Tweety in the Coal Mine

The Cat and the Canary (1927)
directed by Paul Leni
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Paul Leni was an art director first, and the man behind the camera second. The Cat and the Canary begins like an art director's fever dream, with a patriarch in a wheelchair reduced to the size of a small bird, shaking his cane at the cats and pill-bottles that fill the screen. The frames are in shadow, the silhouettes like ghosts. It's beautiful.

But the director's limitations assert themselves as characters arrive at the old dark house and everyone's static gestures make the movie what it was, before the art director began to imagine the Gothic possibilities of a rainswept mansion: a play. I don't remember title cards having such life before - they stretch and shimmer to make the fonts emotional - but the plot is largely plotless, pockmarked by holes and disappointed by the grand beginning that so quickly devolves into by-the-numbers vignettes of cheap comedy, soft horror, and light romance.

An odd precursor to the peephole Porky's genre, but also a movie about greed that never traps its protagonists with the killer. Everyone is free to leave when he chooses, to forfeit the diamonds but save his own life. If nothing else, the option makes everyone's willingness to be haunted a more interesting take on avarice, and I think choice is very much missed in so many of the later films that The Cat and the Canary inspired.