La Nuit mystérieuse

Nice goings-on in an old mansion. But several flaws as well. The plot is a bit over-written, and there are numerous warnings on title cards to be very attentive, to be very afraid and so on. One step away from a brainwash really. From the first moments it's difficult to understand who's who - especially if you have a washed out bootleg copy, such as mine. You just don't distinguish the many faces. Plus there are several black-face performances, which is really stupid, as the men who are supposed to be black servants, have especially distinctive paleface features. Needless to say, they also provide the comic relief, and needless to say, it's all about rolling the eyes, waxing stiff, falling down, and running around in terror, yelling "lawdy, lawdy!" or something similar. In other words, not funny. I did like the leading lady and I can't blame Griffith for falling madly in love with her. Fortunately she's not only pretty, but also quite convincing as a 16-year old precious little rich girl, hungry for her mother's love. I immediately went browsing the net and found two more films where she is in, so I'll know a bit more when these arrive. Strangely enough her career totally ended a few years after this film, and I would like to know the reason, why. The leading man was a new face to me as well, even though looking at the list of his films, I realized I have seen several, but from the later period. He looks like he could be 16 himself, whereas in reality he was 32. Very handsome and moving as a young man tortured by love, he left a very good impression on me. There are nice interiors and some very good 1922 fashions displayed. I only wish there were a good, sharp, legitimate copy released. Despite some obvious flaws in the story, the complexity of the plot and the irritating comic subplot, a thoroughly enjoyable dark old house flick.

This was long for a silent film, over two hours, but probably the best silent film I have seen to date.

The story starts in Africa where a man is traveling with his sister-in-law, who is ill and just delivered a baby girl. They receive news that his brother, her husband was gravely ill himself. Subsequently both parents die...thinking that if he gets rid of the baby there is nothing to stop him from inheriting the estate, title and fortune...the uncle first thinks of killing the baby girl, but instead gives her to the nurse to take to America and raise in anonymity.

Sixteen years later, the girl named Agnes has been raised by this cold nurse who she believes to be her mother...but not really understanding warm motherly affection. The nurse having run out of money compromises herself and gets observed stealing by a wealthy older man. This man takes advantage of the situation by promising not to turn her in if she will marry young Agnes to him. After explaining the situation to Agnes she agrees to sacrifice herself to the old creepy man in marriage, which is how they become engaged.

Subsequently, a young wealthy land owner returns from his travels and meets Agnes...the two fall in love. He invites Agnes and her "mother" to stay at his estate.

The estate which has been unoccupied for years has, unbeknownst to the young man, been being used by bootleggers to store their stock bootleg. Learning the house is being opened up again, they rush to get their supplies out the back.

In the evening there is a big dinner party, but we discover that before the dinner party one bootlegger turned on the other and tried to steal a half a million dollars in cash. He is cornered and killed by his partner but not before he managed to stash the cash. While the staff are opening the house up, the young man's butler discovers the bag containing the cash...but he only sees the important documents that were placed by the bootlegger on top. Thinking the papers were important he takes them downstairs and locks them in the safe which is behind a hidden panel in the wall.

Staff members discover the murdered bootlegger upstairs and the police detectives are called. Meanwhile a dinner party happens and many guests and staff are behaving suspiciously as people sneak off...we assume one of them is the murderer and looking for the money.

And so this becomes a murder mystery...with lots of shady characters!

It was great...although I am not sure it needed a hurricane like storm, but it has one!

"Don't reveal the villain and pay attention to the early scenes..."

I am going to honor their wishes and not share who the villain is, only to say that I was able to guess but it did not dim my delight with the film at all.

A bit of a surprise that I enjoyed tremendously!

I loved one of the end scenes tremendously...a hand kiss followed by a kiss on the cheek (do you know which one).

I highly recommend this to silent movie fans and just cinema fans in general!

"Mystery of love, the sweetest of mysteries without which there would be no light...no music..."

