Cat And The Canary, The (1927) Rating: Starring: Laura La Plante, Arthur Edmund Carew, Flora Finch, Creighton Hale, Tully Marshall, Martha Mattox, Geo. Seigmann, Forrest Stanley Director: Paul Leni Category: Suspense / Thriller, Classic Studio: Image Ent. Subtitles: [None] Length: 81 mins     The 1927 Silent Classic, with the original 1927 Music Score. It was a dark and stormy night, as the saying goes, and the greedy relatives gathered in a gloomy old mansion for the midnight reading of a 20-year-old will were unnerved by sinister events:a clawed hand emerging from the wall, a familiar body falling from behind a secret panel and word that an escaped lunatic was at large.All in an evening's entertainment, for audiences of the silent film era. The Cat and the Canary is so clever and stylish that it would appear to be the well-spring of all "old dark horse" mysteries.But when it was filmed by Universal in 1927, John Willard's play was already a theatrical warhorse, along with other popular melodramas such as The Bat, The Monster and The Gorilla.In their stage and screen incarnations, these chestnuts promised as many laughs as thrills, and audiences thoroughly expected their houses' hauntings to be revealed as the criminal schemes of mortals.For both Broadway and Hollywood, the supernatural would not take center stage until the arrival of Count Dracula.