Movie Night!

A double feature of YouTube’s offerings from the 1930’s yielded a strange dichotomy of performances by two actresses of whom I’ve previously never heard.

DOUBLE DOOR is a 1934 conte cruelle directed by Charles Vidor. Mary Morris, in her only film role, plays the matriarch of a 1910 ridiculously rich family who lives in, and are practically prisoners of a Fifth Avenue mansion. Ms. Morris is intense and wicked…wicked……WICKED! The film is worth watching for her malevolent portrayal alone.

The mansion itself is a mighty character in the film. The insistence of Ms. Morris to keep the windows tightly and thickly curtained, the heavy mahogany paneling, the ponderous doors of the rooms, all reinforce the feeling of barricade. But is it a barricade to keep the world out, or to keep the treasures in? And just what are the treasures? Family? Tradition? Breeding? Style? ………or just treasure? We find out clearly, if a bit implausibly.

JUGGERNAUT is a slouching 1936 British film starring Boris Karloff as a murderous, insufficiently funded doctor. It’s not good at all, but Mona Goya’s performance (she took her performing name from her favorite painter – I wonder if she asked permission) is an un-tasty ragout of hysteria, shrieking and frantic lurching. It’s a performance for which the Razzies were later created.

YouTube; “It’s like a box of chocolates.”