"That moment when a man asks a woman to go with him on the path of Love. The path that goes through life and on through eternity."

D. W. Griffith made his only venture into the mystery field here, primarily due to the success of the "old dark house" genre, stimulated by Mary Roberts Rinehart's novel, THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE, which was very successfully filmed and staged (with Avery Hopwood) as THE BAT. The script written by Griffith (as Irene Sinclair) is extremely complicated, and engages the cast in a jointed series of plots revolving for the most part about attempts at discovery of a missing half-million dollars of bootlegger takings, secreted somewhere within a mansion that is replete with secret passages and hidden panels. Griffith gave his mistress, Carol Dempster, the female lead romantically linked with Henry Hull, whose kinetic limberness is difficult to match, although she acts well, and vigorously too, as much of the scenario provides comedic lunacy; Morgan Wallace is particularly engaging as a Dempster suitor. The film is well-edited, and the special effects by Edward Scholl are creative, to say the least; however, Griffith's penchant for adding numerous story lines to his cinematic landscape causes more than a bit of weariness in the viewer as the work pitches constantly among romantic, mystery and comedy themes; as to be expected, the small moments of detail when the talented players are given rein are generally the most satisfying.

The only thing exciting in "One Exciting Night," D.W. Griffith's slow go at the old dark house formula, is the climactic hurricane sequence. Everything else tends to be extremely dull, drawn out, convoluted, overly explained, exposition-heavy, repetitive and racist. Not only unexciting--it's excruciating, really--it doesn't take place in one night, either, although it should have... it so much should have. In fact, the narrative takes place within nearly two decades. In the complete version of the film, at least, it's over an hour in before it gets to the night in question (I viewed the Critic's Choice VHS from the '90s, which runs 124 minutes). Everything before that should've been cut; it's just unnecessary subplot and filler. I know this was early in the subgenre of old dark house horror comedies, but still, Griffith demonstrated no appreciation that these things are supposed to be light and fast paced. Instead, he indulged in his worst tendencies of excess as a filmmaker: plentiful and verbose title cards, leading the spectator ad nauseam through every plot point, including frequently replaying scenes, too many characters and melodramatic subplots, bland and simplistic appeals to grande themes (greed, love, life, death), African-American stereotypes portrayed by white actors in blackface and minstrel show antics.

There are five title cards before we even see an image with scenery or characters in the film. Furthermore, Griffith contradicts himself in them by calling this a "little effort" before going on, "In this absolute departure from all OLD METHODS of story telling we leave much to YOUR IMAGINATION besides the detection of who is the villain. Therefore it is well to watch closely the early scenes as they become important later on." None of that is true. This was a bloated effort, it is very much in the vein of old methods of storytelling, with Griffith's usual Victorian melodrama and the old dark house stuff being ripped off the popular stage play of the time, "The Bat" (later adapted to screen in 1926 and 1930 by Roland West), and Griffith's storytelling leaves very little to the imagination, including the obviousness of the villain's identity long before it's exposed, and Griffith repeats things over and over again, so there's no need to pay particularly close attention. The film is so bad, though, the best way to enjoy it may be to barely pay attention and use your imagination instead. Just make sure to tune back in near the end for the hurricane, where the repetition in the editorial form of temporal replays are acceptable--I'm OK with seeing Henry Hull hit by the same flying tree branch twice.

The story begins in Africa where a mother dies, leaving a fortune to her infant child, but the next-in-line heir schemes to have a woman pretend the child is hers, thus concealing the baby's identity so that he may inherit the fortune. Upon his death, however, he admits the fraud. And, for the next two or so hours, this plot will be ignored. Jump to the states years later, and Carol Dempster agrees to a blackmail scheme to marry an older man so that he doesn't rat out her thieving and abusive mother. Now, forget that plot, too, because it doesn't really matter, and it's only mentioned a couple times later, including with one of the many flashbacks, lest we forget. Dempster meets a younger man, the hero played by Hull, who had also played the similar part in the stage version of another old dark house horror comedy, "The Cat and the Canary" (adapted to the screen in 1927 and a few times after that). Hull has a spooky house, so, of course, he sets about throwing a party and hiring some African-American servants. That a bootlegger is murdered in the house and that he's a prime suspect doesn't deter him in these activities in the least. Only after another man is murdered, and he's once again a prime suspect, and after he discovers that the bootlegger hid half a million dollars in his home does the situation become tense. This is also when the old dark house formula finally kicks in.

