Seven Footprints to Satan

Thelma Todd spent the last night of her life dying in her car, the cause of death presumably carbon monoxide poisoning. It was suspected that gangster Lucky Luciano had ordered the hit because Todd had refused his request to put illegal gambling machines in her roadside eatery. Luciano denied this accusation to his close associates. To this day, it is unknown exactly how Todd managed to kill herself, passed out in her car.

Groucho Marx, in the movie Monkey Business (1931), kindly informed Thelma (a.k.a. “Hot Toddy”), “You look like you’ve had some tough breaks. We can fix your brakes, but you’ll have to sleep in the garage all night.” Prescient. Indeed, she did — and she never awoke. (Note: That wasn’t an exact quote, but you get the picture.) Thelma rode the iron beast into eternity on December 16, 1935. It wasn’t moving, nor was anything of Toddy’s save for her restless, emancipated shade.

Seven Footprints to Satan is a creepily bizarre and surreal silent romp through an “Old Dark House” that would have made Mary Roberts Rinehart blush. It’s based on a novel by A. Merritt, a popular sci-fi and weird-tale author of the era (who later claimed he wept when he saw how they had thrown out everything of his novel except the title). It was directed by Benjamin Christensen, a Danish director most famous for his film Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922), a pseudo-documentary of disturbing proportions depicting medieval devils and witches’ sabbaths, demonic possession, spell casting, inquisitions — you get the picture. It’s an infamous film that exists today in a version with some slight, nasal, occasional narration by none other than William S. Burroughs.

So the arcane and grim undercurrent of this film, which features devils (though we’re not sure they’re actual ones in the completely hellish sense), is very strong. Toddy and Creighton Hale play a couple (I’m not sure what exactly they’re supposed to be doing together) who are kidnapped from a soirée in which Hale is going to be exhibiting a precious Romanoff emerald — or some such outlandish, comic-book device. (Fun fact: Creighton Hale was the father of actor Alan Hale, best known decades later as “The Skipper” on "Gilligan’s Island.")

Hale has been planning a trip to Africa to discover a lost civilization. To that end, he secrets himself in a secret target range and practices blowing the flame off seven candlesticks. His butler (shades of Alfred Pennyworth) is not amused.

The party is interrupted by sinister gunplay from the vaguely Oriental femme fatale, and a ballroom of 1929 dancers clad in fancy evening wear go stampeding out the door; but Toddy and Hale are kidnapped and forced into a car by crook-nosed thugs who secret them away, hostages, depositing them in a house of high camp.

It’s an “Old Dark House.” The denizens are a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party of witchy-poos and hairy professors (Dr. “Moriarity,” a clear play on the name of a character familiar to Sherlock Holmes fans). Intermittently, Angelo Rossitto will pop out of a hidden compartment and express a dire warning to the duo.

There’s a cavalcade of grotesques here — including the man in the gorilla costume, rather de rigueur for this sort of thing. It is playful, humorous, and all leading to the throne room of the diabolical “Satan,” a masked menace of chapter-play villainy who commands Hale, while apparently entertaining the same ballroom full of late-twenties folks who might have been imported from the Overlook Hotel, to approach him by following the — egad — SEVEN FOOTPRINTS.

These all glow, and we’re not quite sure what the punishment will be if he fails to comply — or if there even is one. (I distinctly recall a threat emanating from Satan should Hale fail to do... something. But I must not have been impressed enough to scrutinize every particular plot point.)

The ending is a washout. We won’t give it away, but it is groan-worthy stuff — fully hackneyed and thoroughly trite.

There are solid grotesques here, monstrous personages. It’s an entertaining little time capsule of dated horror-comedy fun and good times. And there’s a whiff of the morbid here, for the morbidly curious as well — one that smells a little like the funereal flower of poor dear Thelma, who rested all night not in an Old Dark House, but in the garage, as Groucho said she’d have to.

Tough breaks, indeed.

By the way, Thelma Todd was often dubbed as the "Ice Cream Blonde," by the press. Sounds a little like "I-Scream." But I suppose that's neither here nor there.

Seven Footprints to Satan 1929 Starring Creighton Hale and Thelma Todd

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