Programme notes CH 03 — The Haunted Screen
Invisible Ghost
A widower who still lays a place for the wife who left him goes out walking at night, and every few months somebody in his house is strangled.
Monogram gave Joseph H. Lewis Bela Lugosi and a few sets, and Lewis, a decade before Gun Crazy, treated it as a chance to move a camera. Mr. Kessler keeps an anniversary dinner every year for a wife who ran off, talking to her empty chair while the servants serve it. The house is the whole film, and Lewis shoots it through doorways, past banisters and over the furniture. Clarence Muse’s butler, Evans, is the one sane man in it, and the film lets him be. John McGuire plays two brothers, one executed and one who comes asking why. Watch the garden window.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Joseph H. Lewis
- With
- Bela Lugosi · Polly Ann Young · John McGuire
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Bela Lugosi twelve years apart in a house where somebody keeps dying. In 1929 he is the inspector who sits in the dark and waits for the killer to give himself away; in 1941 he is the killer, and has no idea. Same accent, same patience, the other side of the table.