The last time I approached that Old Dark House – the titular edifice of a 1932 Hollywood thriller directed by the queer English filmmaker James Whale and founded on a novel by the English social critic J. B. Priestley—my eyes were not focussed on any particular visual detail. I was remarking generally on the house as a concretization of Priestley’s views on the condition of Britain after the so-called Great War, as the film and its source, Priestley’s Benighted (1927), are often understood: Interwar Britain as an empire haunted by its past and a kingdom lacking a vision as unifying as the largely unchallenged rule of its alleged heyday.
Not that British moviegoers, let alone US American audiences, would have considered this perspective, partially obscured by the retitling of the property, as being essential to the experience of the fun house-ghost train atmosphere the film conjures. Sure, the house, with its shadowy corridors, massive oaken doors and branching staircases, is as ill-lit as any old Gothic-fictional castle; but the unenlightened ones at the heart of this picture are its denizens, the backward, dim-witted and intractable Femms in whose midst we, along with a small group of unfortunate travelers, find ourselves.
Continue reading “Mirror/Lamp: “Significant Othering” in The Old Dark House (1932)”
Harry Heuser 