Scream of the Aeoliphone

Captain Applejack must have been a really awful play: the 1931 film seems to preserve it faithfully. But it adds discomfiting qualities all its own. The old dark house farce-thriller is rendered with a few creative camera angles to disrupt the general staginess by Hobart Henley, a rather interesting director who made numerous silents and a few almost-good pre-codes: his Night World (1932) is actually quite fine. 

John Halliday brings his usual dry, fussy, grating quality to the lead role, and overplays it badly. He also gets to play a rampaging pirate in a flashback, groping the leading lady with surprising explicitness. The transition to flashback is the film’s most interesting visual, as a superimposed galleon gradually grows in front of modern-day Halliday, on his desktop. An odd image the film doesn’t earn or digest: it just sits there on top of the heap of rubble the movie turns to in memory.

The other strong impression is made by the soundtrack. Not the music, for there’s little of that, but the rumble and swish of a theatrical storm. During the opening credits, the title music has to compete with crashing waves. Once the action begins we hear a rippling thunder sheet and the sussuraton of an aeoliphone, which uses friction on canvas to simulate blustery weather. This is heard constantly, with the sounds fading up whenever there’s a lull in the dialogue. The effect is unbelievably oppressive, smothering any chance the “comedy” has of being amusing. It’s like the industrial roar of Eraserhead: exterior sounds for interior spaces.

This all makes for a really unpleasant hour, but I’m glad I spent it. Early thirties films so often open portals into alternative cinema histories, directions the art form might have taken if we hadn’t all come to our senses. Experiments that failed so utterly they shut down entire expressive possibilities for decades. Maybe Captain Applejack will yet inspire some new style of filmmaking. Maybe it will serve us all right. 

by David Cairns