THE 13TH CHAIR [1929]

 BELA LUGOSI'S BIRTHDAY CONTINUES WITH HIS FIRST TALKIE! 

It's not easy finding a Lugosi film I haven't seen before but here it is.  A hoary old stage play made into a stagey early sound film in 1929.  Before the play . . . er the film . . . starts, a man named Spencer Lee has been murdered.  When the movie begins, a social do is being held at stately Crosby manor.  Lee's friend Ned Wales is determined to find out who killed his friend so he has arranged for a medium named Madame La Grange to hold a seance.  When the lights go out for the seance, another person winds up dead.  More of a mystery, THE 13TH CHAIR still has a nice tinge of horror going on with the quite-lengthy seance scene.  Thankfully, unlike quite a few early talkies, THE 13TH CHAIR is actually quite watchable. 

Many of the actors certainly display that stiff, over-enunciated acting typical of such an early talkie but several of the actors are actually quite good:  Leila Hyams (FREAKS, ISLAND OF LOST SOULS does a nice job as Nellie, Margaret Wycherley (WHITE HEAT as James Cagney's "Ma") is flinty and wry as Madame La Grange, old reliable Holmes Herbert as Sir Roscoe Crosby is fine (and oddly would play the exact same character in the 1937 remake of THE 13TH CHAIR)  and veteran Conrad Nagel (THE DIVORCEE) is the least histrionic of the other men.  Bela Lugosi, whose voice we first hear in film history courtesy of this film) starts out business-like as Inspector Delzante but, by the end of the film, he's chewing the scenery in a delightful manner; brow-beating the suspects to within an inch of their lives! Tod Browning directs with a surprising amount of camera angles and changes of perspective (once or twice even breaking the 180 rule) as he's obviously trying to make this stage-bound mystery more cinematic; we're only two years away from Browning directing Lugosi in a certain Universal vampire movie.  I expected this to be a real slog but it ended up being quite fun and entertaining -- if incredibly stagey as the entire film takes place on one set.  THE 13TH GUEST has a place among those other stage barnstormers that were made into films in the 1920s and 1930s such as THE BAT, THE CAT AND THE CANARY, SEVEN KEYS TO BALDPATE and the rest.