"Stiff." That's the word for most films from the dawn of talkies. "Stilted" is a good one, too. The Thirteenth Chair (1929, directed by Tod Browning) fits both descriptions. It's a bit of an evolutionary missing link, given that it was filmed in both a silent and sound version while Hollywood was still in the process of learning how to make talkies. Many theaters at the time were still unable to even show them. The silent version is lost, alas, and I can't help but think that it's a much better film. The silents of the late 1920s were some of the glories of cinema, attaining heights of artistry it took sound pictures almost a decade to equal. This assumes you believe they ever did. I'm dubious of that very last point. This particular film is notable for two reasons. First, the lead role was offered to Lon Chaney. Had he accepted it, it would have been his last collaboration with Browning, and their only talkie before Chaney died of cancer. Chaney did not accept the part. Second, it teams Browning with Bela Lugosi for the first time and prefigures Lugosi's screen image in the films that followed Dracula. Browning ultimately made three films with Lugosi. Beyond the trivia, The Thirteenth Chair is a slog for a contemporary audience, but it's not without interest.
Spencer Lee has been murdered. No one is too broken up about this because he was a bounder and a cad, but justice must be served. The police are following their only clue, that a veiled woman was seen fleeing the crime. Lee's friend Edward Wales would like to see justice done if only to satisfy his own curiosity, and he enlists a medium to name the killer during a seance at his manor. The medium is a fraud, and her supposed powers are of no consequence to Wales, who wants to flush the murderer with the seance. Instead, Wales is himself murdered, prompting the medium to become a detective. Complicating matters is the presence of the medium's daughter, whom she would like no shade to fall upon, and the local police inspector, Delzante. Secrets are revealed, and lives are ruined in the climax...
The Thirteenth Chair started as a stage play written by Bayard Viellier in 1916. It was filmed three years later and again in 1937. The original stage play starred Viellier's wife, Margaret Wycherly, who shows up in the 1929 Browning film(s). It was apparently a popular success in all phases of its commercial life. This is an old-dark house mystery, but Browning stages it very much in the mode of a stage play, with only a few cinematic touches to bring it alive away from the boards. Most of the action takes place on a single set, and most of the actors--especially Lugosi--are projecting their lines as if to be heard in the rear of a theater. And herein is where you can spot the difference between Browning's talking pictures and his silents. His silents relied almost exclusively on expression, both facial and postural, to convey his scenes. This film doesn't have the patience with this, unfortunately. Browning himself said of his later talkies (presumably from Freaks onward) that he labored to eliminate as much dialogue as he could. The Thirteenth Chair is a good example of why he might have wanted to do that, because it's all talking with precious little action. Not all of the dialogue is awful. The affected diction of Conrad Nagel character, though, and Margaret Wycherly's Oirish accent might play pretty well on stage, but they tend to stylize the film in ways that aren't complimentary to the material.
The main thrust of great whacks of Browning's cinema is the humbug. Browning was a carny at heart and he had a soft spot for frauds who could flim-flam the marks. This film seems pretty far away from the carnival, but the character of Madame Rosalie, the fake medium played by Margaret Wycherly, is a character type that shows up in other Browning films besides this one. The key to Browning's cinematic anima is that he views the straights in the cast as suckers and the audience itself as rubes, and that's certainly a key component of this film's plot. His interests are stronger than niceties like cinematic technique. Madame Rosalie isn't a character another filmmaker would promote to lead detective, but Browning does it without a backward glance. She's his kind of people.
And then there's Lugosi. Some historians view this film as a dry run for Dracula. An audition, even. And that's certainly defensible. Lugosi's character isn't a villain here--he's the law, after all--but he still manages a sinister presence. Whether that's a retroactive projection of his later screen anima or not is certainly debatable. I don't know if Lugosi was still learning his lines phonetically for this film--he probably was--but the delivery that works in Dracula doesn't work nearly as well here without the Gothic trappings. I wonder what convinced Browning that Lugosi could transcend this performance as the king vampire. For all that, Lugosi is hardly the stiffest actor in the cast, so there was a learning curve for all involved.
One last thing of note: the original stage play was set in New York, as was the previous film version. This film, cashing in on the vogue for exotic locales kicked off by Valentino's The Sheik, moves the action to Calcutta during the British Raj (which was still extant the year this film was made). The colonialism is baked in, given that its high society isn't much different from what one would find in a film set in England or New York, but for the Indian servants. There's a casual racism to this and a contemporary audience sensitive to such things should consider themselves warned.
Welcome to this year's October Horror Movie Challenge. I'm participating in my friend, Aaron Christensen's annual fundraiser during this year's challenge. Aaron has chosen the Women's Reproductive Rights Assistance Project as this year's recipient for our community's largess, so if you've got a few bucks lying around, here's a donation link for the donor drive. You know what to do.
As usual with the challenge, I'll be prioritizing films that are new to me, so I'm off to a good start there. I'll also be prioritizing pre-Code and silent horror this year, because during the last few decades, the genre has gotten too big to really track and I feel a need to go back to the basics. We'll see how it goes.
My current progress:
New to me films: 2
Total films: 4
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