This is the third part of a three-part column. Read part 1 and part 2.
James Montgomery, whose Nothing but the Truth was one of the huge hits of Broadway’s 1916–17 season, lived to the age of 78, dying in 1966. But his career as a theater writer seems to have ended much earlier. He must have invested his royalties wisely and spent his later decades clipping coupons. A skilled writer of light comedy who also dabbled in musicals, he had several big successes in addition to Nothing but the Truth, including his debut play, The Aviator (1910), which was later transformed into the musical Going Up (1917) and has its own film history in both versions. There followed comedies including Take My Advice (1911) and Ready Money (1912). And after Nothing but the Truth, Montgomery really hit the big time when a play of his that had folded on its way to Broadway was turned into the book for the musical Irene (1919). What with road tours, revivals, and film versions, the girl in the “sweet little Alice blue gown” must have sent her creator many a hefty royalty check. While awaiting their arrival, Montgomery provided sketches for at least one edition of the Ziegfeld Follies, had a hand in the books of more modestly successful musicals such as Jerome Kern’s The City Chap (1926), and was involved with no less than two musical versions of his most popular play.
How two musical adaptations of Nothing but the Truth came to be written in such a short time span is puzzling; probably the Depression, combined with the first adaptation’s lack of success, tempted desperate producers to make a second try. And it may be that some contractual glitch offered a chance: Montgomery’s play is based on a novel of the same name by one Frederic Isham, and the second musical version began life in London, where it actually ran six months. So perhaps some discrepancy between the two countries’ copyright laws had an effect. In any case, the first of the two musical adaptations, in 1927, boasted a book cowritten by Montgomery and William Carey Duncan, with a score largely by Philip Charig and Irving Caesar, and was both produced and directed by the producer of the original play, H.H. Frazee, who had just scored a gigantic success with the musical No, No, Nanette (1927). Naturally, he wanted his new show to be linked in the public mind to his runaway hit (for which Caesar had also provided lyrics), so what could be more natural than to title his new musical Yes, Yes, Yvette? (Years later, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, in their nightclub act, suggested that a third work in the series might have been called If, If, Iphigenia.) But sequels rarely do as well as originals, and Frazee’s luck did not hold up: Yes, Yes, Yvette ran a bare month—thus clearing the way for a second try in 1932, when a British team, largely made up of unknowns, offered Tell Her the Truth. Their London luck, in the cold pit of the Depression, did not hold out in New York, where their adaptation fared even worse than Frazee’s: the show ran barely two weeks. Interestingly, Frazee was dead by then, and Tell Her the Truth’s lead producer was Tillie Leblang, boss of the giant agency that peddled unsold theater tickets for half price in the basement of Gray’s Drugstore, a popular Times Square hangout. But even half-price discounts didn’t save Tell Her the Truth.
On the silver screen, however, Nothing but the Truth was going strong. A silent version, apparently now lost, had come out in 1920 (as had silent versions of The Aviator and several other Montgomery works). The advent of sound brought a new Nothing but the Truth in 1929, starring Richard Dix, in a cast that included Ned Sparks, who had also appeared in the 1920 silent version, and boop-boop-a-doop girl Helen Kane, directed by Victor Schertzinger. (Since dubbing had not yet been perfected, Paramount also shot German, French, and Spanish versions of the film at its Joinville studios in France. The German version had the most notable cast, headed by the young Oskar Karlweis, later a significant figure on Broadway and in Hollywood.)
The Dix-Schertzinger version held the play in moviegoers’ minds till the prewar need for giddy comedies in the late 1930s paved the way for a new version, directed by sometime Broadway playwright-director Elliott Nugent, starring the then-highly-popular team of Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard. (We will meet this trio again when we get to our fourth repertory item.)
Though set in Florida, mostly on a yacht, in place of the original play’s Long Island weekend house, Nugent’s version is said to follow the original’s story much more closely than Schertzinger’s, which I haven’t been able to unearth. The 1941 script, by Ken Englund and Don Hartman, finds room for a fair amount of shipboard slapstick—including a quite surprising string of jokes suggesting that Hope’s character has transvestite tendencies. (Naturally, given the era, the yachting party also includes a mittel-European–accented psychoanalyst, played by Leon Belasco.) Nugent’s cast, which is strong on familiar faces, also includes Edward Arnold, Leif Erickson, Helen Vinson, Glenn Anders, Grant Mitchell, Rose Hobart, and, as Hope’s loyal manservant-cum-sidekick, Willie Best. Oddly, though Hope’s character is supposed to be strapped for cash, he’s the only one to bring a personal servant to the yacht.
