Universal Terror: A Collection of Comforting Karloff Cinema (1937/1944/1952)(Blu-ray Review)

It cannot be overstated how much Boris Karloff’s performance in Frankenstein deserves its iconic status. The physicality and emotional expressiveness he brings to the Monster still have emotional resonance and rightly made Karloff a star. However, he had already been acting for over a decade by this point and Frankenstein was only one of literally hundreds of credits. This Eureka boxset offers a snapshot of Karloff’s range with three other Universal films across three decades, available on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK under the banner of Universal Terror.

Night Key (1937) is an odd inclusion as it is not remotely terrifying or even a horror film. Karloff stars as David Mallory, an inventor of alarm systems, who intends to sell his new wireless system to duplicitous businessman Steven Ranger. Despite their clear professional and personal animosity, Mallory is surprised when Ranger buys the rights to his invention with no intention of implementing it. In order to exact his revenge, Mallory forges an uneasy alliance with Petty Louie, a roguish criminal, to exact revenge under the pseudonym Night Key but soon becomes embroiled with a notorious gang boss.

Karloff transforms himself with a moustache and spectacles but gives an utterly human performance. Mallory is a sympathetic figure with his deteriorating eyesight and wholesome desire for his daughter Joan to be comfortable with Karloff bringing playful and warm energy to ensure the audience is totally on his side, even as he utters warnings to his antagonists like “What I create, I can destroy.”

The nostalgic comfort that thirties American cinema often has nowadays doesn’t negate the dark undercurrent of the film. It’s hard not to read its depiction of police as a corrupt force with door shakers, the nickname for security guards, Mike Callahan and Jake Travers casually overreaching their authority with little consequence. It makes the latter’s romance with Mallory’s daughter Joan seem even more trite and questionable as it serves as the perfect example of the “stalking for love” trope.

The more intentional darkness of the criminal gangsters fits the stereotype we have of them now but their presence adds new energy to the second half of the film. Alan Baxter as The Kid, leader of the gang, looks like an early brooding Brando but with a monotone voice that may seem dull to some. I found him a quietly threatening presence that offsets the borderline parodic but fun criminal machinations.

Director Lloyd Corrigan proves solidly adept at the tonal contrasts of shadowy criminal action and snappy science-fiction-inflected entertainment with playful montages and transitions, though it isn’t enough to alleviate the feeling that the plot is being dragged out even with a running time of just over an hour.

The other film on the first disc, The Climax (1944), provides an excellent contrast to the two black and white films in this collection, bursting with colour and song. It comes from the director (George Waggner) and writer (Curt Siodmak) of the horror classic The Wolf Man three years prior and was originally intended to be a sequel to another classic Universal horror, The Phantom of the Opera. Despite these credentials, it is more of a thriller than straight-up horror.

Karloff’s first film in colour opens with him as Dr Friedrich Hohner making a late-night visit to the theatre that he works in.  With his slicked-back hair, cloak and cane, Karloff again transforms himself, this time as an ironically deathly figure who is mistaken as dead when asleep. But behind the stillness lies a disturbed mind as we learn that ten years ago he insisted soprano Marcellina marry him and give up her career because he doesn’t want anyone else to hear her sing; as he says to her, “I only hate the thing that’s come between us, your voice.” Her refusal leads to him silencing her, forever. But the arrival of Angela Klatt, a young music student, and her eerily similar singing reawakens Hohner’s dark thoughts as history seems to repeat itself.

The plot summary makes the film seem more ghoulish than it is with Karloff being the only source of menace. The film is generally a light drama focusing on the very sweet Klatt and Franz Muzner, her fellow student and fiancee, who chews up his programme in enthusiasm watching her perform. The dominant colour palette is bright pastels and it is no surprise that it was Oscar-nominated for its art direction. For some, the long musical numbers will drag and though they do handily pad out the running time, they all have a necessary plot function in showing how and why Hohner’s obsession with Klatt grows so intensely.

For all that the lightness undercuts the horror, its combination of theatrical, Gothic and comic tones make it very much up my street. Even the slightly silly child king or vague supernatural presence of Marcellina’s projected voice isn’t enough to drag the film below enjoyable. One frustrating aspect is how the film is a hair’s breadth of being progressive, with moments that almost lead to surprising subversion before resolving conservatively. For instance, lead soprano Jarmila, generally portrayed as an unlikeable diva, is introduced complaining about inappropriate touching from the male lead. It seems the manager may actually respond positively before he decides to replace her with an understudy. It’s an innocuous scene that ages badly for a modern audience and exemplifies how the film is a few decisions away from being a classic.

On its own disc, The Black Castle (1952) immediately harkens back to the heyday of Universal horror, opening with a Gothic castle during a violent storm soundtracked by a howling wolf and an overdramatic score. Despite being the most modern film in the set, it feels more traditional with its melodramatic folkloric period tale with shades of the Bluebeard story. It opens with Sir Ronald Burton, under the hidden identity of Richard Beckett, about to be buried alive by Count Karl von Bruno after trying to find his two missing friends. Once we flashback, the film tells the tale of how he got there, a structural device that undercuts the narrative somewhat.

Nonetheless, knowing his inevitable capture adds to the sense of atmospheric dread. In a manner similar to Universal’s own Dracula, Burton takes a long coach ride to the Count’s castle, where regular hunts on the grounds are organised at his Black Forest home. If the villainous eyepatch didn’t give it away, the Count exerts threat by whipping the cage of a captured African leopard and making declarative statements like “I kill with my heart.”

As you may gather, every character is a stock character type with little interiority but the actors play their roles with real gusto. In particular, Richard Greene as the dashing hero Burton and Stephen McNally as the seductively villainous Count tear into their antagonistic relationship. Oddly, the two horror stars, Karloff as Dr Meissen and Lon Chaney Jr. as mute manservant Gargon, have quite small roles that grow more prominent but are surprisingly forgettable alongside the two central powerhouse performances. Rita Corday similarly does her best with her slight role as Countess Elga, convincingly bringing out her distress at being a “wife by force” and the brutality of the Count’s “activities.”

Even though the first two films are available on UK home release for the first time, there are few supplements on these discs. The first disc has audio commentaries by Kevin Lyons and Jonathan Rigby while The Black Castle gets one by Kim Newman and Stephen Jones. All are as fun and informative as you would expect from the contributors with plenty of information provided on the cast and crew. The focus of this boxset is clearly on the films themselves and, though they are arguably unessential and go almost exactly as you expect they will, there is a pleasurable comfort to them. Karloff’s screen presence is always a delight to watch and they are all so short, that they would make a great triple bill to pass the time on a sunny afternoon.

Universal Terror with Boris Karloff in Night Key, The Climax & the Black Castle