The Cat and the Canary 4K 1927 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

The relatives of eccentric millionaire Cyrus West, who died twenty years ago, gather at his gloomy estate to announce his will.

Review 4K Movie

Although I am not a big fan of silent films, of the masterpieces of that era, I recognize and truly love only The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the films of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau and Charlie Chaplin, and Metropolis. However, I recently discovered another excellent director from that period, Paul Leni. Although this director has only one universally recognized masterpiece to his credit, The Man Who Laughs, which is included in film textbooks, it would be a mistake to limit one's attention to this work alone. In addition to The Man Who Laughs, he also has another interesting detective story to his credit: The Cat and the Canary.

The plot of the film cannot be called original or a masterpiece. Fortunately, at that time, filmmakers were very successful in experimenting with the scary, surreal, unnatural, gloomy, and otherworldly in cinema, which was subsequently dominated in the 1930s by Gothic, truly frightening two-color imagery. Bright examples of this are Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, London After Midnight, and the same Caligari. The action of the film itself seems to wander around the surroundings of an old, “gloomy,” half-ruined castle, a gloomy mansion full of mysteries, eerie secrets, and mysterious corridors.

The line between scary and funny is the main selling point of this film. This technique was later successfully, and sometimes brilliantly, elevated to a pedestal by many outstanding comedians, who used this synthesis very, very successfully. And it is perhaps Leni who is responsible for creating this ‘synthesis’. The gloomy, oppressive, eerie Gothic-Hitchcockian atmosphere in the film is stunning, ' cat-like' grace, with a crazy, slightly slapstick bustle and a kind of madness similar to what happened in the Marx Brothers' comedy-burlesque films a little later.

The horror-investigation formula, if you can call the style of presentation that, works very well in the film - and although the film is not scary, and at times incredibly light, it still creates tension, with something mystical and phantasmagorical emanating from every scene, even where there is no hint of ‘mysticism’. Such is, apparently, the magic of cinema of the 1920s and 1930s: to scare without showing fear, to create tension without expressing tension, to make you shudder where there should be no shuddering!

As for the acting, I don't think there's any need for special discussion here - the acting was basically good, very good, with a high-quality range of emotions, truly believable emotions, although in some places you can see some exaggeration, a lack of seriousness towards the character, but after all, the era of silent films did not require maximum effort, the criteria rose sharply during the heyday of film noir. And here, without taking into account the obvious shortcomings, it is worth noting that the film really turned out well, and even if it seems silly and unnatural to the viewer, do not judge it harshly, because cinema was just beginning to rise to the “top,” and there was still a long way to go before reaching the level of The Maltese Falcon or Shadow of a Doubt. And if you really want to feel the “magic of fear” of 1920s cinema and be scared, watch Murnau's Nosferatu.