Superfluous Style for Spooky Silliness
(originally posted on IMDb 29 October 2018)

"The Cat and the Canary" is one of quite a few old-dark-house horror comedies made around this time--a popular subgenre adapted to the screen from the stage, including John Willard's 1922 play of the same name for which this film and several later ones are adapted and the 1920 "The Bat," which Roland West made into two films, "The Bat" (1926) and "The Bat Whispers" (1930). Before Universal's more sinister 1930s shockers output, such as the trope-namer "The Old Dark House" (1932), "The Black Cat" (1934) and "The Raven" (1935), it seems to have been silly season for these haunted houses--relying on convoluted murder mysteries and the broad comedy of characters' fear of ghosts. None of which I find appealing, although exceptions such as West's "The Monster" (1925) and director Paul Leni's subsequent "The Last Warning" (1929) may be interesting for other reasons. And most of the subgenre's tropes are here: a midnight will reading, a windy (if not stormy) night, lunatic on the loose, suspicious and creepy housekeeper, murder mystery with an inheritance at stake, spending the night in the spooky house, characters running around scaring each other silly, hidden panels and passages and a ghoulish hand reaching out and grabbing people. That said, "The Cat and the Canary" does have style.

As opposed to West's "Bat" films, where the director appropriated techniques from the German silent cinema intermittently, "The Cat and the Canary" benefited from the sustained mastery of such stylization by émigré Leni, responsible for such intriguing pieces of Weimar cinema as "Backstairs" (Hintertreppe) (1921), part of the so-called Kammerspielfilme movement, which downplayed intertitles, and the Caligari-esque "Waxworks" (Das Wachsfigurenkabinett) (1924). Coming to directing from the art department, Leni demonstrated an eye for exploiting sets in his films. There's certainly some good use of the house here, including the tracking shot down the corridor with curtains blowing, but not as much as I might've hoped for. The cinematography, on the other hand, is a highlight. The shadowy lighting is practically entirely responsible for the haunting atmosphere. The beginning is brilliant, too, with superimpositions, the aforementioned hallway shot and a POV tracking shot of someone tampering with the contents of the safe--all of which lend the otherwise dull exposition some interest. Some high and low-angled shots hardly seem motivated, but otherwise this is a consistently well-photographed late silent film. The tinting/toning in the prints available on home video today look nice, too, and there's some creative title card movement effects.

The doctor plays a strange part here, and the crazy thing is that we never discover the diagnosis to the mystery of the sanity or lack thereof of the West family.