Image of the Day: Who Nose What Evil Lurks....

on December 13, 2010 by Steve Simels
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(Pretty) Great Profile Bela Lugosi puts the moves on Lucille Lund -- winner of The Most Beautiful College Coed contest of 1933 (seriously) -- in The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934).

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I bring this up because -- as attentive readers will recall -- back on November 10 I had a little fun at the expense of Steve Miller, author of an extremely bad book [150 Movies You Should Die Before You See] about supposedly bad movies. At the time, I took particular umbrage to Miller's dissing of The Black Cat, a film he conceded to be one of the genuine classics of 30s horror but which he nevertheless mocked because "it has absolutely nothing to do with Edgar Allan Poe's short story....So why even bother to connect it to Poe?" Which seemed pretty dumb to me.

Well, turns out I may have maligned Miller unfairly. I have since discovered that people at Universal -- The Black Cat was the studio's highest grossing film of 1934, incidentally -- had similar qualms, albeit down the line. Here's the poster for a studio reissue of the film from later in the decade. Note the new title.

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It lacks a certain poetry, for my money, but you certainly can't say it connects to Poe in any way. I should also add that further research has turned up the fact that when the film was released in England it was retitled as The House of Doom, presumably for the same reasons of Poe purism.

In any case, apologies to Mr. Miller.

Tags: Bela Lugosi, Lucille Lund, The Black Cat
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