An excellent merger of the then popular haunted house mystery with wise-cracking comedy, Paramount’s The Cat and the Canary was a rare genre excursion for the studio but one that has proved to be an endearing favourite. John Willard’s stage play had been adapted straight for both silent (The Cat and the Canary (1927)) and talkie (as The Cat Creeps (1930)) but here was reworked as a vehicle for vaudeville/radio comedian Bob Hope. Everyone else plays it straight while Hope – as a cowardly, smart talking, second rate actor – is as smart, motor-mouthed and self-deprecating as we’d expect in the role that was to boost his career to a whole new level. Paulette Goddard, who had come to prominence as the ingenue in her husband Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) and this same year co-starred in the all female The Women (1939), makes a gorgeous, funny and determined heroine. The supporting cast portray a range of stock characters – the dotty aunts, the rakish charmer, the lecherous would-be suitor – with George Zucco on top form as the grave, knowing, will reading lawyer and Gale Sondergaard as the doomy, dark, spiritualist housekeeper being particularly memorable. Zucco regularly appeared as a mad professor in such films as The Monster and the Girl (1941) and House of Frankenstein (1944) whilst Sondergaard, whose career was all but destroyed by the House of Un-American Activities Committee, is best remembered as Adrea Spedding, the Spider Woman in the Universal Sherlock Holmes film The Spider Woman (1944) and its sequel The Spider Woman Strikes Back (1946).
The horror mystery had become a staple of both stage and screen. The play had popularised elements that would become overused very quickly even by the end of the thirties. The mysterious house suddenly cut off from civilisation in the middle of nowhere in a gloomy locale; secret panels and underground tunnels for the leads to explore and for the killers to lurk; victims picked off one by one; the history of insanity; the mysterious mad killer; the cast of bizarre suspects and victims. Hope plays Wally Campbell, one of a number of mis-matched souls drawn to the gloomiest of old dark houses by the promise of the reading of a will. The gathering is whittled away by a killer, mainly seen as a clutching hand, who is ultimately revealed to be after the inheritance due Joyce Norman (Goddard), named as the rightful heir to the family fortune.
Hope is on sparkling form throughout, firing off one-liners in all direction giving the hoary assemblage of cliches that made up the plot renewed vigour and energy. Thanks to his self-deprecating humour and the witty, knowing script by Walter DeLeon and Lyn Starling that playfully disarms audience objections that they’d seen this all before. The Cat and the Canary seems a lot more inventive than its source material might have suggested. Hope never quite steals the show, his asides and witticisms never being allowed to crowd out the rest of the cast or to detract from the central story. It remains an old dark house thriller but isn’t afraid to poke fun at itself and to invite its audience to laugh along with it.
Perhaps this is why The Cat and the Canary still stands up today for audiences who perhaps wouldn’t sit still for the more earnest and serious haunted house mysteries of the time. The gags mean that we don’t have to take any of this silliness at all seriously, though DeLeon and Starling are canny enough to ensure that the film never lapses into outright parody. Today the sting has been taken out of the tail of such films, thanks in o small part to the likes of the Scooby-Doo cartoons which borrowed the basic plots week after week. Other films both of the time, like The Gorilla (1939), and later attempts, like Bloodbath at the House of Death (1984), that made the villains, red herrings, victims and plot all part of the joke just come across as silly and appeal to few but than fans of the comedians involved – the Ritz Brothers and Kenny Everett respectively in these examples. The Hope/Goddard team – his persona borrowed by subsequent comedians as different as Frankie Howard in The House in Nightmare Park (1973) and Gene Wilder in Haunted Honeymoon (1986), and she the victim who is actually more fearless and does as much detecting as her male counterpart – are as modern as the male/female teams in such disparate mysteries as Jonathan Creek (1997-2016) and Monk (2002-2009).
Pacily directed by Elliott Nugent (who had directed a number of Hope’s earlier films) and attractively photographed by Charles Lang, The Cat and the Canary looks great, provides enough old-dark-house chills for the fans and has Bob Hope, which was surely any film of the time’s most effective draw at the box office. Some of the gags may have dated but it still crackles with humour and it remains one of the finest and most effective blendings of horror and comedy.
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