T Hayes Hunter, “The Ghoul” (1933)
I had never heard of this film before and stumbled on it while looking for something else on Youtube. Boris Karloff plays Professor Morlant, an eccentric Egyptologist who long ago bought a mysterious jewel that bestows the gift of eternal life. Now dying, he gives his staff specific instructions on how he is to be buried and states the jewel must be buried with him. After his staff promise to obey him, Morlant soon carks it and initially he is lain in his coffin with the jewel as per his orders.
A young woman Betty (Dorothy Hyson) inherits Morlant’s property and she and a male cousin Ralph (Anthony Bushell) arrive for the reading of the will. Others arrive too – Betty’s older unmarried friend Kaney (Kathleen Harrison), Morlant’s Egyptian colleague Ben Dragore (Harold Huth) who plans to steal the jewel, a vicar Nigel Hartley (Ralph Richardson, in his first film role), Morlant’s old butler Laing (Ernest Thesiger) and solicitor (Cedric Hardwicke) – and soon enough they discover Morlant’s mansion is plagued by strange shadows, things going bump in the night and a ghoulish presence. Sure enough, Morlant has revived and discovers the jewel that was supposedly buried with him has been stolen. What happens then is the jewel passes from one person to another as Morlant pursues it.
The film contains as much comedy as it does horror, in which there’s very little of the supernatural: what has happened is that Morlant fell into a coma, was thought to be dead and after a several hours lying in a cool tomb, has recovered his strength if maybe not his wits. An amusing minor sub-plot develops when Kaney falls heavily in love with Ben Dragore, imagining him to be a Valentino-style desert sheikh which Ben Dragore, figuring she might be useful to his thievish scheme, does little to disabuse her of: a number of cultural stereotypes about Arabs then popular in Britain is skewered neatly during their encounters. The most exciting part of the film happens AFTER Morlant dies for real while worshipping the Egyptian god Anubis: the vicar is revealed as a fake, part of Ben Dragore’s little gang of thieves, and tries to kill Betty and Ralph. The mausoleum where Morlant was interred after his first “death” soon catches fire and Betty and Ralph must fight their way out of the tomb before they are overcome by smoke and heat.
The acting varies from competent to histrionic and the cast behaves as though part of a stage comedy of manners. The characters conform to British stage stereotypes: Ralph as stiff upper-lipped hero, Betty as a sometimes independent and capable young woman eventually reduced to screaming damsel, Kaney as lovelorn spinster, unlucky in love, the vicar as head villain and Ben Dragore as straight man partnered with the pathetic Kaney. Indeed, Huth and Harrison display excellent comic timing in their scenes together and it is a credit to both that their characters are not as one-dimensional as might be assumed from the plot and the minor roles they play in it; Harrison in particular displays some very heroic qualities near the film’s end. Ralph and Betty are rather more conventional characters who quarrel at first, then start to co-operate and finally show romantic interest in each other after surviving some gruelling tests. Much good acting comes from Karloff himself as the “mummy” character and he also provides some comic relief in a memorable scene where he menaces an unwitting Kaney, waving to Ben Dragore through a set of French doors; the ghoul then leaves and shuts the door behind him, and it’s only then that Kaney turns around to see the door shut and begins to panic!
The set designs are astonishing in their clean quality for a 1930s British film (they had been worked on by people with a German Expressionist background) and there is plenty of “haunted house” atmosphere with the filming of shots that emphasise dark shadows and gloomy ambience. Action takes place mostly at night and the grounds of Morlant’s mansion see plenty of creepy occurrences among tall overgrown grass and trees with bushy canopies, lit up in parts by the light of a full moon. Unusual camera angles stress atmosphere and suspense.
For us moderns, the film isn’t really scary and the action only perks up well past the halfway mark; most of the film is actually character-driven with various cast members having their own reasons for turning up at Morlant’s mansion to hear the will being read, and the movie takes its sweet time setting up the characters and providing them with motivation. The film does have the look of having been adapted from a stage play; in fact it was based on a novel. It’s recommended mainly for the technical production aspects (set design, cinematography) which can be very outstanding; as plot and characterisation go, “The Ghoul” isn’t one of the better films of the 1930s.