Film review – Arnold (1973)

My notes on Arnold (1973)

Director Georg Fenady’s CV consists mostly of episodes of time-wasting TV fluff like Knight Rider and Baywatch.  In 1973, he teamed with producer brother Andrew J. Fenady on two old-timey setbound horror films studded with guest stars of yesteryear and heavy on dry ice fog.  Terror in the Wax Museum is a whodunit with a Jack the Ripper/House of Wax theme while Arnold is a stab at black comedy.  Despite a sterling cast, it’s a little disappointing: running jokes stumble and fall, and no matter how much Elsa Lanchester (in particular) refuses to let go of a scene many routines stubbornly fail to work.  However, has a strange charm.  Perhaps it’s the sense that folk pretending to be shivering somewhere in Wales are actually trapped in a stifling, probably tiny studio in sunny California.

An opening sequence offers a macabre hook, and a strident theme song warbled by Shani Wallis which is reprised throughout.  Millionaire Lord Arnold Dwellyn* (Norman Stuart) is propped up in church for an open-casket funeral which – thanks to legal shenanigans – is combined with his marriage to long-time mistress Karen (Stella Stevens).  Lady Jocelyn (Wallis) refused to divorce Arnold when he was alive but he’s decided that the ‘til death us do part’ clause dissolves their marriage.  The will ticks off the heirs with insulting bequests or conditions which force them to remain in the house.  Then they start dying in Phibes-ish manner.  Worthless younger brother Robert (Roddy McDowall) puts on a suit of Arnold’s clothes which shrink, crushing him.  Also in the household (and doomed) are Jocelyn’s lover (Farley Granger), the family lawyer (Patric Knowles), the gardener (Ben Wright), a hook-handed one-eyed mute Indian servant (Jamie Farr), dotty sister Hester (Lanchester) and Karen (the lead, but nothing like a heroine).

Given the fog and wood panelling, it seems like a period piece but the plot depends on messages relayed by a nifty eight-track tape-deck in the side of Arnold’s coffin.  Though Lanchester, as in Terror in the Wax Museum, is the biggest ham, she gets competition from Bernard Fox (an actual Welshman with the proper accent) as a supernaturally thick local policeman whose bosomy barmaid fiancée (Wanda Bailey) runs off with his lecherous Dad (John McGiver).  Few films match Robert Hamer’s mix of venom and valentines in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1948) and Arnold flounders more than most as it tries to be simultaneously cynical and jolly.  It might work better if Stevens’ character were a true innocent surrounded by sharks but making her as conniving as everyone else robs the film of a centre.  A naturally gifted and appealing comic/sexy leading lady, Stevens seemed forever stuck with sub-standard material; the film which best shows her off is Sam Peckinpah’s underrated The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), where she delightfully takes a standard tart-with-a-heart role and runs with it.  As it is, the players who shine most are the ones with least to do.  Victor Buono, an eye-rolling ham of the first water, is terrific in his one scene as the appalled, befuddled clergyman presiding over the funeral-nuptial ceremony.  Stuart (who ironically had a long career as a dialogue coach) pre-empts Weekend at Bernie’s (1989) as the smiling corpse; the voice on the mocking tape messages is Murray Matheson.

Along with cinematographer William B. Jurgensen and art director Monty Elliott, Fenady doesn’t pull off stagebound gothic as well as Roger Corman or Jacques Tourneur in The Premature Burial (1962) or The Comedy of Terrors (1963).  The flat, TV movie-ish feel further blunts any attempts at wit.

Here’s Shani singing the catchy theme song …