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The first of Val Lewton's suggestive dreamscapes: "I never cease to marvel at what lies behind a brown storefront." The delicate Ovidian scent already hangs over the introduction of the Serbian designer (Simone Simon) and her beau-to-be (Kent Smith) at the New York zoo, a loaded flirtation watched by a caged panther. (A crumpled drawing of the pierced beast gives the first of the mysteries.) Old World folklore and tragic history dwell in her, so feline that her mere presence has a hundred pet-shop birds shrieking at once. Fears leave the marriage unconsummated, the wife seeks a solution and finds the condescending rationality of the psychiatrist (Tom Conway) while the husband strays toward a confidante (Jane Randolph). "I have no peace... for they are in me," moans the heroine in a trace, her face illuminated like a crescent moon encircled by Nicholas Musuraca's chiaroscuro. An unmistakably European vision, with its traces of Freud and Ibsen and tacit acknowledgment of refugees, nothing is lost on Jacques Tourneur. (His astonishing visual sense posits immigrant dislocation and marital anxiety as spiritual states suspended between planes of light and shadow.) Maya Deren would avail herself of the dream sequence's gleaming blades and erect keys, the great horror in the famous nocturnal stalk is not just the bus suddenly screeching into the frame, but the tranquil shot of tree branches shaking from something having just leapt off of them. And there's Simon's sorrowful, erotic Slavic kitten, crouching in heat and sadness during her honeymoon, her naked back glistering as she weeps in a bathtub. Donne has the last word: "But black sin hath betrayed to endless night / My world, both parts, and both parts must die." For the proper remake, look not to Schrader's garish vulgarization but Marnie, Repulsion, Sisters, Ms .45... With Jack Holt, Alan Napier, Alec Craig, and Elizabeth Russell. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |