October 26, 1974 (Noon): The Black Castle (1952) / Weird Woman (1944)

Synopsis: In 19th century Austria, Sir Ronald Burton (Richard Greene) travels to the castle of the fearsome Count von Bruno (Stephen McNally). Burton is in search of two friends who had disappeared after going to confront the count. Suspecting they have been imprisoned or murdered, he adopts the pseudonym Richard Beckett and arrives at the castle, where he is welcomed as a guest.

Count von Bruno is the sort of guy who wears an eye patch and keeps a pit filled with hungry crocodiles around in case he needs to throw some smart-alec into it. He enjoys pausing for diabolical laughter when he has done something particularly sinister, and has a couple of other accoutrements of the evil aristocrat: a mute, brutish assistant named Gargon (Lon Chaney, Jr.) and a beautiful, unhappy wife named Elga (Rita Cordray).

Burton finds himself attracted to Elga, and the two strike up a relationship. He also finds an ally in the Count’s dogsbody Dr. Messien (Boris Karloff). Burton promises Elga that he will find a way to take her away from the castle.

But Count von Bruno has been suspicious of his houseguest all along, and not only does he determine that Beckett is really Sir Ronald, but he also finds out that he has been moving in on Elga as well. He locks them up in his dungeon, but they are assisted by Dr. Messien, who provides them with a drug that will simulate death for 10 hours. Messien will help spirit away their bodies after the Count gives them up for dead.

Unfortunately, Count von Bruno discovers Messien’s plan, and he kills the doctor, then decides to bury Burton and Elga in 10 hours time — just as they will be regaining consciousness….

Comments: The Black Castle was the first feature directed by Nathan Juran, who worked occasionally under the name Nathan Hertz; and it seems fair to say he had a successful career that varied a good bit in terms of quality. This film is actually a pretty good example of what he could do. It’s a workmanlike film, not flashy; a simple, competently-made programmer. Juran went on to direct a number of genre films, including some very good ones (The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, 20 Million Miles to Earth) and some that weren’t so good (The Brain From Planet Arous, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman).

Juran wasn’t a director with an identifiable style, but he was an able craftsman and even his lesser efforts had a professional sure-footedness about them.

This film hearkens back to Universal’s horror titles of the 1930s and 40s, and even boasts the presence of two of its biggest stars of that era, Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney, Jr. From that alone we should expect something interesting from the studio that once dominated the genre. But despite its trappings The Black Castle isn’t really a horror film at all. It’s a costume melodrama that echoes the horror films of Universal’s golden age without having anything new or memorable to say.

Tonally the movie most closely resembles Karloff’s own The Black Room, but with the showy bad-guy role going to McNally and Karloff relegated to playing the count’s conscience-ridden physician.

However, Karloff in his supporting role does far better than Lon Chaney, Jr. It had only been seven years since Chaney starred in his last Inner Sanctum mystery (1945’s Pillow of Death) and — to put it mildly — the years had not been kind to him. Here we find him playing Gargan, the count’s wild-eyed, nearly-mute house maniac. Bloated, sallow, no longer able to memorize dialogue, Chaney stumbles around and grunts, exactly the same way he would play Mongo in The Black Sleep a few years later, slumming it with Tor Johnson and John Carradine.

Richard Greene is a winning presence as Burton. He was best known for playing Robin Hood on his 1950s TV incarnation, and his insouciance is quite winning here.

Rita Cordray is pretty enough but never seems to find her character, and it isn’t clear how a woman as pure-hearted as Elga ended up with an evil count. Cordray doesn’t seem well-suited to period dramas, and indeed this appears to be her only one, having done most of her work in programmers like The Falcon in San Francisco and Dick Tracy vs. Cueball.

Weird Woman

Synopsis: Norman Reed (Lon Chaney, Jr) is a professor at Monroe College, specializing in the study of ancient cults and superstitions. While working at home on his book on the subject, Superstition vs. Reason and Fact, he gets a phone call from his neighbor Evelyn Sawtelle (Elizabeth Russell) who says she just saw his wife Paula (Anne Gwynne) walking home in the bitter rainstorm raging outside.

Reed says it’s not possible, because Paula had gone to bed some time ago. He goes upstairs to look and finds Paula in bed, and she says she hasn’t been up. Reed notices a pagan charm she has placed on the nightstand and angrily removes it, admonishing her for falling back to the pagan rituals she practiced in her native land. Reed later discovers mud on her shoes, indicating that she’d been out and had lied to him about it.

