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The children's excursion into Sleepy Hollow delicately sets up the Lacanian encounter, the Symbolic (hollow tree trunk as mailbox) versus the Imaginary (satin-wrapped movie star in the playground). "Something moody, something sickly," the solemn little daydreamer (Ann Carter), lonely and curious, "a little different." Her parents (Kent Smith, Jane Randolph) worry about "too many fantasies," possibly because the enchanted princess who turns up as her imaginary playmate is daddy's late first wife (Simone Simon). Given a "magic" ring, the tyke wishes for friendship: The leaf-carpeted garden darkens and then glows, the child's face bubbles with joy as the beatific cat-woman materializes "from great darkness and deep peace." Goya's paintings and Stevenson's poetry are among the objets d'art in the household, "a home connected." (The vessel is here a miniature model, Sir Lancelot the spiritual go-between is a domestic servant.) By contrast, the Gothic mansion down the street is a tangle of shadows and staircases presided over by an addled grand dame (Julia Dean) and, with the recluse (Elizabeth Russell) hardened by her senile mother's rejection, the stage for a different kind of familial haunting. Gunther von Fritsch and Robert Wise share directing duties, though authorship belongs wholly to Val Lewton, who's both the figure crouching in terror in the woods as well as the old storyteller regaling the camera in jack-'o'-lantern close-up. The adults are lost, bitter, desperate to forget the past, specters. The tiny heroine's virginal gaze, meanwhile, instinctively gravitates from the stolid carolers in her living room to the mysterious apparition outside singing "Il est né, le divin enfant." A remarkably elusive work, a producer-auteur's personal summarization, a great fountain of inspiration for subsequent fabulas (The Spirit of the Beehive, Cría Cuervos). Cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |