Seven Footprints to Satan (1929)

I was hoping for more from this picture, but that may be due to my age and background. Back in the early 1960’s I luxuriated in the pulp fiction revival brought about by the rediscovery of Edgar Rice Burroughs. (I still remember fondly the paintings by Roy Krenkel, Jr. and Frank Frazetta that adorned the covers of the Ace paperbacks I collected fervently. In fact, I’m looking at four of them now. But I digress.) After ERB made the scene, Robert E. Howard, Kenneth Robeson, Maxwell Grant, and other pulp magazine scribes returned, among them A. Merritt, and my favorite among the Merritt titles was the 1927 Seven Footprints to Satan. As much as I enjoyed it 50-odd years ago, I’ve haven’t reread it so I don’t know how the plot compares to that of the film written and directed by Benjamin Christensen, but the movie seems sillier than anything I would have liked as a 14 year old.

In the film, Jim (Creighton Hale) has inherited a fortune and wants to spend a good chunk of it exploring Africa. His girlfriend Eve (Thelma Todd) and his Uncle Joe (DeWitt Jennings) want him to stay home and do what sensible millionaires do—seek the Republican nomination for the presidency (joke), but he is determined to do the doctor-Livingston-I-presume thing.

The night before his departure, Jim and Eve are stolen away from a dinner party and taken to a mysterious mansion, the inhabitants of which are devil worshippers looking for a human offering to their deity, and Eve looks like she’ll fit the part perfectly. 

The couple is subjected to the usual run of old dark house gimmickry, including hidden rooms, sliding panels, disguised doors, threatening situations, and an assortment of Satanists so odd looking you’d think that Fellini was the casting director. (Character names include The Spider, The Old Witch, and The Dwarf.) It all wraps up in the kind of conclusion that makes genre film lovers want to put a boot through the screen.

 Hale is fine as the rich nerd who finds surprising heroism when he has to dig for it. The character is essentially the one he played in 1927’s The Cat and the Canary, a similar film. Thelma Todd is the delight of the cast, especially if you know her primarily from her talkies. She’s quite convincing as both bright girlfriend and terrified heroine. She’s slimmer than you’re used to her being and much prettier.

The rest of the cast includes Sheldon Lewis, William V. Mong, Nora Cecil, Kalla Pasha, Harry Tenbrook, Cissy Fitzgerald, Angelo Rossitto, and an uncredited Loretta Young as one of Satan’s victims.

The picture was shot by Sol Polito and edited by Frank Ware.

Seven Footprints to Satan is a moderately entertaining old dark house comedy/mystery, if that’s what you’re looking for. It’s far better than The Bat but nowhere as good as The Cat and the Canary. Perhaps the source novel isn’t as suspenseful as I remember. Perhaps Christensen’s witchcraft wasn’t as strong when he worked in America.

The House of Darkness (1913)

                                            This one-reel “shocker” was directed by D.W. Griffith from a scenario by Jere F. Looney and filmed by G.W. “Billy” Bitzer for the Biograph Company. Pretty good credentials, yes? Add to that the names of Lionel Barrymore and Lillian Gish in the cast and, even at its abbreviated running time, you’d expect to have a solid if unpretentious entertainment. And you do.

But there’s a sadness that underlies the film’s suspenseful little story. It’s the sadness that is the lives of the “unfortunate” patients who exist in mental hospitals.

We meet two such. A woman has lost a child in infancy. When the attendants come to take her away, she is holding an empty blanket as if it were a baby and swaying it in her arms. 

At the hospital, Griffith show us two scenes that will have meaning as the movie progresses. In one, an aggressive patient hears a nurse playing the piano (Lillian Gish) and the music hath charms to sooth the savage breast. We also see a nicely realistic moment as one of the doctors flirts with and then proposes to one of the nurses.

