This time a movie not quite so old: The Old Dark House (1963), a horror-comedy (parts cleverness, parts farce) with a clutch of character actors of the time: Tom Poston, Robert Morley, etc. This is a fairly mundane, sometimes excruciating story of an American in Britain who, at the call of an odd friend, goes to the man’s home, a small mansion in a marsh. There he finds the man dead, and all of his relatives as dotty as they come, from the mother who is not particularly upset at the passing of her son, to his twin, and various cousins and uncles; we find an ark in the backyard, a fierce collection of firearms, including one jury-rigged to assassinate the prime suspect in the first murder, and a lass with an execrable obsession with explosives. The humor is fairly standard for the era, thus my itching teeth.
But what twigged my interest was the theme. The plot mechanism is that there is a fortune associated with the mansion, with everyone in the family an heir to it, but with the stipulation that each must be present in the mansion at midnight; the family gathers in a given room at the as the clocks strike twelve, and if one is missing, why, they’re out of their inheritance.
And, often, their life.
But the theme, yes, the theme is how wealth, with its tempting fragrance of lifelong leisure, can twist people into madness. The first member of the family we meet may have been the sanest, escaping to London most days to gamble, and engaging a small airplane to fly him home before midnight; his mother is engaged in knitting, measuring her useless accomplishments by the mile, and behind her facade of English gentility may be the maddest of them all. The gun aficionado is relatively sane; another uncle is busy constructing an ark in the surrounding marsh, which is, perhaps, a trifle artificial. The femme cousins (I apologize for the harsh pun on the family name, the Femms) appear distressed but otherwise mildly harmless.
I suppose obsession with wealth has been around for almost as long as humanity has conceived of possessions, but this movie does an interesting job of pointing out how much humanity wastes on the chase after wealth, as the walls of the mansion become obstructions to seeing anything but that wealth. Where are the visitors, the socializing, the enterprise essential to human nature? Gone, stolen by the mansion’s wealth.
