The Thirteenth Chair

Dir. Tod Browning

72 Minutes

USA

1929

Starring: Conrad Nagel, Leila Hyams, Margaret Wycherly, Helen Millard, Holmes Herbert, Mary Forbes, Bela Lugosi

**/*****

First sound film from a personal favorite, Tod Browning. Watched about a year ago and found it quite frustrating but felt the need to give it a second go-round. My suspicions and trepidations were not altered. This is quite the slog both as a mystery and as an exercise in style, and one can almost see everyone from Browning to the cast struggling with the new technology. It is a very simple premise: there is a murder and a famous medium is invited to (hopefully) trap the killer into revealing who he or she is. There is some fun early on as the medium (played by Margaret Wycherly) explains several of the tricks that she uses in her line of work (mostly involving the "rap once for yes, two for no" system (ooo, sound film!)), but after there is another murder things move at a glacial (and very stagey) pace as a detective (played by a pre-Dracula Bela Lugosi) gives long speeches about his investigation. Conclusion weirdly foreshadowed by an oddly framed crane shot as the investigation goes under way, in a "blink-or-you-miss-it" moment.

On the first viewing, I found this quite disappointing, and my excitement to discover a "new Browning" film was hindered by a quite lousy picture. But on this viewing I found it a bit more of a foundation for later, better work, both for Browning and just for this type of horror-mystery film in general. Browning seems to be getting a bit accustomed to the new technology, and he would come back into his own again with horror films like Dracula, Freaks, The Devil Doll, and Mark of the Vampire, and even a drama like Fast Workers which is not so terrible). And it is an early example (though not the first example) of the "old dark house" subgenre. There is just no particular style or risk or anything very interesting visually taking place. Two major pieces of action actually take place in a mostly dark frame, which is perhaps intriguing on a level of exploring the newfangled sound devices but does not make for very interesting viewing in a visual medium. I appreciate having seen the film (twice now), but I think my revisits of the film are finished for the time being.

August 26th, 2019