After Nugent’s version, the comic premise of a man compelled to tell the truth for 24 hours lay fallow for a long time—though the late 1980s saw yet a third, abortive, attempt to turn Montgomery’s comedy into a Broadway musical: This time the collaborators were the Barnum team of Cy Coleman, Michael Stewart, and Mark Bramble; the project was cut short by Stewart’s death in 1987. One might say that Nothing but the Truth then slept fitfully until 1997, when it was picked up in a most improbable fashion by the handlers of yet another of filmland’s star comedians: Jim Carrey. Only Carrey’s collaborators, director Tom Shadyac and the screenwriting team of Paul Guay and Stephen Mazur, moved the details so far from Montgomery’s work that only the central premise—a man compelled to tell the truth for 24 hours—remained. In Liar Liar, the hero was not a stockbroker but an ambitious young L.A. attorney with an ex-wife and a son. And instead of the hero’s motive for honesty being a $10,000 bet, Carrey’s team gave him a supernatural motive: When the hero lies to get out of attending his small son’s birthday party, the son’s wish, as he blows out the candles, is that his father would stop lying for just one day. Magically, the wish is granted, leading to consternation at the law firm, a royal mess with a wealthy couple’s divorce case (which Carrey’s hero, to his regret, manages to win on a technicality), and a lot of physical comedy as Carrey tries to stop his ex-wife and son from flying to Boston, which ends with him landing in an airport baggage truck. Boasting both more slapstick and more overt sentiment than earlier versions, the film was well received but faded quickly from the public mind. And though the names of James Montgomery and Nothing but the Truth played no part in the film’s credits or in reviews of it, film and video scholars were quick to note that the premise of a man compelled to tell the truth through supernatural means had been used years before in a Twilight Zone episode called “The Whole Truth,” in which a used-car dealer acquires what turns out to be a haunted car, and must speak honestly as long as he owns it. No doubt Rod Serling was familiar if not with Montgomery’s play at least with the Bob Hope rendering of it.
The Admirable Crichton, Topaze, and Nothing but the Truth are all comedies that derive their varying hints of seriousness from their underlying social bite: class, money, privilege, and hypocrisy are the themes being tossed about. But our fourth specimen, The Cat and the Canary, is pure dessert, a melodramatic comedy confection whipped up in 1922 by actor-playwright John Willard. Willard’s acting credits are an interesting mix of musical and legit theater, including second leads in the star comedian DeWolf Hopper’s Gilbert & Sullivan company, for which he played, among other things, Strephon to Alice Brady’s Phyllis in Iolanthe. Though he wrote a string of plays in the 1920s and early ’30s, none of his later works had the success of The Cat and the Canary. A haunted mansion with hidden passageways, a bizarre will that leaves the mansion builder’s fortune to a vulnerable young woman, a sinister housekeeper (whom Willard names “Mammy” Pleasants!), an escaped lunatic from a nearby asylum, a masked figure that emerges from secret panels in the darkness—Willard clearly knew every trick of the genre, and he rolled them all into a thriller that, as befit Broadway’s Jazz Age style, laced its thrills and chills with comedy, much of it carried out by a hero who was a bumbling doofus instead of the usual dashing, square-jawed young prince.
The novel combination of laughs and shudders made The Cat and the Canary a gigantic success, on Broadway and nationwide. Willard allegedly held off selling the film rights because he was worried that by revealing the surprise ending, a widely seen film would endanger the play’s success. Smartly, he parted with the rights four years later, by which time it had nearly become a cliché among theater people, who regard it to this day as the quintessence of the “old dark house” genre.
Universal’s Carl Laemmle, the lucky bidder for the rights, knew exactly which director he should put in charge of The Cat and the Canary’s film debut. Paul Leni (born Paul Levi), a new arrival from Berlin, had made a hit internationally with his supernatural episode film Waxworks, in which the figures in a wax museum come to life. A painter and designer whose sets had made him a familiar name in the Berlin theater scene, Leni had revealed in his filmmaking an eerie ability to combine the frenetic extremes of expressionist art with ironic touches of humor. His elegant touch with The Cat and the Canary proves that Laemmle had found the right man for the job. The film’s very first moment perfectly encapsulates Leni’s style: A black-gloved hand brushes away thickly layered cobwebs to reveal the opening credits, lettered as if carved on a tombstone.
Cunningly, Leni uses the conventional exaggerations of silent-film comedy to parallel the more individualized extreme visual gestures that were the hallmark of German expressionist film. Creighton Hale, as the bumbling hero, wears black-rimmed spectacles that recall Harold Lloyd’s, while the close-up reaction shots of relatives expressing skepticism or disapproval of Laura La Plante’s muted hysteria as the heroine are so close to the double-takes of slapstick comedy that you half expect someone to get hit with a pie. At the same time, Leni provides some memorably ghostly, dreamlike moments: One particularly famous early shot, of an empty corridor with window curtains blowing in a breeze that seems to come from several different directions at once, was duplicated verbatim nearly two decades later in Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1946); the idea for the quotation may have come from Cocteau or from his film’s brilliant designer, Christian Bérard.
Like Willard’s play, Leni’s film was a resounding success with both critics and public. The New York Times reviewer, praising the ease of Leni’s style, suggested that other Hollywood directors should see the film to learn “how a story should be told.”
Leni’s success with The Cat and the Canary not only boosted his prestige but also confirmed to Universal that horror, suitably salted with comic relief, would prove a profitable path. Director James Whale, who often cited Leni’s Cat and the Canary as an inspiration, became Universal’s principal hand for steering such movies in the early sound era—including, along with Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein, The Old Dark House (1931), now a cult classic. Leni himself went from The Cat and the Canary straight on to the romance touched with grotesquerie of The Man Who Laughs, based on Victor Hugo’s novel, which Universal had originally intended to star its king of the grotesque, Lon Chaney, but made instead with Conrad Veidt, an alumnus of Leni’s German film Waxworks. (Veidt’s impeccably expressionist credentials included his appearance as Cesare the somnambulist in the granddaddy of all expressionist films, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.) From Hugo’s imaginary Tudor England, Leni moved back into modern mystery with the early Charlie Chan film The Chinese Parrot (now lost), and with The Last Warning (1928), a part-talkie with a backstage theater setting, intended as a follow-up to The Cat and the Canary. Based on yet another Broadway comedy-thriller by one Thomas B. Fallon, The Last Warning largely failed to thrill, though Leni’s directorial style and the stylized camerawork of Hal Mohr drew some critical praise. Perhaps Leni was uncomfortable with sound; reviewers complained that the dialogue passages, which are now lost, slowed the film down. Or perhaps it was the material, which makes little sense in synopsis. (Fallon’s play was itself based on a novel by a writer with the resplendent name of Wandsworth Camp, known to historians of children’s literature as the father of Madeleine L’Engle.) In any case, The Last Warning suffered the ignominy of most attempted sequels. For those of us interested in theater, all that remains worth noting aside from the reteaming of Leni and La Plante is the presence, in a secondary role, of John Boles, whose good looks and rich singing voice would shortly make him a major screen presence in musicals such as The Desert Song and Rio Rita.
The Last Warning was also the last film of Leni’s tragically brief career, truncated by his sudden death on Sept. 2, 1929, of blood poisoning caused by an infected tooth. His death temporarily halted Universal’s plans for an all-talking remake of The Cat and the Canary—a delay that may have contributed to La Plante’s becoming unavailable to re-create her role in the newly audible medium. At any rate, the studio regrouped, assembling a cast headed by Helen Twelvetrees and Raymond Hackett under the direction of an old silent-movie hand, Rupert Julian. Among the supporting players were Montagu Love (who had just played opposite La Plante in The Last Warning), Jean Hersholt, Neil Hamilton, Blanche Friderici, and, as Annabelle’s sassy city cousin, Lilyan Tashman, an ex–Ziegfeld Follies showgirl whose penchant for dating millionaires led Lorenz Hart to quip “And Lilyan Tashman/ Is not kissed by an ashman.” To make clear that this would be in no way a remake of Leni’s film, Universal changed the title to The Cat Creeps.
The result seems to have won a modicum of critical praise and to have been moderately successful. More than that we don’t know, because The Cat Creeps is now a lost film—one of many from its era that has failed to survive. We do have a Spanish-language version, shot on the same set but of course with an entirely different cast and director, released under the title La voluntad del muerto (The Dead Man’s Will). The disappearance of The Cat Creeps has been another stroke of bad luck for the reputation of Helen Twelvetrees, whose talent, according to cognoscenti, far outstripped her now rather faded reputation. As if adding insult to injury, Universal reused the title The Cat Creeps in 1940, for a conventional horror film unrelated in any way to the story of Willard’s play and its various movie versions.
But before Universal could repurpose Williard’s original title, his property migrated to Paramount, where the team of Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard—with Elliott Nugent at the helm as with their version of Nothing but the Truth—turned out a highly successful version of The Cat and the Canary that, if not in so fully achieved a style as Leni’s silent, has a lively energy and wit of its own, nicely balancing chills with wisecracks. In lieu of the nondescript sad-sack hero whom Willard and the makers of the first two film versions named Paul Jones, Hope plays Wally Campbell, a radio actor whose sincerity is forever doing battle with his egomaniac thirst for recognition, and whose constant stream of wisecracks clearly stems from a frantic insecurity about himself and his place in the world. Nugent cunningly cast some actors with horror-film associations in key roles: George Zucco is the stiff-jawed family lawyer and Gale Sondergaard, on her way to the Spider Woman series of B pictures, is the eerie housekeeper, called “Miss Lu” in this version. Nugent and his screenwriters, Walter de Leon and Lynn Starling, moved the old dark house from the mountains of upstate New York to a fogbound Louisiana bayou, with family members arriving by rowboat for the reading of the old miser’s will. The team also gave Goddard’s character, now named Joyce Norman, a little more spunky assertiveness than the tremulous ingenue La Plante embodies, as well as an occupation (fashion sketch artist). John Beal, Nydia Westman, and Douglass Montgomery round out the family portrait, which is topped off by the presence of Elizabeth Patterson, as hyper-nervous Aunt Susan, the same role she played a decade earlier in The Cat Creeps. As with the Hope-Goddard-Nugent version of Nothing but the Truth, the film’s overall geniality and its light-footed switches from scares to laughs carry it through. If it’s unlikely to be mistaken for high art, it nonetheless offers audiences a good time.
Which is more, perhaps, than can be said for the most improbable recycling The Cat and the Canary has yet received: a 1978 Technicolor version, shot in England with a largely British all-star cast, written and directed by—I hope you’re sitting down—New York’s own Radley Metzger, the onetime king of soft-core porn. Unlikely as the mismatch of artist and material seems, it had its basis in Metzger’s hunger for artistic legitimacy. Though mainly booked in less-than-reputable movie houses, Metzger’s ventures into erotica, like Camille 2000 and The Lickerish Quartet, had made a point of featuring lavish production values, lush cinematography, and a degree of striving toward serious artistic cachet. Also, as his producer, Richard Gordon, explained, the work had a familiar title, had never been filmed in Technicolor, and, being a murder mystery, would naturally be set in Britain. (That the work was wholly American and had no British links whatever did not seem to strike him or Metzger as a problem.)
Taking a leaf from Nugent’s book, Metzger moved the action forward to the mid-1930s, and made two further innovations: As the dead man’s lawyer, Crosby, a role normally played by a man, he cast the beloved Dame Wendy Hiller. And rather than have her read the will, which has supposedly been drawn up before the old man’s death 20 years earlier, Metzger invented, with a painful stretching of plausibility, a cinematic record, with simultaneously recorded sound, of the deceased (Wilfrid Hyde-White) reading his own testament out loud to his future potential heirs. In a final free-form gesture, Metzger reconceived dithering Aunt Susan as a staunch, grim-lipped big game hunter, played by Honor Blackman in full-on Avengers mode.
Neither these innovations nor the oddly jumbled cast helped Metzger strike any sort of balance between mystery and comedy, though he tried painfully hard for the latter, usually missing. Carol Lynley and Michael Callan, as Annabelle and her hapless Paul, seem to have come from a different film as well as a different nation. The others, who include Daniel Massey, Peter McEnery, Olivia Hussey, Edward Fox, and Beatrix Lehmann as the ghost-loving housekeeper, fit together well enough but can’t seem to animate the material, which never takes off despite Metzger’s efforts to load the film with violent and macabre effects (which fill the function of the erotic byplay in his more notorious films).
Undoubtedly, when our theaters get back in business, someone will stumble on The Cat and the Canary, as they will on the other three plays I’ve spoken of here, and a revival or, heaven help us, a revisal will occur. Whether it succeeds or not, it will probably give movie producers ideas, and the cycle will start all over again. What was it the humorist S.J. Perelman said was the most important part of the movie business? “Stealing the property.” Or, at least, turning it into something the original author might have severe trouble recognizing.
