The Silent House

A late British silent from Walter Forde, 1929, out of a West End play: an old-dark-house picture with a snake pit, a corpse in the fireplace, and a mandarin (Gibb McLaughlin) who hypnotizes a woman to find the jewels her uncle stole from a Chinese temple. Mabel Poulton is T'Mala; Arthur Pusey inherits the house. Nettlefold Studios, Walton-on-Thames. The yellow-peril plotting is of its moment; the camera movement is Forde's, already thinking like the sound director he would become. A print survives at the BFI. The colonial unease Jonathan Rigby later named is not subtext. It is the plot.