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America, not quite out of the Depression and not yet at war, as a pair of siblings split across noir lines and Gothic shivers. The Southern community is "a beehive without bees," the mill is dormant but the juke joint is jumpin'. The camera tracks to the gated cemetery and later to the crumbling mansion in the woods, deeper and deeper it ventures until it finds the "hopeless maniac" in his straitjacket, rocking with delight at the storm brewing outside: "This is the exciting part. When it's hanging over you like this... Threatening. Ready to break loose." As the Good Twin, Albert Dekker wears business suits, is married to a thoroughly declawed Frances Farmer, and is blissfully unaware of the dark secrets about to be literally exhumed. As the Cracked Twin, he keeps his jaw stubbly and hangs out with the proletariat, is sweet on the boarding-house kitty (Susan Hayward), and can still hear his battered mother's screams rattling inside his head. (The brutality and helplessness of abuse are found in the faces of his strangled victims, grimacing corpses with hands clasped over their ears.) Shadows have long chipped away the ancient pillar of integrity (Harry Carey), the bounty on the killer's head puts the villagers in a hunting mood. Abel and Cain but also Frankenstein, the storming of the castle yields to a kangaroo court. "You take off the outside wrapper, and up pops a different guy." In just over an hour, a quite heady small-town portrait served by Stuart Heisler with a keen sense of down-home expressionistic frenzies. Fury and Of Mice and Men pass through, on the way to Straw Dogs. With Gordon Jones, Jean Phillips, Ernest Whitman, Maude Eburne, Frank M. Thomas, and Harlan Briggs. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |