaps, even loves him. Furthermore, the film luxuriates in glamorous imagery of Melvyn Douglas playing Penderal - the sort of soulful, soft-focus lensing applied to leading ladies like Garbo and Harlow is here utilized to depict Penderal. Penderal seems to be made-up to emphasize his luminous eyes. By contrast, the camera-work devoted to the leading ladies is not particularly flattering – they are shot in a "girl next door" mode. Accordingly, the film certainly seems to toy with gender issues in a way that later writers would identify as "camp."
Of course, a film can be defined as related as Queer Cinema on the basis of the director and actor. This raises an interesting question: Is a film an example of Queer Cinema because its director was openly homosexual? Or does the film have to address homosexual issues? In The Old Dark House, the director and one of the leading characters, Ernest Thesiger, playing Horace Femm were overtly homosexual. Charles Laughton was closeted, but known to be homosexual by those in Whale’s coterie. (The sexual orientation of the remarkable Brember Wills, the character who steals the movie with his portrayal of Saul Femm, is not established. Indeed, very little is known about Wills who was born in Philadelphia in 1883, but worked mostly in London on the stage as a character actor. Obviously, Whale admired him immensely because he imported the actor to Hollywood to play his role in the film. Wills made only one or two other movies and no biographical information about him is available. He must have been selected for the role because he is a very small man, slight, and, therefore, makes a strong contrast with the hulking Karloff as Morgan. Karloff has to carry him upstairs, a feat that might be difficult if the actor were larger and heavier. It’s interesting to contrast Douglas gallantly carrying his romantic interest, Gladys (Lillian Bond), who protests that she is heavy – Douglas, in fact, drops her twice climbing the steps to the mansion, a faux pas not permitted in the more dainty and romantic scene in which Karloff bears the dead Saul up to the steps.)
Ernest Thesiger, in particular, was notorious for his campy and histrionic homosexuality. Thesiger’s blood was blue – he was born into a family of British aristocrats. Indeed, the date of this birth coincided with the butchery of his uncle by the Zulus at the Battle of Isandlwana. (His cousin, Wilfred Thesiger, was a famous explorer, specializing in heroic and dangerous treks across the empty quarter of Saudi Arabia.) A beautiful young man, Thesiger was painted by John Singer Sargent and feted by high society. He painted, performed in plays, and was friends with many notable people, including George Bernard Shaw. At 35, Thesiger volunteered for military service in World War One. He claimed that he sought enlistment in a Scottish battalion because he wished to "wear a kilt into battle." "I wasn’t accepted," Thesiger said, "because my feigned Scottish accent wasn’t convincing enough." Thesiger fought in France where he was wounded in 1915. A shell fragment damaged his hands. For physical therapy, Thesiger was prescribed needlepoint and became a master of that craft. (In fact, Thesiger was so accomplished at needlepoint that he was appointed conservator to the Queen’s tapestries – The Master of the Queen’s Tapestries – a role that he relished until the end of his life.) Thesiger volunteered at military hospitals for the duration of the war, teaching wounded men to do needlepoint to pass the time during their convalescence. After the war, he married a society woman, but made no attempt to disguise his homosexuality. He was a fixture in London theater in the twenties and invited to Hollywood by Whale to star in The Old Dark House. Thesiger is famous today primarily for his unique and waspish presence in this film and The Bride of Frankenstein in which he plays Dr. Septimus Pretorius. On set, Thesiger ceaseless passed the time with his needlepoint and called himself "the stitching bitch."
A much-debated question is whether Whale’s succession of great films made in the thirties represents Queer Cinema avant la lettre. Curtis Harrington, who knew Whale well, says that he would have been horrified by the idea. Harrington said that Whale was an old-time Hollywood director whose chief objective was to make the most entertaining film possible. (Critics also observe that most of the bizarre elements in The Old Dark House derive directly from the novel – Whale didn’t invent those things.) Whale didn’t regard his movies as art and deprecated them as mere amusements when asked about them. Much of New Queer Cinema focuses on grievance and oppression. Harrington, himself gay, noted that neither Thesiger nor Whale regarded themselves as oppressed; they were not outcasts or despised but rather the center of a large network of social acquaintances, friends, and lovers in Hollywood, a place generally tolerant with respect to sexual mores. Accordingly, Harrington scoffs at the idea that there are gay themes implicit in Whale’s movie. But, of course, the evidence is on the screen and each viewer must decide for himself what to make of it.
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