We learn that Paula is a native of the South Sea islands, and that she was seen as a powerful witch by the natives of her home island. In a flashback sequence, Reed meets Paula while is on the island doing research. He had met her a number of years earlier while a graduate student, and they hit it off again immediately. But when Reed steps across a line of charms against evil the islanders had set up, he is seized and nearly killed; only Paula’s intervention spares his life.

When Reed returns from the island to Monroe college, it is with Paula as his bride. This greatly upsets Nona Carr (Evelyn Ankers), who had believed she and Reed had been getting serious. Reed brushes this off, telling her it was nothing more than a “flirtation”.

Superstition vs. Reason and Fact is finally published to great acclaim, and Reed becomes something of a celebrity in the academic world. This is greatly concerning to Evelyn Sawtelle, who had been pressing her husband Millard (Ralph Morgan) to complete his own book in hopes that publication might help him secure the position of department chair. But the weak-willed Millard had only been pushed into completing the book by Evelyn. Nona, sensing an opportunity in his weakness, goes to Millard and tells him she knows he plagiarized large portions of his book from a student’s thesis. She convinces him to kill himself, then convinces Evelyn that Reed must have driven Millard to suicide in order to eliminate his competitor for department chair.

At the same time, knowing that Reed’s assistant Margaret (Lois Collier) is infatuated with him, Nona tells Margaret’s jealous boyfriend David (Phil Brown) that Reed has been taking advantage of her. She also spreads the rumor that Reed’s exotic wife is a witch.

Secretly following Paula on one of her late-night excursions, Reed discovers she has been visiting a graveyard, where she has been conducting strange rituals from her homeland. Confronting her, Reed destroys the charms she has been using, telling her that it’s all superstitious nonsense. But Paula insists that the charms were for his protection, and now that they’ve been destroyed, there’s nothing to keep evil away from either of them….

Comments: This the first Horror Incorporated broadcast of Weird Woman, which means we’ve now seen five of the six Inner Sanctum mysteries on the show, with only Strange Confession yet to make an appearance. Weird Woman is one of the better entries, sporting all the best-known hallmarks of the series: whispered stream-of-conciousness passages, a protagonist being aggressively courted by numerous women, and supernatural happenings that turn out to be just a red herring.

The movie is based on the Fritz Leiber novel Conjure Wife, which was something of a satire on the backstabbing world of academia. Weird Woman undercuts the satire and shoehorns the witchcraft subplot into the Inner Sanctum template: it offers a patina of the supernatural just long enough to get the audience interested, then retreats to a conventional murder plot and an explained-away ending.

Norman Reed is a typical Inner Sanctum protagonist in that he’s a respected and self-confident professional who doesn’t seem to notice the gaggle of beautiful women who are inexplicably in love with him. Reed is apparently an anthropologist (it’s never stated explicitly) who travels the world to study the religious beliefs of technologically backward cultures, yet has no respect for them, dismissing their beliefs as foolish superstition, something they should wise up and reject.

We’re told that Paula was a native of the island Reed was studying, and that she has abandoned her home and family in order to marry him, traveling halfway around the world to be a housewife in what must be to her a strange culture. Yet this sacrifice isn’t enough for him; he demands that she shed any trace of the culture she grew up in. The woman Reed demands she become is indistinguishable from Nona Carr or Evelyn Sawtelle or any of the other backbiting wives on campus, and it isn’t clear what attracted him to Paula in the first place. We don’t catch the slightest glimpse of Paula’s interior life, assuming she even has one; in fact, her decision to carry out pagan rituals turns out to be out of devotion to him, in order to protect him from the predations of others.

So vaguely identified is the south seas island Paula comes from that the screenwriters don’t bother to give it a name, and in fact “Paula” is her handle on the island as well as in the bucolic campus town she ends up in. Even by the standards of the 1940s Anne Gwynne could not be regarded as “exotic” in her looks, and she fortunately doesn’t attempt to adopt any sort of foreign accent.

I must pause for a moment to praise Inner Sanctum veteran Evelyn Ankers, whom I have derided many times for her forgettable performances. She is actually quite good as the conniving Nona Carr, and seems to be greatly enjoying driving men to suicide and plotting to ruin careers. It’s a shame she didn’t do more of that during her time at Universal.