The Last Warning Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.5

The Last Warning Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 13, 2021

Considering the often outsized temperaments that accompany those who work in the performing arts, it’s probably a minor miracle that more people haven’t been murdered in a theater. In that regard, there have been at least a few stage plays and movies revolving around murder in the wings (so to speak), and in that regard, whoever is in charge of synchronicity may be toying with this particular reviewer again, as so often seems to be the case. Just recently in our Inner Sanctum Mysteries: The Complete Film Series Blu-ray review, I mentioned how that film series stemmed not just from the well known radio iteration, but from an imprint of venerable publishing firm Simon and Schuster, who had been putting out Inner Sanctum books since the 1920s, books that often (though not always) dealt with murder. One of the Simon and Schuster Inner Sanctum offerings was a 1941 detective outing by famed stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, which itself became a film with the same name as the book, The G-String Murders, documenting some unseemly activities at a burlesque joint. Fans of Cabaret songwriting team John Kander and Fred Ebb may know they had a later hit with their musical Curtains, which featured Frasier’s David Hyde Pierce as a starstruck cop trying to get to the bottom of a murder or two that takes place as a late fifties musical is on the road out of town getting ready for a Broadway opening. (Curtains includes a rather funny song called “What Kind of Man?”, which attempts to provide insight as to why anyone would want to become a critic.) These are just two examples of “backstage murder mysteries”, but much as Paul Leni’s Waxworks predates other, arguably better known, “wax dummy murder” films like Mystery of the Wax Museum, Leni’s The Last Warning is an early outing that documents murderous shenanigans taking place both onstage and backstage during the run of a Broadway play.

The Last Warning followed in the wake of Paul Leni's The Cat and the Canary, and like that previous film, The Last Warning, too, had its genesis as a stage offering. The whole "meta" aspect of having a play where a murder takes place in a play probably obviously loses something in the translation to the medium of film, but even with a certain "distance" in this version, The Last Warning is a genuinely entertaining piece, if arguably not quite as consistently engaging as its predecessor.

Perhaps just a bit too elaborately plotted for its own good, and with a denouement that is kind of illogical at its core, The Last Warning deals with the assumed death and disappearance of an actor during a performance of a Broadway play. A "re-enactment" of sorts, in both senses of the term, is undertaken some time later in order to try to figure out what happened the first time, but the theater itself seems to be giving most of the participant decided messages that it may be best not to continue, and that the show most definitely should not go on.

If the narrative here may seem old hat to modern day audiences, the film's stylistic flourishes are quite inviting, and Leni had the good fortune to be able to use the sets from the then relatively recent Lon Chaney epic The Phantom of the Opera. Leni's camera is often impressively creative, including kind of skewed POV shots (see screenshot ) and a nice, quasi-gothic flair despite the film's supposedly "modern" setting. A late moment featuring a suspect on a rope also has some really impressive camera moves for a silent feature of that era. Speaking of that era, The Last Warning is kind of an interesting historical curio, as is gotten into in some of the supplements, in that Universal, responding to the furor created by Warner Brothers' The Jazz Singer, released two versions of this film, the silent one which is included here, and a partial synchronized sound offering which is thought to be lost or at least incomplete.

The Last Warning Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Last Warning is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Eureka! Entertainment's Masters of Cinema imprint with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.35:1. Eureka only sent a check disc for purposes of this review, and so I'm not privy to any information on the transfer that might be included in the insert booklet. A brief closing text card states that this was a 4K restoration conducted by Universal Pictures, from a 35mm nitrate dupe negative provided by the Cinémathèque française and a 16mm print provided by the Packard Humanities Institute at the UCLA Film & Television Archive. There are understandably manifest differences in clarity, detail levels and grain structure due to the differing source elements, some of which can clearly be seen by simply looking through all of the screenshots accompanying this review. There's also quite a bit of damage on display, including some rather long lived scratches that afflict the right side of the frame in particular, lots of other smaller nicks and blemishes, dirt and a couple of warped frames and even a missing frame or two. That said, detail levels are often quite appealing, and things like patterns on costumes and sets typically look at least decently precise and often better than that. Contrast is also a bit variable, some of which I'm attributing to the varying source elements.

The Last Warning Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Last Warning features an enjoyable score by Arthur Barrow which is presented in LPCM 2.0. Fidelity is fine throughout, supporting all frequency ranges, and if the track is admittedly not overly spacious, it has a nice warmth and good energy.

The Last Warning Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary with horror and fantasy authors Stephen Jones and Kim Newman is a fun and sometimes funny conversation between the two, though it does have a couple of odd amplitude spikes that are perhaps due to what sounds like phone or remote recording issues.


• Paul Leni and The Last Warning (HD; 9:58) is an overview of Leni and the film by John Soister, who I found just a little hard to understand at times. This feels like it came from a longer, more involved, piece, but perhaps not.


• Rare Stills Gallery (HD) includes:

  Production Stills

  
  

  Behind the Scenes

  
  

  Posters

  
  

  Trade Ads

Eureka only sent a check disc for purposes of this review, but both a press sheet accompanying the check disc and Eureka' sight mention a collector's booklet is also included which features a new essay by Philip Kemp and a short essay by composer Arthur Barrow.

The Last Warning Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

One of the other interesting "meta" or perhaps "Trivial Pursuit" aspects of The Last Warning is that, while it was based on a Broadway play, the play was based on a story called The House of Fear by Wadworth Camp. The House of Fear was made as a film under that title in 1939, and one of the supplements suggests that the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes entry The House of Fear owes at least its title to the Camp story. However, there's even another interesting trivia angle with regard to Camp: he was the father of noted science fiction writer Madeleine L'Engle, who of course gave the world A Wrinkle in Time. All of this may help some curmudgeonly viewers to look past some baroque plotting to enjoy these another "hidden" elements, as well as Leni's always superb style. Video encounters some age related issues, but audio is fine, and the supplements very enjoyable. Recommended.