The Old Dark House

There is a scene in The Old Dark House in which a hyena climbs into bed with Tom Poston. Poston is asleep and dreaming of a girl. “You have such short hair,” he murmurs. He tells her she doesn’t have to kiss his hand. Then he wakes, and the picture cuts to the hyena, and the hyena is stuffed. Mounted, glassy, growling away on the soundtrack while its face declines to participate. We cut to Poston. Then we cut back to the hyena, and hold, which is the part I have been turning over in my mind ever since. Once is an accident. Twice is a decision. William Castle wanted us to see the taxidermy, and I have no idea why he thought that was funny.

Castle is the man who wired theater seats to buzz during The Tingler and flew a plastic skeleton over the audience for House on Haunted Hill, so he was not a director burdened by shame. In the early sixties he wanted to remake James Whale’s 1932 chiller. So did Hammer, which had been strip-mining the old Universal horrors for half a decade. Instead of racing each other, they shook hands: Hammer’s Bray Studios, Hammer’s crew, Hammer’s British cast, Castle in the chair.

Filming wrapped mid-1962. Columbia dumped it into American theaters late the following year, in black and white. Because color prints cost money. Hammer waited three more years before slipping it out at home as the B-picture under A Big Hand for the Little Lady, a comedy western from Warners.

Everyone involved appears to have known.

The plot: Poston plays an American car salesman working in London who drives a delivery out to his eccentric flatmate Caspar’s ancestral pile. He arrives to find Caspar dead. The surviving relatives are chained to the house by a will that pays out to the last one breathing, an arrangement that would seem to invite murder, and does. Bodies accumulate, and nobody leaves.

The house is the best thing in the picture after the credits. Hammer knew how to build a ruin and got its money back by reusing these sets for years, but the small touches are what land: a staircase railing repaired with a raw tree branch, chamber pots and mixing bowls scattered across the floors to catch the rain coming through the ceiling. It is a fine old house. It is not a dark one. Whale’s mansion was all shadow and menace; this one is just dim. I guess “The Old Dim House” doesn’t have the same ring.

The credits are animated by Charles Addams. They are terrific and they ruin everything after them. Addams promises a comedy of ghouls who are perfectly pleasant to each other and lethal to everyone else. What follows is a man being buried in coal.

That would be Poston, who spends the picture running in place in the cellar with his legs spinning like Wile E. Coyote’s, wandering the halls in his boxer shorts, having his skull introduced to the walls, and emerging from all of it with nothing worse than a wide-eyed look of astonishment. A brass section blares at each pratfall to inform us that comedy is occurring. The larger problem is that a man who cannot be hurt cannot be threatened, and a house full of murderers becomes a house full of eccentrics with hobbies. Poston is a decent character actor stranded in a leading role that gives him no character to act, a Jimmy Stewart without the thing that made Stewart worth watching.

The British cast plays it straight, God bless them. Robert Morley and Joyce Grenfell perform as if the script were by Robert Bolt. And every so often you catch the movie the writer thought he was writing, as when a woman is found impaled through the throat with her own knitting needles, and a relative observes, “Must have been murder. She always knitted so carefully.” That line wants Whale, or Ealing, or anyone with a dry mouth and a slow hand. It gets a director shouting from off camera that this is the funny part. The corpse, incidentally, is a still photograph, held long enough for you to be certain of it.

Castle’s autobiography doesn’t mention this movie. He’d like it forgotten and I can’t blame him. Eighty-six minutes, no scares, and I never laughed, not once, not even privately. Terence Fisher was originally attached. Give him a Jimmy Sangster script, this house, this cast, and no Poston, and we might have had something.