Programme notes CH 03 — The Haunted Screen
The Thirteenth Chair
A medium is brought to a Calcutta mansion to name a murderer, and in the dark of her séance the killer strikes again.
Two years before Dracula, Bela Lugosi is the man in charge: the inspector of police, all patience and a little menace, waiting for somebody to slip. Tod Browning’s first talking picture is Bayard Veiller’s Broadway séance thriller, with a circle of guests, joined hands, the lamps put out, and a man dead in his chair when they come back on. Margaret Wycherly, who played the old fortune-teller on the stage, plays her again here, a mother who will say anything to keep her daughter off the gallows. Browning holds the camera still and lets the dark rooms do the frightening. Watch the hands on the table when the second séance begins.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Tod Browning
- Photographed by
- Merritt B. Gerstad
- With
- Margaret Wycherly · Bela Lugosi · Joel McCrea · Mary Forbes · Conrad Nagel · Holmes Herbert
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Tod Browning four years apart, both times staging a performance for an audience that does not know it is being fooled: Echo throwing his voice into a parrot, Madame La Grange calling the dead into a dark room. The first time the trick is the crime; the second time it is how the crime is solved.
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.