The Last Warning

Plot

In a Broadway production of a play entitled The Snare, one of the actors, John Woodford, inexplicably dies during a stage performance, and his body disappears. Few clues exist as to what caused his death, aside from several drops of liquid found that resembled chloroform. Rumors of a love triangle between Woodford and two cast members circulate as a possible motive for his death.

Five years after the theater's closure, producer Mike Brody decides to solve the mystery by again staging the play with the remaining cast and re-enacting Woodford's murder. During rehearsals in the abandoned theater, strange occurrences plague the cast, including ominous noises, falling scenery, and an unexplained fire. Doris, the lead actress, has her purse stolen from her dressing room by an unseen assailant; Josiah Bunce, the stage manager, reportedly receives a telegram warning him to drop out of the play, signed by John Woodford, and the theater's new owner, Arthur McHugh, also receives a visit from Woodford's ghost.

The production continues, and during the final rehearsal, Harvey Carleton inexplicably disappears from the stage during a blackout. Doris spots a mysterious masked figure in a theater box in addition to a man resembling John Woodford, but both disappear. Behind a picture hanging on the stage, a lever is discovered which opens a trap door, where the cast find Harvey incoherent. Arthur and Richard Quayle, another cast member, venture inside, where they discover a tunnel that leads to Doris's dressing room.

Arthur has police officers appointed at the theater for the show's opening the following night. During the performance, an electrical wire charged to 400 volts is discovered connected to a candlestick onstage, and Arthur lunges at Richard to prevent him from touching it during the final scene. The unseen masked assailant is discovered hiding inside a grandfather clock onstage, but he drops through a trap door in the floor just after shooting one of the police officers. The assailant scales the theater and throws a dummy resembling John Woodford onto the stage. He then begins swinging from a rope, but is brought back down by a stagehand who cuts it.

The masked assailant is discovered to be Josiah, who caused Woodford's death via electrocution and had been behind the "hauntings" to prevent the theater from being used.

Cast

Production

The film was envisioned as a companion piece to director Leni's earlier The Cat and the Canary, due to that film's great popularity. Though it re-teamed Leni with The Cat and the Canary star Laura La Plante and features a similar style, The Last Warning lacks the supernatural elements of The Cat and the Canary and is therefore usually considered in the mystery genre rather than the horror genre.

Production on the film began in August 1928. The theater set used in the film was built for the 1925 The Phantom of the Opera starring Lon Chaney.

Release

The Last Warning was released theatrically on January 6, 1929. The film is often considered one of the last silent films produced by Universal Studios, but it was also released in a "part-talkie" Movietone version with a brief minute or two of synch-sound footage added, as well as screams, cries, and other sound effects. These scenes have since been lost. Few prints of the film exist in the United States: One is owned by the George Eastman House Motion Picture Collection in Rochester, New York, which was originally owned by the Cinémathèque Française, and is slightly edited and entirely silent with French intertitles.

In 2016, the film underwent restoration by Universal Pictures, sourced from both the Cinémathèque Française print, as well as a print featuring the original English title cards owned by the Packard Humanities Institute Collection of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. The restored print was screened at the Castro Theatre as part of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival on June 4, 2016.

Critical reception

Extant published reviews of the film were almost exclusively positive. Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times noted the film contained "some finely directed passages," but that it was "not especially disturbing." He also criticized the film's utilization of sound, writing: "There are too many outbursts of shrieking, merely to prove the effect of the audible screen, to cause any spine-chilling among those watching this production." Sid Silverman of Variety gave the film a positive review, noting the film's use of sound effects as "multiple, continuous, and in detail," and that it included "enough screams to stimulate the average film mob into sticking through it."

Other adaptations

The Last Warning was re-made in 1939 by Joe May under the title The House of Fear.

Works cited