The Black Cat (1934, Edgar G. Ulmer) (Patreon)

63/100

Second viewing, last seen 1997. There's a record of my reaction back then, as emailed to a friend: 

The Black Cat (Screen Deco series, Film Forum): I believe this is the only set-based retrospective I've ever encountered. Weirdass Karloff/Lugosi chiller makes no sense at all and has nothing to do with the Poe tale which allegedly "inspired" it, but is still utterly fascinating (though its incoherence did make it seem a bit long, even at a mere 65 minutes). My first Ulmer film.

Short and barely descriptive, yet somehow hard to improve upon. There's no denying that The Black Cat is at least as memorable for its primary set—Poelzig's extremely Art Deco house, with its circular stainless-steel staircase and glistening chrome fixtures seeking to deny the existence of catacombs and rubble and most likely many buried corpses below—as for any of its ostensible spookiness, or even for its legendary status as the first film in which Karloff and Lugosi faced off. That aspect's a bit disappointing, actually, in that it's not at all the ghoul duel one would naturally anticipate; while Karloff's very much in sepulchral-madman mode, and looks amazing in a widow's peak that could till soil, Legosi has unaccountably been cast in what's essentially a vengeful-hero role, for which he's ill-suited (at least until the very end, when he gets to flay someone alive). And since Werdegast simply killing Poelzig upon arrival would cut this barely hour-long feature down to a 15-minute short, the screenplay has to go through multiple contortions in which the two e.g. play chess to determine the innocent couple's fate and then just ignore their match's outcome, proceeding as if it hadn't happened. Simple matters like how many black cats Poelzig has around aren't clarified, so that we're briefly confused when Werdegast hurls a knife at one, killing it, and then Poelzig's holding another (I assume) just a few minutes later.  But at least when things confound, they do so in front of some striking production design. 

Were The Black Cat a standard-length movie—if it ran even as little as, say, 82 minutes instead of 65—I think its haphazard quality would eventually become wearisome. As is, I very much wanted to turn off the omnipresent musical score, which much of the time seems completely unrelated to anything happening onscreen, as if someone had just grabbed a random hunk of orchestral music and let it run unedited over the entire picture. (A few potentially creepy moments are nearly ruined by bizarrely jaunty accompaniment.) As I noted 26 years ago, however, there's something mesmerizing about the way that all of this mini-movie's polite lunacy unfolds. The revelation of Werdegard's ailurophobia (which you'd think would be important, but is not, really; I'd forgotten that the tradition of Poe "adaptations" that are actually invented from scratch long predates Corman)—anyway, Werdegard's crazed fear of cats instantly gets upstaged by Joan having been drugged into a somnambulistic stupor, and then we get the whole lady-corpse tour, and then Werdegard's dead daughter turns out to be alive in Poelzig's bed, and then he's preparing to sacrifice Joan in some satanic ritual, and then wait go back a minute because I just realized that I have no idea why Poelzig has half a dozen female bodies on display in his home. Doesn't really make sense, given what we're meant to understand happened with Werdegast's wife and daughter (both named Karen, just for added confusion)—are those supposed to be women whom he abducted and murdered while waiting for Karen the younger to grow up? I think that's a fair question, yet posing it doesn't make the sequence in which he walks around lovingly gazing at them any less potent. And that's true of the entire movie, which even concludes by poking self-aware fun at how ludicrous its narrative has been. Ultimately, atmosphere wins out: The Black Cat may traffic in what were clichés even way back then, like having our heroes try to call for help only to discover that the phone is dead, but it also has Karloff making an absolute future-Grinch-narrator meal out of "You hear that, Vitus? The phone is dead. Even the phone is dead." That's enough for me.