Tonight we're to dabble in witchcraft and occultism.
While some directors were able to make a relatively smooth transition from silents to talkies, others had a harder time of it. As evidenced by his 1929 feature The Thirteenth Chair, Tod Browning is one who falls into the latter category. Working from a stage play which had already been brought to the screen one decade earlier and would be again eight years later, Browning seems hemmed in by the need to move the story along primarily through dialogue, resulting in a film that is none too thrilling to watch in spite of the presence of Bela Lugosi (who's seventh-billed) as a police inspector called in to solve the murder of someone at a seance called to shed light on a prior murder.
Set in Calcutta -- then still under British rule, which gives it a modicum of local color -- but entirely sound stage-bound, the film's plot is set in motion by busybody Edward Wales (John Davidson), who's determined to get to the bottom of the murder of his friend, reporter Spencer Lee, a "rotter" who was done in by a so-called "veiled woman." To do this, he arranges for Irish medium Madame La Grange (Margaret Wycherly) to appear at a party given by his friends Sir Roscoe and Lady Crosby (Holmes Herbert and Mary Forbes) to announce the engagement of their son Richard (Conrad Nagel) to Lady Crosby's secretary Nelly (Leila Hyams). Before she can perform the seance, though, Madame La Grange has to endure the pointed barbs of skeptical socialite Mary Eastwood (Helene Millard), and after the seance everybody has to cool their heels while CID man Delzante (Lugosi) smugly goes about solving the locked-door mystery. The trouble is, what probably worked like gangbusters on stage -- turning the lights out whenever Madame La Grange goes into one of her trances -- simply turns what's already a talky movie into a static radio play for a few minutes. In other words, not exactly the stuff of great cinema.