It's A Regular Hermit's Convention
Writer George M. Cohan bets $5000 he can write a serious novel in 24 hours. His friend lends him his summer resort "shut up tight as a drum", and so he takes the train there.... only to discover a horde of unlikely types using the place for their own nefarious purposes.
Cohan had had a hit on the boards with the play, adapted from a story by Earl Derr Biggers, so successful that this was the second screen version; there would be seven big-screen versions eventually, of this Old Dark House comedy-drama.
Whence the type of story? I suspect it originally arose as a lampoon of Gothic romances, the sort which are still published in paperback, with the cover illustration showing a woman in something gauzy fleeing an old mansion with three lights in the upper windows. This particular story is a wacky one, judging by the other versions I have seen, but the principal pleasure lies in seeing George M. Cohan in his prime, playing George Washington Magee; the man of whom it is said he was born on the Fourth of July couldn't be yclept 'William' of course. You can see a lot of his stage performance on the screen here, soothed a bit for the screen. You the voice I hear in my mind when I read the titles of his words is Jimmy Cagney's.
With Anna Q. Nilsson and Hedda Hopper.
Cohan had had a hit on the boards with the play, adapted from a story by Earl Derr Biggers, so successful that this was the second screen version; there would be seven big-screen versions eventually, of this Old Dark House comedy-drama.
Whence the type of story? I suspect it originally arose as a lampoon of Gothic romances, the sort which are still published in paperback, with the cover illustration showing a woman in something gauzy fleeing an old mansion with three lights in the upper windows. This particular story is a wacky one, judging by the other versions I have seen, but the principal pleasure lies in seeing George M. Cohan in his prime, playing George Washington Magee; the man of whom it is said he was born on the Fourth of July couldn't be yclept 'William' of course. You can see a lot of his stage performance on the screen here, soothed a bit for the screen. You the voice I hear in my mind when I read the titles of his words is Jimmy Cagney's.
With Anna Q. Nilsson and Hedda Hopper.
- boblipton
- Feb 7, 2021