Edgar G. Ulmer | The Black Cat / 1934

triple murder

by Douglas Messerli

 

Peter Ruric (based on a story by Edgar G. Ulmer and Peter Ruric, based, in turn, on the story by Edgar Allan Poe), Edgar G. Ulmer (director) The Black Cat / 1934

 

Numerous commentators describe Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat as a film of LGBTQ interest, which is rather strange since the film has no obvious or even clearly sublimated gay or lesbian context. Presumably critics have hauled the movie into the LGBTQ court because of its various other deviant sexualities; if nothing else, the long-time relationship between the two central “monsters” of this tale, Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff) and Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Béla Lugosi) is queer in the general meaning of that word.

    During World War I, apparently Poelzig was head of a Hungarian fortress, upon which he has now built his Bauhaus-like mansion, betraying his men to the Russian forces which killed thousands. One of the officers, Werdegast was sent to prison and has returned after 15 years to Poelzig’s isolated home in an attempt to find his wife Karen and his daughter, also named Karen. Werdegast knew, even back in the war years, that Poelzig desired his wife, and soon finds that the architect has indeed taken her on as his mistress until she died, Poelzig having embalmed her body and placed it in a sealed plastic cubicle where it will remain forever “beautiful and young.” He also reports that their daughter Karen died of pneumonia after the War. But we discover, in fact, that he is currently living with the younger Karen as his wife, and when her existence is discovered, Poelzig kills her—as we now must suspect, he probably previously killed her mother.

      Along with ailurophobia (the fear of cats) which Werdegast suffers, accordingly, the film has a so much on its mind—necrophilia, possible incest, murder, betrayal, and as we soon discover, Satanism (which Poelzig practices), drugs (provided by Dr. Werdegast), a chess game that determines the survival of members of the cast, and genocide—that it hardly has room for something as simple as same-sex desire. If nothing else, however, we can surely describe Poelzig as being insanely misogynistic as well. And the two villains certainly have a perverse life-time relationship, even if it is not particularly a gay one. 

      Into this quite horrific vortex the plot hurls two seemingly innocent individuals, Peter Alison (David Manners) and new wife Joan (Jacqueline Wells) who are celebrating their honeymoon in Hungary. They have hardly settled into their private coach room on the train and readied themselves for a honeymoon kiss before the conductor reports that the railroad line has mistakenly sold a seat in their coach to another man as well, Dr. Werdegast. The polite gentleman, a psychiatrist, insists he can remain in the passageway, but the equally polite couple insist that he join them.

      We soon perceive Werdegast as creepy individual, not only because he is played by Lugosi, but because while the couple sleep, he gently strokes the air over Joan’s head, Peter awakening in time to observe the act, which Werdegast quickly tries to explain away by describing his marital and war-time history.

 

“I beg your indulgence my friend. Eighteen years ago, I left a girl so like your lovely wife to go to war... She was my wife. Have you ever heard of Kurgaal? It is a prison below Amsk... Many men have gone there. Few have returned. I have returned. After fifteen years, I have returned.”

 

   Rather than simply asking the man to leave their coach because of his rather perverse actions, Peter not only buys the doctor’s explanation, but soon after, almost joyfully joins Werdegast and his servant Thamal (Harry Cording) on a small bus to take him and his wife to their next connection.

      As any horror film enthusiast might have foretold, the bus crashes on route to its destination, killing the driver and injuring Joan. And since they are near to Werdegast’s destination, Poelzig’s house, Werdegast invites them to visit Poelzig as well, evidently so that he might better care for Joan—although why a psychiatrist takes on the medical care of a crash victim is yet another mystery.

      Poelzig warily invites them to stay the night, which we have learned from our experience with the Dracula films, will surely lead them into danger. 

      Even stranger, from our point of view, but apparently not from Peter’s perception, the doctor injects Joan with a tranquilizing drug hyoscine, presumably so that she can sleep comfortably. Without any sense of injustice for having his honeymoon night so fully coopted, Peter docilely beds down in a nearby room which just happens to connect to Werdegast’s bedroom.

      If nothing sexual has been established yet between any of the film’s figures, we at least are given pause by the two lines spoken by the men as they settle down into their beds:

 

Werdegast: Do you mind if I keep this door open?

Peter: I’d sleep with a cold sweat if you didn’t. You know... this is a very tricky house. The kind of place where I'd like to have company.

        

       One might easily interpret this strange invitation to each other as providing us with a sense of Peter’s dis-ease in sleeping in Poelzig’s house, although he doesn’t at all imagine any danger for Joan in still another room. And we might remember also that he is opening his bedroom door to, so to speak, and even inviting in the company of someone who has long been in prison and has just demonstrated some sexual interest in his new wife.