Soon the aggressive patient (Charles Hill Mailes) gets into another fight with a fellow unfortunate. As the guards try to return him to his room, he somehow locates a gun and escapes, moving toward the doctor’s house. How does he know where the doctor lives? This is no explained, but when he arrives there we see him hiding behind a tree on the left side of the screen. He then carefully slips toward us, moving carefully around the tree’s trunk. First we see part of his face peering around the wood, then half of his face, and then he moves toward the camera and glides past it, as if he were sneaking past our left shoulder. The moment will be familiar to anyone who has seen Griffith’s 1912 gangster picture, The Musketeers of Pig Alley, in which this shot was first used.

The Unfortunate peers through the window for a few moments watching the doctor’s wife (Claire McDowell) before he steps into the room and threatens her with the gun. Suspense builds as we’ve seen evidence of his violent temper and fear the worst. 

But before anything bad can happen, the wife piano plays the piano, the man calms down, the doctor (Lionel Barrymore) and the guards arrive, and the Unfortunate is returned to the hospital where, despite his violent escape, he is left free to roam the grounds and, supposedly, get into another fight.

Just a few years later and Barrymore would have played the Unfortunate and Gish the wife. Of course, a few years later and Griffith was no longer directing trifles like this. What we see is like a rehearsal for things to come.

L'orgie romaine (The Roman Orgy, 1911)

In The Pirates of Penzance, when Major-General Stanley sings that he can “quote in elegiacs all the crimes of Heliogabalus,” he hadn’t seen Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s famous painting “The Roses of Heliogabalus” (it wouldn’t be created until nine years after the operetta’s premiere in 1879), but film director Louis Feuillade must have. Rumor had it that the emperor Heliogabalus invited guests to dine one day and then buried them alive in flower petals when a false ceiling opened releasing a deadly bower.

This incident is referenced in Feuillade’s A Roman Orgy, although no one is killed by bower power.

The film is short and presents Heliogabalus as a raging psychopath. We see the last afternoon of the emperor’s life in five scenes. Although there is much action within the frame, the camera is static and stationed as if it were the audience for a staged drama. 

Scene 1: Rome, the year 218.

“The debauched emperor presides over a congregation of women whose job it is to determine the dress and duties of the courtesans.”

Guards keep watch over a roomful of women who pet each other and snuggle while Heliogabalus examines them and nods his approval. The women fawn over his every word and toss petals in the air as he leaves. The emperor is dressed as one of them.

Scene 2:

“Heliogabalus’s bath.”

Gender non-specific youths give him manicure and pedicure. Musicians play and sing. The emperor rewards the manicurist with a kiss on the head but when the foot mechanic scratches him, Heliogabalus orders him thrown to the lions. 

Scene 3:

“Above the Coliseum floor.”

Emperor and court look down on the lions, which are fairly lethargic. The youth is shoved in through the gates and immediately rushes out of frame right. The lions follow and we assume rip him to pieces off screen. 

Scene 4:

“After the sacrifice, the banquet and the orgy.”

We see a roomful of people hoisting their wine cups in the air and occasionally even taking a sip. General lollygagging. Two women enter and climb on the table to dance, although it’s mostly posing. Petals start to fall, “but suddenly, a frightening howl” and “Heliogabalus unleashes unexpected guests.” The “guests” are a pack of lions. The banqueters rush off and the lions follow listlessly.

Scene 5:

“The courtiers decide to put an end to the reign of madness and vice before which they have trembled”

They surround Heliogabalus, shouting at him and waving their arms about threateningly, then leave him alone. The Praetorian guard enter. The emperor begs for his life but they shove him off screen and do him in. One of the guards beheads him, again off screen, and the gang leaves with what we are to assume is Heliogabalus’s head on a pike.

Thus ever to tyrants.

The film stars Jean Aymé as Heliogabalus and features Louise Lagrange, Luitz-Morat, Renée Carl, Edmond Bréon, and Léonce Perret. It was produced by Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont. 

It is well-costumed and acted and generally good enough that you wish it ran for longer than 11 minutes, although if it were much longer it might climb to the top and then go over.

The Wicked Darling (1919)

Between her screen debut in 1912 and her last appearance 20 years later, Priscilla Dean made 88 movies. The only one with any claim to fame is The Wicked Darling, one of the seven pictures she made in 1919, and it isn’t remembered because it’s a Priscilla Dean starring vehicle but because it marked the first time Tod Browning and Lon Chaney worked together.

