Vintage lobby card for The Man from Beyond (1922), a Harry Houdini film featuring a man defrosted from the Arctic ice…
The Best Moving Pictures of 1922-23 states this movie was “Released August 20, 1922”, having had a premiere in New York in April. The release date means that this cannot have been the object of the major cinema outing by Lovecraft and friends during his stay in Cleveland (from 30th July – 15th Aug 1922)…
“in the evening Loveman organised a party to see the most lavish cinema show in town — a party consisting of himself, a friend named Baldwin, Kirk, young Wheeler, Galpin, and myself.”
Given the various release dates of the 1922-release movies, and the likely tastes of the group, it was more likely that the movie seen was either the lackluster (and now mostly lost) Sherlock Holmes of 1922, or Nanook of the North (a ground-breaking documentary filmed in the Arctic). Since Lovecraft doesn’t even mention the name of the movie in his letter, it was probably the disappointing Holmes. If so, then Lovecraft could at least have been satisfied by the film’s “extensive location work in London”, which would have given him a sense of the city he so longed to visit…
If it was Holmes they saw, then perhaps some of the visuals helped with the writing of Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls”, set in England, which was written the following summer?
Judging from his description of the venue (Lord of a Visible World p.108) it was probably the Allen, a new and very sumptuous 3000-seat independent movie palace that opened in 1921…
Nosferatu, Dr. Mabuse, and Haxan (all 1922) don’t appear to have made it out of Europe at that time. Nosferatu would not reach the screens of New York until 1929.
