One Exciting Night (1922) *
In 1920, Mary Roberts Reinhart and Avery Hopwood adapted Reinhart’s hit novel, The Circular Staircase, into a stage play entitled The Bat, spicing it up by adding a Fantomas-like super-criminal to what had originally been a purely mundane whodunit. The Bat was the biggest ticket-seller on Broadway when it debuted that August (so much so that the authors immediately set to work on a re-novelization), and it remained among the biggest ticket-sellers for years thereafter. Imitators crawled out of the woodwork in response— some of which, like The Cat and the Canary, The Monster, and The Last Warning, became long-running Broadway phenomena themselves. Inevitably, film rights to The Bat were a hot commodity throughout its run, but Reinhart, Hopwood, and the producers of the play refused to sell, lest a movie undercut the stage version’s longevity. The Bat wouldn’t make it to the screen until 1926; in the meantime, filmmakers who wanted a piece of the action had to settle for adapting its competitors instead, or for mounting their own original ripoffs.
One such filmmaker was D.W. Griffith, whose New York homecoming was not going according to plan. His new studio at Mamaroneck wasn’t a boondoggle, exactly, but neither was it terribly profitable, and the operation was half a million dollars in debt by 1922. Griffith needed a hit— maybe even a blockbuster— to turn his finances around, and The Bat was busting blocks left and right, both on Broadway and in London’s West End. Again, though, those film rights weren’t for sale at any price, even to the auteur of The Birth of a Nation. So Griffith devised a copycat production that would double as a vehicle for his 20-year-old mistress, Carol Dempster. That film, shot under the title, The Haunted Grange, but ultimately released as One Exciting Night, serves as an object lesson in the value of getting an early start. One of the first spooky house mysteries to ride the crest of Bat mania, One Exciting Night was indeed a success, even though it sucked in just about every way that money couldn’t fix. I’ll concede, though, that it’s impressive to look at, especially during its extremely silly climax.
Somewhere in Africa (context clues point toward Guinea), Stuart Bruce-Douglas (not credited) conveys his sister-in-law (not credited either, although the actress bears a notable resemblance to Mary Astor, of Puritan Passions and Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte) and his infant niece to the home of his gold-mining brother. The elder Bruce-Douglas is sick with some deadly tropical fever, but in rushing to be by his side, his young wife has fallen equally ill. While the family, a native servant identified only as “the Kaffir” (Frank Wunderlee, in terrible blackface), and Mrs. Bruce-Douglas’s companion, Marie Barton (Margaret Dale), pause to await the ailing woman’s recovery, a rider from the mining compound arrives with a letter announcing that they’re already too late. Weak as she already was, the news her husband’s death is too much for Mrs. Bruce-Douglas, who immediately keels over from shock and breathes no more. That’s when Stuart has a wicked idea. With his brother and sister-in-law both dead, that little baby is all that stands in the way of him owning the whole Bruce-Douglas business empire free and clear— and who would be surprised to hear that a white infant had sickened and died alongside her parents on a trek across Africa? Now Stuart is no murderer (let alone an infanticide), but the owner of an African gold mine could make it well worth a lady’s while to go very far away and raise that inconvenient kid as her own. Miss Barton takes the hint, and returns to the coast with little Agnes.
Sixteen years later, on the other side of the globe, Agnes has grown into the aforementioned Carol Dempster (whom we’ve seen before in Sherlock Holmes, and may see again one of these days in The Sorrows of Satan). Marie Barton, meanwhile, is calling herself Mrs. Harrington now (although there’s no sign of any Mr. Harrington), and has been representing herself as Agnes’s mother even to Agnes. They live in Louisville, Kentucky, where the girl has caught the amorous eye of aging rich playboy J. Wilson Rockmaine (Morgan Wallace, from House of Secrets and The Third Sex). She’s somewhat responsive to Rockmaine’s wooing, too, even despite his age, reputation, and scandalous forwardness, simply due to the novelty of having someone bestow affection upon her. (Stuart Bruce-Douglas could pay Barton enough to raise his niece, but not enough to love her.) The courtship starts to seem less appealing, however, after “Mom” confesses that Rockmaine is the one person who saw her try to steal a bit of expensive jewelry from a fellow guest at a society party some years ago. If Agnes doesn’t give Wilson what he wants, the bastard might just spill the beans about the attempted theft.
Meanwhile, back in the British Empire, Stuart Bruce-Douglas has just kicked the bucket. What’s more, he repented on his deathbed of screwing his niece out of her inheritance. The dead man’s London solicitor is therefore moving heaven and earth to locate the girl before the deadline stipulated in Bruce-Douglas’s will, after which the estate will pass to more distant relatives instead.
