This is another old gothic film that I love. I own the Cohen Brothers Blu-ray edition, and it looks absolutely fabulous! Karloff is chilling in this film.
“Femm” was already established as the family name of the odd inhabitants of the house in Priestley’s novel “Benighted.” But it may have been seen as serendipity to Mr Whale!
Great channel, Antonia! I came across your interview with Heath on his channel, Cereal At Midnight, and came over here to sign up for yours. Universal monsters and films from the era you cover here were the foundation of my film exposure as a young man. Your love of these films is infectious. I'm ecstatic that people your age are still interested in these magnificent films from a bygone era. Also, your Uncle Carl is one of my heroes of the film world, and I'm so glad you are keeping his memory alive with your channel and the fine work you do here. BTW, I agree with your views here on Old Dark House which is one of my favorite Universal films of the 30's. It has many gay underlining themes which, to me, makes it all the more fascinating. Keep up the great work and film analysis, and thanks for the great channel.
you might be over analyzing the Morgan and Saul thing. I always saw it as Morgan was sad his friend died. It could be Karloff's acting as well. Remember when in the Son of Frankenstein the monster discovering Igor was killed, the monster reacted with sadness and I doubt Igor and the monster were lovers LOL. Karloff was able to express a range of emotions with tons of makeup on. I might be wrong about this, it has been awhile since I last saw TODH. I'll have to watch it again this October. Love your vids btw
Thank you! That's a totally fair interpretation. Of course I'm going into this specifically looking for queerness, and because of that, I'm going to see it everywhere. Morgan and Saul may have been a stretch...
As a Karloff fan, I was disappointed the first time I watched The Old Dark House. His character is mute and he doesn't have much to do until Morgan gets drunk and starts menacing Gloria Stuart with the threat of sexual assault. Boris finally gets to act at the end of the film when Saul Femm dies. We're meant to think that Morgan is Saul's jailer and beats him. But Morgan's grief and gentleness when Saul dies in the fall reveals that their relationship was caring and co-dependent - perhaps as the 2 outsiders in the household. Morgan carrying Saul's dead body upstairs is.very moving. I don't get any vibe that Saul and Morgan were lovers.
Great video! I’ll have to watch more of your videos. Daughter of Dracula was probably the most obvious queer coded movie I ever seen. Never would have thought Old Dark House would have been QC as well.
I'm glad I found this channel I love everything about the classic universal monsters, and the remakes don't do justice for them. Plus, you are very informative thank you
Just twenty years earlier the Titanic sank. I bet Gloria Stewart never thought she'd receive an Oscar nomination for a film called 'Titanic' 65 years after she made this movie.
It seems to me that the dinner scene in a Rocky Horror was definitely influenced by The Old Dark House: Riff Raff vs Morgan pouring water/wine into glasses is the giveaway… and the carving…
I agree with your assessment; as do many other film critics. It’s also amusing that this film also has numerous one-liner innuendos that surprisingly bypassed the censors. Thanks for the video!
Interesting note. In the mid 60's there was Shock Theater, playing all of those wunderbar Universal horror movies (and perverting my childhood my mind in the process). Universal made these classics available to local stations in a package, that also included such clunkers as "The Secret of the Blue Room" and "The Mad Ghoul". If you wanted Frankenstein and Dracula, you had to take these B offerings as well. However, "The Old Dark House" was never included in that package.
It was indeed. It's also one of my favorite movies. It stars Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, Christopher Lloyd, and a whole bunch of other great actors. It's so witty and fun!
Off the mark? No I think you could definitely interpret many of the characters being gay. First time viewing I picked up on the possibility of William and Rebecca being gay but not really Morgan and Saul. I just thought with how psychologically damaged the two were that they were each others best friends but maybe their is something more there that I missed. The film itself is one hell of a picture full of witty dialouge and atmosphere. Best way to watch it for any first timers is to find the Kino restoration.
Regardless of whether it's a queer movie or not, it is a great movie. Considering this was the Precode era, and filmmakers we're pushing the boundaries whenever they could, it wouldn't surprise me if it was intentionally queer. James Whale certainly would have tried to push as much as possible under the nose of the censors, and he chose actors very capable of taking dialog that appears innocuous on paper, and providing all the subtext in the performance. So to answer your question, I think it's highly probable that you are correct. I think I remember hearing somewhere that when Joseph Breen started enforcing the Code, Whale's opinion of him was quite disdainful. So to think he would have tried subverting the Code when it was just a bunch of words that the studios ignored seems highly plausible.
I don't think you're totally off the mark... There definitely is an obvious queer and camp dynamic to the film in the choice of cast, presentation of characters, the family name, etc. as well as being directed by James Whale. But do I think a few of your examples are reaching a bit, which can happen when one is deliberately trying to read the film through one lens or another. The "queerness" of Laughton's character is not that he's gay, but that he's ugly and unheroic. This is pretty much stated explicitly in the film... He's not an attractive man, so he compensates with money and hanging golddiggers off his arm. And I wouldn't say that he didn't have a problem with his trophy falling in love with another man, but he had the self-awareness to understand what the dynamic was. While they still exist today, we don't TALK about golddiggers as much. In the 1930's, there was an entire series of movies about golddiggers, so that was very much a part of the zeitgeist. Subtextually we can understand Laughton's character as an allegory for homosexuality because it reflects the reality of Laughton's life. He married Lanchester as a beard, while himself dealing with the shortcomings of his own physique as a gay man. His character MAY be gay (and the term wasn't really used to refer specifically to homosexuality until the mid-20th century), but I don't think that's a necessary interpretation to pull his character together. I also don't think that Moore's character is a closet lesbian either. She's pretty explicitly a religious fanatic. There is even a line of dialogue about how her father and brothers were always having parties with loose women and they would tell her to go away and pray when she came down to chastise them. The "queerness" of her character would be the camp of her being a religious hypocrite. She doesn't WANT Stuart's character. She wants to BE Stuart's character. She'll condemn someone for vanity and then peek in the mirror. The "queer" reading of Wills' and Karloff's characters as a couple is interesting, but I also think we tend to lean too heavily into that viewing of male relationships in the present day. There's a trend towards seeing or reinterpreting male friendships as some kind of repressed homosexual relationship rather than as... friends. I once heard someone refer to two male characters as having a "non-romantic queer partnership," which I thought was a rather bizarrely sexualized way of talking about friends. Part of the point of the movie is that everyone in the house is flawed in one way or another, and especially the Femm family are bound together in a web of mental illness, repression, violence, and sin. One shouldn't overlook the source material as a meditation on post-WWI pessimism and disillusionment, especially in light of the thesis that the Universal Monsters, by-in-large, were a product of and a response to the same problem. Sorry for the essay... Your video was thought-provoking on one of my favourite Universal films!
Never saw this until recently. Heard a lot about it being great so creepy and scary .I finally watched it and thought was just awful. Waste of a lot talent there.
I don’t know who this chick is talking, but you’re cute. I’d tap that. But I think you’re totally off the mark. I never saw anything queer in this movie. But then I’m a straight man. I don’t go looking for stuff like that. I just enjoy the story. This one has good mood and atmosphere. Anyway, good job with the movie review. It looks like I’ll have to quit watching this one.
If you're an intuitive straight man, you'll catch on to the queerness in "The Old Dark House". If you have any kind of homophobia, you'll do your best not to see queer coding. This homophobia is present in many LGBTQ+ people, too.