And most of the subgenre's tropes are here in spades--at least the ones that also appear in "The Bat": secret passages and mysterious panels, hidden cash, nighttime shadows, hands reaching out from hidden corners to grab people, flickering lights, a storm, people running around scaring themselves silly, comic relief, a whodunit murder mystery and a masked villain. Unfortunately, most of the comic relief is debasing slapstick of an African-American stereotype named Romeo played by a white actor in blackface, portrayed as a dishonest (Griffith's title cards inform us that he found the war medal he passes off as having earned), running around scared and wide-eyed at the sight of almost everything. Meanwhile, another blackfaced character is referred to by two different racial slurs and as "primitive," and that's not even counting Griffith's title card informing us that, "It is well known that Black Sam is the dark terror of the bootleggers' band." In the end, all of the blackfaced caricatures, as well as the extras that include some actual African Americans, are portrayed as either servile, stupid or lazy.

Another title card, "Pictures -- white man's magic to be treasured," seems to sum up well what Griffith thought of his own filmmaking prowess. Yet, while he was one of the more innovative of pioneering directors at Biograph and into his features of the 1910s; in the 1920s, with one or two exceptions, his work is among the most detestable, as the quality of his pictures suffered from the financial changes in Hollywood and as he failed to keep abreast of advances in content, tone or technical matters, with his dated racial and Victorian ideals becoming ever more burdensome within inferior goods.

There are two reasons why you'd rent One Exciting Night, an old silent movie nearly 100 years old: Either you love D.W. Griffith's movies, or you love Henry Hull and this is the only silent movie of his you can get your hands on. I watched it for Henry, and it was worth it. He's so cute! With the advent of talkies, and his fame on Broadway for playing the old, crotchety Jeeter in Tobacco Road, he was almost always made up to be an old man and told to use a gruff, gravely voice. You'd never think, watching him in Jesse James or Great Expectations, that he looked like Matt Dillon when he was young! Seriously, folks, if you don't think it's possible that the grizzly old doctor from High Sierra was ever handsome, you've got to rent this silent movie.

This long romance-mystery takes place mostly in a beautiful mansion. Guests get together for a party, but there's a burglary underfoot. While dead bodies pop up and detectives try to figure things out, there's also a love story. The beautiful Carol Dempster feels pressured to marry the older, creepy Morgan Wallace because her mother wants his money, but as soon as she meets Henry Hull, her heart tells her to disobey.

This movie has a running time of 2 ½ hours, and it easily could have been edited down to a flat two hours if all the racism was eliminated. I'll admit it leaves a really bad taste in your mouth and ruins the rest of the movie. The prominent characters of color are white actors in blackface, and while it's not hard to believe black actors wouldn't want to take such insulting roles, it's more likely that the studio preferred to pay white actors.

If you do decide to watch it, with your fast-forward button handy, you'll be treated to another D.W. Griffith epic. This may start out as a simple house party, but you'll get to see where the studio put its money: a huge rainstorm that topples trees threatens to tear the young lovers apart. Henry not only wrestles with the rain, trees, and mud, but he also gets into fistfights with bad guys and gets to woo Carol with a big, sweeping kiss. This movie contains one of two onscreen kisses I've seen him enjoy, so that's pretty exciting. It's a whole different ball game to master silent acting versus talkies, and it's just delightful to see Henry Hull, famous for his gravelly voice, as the young romantic lead with delicate features. Plus, Carol is cute as a button and gets to parade around in some adorable dresses, too!