But let’s forget about that for the moment, and return to Louisville, where wealthy young hollowhead John Fairfax (Henry Hull, from Master of the World and Werewolf of London) is on his way home together with his butler, Parker (Percy Carr), after several years of studying abroad. This is extremely inconvenient for the bootlegger mob led by Clary Johnson (Herbert Sutch), which had been using the unoccupied Fairfax mansion as their base of operations. Obviously all the gang’s crap will have to be cleared out before the rightful owner begins moving back in. Luckily for Johnson, though, Fairfax’s resettlement is going to take a little while. No Southern rich-fuck household can function without a staff of black servants, after all, so John will remain ensconced in a nearby hotel until such time as Parker has a chance to recruit the necessary personnel. That’s going to be an unexpectedly tall order in itself, because the mansion has developed a reputation for hauntedness during Fairfax’s absence. True, neither John nor Parker notice any ghosts on their preliminary visit, but you might observe a shambling figure with a face like a rotten Jack o’ lantern spying on them while they look the place over.
In the meantime, Fairfax sets about reintegrating himself into Louisville high society. His first step in that direction is a lawn party at the home of his aunt (Grace Griswold), where he makes several fateful acquaintances. Most to his liking, he meets Agnes Harrington, and is almost instantly smitten with her. On the other hand, he also meets the girl’s ostensible mother, who is considerably less than smitten with him, and J. Wilson Rockmaine, who can’t fail to notice that Agnes enjoys the younger man’s company more than his own. And as if that weren’t trouble enough, Fairfax later gets into an altercation with Clary Johnson (who owes his presence at Auntie Fairfax’s party to his above-board occupation as one of the city’s most respectable real estate agents) in front of several witnesses. Nevertheless, the young millionaire is in an expansive enough mood to invite all the attendees (well… maybe not Johnson…) over to his place for a big fishing party just as soon as he has the mansion fit for human habitation again.
As John’s moving-in day approaches, the bootleggers acquire an even bigger problem in the form of some unusually competent and determined revenuers, who press them so hard that Johnson feels he has no choice but to disband the gang. Crooks of his caliber never do anything honestly, though, and Johnson tries to swindle his out-of-town partners while going out of business. Rather than split the accumulated loot according to whatever agreement was previously made, the bootlegger sneaks back to the Fairfax place with the whole half-million bucks, and stashes it at the bottom of a trunk that he finds beside a second-story fireplace. The subterfuge avails him little, however, for one of the aforementioned partners trails him to the mansion for a confrontation. The ensuing shootout leaves Johnson dead— and occurs just as Fairfax, Parker, and the new maid (Irma Harrison, in blackface sufficiently subtle that at first I thought she might actually have been a very light-skinned black woman) arrive to take the house in hand. The surviving gangster obviously can’t mount a search for the cash just now, so he sneaks away unobserved in a stunt almost worthy of Pearl White. Fairfax, meanwhile, finds Johnson’s corpse, leaving him with a great deal of explaining to do in front of a detective (Murder by the Clock’s Frank Sheridan) who inconveniently is well aware of John’s earlier run-in with the dead man.
Johnson’s killer wasn’t the only one whom the bootlegger was trying to cheat, however. A share of the money was also owed to Black Sam, the gang’s most formidable trigger man— and if that guy looks naggingly familiar, it’s because we saw him before back home in Africa, working for Stuart Bruce-Douglas. Very curious, if you ask me, that the Kaffir should turn up after all these years, pulling mob hits in the very town where his former master’s niece is living incognito. Be that as it may, Sam must have heard of the circumstances surrounding Johnson’s death, for he cunningly applies for a job at the Fairfax mansion in order to facilitate his own search for the missing cash. He’s going to have his work cut out for him, though, because Parker stumbles upon the trunk with the money in it before Sam has even begun his investigations. The butler is too busy at the time to go through its contents, but he correctly intuits that the trunk probably contains something valuable, and stashes it in the secret compartment that also conceals the Fairfax family silver. Incidentally, employing a mob assassin on a secret treasure hunt somehow isn’t the worst hiring decision Parker makes that day. He also engages Romeo Washington (Porter Strong, in— you guessed it— blackface even more appalling than Frank Wunderlee’s), a racist comic relief caricature so loathsome that you’ll be begging for Willie “Sleep ’n’ Eat” Best to come take his place before the end of his introductory scene.
