by Ted Davis

Original Title: Unheimliche Geschichten

Directed by: Richard Oswald

This review contains a Kitty Carnage Warning for rough handling and scruffing!

Cat Out of the Bag Alert! This review contains some spoilers for this film!

Synopsis: Conrad Veidt, Anita Berber and Reinhold Schunzel play multiple roles in this omnibus movie which presents adaptations of five spooky tales: The Apparition by Anselm Heine; The Hand by Robert Liebmann; The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe; The Suicide Club by Robert Louis Stevenson; and The Spectre contributed by director Richard Oswald.

Cat Burglar (Scene Stealer): As might be expected, a black cat is prominent in this free adaptation of Poe’s The Black Cat, in which a drunken husband (Reinhold Schunzel) abuses his wife (Anita Berber) and her cat. The handsome cat is first revealed in a closeup, comfortable in the wife’s lap as she tends to her sewing.

This blissful communion ceases when the drunken sot of a husband returns home and threatens the cat and eventually strikes both his wife and the cat with his hat, at which point the cat jumps to the floor. The wife is shown to be disgusted with her spouse’s behavior.

The next evening, a traveler and potential seducer (Conrad Veidt) joins the couple when they again return home. On arriving, the wife gathers the cat in her arms and holds it protectively against her boozing husband’s taunts.

The husband serves steins of beer to the traveler and his wife, and presses her to drink. The traveler takes advantage of the husband’s drunken condition to console the drunk’s wife, who is still holding and caressing her cat.

Drunk as he is, the husband notices the traveler’s attentiveness to his wife, and sits between them at the table, then passes out quickly.

The traveler takes advantage of the husband’s stupor and presses his attentions more strongly upon the woman, who is receptive to the advances. The black cat remains in her arms.

The atmosphere is ominous when the husband revives after several moments and the traveler takes his leave.

With his departure, the tension breaks and the raging drunk husband threatens his wife with a chair, then grabs and shakes the cat before dropping the unfortunate animal and punt kicking it across the room (no actual contact between man and cat is shown with the kick.)

With this action, the husband’s fury only intensifies and he hurls the heavy steins at his wife. Both woman and cat are not visible during the shot, but the husband’s horrified reaction indicates the worst possible outcome for the wife. And so it is, for several days later the concerned traveler brings the authorities to check on the safety of the wife. The comparatively sober husband allows them to search his house, including the basement area, which is a major error of judgement because a section of the wall begins to disintegrate before their eyes, prompting the the traveler to grab a handy ax and widen the breech in the wall to reveal the wife’s meowing black cat which jumps to the floor. (The cat is actually nudged through the wall opening.) The appalled group of men realize that the husband entombed his dead wife with her still living cat.

Final Mewsings: The execrable husband deserved no mercy, not only for the murder but for his contemptible treatment of the family cat.

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