The Last Warning
About The Last Warning
During a Broadway performance of The Snare, actor John Woodford dies on stage and his body vanishes. Drops of a liquid like chloroform are left behind. Five years later producer Arthur McHugh restages the play with the old company to force the answer. Falling scenery, a fire, a stolen purse, and messages signed by Woodford disrupt rehearsals. On opening night a candlestick is wired at 400 volts. The masked man is stage manager Mike Brody, who had electrocuted Woodford and staged the later scares so the theater would stay shut.
Cast & crew
More about The Last Warning
Paul Leni directed for Carl Laemmle, with Carl Laemmle Jr. as associate producer. Alfred A. Cohn, Robert F. Hill, J. G. Hawks, and Tom Reed worked on the adaptation of Thomas F. Fallon's 1922 play, itself drawn from Wadsworth Camp's House of Fear. Photography began in August 1928 on the theater set built for The Phantom of the Opera. Sixty feet of spoken dialogue were added. Those talking scenes are lost. Leni died of blood poisoning on 2 September 1929.
Themes
Background
Universal sold the picture as a follow-up to Leni's The Cat and the Canary, made before most of its theaters had finished the change to sound.
Reviews
Mordaunt Hall in The New York Times found some finely directed passages but said the film was not especially disturbing, and he objected to the shrieks added for the audible screen. Photoplay called it an obvious cross between The Phantom of the Opera and The Terror.
Look
Hal Mohr shot the film, uncredited. Graham Petrie describes a shot in which the camera swings on a rope with the villain across the theater.
Technique
The release was a part-talkie: a short stretch of synchronized dialogue plus a score, effects, and English intertitles. A silent version was prepared for houses without sound.
Music
Joseph Cherniavsky is credited, uncredited on screen, with the music.
Preservation
Only a shortened silent version is known to survive. In 2016 Universal restored it from a Cinémathèque française nitrate, with French titles, and an English-title print from the Packard Humanities Institute collection at UCLA. The restoration opened at the Castro Theatre on 4 June 2016 during the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Flicker Alley issued it on Blu-ray and DVD in 2019.
Notes
- Advance screenings ran on Christmas Day 1928, including shows in Chillicothe, Missouri, and Manhattan, Kansas. The AFI catalog dates the New York theatrical debut to 6 January 1929.
- Fallon's play ran 238 performances at the Klaw Theatre, from 24 October 1922 into May 1923.
- Laura La Plante plays Doris Terry, Montagu Love plays Arthur McHugh, John Boles plays Richard Quayle, Margaret Livingston plays Evalynda Hendon, and Bert Roach plays Mike Brody.
- This was La Plante's first talking picture. The part is mostly reactions to attacks and visions.
- Carrie Daumery plays Barbara, the elderly actress from the original company.
- Joe May's 1939 film The House of Fear is a remake. Universal's 1938 film also called The Last Warning is a different story.
- Sound-on-disc recordings of the part-talkie survive in private hands.
- Wikidata lists 89 minutes. The Wikipedia infobox, citing the AFI catalog, lists 87.
Scenes
- John Woodford drops dead during The Snare and the body is gone.
- Arthur knocks Richard away from a candlestick wired at 400 volts.
- The masked man swings on a rope until a stagehand cuts it, and Brody is unmasked.
Influenced by
- The Cat and the Canary (1927 film)
- The Last Warning (play)
- House of Fear (story)
Influenced
- The House of Fear (1939)
Also available
- Internet Archive (TheLastWarning1929PaulLeni)
- Wikimedia Commons (The Last Warning 1928.webm)
- Flicker Alley Blu-ray and DVD (2019)