Dean plays Mary Stevens, a young woman who, as they used to say, is no better than she has to be. She is a thief and pickpocket working with “Stoop” Connors (Chaney), a rough street villain who combines the more charming qualities of Fagin and Bill Sykes.

Browning wastes no time in letting us know why the film’s working titles was “The Gutter Rose” as he opens the picture with a cross fade from a flower in the street to Mary, who manages to steal a string of pearls at a fancy reception. When her victim realizes who the culprit is, Mary rushes away. She evades her pursuers by slipping through the open front door of a brownstone. (The house’s occupant, Kent Mortimer [Wellington Playter, a stolid, blocky actor] has left if open while he pays for a cab ride.)

When Kent finds her in his house, Mary makes some weak excuses for being there and then begins to play up to the apparently wealthy man. He appears to be slightly older than she, but not so much that flirting seems too obvious. She friendlies him along with the intention of returning later to burglarize the house. When she leaves, she sneaks photos of Kent’s girlfriend out with her.

Dean may seem to a modern audience like an unusual choice to play a lady crook who uses her good looks to put potential male victims off their guard. Her face is interesting but not really pretty. Her profile if flat and, while the sharpness of her features are not pronounced enough to be described as “hatchet-faced,” her face is definitely long.

As a result of her association with Kent, Mary decides to go straight. She falls in love with the guy and takes a job as a waitress. Her affection for him is shown when he comes in to eat at the café where she works and she inadvertently drops his steak on the floor. We know that for other customers, a quick brush-off is all that’s required to make a dropped steak edible, but for Kent, she goes back to the kitchen for a fresh one.

Browning’s humor is also evident after Kent loses his money and is reduced to living in a cheap boarding house. (Yes, it’s one of those stories.) He’s shot on the street by Stoop and when he goes back to his room he tries to keep his landlord from finding out about his wound. (He’s several weeks behind in the rent. I told you it was one of those stories.) Browning gives us a shot of Kent bleeding into his chamber pot in an attempt to keep from staining the floor.

The plot is fairly routine for melodramas of this period. Stoop and his minions are set on dragging Mary back into a life of crime—or at least get those stolen pearls from her--and will do what they need to do to Kent in order to accomplish this goal. Stoop sometimes seems to be in love with Mary, but mostly he just wants to reclaim something he thinks belongs to him. It’s an illogical motivation that Chaney will rely on frequently in the years to come. Other of his characters will pursue petty and seemingly pointless goals out of pure obsession.

The film’s two points of interest are its naturalistic depiction of street life and small time crime immediately after The Great War, and Chaney’s growing confidence in larger roles. Browning’s eye for shabby gentility and gutter existence is as keen as D.W. Griffith’s in Musketeers of Pig Alley or Raoul Walsh’s in Regeneration. His streets don’t look like sets dirtied up to approximate the real things. The stench of decay and crushed dreams comes right off the screen.

Unfortunately, one of the tools Browning uses is a reliance on racial stereotypes. One of Stoop’s partners in crime is Fadem, a Jew with a large nose and money-grubbing ways. Actor Spottiswoode Aitken lays the clichés on so thickly you can almost hear him moaning “Oy” every time he enters the frame.

As for Chaney’s performance, no one played intensity like he did. His Stoop Connors is such an ominous presence it’s hard to imagine him ever seeming to be a nice guy. But lots of actors can play tough. What Chaney played so well—and didn’t seem to mind playing—was the kind of low-life that makes your skin crawl just to be near him. He snivels and creeps so well. He may be the best film actor ever at presenting the pettiest elements in human nature, sort of an Elisha Cook, Jr. who looks fit and strong enough to be a tiger but prefers to be a cockroach.

The Wicked Darling only rewards viewers who want to follow the Browning/Chaney partnership from its beginnings, or those with a sociological interest in the years immediately following World War I. As a stand-alone entertainment it is lacking in almost every way.