As much as I'd like to say that I liked a silent film that was only rediscovered in a 16mm print from a Canadian basement in 2017, I'm not going to lie, but neither does that change my belief that all found lost films is cause for celebration--the good, the bad and the offensive. And so I was happy to view "Secrets of the Night" over a Zoom conference via the University of Toronto. Plus, even if a lackluster entry, it's part of a genre or two that I've had particular interest for in the past, mystery fiction and the more cinematically-precise subgenre of old-dark-house pictures. Basically, "Secrets of the Night" is a whodunnit with horror-comedy, as well as melodrama, elements. It's adapted from some play I'm unfamiliar with, but it seems as though it was likely one of the many imitations of "The Bat," staged in 1920 and adapted to film in 1926, 1930 and 1959 (at least one of the first two films of which have been credited as inspiration for the creation of Batman, by the way, so it's a genre worth understanding in today's age of superhero movies if you want to know their history). One of the first such films, at least of American features, was D.W. Griffith's "One Exciting Night" (1922) and followed by more-enjoyable flicks by the likes of Roland West, Paul Leni, Benjamin Christensen and James Whale, "The Monster" (1925), "The Cat and the Canary" (1927), "The Last Warning" (1928), "Seven Footprints to Satan" (1929) and the trope-namer "The Old Dark House" (1932).
Whatever its genre, "Secrets of the Night" is a poor example. As a comedy, its best part is played by a glasses-wearing ZaSu Pitts, right before going to work on "Greed" (1924), scaring herself silly, but even that is largely ruined by her spending most of her time on screen with an offensive stereotypical servant played in blackface. As romance, I think the filmmakers overestimated the appeal of audiences becoming emotionally involved in the love lives of corrupt bankers. There are no secret passages or storms, such as the one that rescued Griffith's otherwise intolerable "One Exciting Night," which, predictably, also included blackface. Wind appears to blow a curtain at one point, but then the film cuts to a calm exterior scene. There are mysterious figures running around in the night, though, and whom may hold the answer to the murder mystery.
As a whodunnit, though, and despite ZaSu being introduced reading the granddaddy of detective stories, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," the mystery of "Secrets of the Night" violates at least a half dozen, if not more, of the "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories" by S.S. Van Dine. 3) There must be no love interest, but "Secrets of the Night" wastes at least half an hour preceding a corpse establishing its melodramatic love triangle plus time thereafter on it. 5) "The culprit must not be determined by accident or coincidence or unmotivated confession," but that's what happens here. 6) The detective must detect, but that's not something we see them doing here. 9) "There must be but one detective," and this one makes a gag out of its having three. 16) "...No long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no 'atmospheric' preoccupations." Guilty. And the other violations I shan't list without spoiling the resolution, of which I don't actually have a problem with, relatively.
Point is, "Secrets of the Night" isn't much good at being anything. After 36 minutes of a banker attempting to get people to murder him so that his life insurance policy will rescue his bank for the bad loan he made and berating those people for not having the courage to kill him, I was ready to grab Chekhov's gun to put the scenario out of its misery.
I'm glad to see a film from director Herbert Blaché, though, most of whose films remain lost. Today, he's best known as the one-time (and no "two-timing" jokes... oops) husband of Alice Guy(-Blaché), celebrated as the world's first female director, head producer, studio owner, etc. Hard to judge Mr. Blaché's direction based on what was likely an unusual genre for him and for a scenario of which he may've not had much input. Technically, the film appears competent enough, and I did enjoy the constant shifting of tinting/toning between amber and blue in the crosscutting between interior and exterior views. Perhaps, I'll get a chance to see more of his oeuvre someday. In the meantime and picking up on finishing her Gaumont work last year, for this year's Women's History Month, I'm going to get into Guy's productions for Solax, the studio her and her husband founded after leaving France for the U.S and including "A Fool and His Money" (1912), credited as one of the first films to feature an all-African-American cast, a dozen years before "Secrets of the Night" didn't even at least hire one.
