Lack of good storyline.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

"The Cat and the Canary" is a favourite of mine. Combining elements of Horror with Comedy, this film has many excellent moments.The sets that represent the house in question, are outstanding. I can believe that someone or something is roaming about along those long, dark corridors.The direction by German director, Paul Leni is excellent as he makes full use of the cameras and the lighting.The acting is pretty good on the whole.I rate "The Cat and the Canary" as being on a par with the best from "Universal's" horror period.

The fortune of a man is left behind to his relative (Cousin West), on the condition she is proved by a doctor to be perfectly sane. If she fails the condition, the will passes to another. Set in a large mansion, rumoured to be haunted, at midnight (for when else would you do such a thing?), with a creepy house maid, shadowy lighting, and lunatic on the loose, various personnel who come for the will reading are snatched away from a hand that appears out of moving walls, while the rest are plunged into fear. As the disappearances happen with only Cousin West as witness, the others start to believe she is crazy, and we wonder who is behind it all?It is all done with a large wink, very hammy, and with brief moments of humour inserted throughout, showing not even the scriptwriters could take it seriously. Perhaps it was meant more for the comedy genre than the suspense, as if the very act of working in this genre was funny, but in that case I would say Keaton ("Electric House", "The Haunted House" and "The Navigator") got far cleverer laughs from similar themes, as did Lloyd, who the style of humour often reminded me. To it's credit though, it does create enough mystery to avoid being a bore, and the knowing silliness makes it more fun than it might have been if made with a completely straight face.

The version I watched on Amazon was the one issued by Kino with the music score intact. This was quite both a scary and funny movie with Creighton Hale a hoot as the comic hero. This must have been one of the early movies in which a group stays at a haunted house after a reading of a will and the one who stands to inherit it all is the one who gets almost scared of his/her wits. This is the kind of plot I used to regularly watch on "Scooby Doo" cartoons on Saturday mornings when a kid during the '70s. Anyway, I quite enjoyed this silent version of something I watched a talkie version of years back-the one with Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard from 1939. So yeah, that's a recommendation of this version of The Cat and the Canary.

When a lawyer arrives at the estate of a recently-deceased client for a reading of the will, he finds that there's a living moth inside the safe he sealed twenty years earlier. Clearly, something's not quite right in THE CAT AND THE CANARY. The ensuing attempts by various and sundry people to gain possession of the dead man's riches (by legally proving that the heiress is insane) leads to some classic Horror Movie moments (and images ingrained in many minds long ago by Forrest J. Ackerman's FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND)- moments that have been "re-imagined" a million times since. There's also a Harold Lloyd look-alike who has perhaps the best line in the movie. "Don't interrupt me," he says at one point: "I think I'm thinking." Besides these assets, THE CAT AND THE CANARY offers some amazingly MODERN filmmaking techniques (not to mention the greatest number of dissolves and super-impositions I think I've ever seen). It's called a classic for a reason.