      What Peter and the viewer cannot yet know is that Poelzig has no intention of letting the couple leave, and that the next day the two old “friends” calmly play a game of chess concerning their fate: if Werdegast wins, the couple can leave. But, of course, it is Poezig who declares check-mate.

      Joan, having awaken the next morning feeling well and very eager to leave, finds her husband not at all attending to her but having breakfast somewhere else in the house.

      No sooner does Werdegast’s servant Thamal (now strangely order by his master to do the bidding of Poelzig) find him, that the couple are told that Poelzig’s car is out of order. Peter discovers immediately after from Poelzig, in one of the drollest lines of the film, “Did you hear that, Vitus? The phone is dead. Even the phone is dead.”

 

     When the couple attempts to escape on foot, Thamal knocks Peter out and carries off Joan. For most of the rest the film the inattentive and rather incompetent husband spends his time in the underground cell in the basement, clearing the man out of the plot.     The rest of the film is filled with a rather discombobulated series of events. Out of nowhere, a coven of satanists arrive to participate in Poelzig’s Aleister Crowley-like, devil-worshiping ceremony. Joan is brought in, perhaps as a sacrifice or to be consecrated as an acolyte. A scream of another attending female interrupts the affair, giving Werdegast and Thamal time to grab Joan and carry her off, much to her equal horror, until he tells her to forget about her husband and leave the place as quickly as she can. Poelzig’s servant enters and shoots Thamal.

       Joan, in turn, tells Werdegast about having seen his daughter Karen in the house. As he rushes off to find her, he discovers her dead body on a nearby slab.

       By this time, Poelzig has arrived on the scene, the two monsters battling, the dying Thamal helping Werdegast to overpower Poelzig. Placing him on his embalming rack, Werdegast announces his intentions before proceeding to skin Poelzig alive:

 

“Do you know what I am going to do to you now? No? Did you ever see an animal skinned, Hjalmar? Ha, ha, ha. That's what I'm going to do to you now - pare the skin from your body... slowly... bit by bit!”

    

       This is the same man to whom Peter opened his bedroom door.

     By this time our ineffectual groom has finally escaped and seeing Werdegast bending down with Joan to pry a key out of the now dead Thamal’s hand, presumes Werdegast is attacking her and shoots him (where he has gotten a gun in not explained), thus killing off the man who was supposedly trying to help him and Joan escape.

      Werdegast, recalling the wartime dynamite charges in the old fortress, orders the honeymoon couple to leave the house immediately, as he sets off the explosions, destroying what is left of Poelzig, his cult, and himself. The End.

       So where’s the gay sex? Did I miss it? Well, perhaps it wasn’t quite where we thought. Ulmer has provided us with a very odd final scene. Peter, now returning home from their Hungarian rhapsody,* tucks up Joan in a traveling blanket as he abruptly reaches for a newspaper on the seat next to him, discovering a review of his newest mystery, Triple Murder.

 

“In Triple Murder, Mr. Alison's latest mystery thriller, he fulfills the promise shown...We feel, however, that Mr. Alison has, in a sense, overstepped the bounds of the matter of credibility. These things would never, but with a further stretch of the imagination, actually happen. We could wish that Mr. Alison would confine himself to the possible instead of letting his melodramatic imagination run away with him.”

 

      The screen goes black. So, we must ask ourselves, are we intended to now assume that the fiction we have just witnessed served as the source of his new mystery novel, or, more likely, that the film we’ve just experienced has been a recreation of his fiction?

       If it’s the latter, and he spent nearly all of the honeymoon vacation writing this mystery, then I’d suggest we have something to talk about. If the mystery oversteps the bounds of credibility, perhaps what it tells us a great deal about its author, an ineffectual lover who is probably at heart a misogynist who enjoys exploring all the various manias we’ve just witnessed. I’d suggest that Peter (played by gay actor Manners) has not at all wanted to remain in his relationship with Joan, whether or not the couple are honeymooners. This is a man who might very much enjoy the midnight company of a strange man in his bed. And now that he’s got his wife nicely embalmed in her traveling blanket he can go on to explore yet another fantasy of how to escape the woman to whom he's found himself wed. And, incidentally, having killed off the two villains, what other character is meant to represent the “triple” murder? Perhaps Karen, but she’s hardly a central figure in the movie/book, nor is Thamal. If nothing else, we might whisper to Joan what she perhaps already knows, never to trust this Peter.  

 

*Given the movie’s notable score featuring classical pieces by Franz Liszt, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Frédéric Chopin, my metaphor is quite apt.

 

Los Angeles, December 25, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).