A Hammer horror comedy directed by William Castle. Just from that description, you know 1963’s The Old Dark House is going to be a strange animal.
Really, there had always been a knowing wink in even the director’s straight-up horror films. But many elements of this production are very much like a sitcom, and that includes having TV staple Tom Poston as the lead. As usual, he plays an affable guy and is perfect as a fish out of water who finds himself drawn into the titular locale in which a very strange family resides.
This American had been happily living in the apartment he shares in London with Peter Bull. When I say share, they have a bizarre arrangement in which only one of them is in it at any given time. Poston works days selling cars and crashes there at night, which is when Bull mysteriously takes off until morning. Eventually, Bull becomes very insistent Poston come to the old family mansion with the stated intention of the delivering the car Bull has bought, but with the underlying suggestion of a potential romance between his attractive sister and the Yank.
This is the kind of old, creepy mansion that would have been in humorless horror films three decades prior but which was only used for camp works like this by the early 60’s. It is the kind of place with secret passageway which only exists in movies such as this and the board game Clue. The roof leaks everywhere, resulting in a random assortment of pots on the floors throughout the place. Other pots contain dead plants, which had me wondering if this was somehow my house. There is also the obligatory quicksand pit, and I believe such an estate would not even be listed on Zillow without one. The house has fallen into such disrepair that a handrail on the staircase has been replaced with a tree branch, which I thought was a nice touch. Pushing the doorbell opens a trapdoor dropping the unsuspecting into the coal cellar, but this only happens to Poston and enough times that it seems he should anticipate it.
Once Poston finds his way upstairs from the basement into which he was deposited, he will discover Bull had died just an hour before and is now laid out in a coffin in the family room. Tellingly, we had already seen several more coffins in the basement, and there a great many potential victims waiting to fill those. There’s the eldest, Robert Morley, the gun-collecting head of the household. Joyce Grenfell is slightly dotty and knits incessantly. Mervyn Johns believes a second great flood could happen any day now and is preparing in the immense back yard an ark for this. Poston will find his attention diverted by two women, the comely Janette Scott and the cartoonishly oversexed Fenella Fielding. Bull appears again after death as the previously-undisclosed twin of the deceased.
Appropriate to this environment, this is an eclectic bunch. Grenfell is never knitting anything with the intention of a finished product, which is something I found interesting. The results supposedly go on for miles, with the colors of any given stretch documenting her mood at that point. As she demonstrates to Poston: “It’s just a way of expressing myself. This was a good day. This was an unhappy day.” Then there’s Johns, with his accommodation for Poston and Fielding on the ark to ensure the survival of humanity, regardless of what our protagonist might think of that. Fielding’s murderous father, Danny Green, is determined to prevent that, or any other coupling, from happening.
The script’s strangest element, the one everything here hinges upon, is any member of the family who hopes to inherit must be in the main room at midnight each day or they forfeit their share. Allegedly, this was because the founder of the family was a pirate and was so determined to prevent anybody else from following in the same career that they would make them landlocked permanently. There is one relative who ran away to America a long time ago, and Morley believes that girl became Poston’s mother. At least, Poston sure looks like the pirate in the painting in the entryway. Curiously, this revelation prevents neither Poston from pursuing Scott nor Fielding from pursuing him.
There will be a fair amount of murder, both attempted and successful. The means are largely ridiculous, such as a basin of hot water left in Poston’s room which turns out to actually be acid. Good thing his tie fell into it before any exposed skin did. That has a good payoff when Poston uses the tie to test a cup of mulled wine, leading Johns to speculate: “It must be an American custom. Does it make it taste any better?” Having tried it, he concludes it does.
Some bits fall completely flat, especially one where a hyena supposedly attacks Poston in his sleep. In close-ups, it is a taxidermized specimen being jostled by some people just out of shot. This was not even unintentionally funny, and it came close to taking me out of the movie. A long detour with the subplot about Johns’s ark is unnecessary and interminable. That Poston inexplicably imagines Fielding’s head in place of a seal’s does not improve the scene in the slightest.
The movie isn’t especially funny but, almost more importantly, it isn’t not not funny. The humor is sitcommy and doesn’t strain itself. One of the few lines that even made me chuckle is Poston’s response when Scott asks if he’ll be able to sleep: “Yes. I’ll count corpses.”
I don’t want it to sound like I didn’t enjoy The Old Dark House because, strangely enough, I did. I’m hard pressed to say why I did, but it was relatively harmless humor that wasn’t black so much as it was a light grey. It is associated in my mind with such similar entertainments as TV’s Addams Family. Go figure, the opening credits of this picture play out over images drawn by Charles Addams. In a welcome touch, he signs his own signature and does so in a hand made up to be like a hairy monster’s. For better or worse, it is the most surprising and unique thing that happens.
Dir: William Castle
Starring Tom Poston, Robert Morley, Janette Scott, Joyce Grenfell
Watched as part of Powerhouse/Indicator UK (region B) blu-ray box set William Castle at Columbia, Volume Two