The Black Cat (Le chat noir)
The first cinematic teaming of horror greats Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi is a bizarre, haunting, and relentlessly eerie film that was surprisingly morbid and perverse for its time. Peter (David Manners) and Joan Allison (Julie Bishop) are honeymooning in Budapest when they meet mysterious scientist Dr. Vitus Verdegast (Lugosi) aboard a train.
5 February 1906, New York City, New York, USA
18 February 1867, Halle an der Saale, Province of Saxony, Prussia [now Saxony-Anhalt, Germany]
December 21, 1894
15 March 1886, Mogilev, Russian Empire [now Belarus]
October 5, 1912 in McAllen, Texas, USA
March 27, 1890 in Straßburg, Alsace, Germany [now Strasbourg, Bas-Rhin, France]
23 November 1887, Camberwell, London, England, UK
4 July 1888, Palermo, Sicily, Italy
October 13, 2007
Karloff--Lugosi--Karloff--Lugosi...
August 08, 2006
More foolish than horrible. The story and dialogue pile the agony on too thick to give the audience a reasonable scare.
October 20, 2016
Wildly expressionistic, the movie has nothing to do with the Poe story from which it takes its title and everything to do with Ulmer's sense of the Nazi menace.
October 06, 2013
This timeless classic is a testimony to the craft of director Edgar G Ulmer before his career lurched into the quickie arena.
September 26, 2007
Story is confused and confusing, and while with the aid of heavily-shadowed lighting and mausoleum-like architecture, a certain eeriness has been achieved, it's all a poor imitation of things seen before.
July 03, 2010
Edgar G. Ulmer's grandest danse macabre, a magnificently sustained trance
February 09, 2006
Sumptuously subversive... one of the very best horror movies Universal ever made.
October 19, 2008
A magnificently eerie entry from the early days of Hollywood horror.
September 26, 2007
Ulmer never again had the budgetary resources granted him by Universal (at the time, Karloff and Lugosi were two of the studio's biggest stars), and he makes the most of them.
October 15, 2008
No monsters but lots of atmosphere, this is a classic of the genre.
October 14, 2014
This bizarre, utterly irrational masterpiece, lasting little more than an hour, has images that bury themselves in the mind.
October 19, 2008
A dismal hocus-pocus which seems to confuse its actors as much as it fails to frighten its audience.
