Recensioni de* critic*

While not as epochal as Whale's "Frankenstein" (1930) or the equal of his two great horror comedies, "The Invisible Man" (1933) and "Bride of Frankenstein" (1935), it's an extremely credible entertainment that, creaking along at a smart pace, applauds itself with shrieks, thuds and thunderclaps.

Still the wittiest example of the genre that took its name, The Old Dark House assumes glittering and sometimes rabid new life in a first-class 4K restoration, screening on September 30 at the New York Film Festival. Suddenly, we can see every gray or ebony strip in the latticework of aged wood and smoke-stained plaster and billowing shadows that Whale and his team built into their production design. So when some bright young things pierce the darkness, they're akin to licks of flames.

This is the archetypal horror comedy, or would be had it ever been equaled. Ernest Thesiger is genius incarnate as the house's very nervous master Horace Fenn, while British stage actor Eva Moore is an exemplary crone as his religious fanatic sister. The movie brims with quotable dialogue, including the immortal line "Have a potato." The restoration, produced by U.S. outfit Cohen Media, looks dazzling.

Deliciously atmospheric with Whale's signature wit, The Old Dark House is a suspenseful brew of gothic and comedy.

As much as The Old Dark House is a send-up of Gothic horror conventions, it works equally well as a horror movie, thanks in no small part to Whale's visual sensibility, which emphasizes strange textures and surfaces: curved mirrors, cobwebs, over-sized shadows.

The film stands tall in the lineage of haunted mansion horror, even though it's also a parody of that sub-genre—but leave it to Whale to make a movie that succeeds at multiple, often contradictory, purposes.

Least-touted of Whale's horrors is 1932's The Old Dark House, which strands a terrific ensemble cast (including Karloff) in the secluded manor of some Welsh gentry, each family member more degenerate than the last. In the character of Charles Laughton's knighted bigmouth industrialist, still smarting from slights before his social rise, Whale's sensitivity to class shows—a gift no more common then than now.

Whale directs with undisguised staginess, which somehow supports the conceit. Hitchcock's Number 17 is a much livelier and more artful film in a similar style, but the Whale stays pleasantly in the mind—it could be the most personal film of this eternally unlucky filmmaker.