By this point, waiting for the onset of the titular exciting night is all but certain to have given you the mother of all itchy asses, but thankfully we’re just about there. The day of John’s party rolls around, and the mansion fills up with every character we’ve seen who is still alive— including a bunch who weren’t actually invited, but show up anyway. We’ve got Auntie Fairfax, of course. Ditto Agnes and her fake mom. J. Wilson Rockmaine. That detective on the hunt for Johnson’s killer. Seemingly half a hundred sharp-suited guys with goofy hats and goofier moustaches, most of whom seem likely to be incognito gangsters, undercover cops, or double agents working both sides of that fence. Then there’s the sullen-eyed, beaky-nosed, droopy-jowled weirdo (Charles Croker-King) who plainly has some manner of agenda, but lacks any currently intelligible connection to anyone or anything else in the film. (We’ll find out what his deal is only during the dizzying post-climax wrap-up, in which one character after another comes forward to explain whatever the fuck we’ve been trying to watch for the past two hours.) Even the shambling pumpkin-faced guy puts in an appearance once the sun goes down, peering into every window in the house to no evident purpose. But the most important of the gatecrashers is the chap whom I came to think of as “the Aye-Aye”— the distinctly sub super-criminal with the balaclava, the cape, and the wide-brimmed hat who serves as One Exciting Night’s counterpart to the Bat. I sure hope you enjoy watching people whom you can barely tell apart chase each other around in intersecting circles through a Southern Gothic mansion and its grounds, because you’re about to get a whole fucking lot of that.
Woodrow Wilson famously likened The Birth of a Nation to “writing history with lightning.” Well, One Exciting Night is like writing mystery with a mildewy gym sock— and it’s just as vilely racist as the more famous film to boot! What stands out most glaringly is how little value it gets for the incredible surplus of convolutions in the setup. The business about Agnes’s secret identity never has the slightest bearing on the actual plot, for starters. Linking the girl to a colonial gold-mining concern serves solely to render her happy ending acceptable in the eyes of people who think oligarchs should marry only other oligarchs, and the drama of the missing mob money would reach exactly the same resolution if One Exciting Night had never set foot in Africa. There are needless duplications of effort everywhere you look in this story, too. Most obviously, we don’t need Pumpkinface and the Aye-Aye; one weirdo masked criminal is plenty, thank you very much. Nor do we need two completely independent and unrelated investigations by none-too-trustworthy authority figures. The Louisville police detective trying doggedly to pin Clary Johnson’s murder on John Fairfax can do that job without any help from a team of undercover Scotland Yard men hunting for the Bruce-Douglas heiress in the shiftiest manner possible. (And while we’re on that subject, let us note that Scotland Yard isn’t normally in the business of running international stakeouts on behalf of private probate lawyers!) And if it’s silly for Agnes Harrington to have one secret identity, it’s downright absurd for the Kaffir to have two of them, posing as a mob assassin posing as a valet.
Matters don’t improve much, either, once we get into the meat of the story, not least because by that point, Griffith has hopelessly confused himself as to what the story even is. Each character or faction has an agenda so well insulated from those of every other that no single through-line can possibly cohere out of the chaos. Different groups of people keep reenacting the same cycles of events without bringing any of them to a proper conclusion, because they’re always interrupted at the crucial moment by some other bunch playing a similar cycle out from the beginning. This is the kind of movie in which Fairfax and Parker can announce that they’re leaving to drive all the party guests home, only to return ten minutes later still accompanied by every one of the people whom they were supposedly dropping off. It’s the kind of film in which the action is illogical along so many different vectors at once that it becomes hard to keep track of exactly why any given turn of events makes no sense. And when the Aye-Aye’s identity is revealed at last, it raises more questions than it answers, because the culprit has no apparent way of knowing what he’d need to in order to motivate his crimes.
Then there are the goddamned intertitles. That seems like a very weird thing to get worked up about, I realize. Normal silent-movie intertitles are forced by their very function toward a brevity that precludes notably good and notably bad prose alike. Griffith likes to set a scene, however, and he likes to do it by filling up the screen with solid walls of text. How to describe this drivel? It is at once impossibly florid and unutterably stiff, obnoxiously pompous and drunkenly ungrammatical. Imagine if the monologues that Ed Wood Jr. would later write for Criswell and Bela Lugosi had none of their notorious batty charm, and took instead the hectoring tone of a Congregationalist sermon.
Even the one positive thing I can find to say about One Exciting Night requires a great, big asterisk. Griffith knew how to work big by 1922, and one thing you can’t accuse him of here is skimping on production value. The Fairfax mansion is a vividly realized place, regardless of whether it’s represented in any given shot by a set, a location, or a miniature model. Only during the opening Africa sequence does this movie ever give the impression that you might as well be watching it on a stage, the way so many others of its subgenre do. And I can’t fault the climax for ambition, no matter how flagrantly stupid its subject matter. You see, test audiences reacted poorly to Griffith’s original ending, complaining that it lacked excitement and spectacle. While the director was pondering what to do about that, Mother Nature lent a hand by dropping a hurricane on Mamaroneck! Griffith sent a camera crew out into the storm to film as much of it as they could bear, then built a whole new ending around the resulting footage. Of course, that left him and us alike in the ludicrous position of pretending that Louisville, of all places, is subject to typhoons, but the stunts attendant upon that absurdity are extraordinary, and the intermingling of authentic hurricane footage with the setbound sequences featuring the reassembled cast is some of the best I’ve ever seen. It’s just a pity you have to put up with almost two hours of the dreariest bullshit in the spooky house canon to get to it.
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