FANTASIA OBSCURA: When Karloff Returned Home for a Ghoulish British Horror
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, a little trip home will do you some good, regardless of the outcome…
The Ghoul (1933)
Distributed by: Gaumont-British
Directed by: T. Hayes Hunter
In 1933, Universal Pictures was in trouble and hemorrhaging cash, something they tended to do fairly often. Despite its successes with its monster franchise films, the studio could not manage its cash flow as the Great Depression hit it hard. Layoffs hit the studio in the first half of 1933, with no one safe form getting the slip.
Times were such that one of their biggest stars, Boris Karloff, had just done some spectacular work in 1932 in The Mummy, where he played the resurrected Imhotep, but the studio could not afford to meet his salary demands, a 33% increase to one thousand dollars a week (over $19,000 in today’s value). Tensions were rising between Karloff and Carl Laemmle, Jr. where in retaliation for not getting his raise, Karloff refused to do The Invisible Man for the studio. (Had Karloff acquiesced, it’s safe to say we’d have gotten a much different movie.)
At that time, Gaumont-British had wanted to bring the Universal sensibility to the UK, trying a full 25 years before Hammer Films would make a go at it. They spoke to Universal about a loan out agreement for Karloff, where they bought his services for a film to be shot in England; Universal, obviously needing the money and probably thinking sending their star back home to England (where he was born under the name William Henry Pratt in 1887) would put him in a better place mentally, readily agreed.
And apparently, did so without thinking to look more closely at a ‘no compete’ clause in their deal…
Our film opens as we watch Mahmoud (D. A. Clarke-Smith) as he stalks Aga Ben Dragore (Harold Huth), following him to his boarding house. Mahmoud interrupts his prey just as he’s about to enjoy some absinthe, demanding that Dragore return the ‘Eternal Flame,’ a gem stolen from an Egyptian tomb two years earlier.
(Yeah, it’s two English guys in brown face; all said, it could be a lot worse…)
Dragore states that he sold the gem to Professor Henry Morlant (Karloff), an Egyptologist who was willing to spend £75,000 (about $6.4 million in equivalent sums today) to purchase the stone. Why he was willing to spend that much coin on a rock, he explains to his manservant Laing (Ernest Thesiger) what he intends to do with it, as he lays on his death bed.
Which he presumes will not be such:
Soon, Morlant is buried in an Egyptian themed tomb, which raises only a few eyebrows; hey, if it was good enough for F. W. Woolworth, why not…? We find out soon enough that Laing did not follow the Professor’s wishes, which raises the suspicions of Morlant’s solicitor, Broughton (Cedric Hardwicke), who gives off a nasty vibe of his own even when he does the right thing.
The right thing here includes handling his client’s estate, which means reaching out to Morlant’s heirs, his nephew Ralph (Anthony Bushell) and his niece Betty (Dorothy Hyson). The two don’t like each other, for reasons they allude to but never explain. They both travel together despite their sniping at each other to the house to settle the estate, accompanied by Betty’s roommate Kaney (Kathleen Harrison) and picking up along the way the local parson (Ralph Richardson in his first credited role). Meanwhile, Dragore and Mahmoud show up using false pretenses to pay their respect to the late professor.
Which seems like a wasted effort, as Morlant is up and about, and pissed at not having the Eternal Flame with him…
And yeah, it seems familiar because there’s more than a passing resemblance between this film and The Mummy. Both have Karloff questing for immortality, along with grave robbing by colonial powers who are fetishizing the cultures they take from (especially with Clarke-Smith and Huth’s characters, with both their lines and presence), though honestly, The Ghoul seems to pay more attention to these issues than the Universal film did, if even just peripherally. In fact, there’s a lot of heavy stuff the screenplay teases, including a scene where Kaney makes it pretty clear to Dragore in coded language that she’d love to be a ‘sub’ to his ‘dom’…
(Kids, ask your parents…)
Production of The Ghoul, with Karloff taking direction from Hunter, seated
Still, the film’s screenplay for all its veiled daring doesn’t quite boldly tell a story or go anywhere narratively. The characters take a few detours getting to Morlant’s place and sometimes lose the focus of the piece. The fact that Morlant doesn’t rise from his sarcophagus until 50 minutes into the 77-minute-long film shows just how much fat and gristle there was for the actors to chew mercilessly on the set.
There’s a case to be made that Hunter, who got his start and had most of his work in the silent era, just couldn’t handle dialog, and the number of set-ups of scenes that are heavily visual and stylistically acted out are cited for this. However, his effective use of the score by Louis Levy and Leighton Lucas refutes that claim. And in any event, Hunter’s shot set-ups and eye for incorporating his cast effectively into a set that screams German Expressionist far more effectively than all the Universal films that borrowed from those sources as well counters any such critique that could be leveled against him.
The cast certainly gave quite a bit to the film and its director. Harrison’s Kaney is of a type of character found more in comedies that actually finds her place here and fills it well. Hardwick’s Broughton is memorable as well, and the interplay between Karloff and Theisger keeps things going on set. The two worked well together before in other films, and their sharing scenes two years later in The Bride of Frankenstein made that film a true classic.
In terms of his own work, there is an account from the writer of Karloff’s officially sanctioned biography Stephen Jacobs there indicates that the actor enjoyed his sojourn back to England while the film was made. He spent two months there accompanied by his fourth wife Dorothy as he visited old sights and friends, as well as family, between shooting the film. He came back to Hollywood at the end of the trip refreshed and ready to go to do some of his most famous work for Universal.
You might be tempted to say the trip resurrected his relationship with the studio…
NEXT TIME: Getting sick is never fun, especially if it’s during war and you end up in in quarantine with bad company…
