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Private school is the orphan's chrysalis, the first image succinctly blurs the lines between sanctuary and mausoleum: Stained glass and vocal exercises over a staircase, the heroine (Kim Hunter) pushing against a rush of departing schoolgirls. She enters the outside world to the tune of "Nautilus" ("Build thee more stately mansions O my soul"), her sister has vanished in Greenwich Village. A neighborhood bistro named Dante's offers looming Italianate frescoes and, upstairs, the missing woman's vision of happiness—a locked room with a hangman's noose dangling and ready. Brother-in-law (Hugh Beaumont) and psychiatrist (Tom Conway) and poet (Erford Gage) join the search, conspiracy is hinted in a deserted subway and confirmed at a secret society meeting. The Psycho premonition of a blurry shower invader is prepared by an equally unnerving shot in the warehouse at night (paraphernalia silhouetted by frosted glass), the wizened private detective (Lou Lubin) tiptoes down the darkened hall and staggers back with a slashed chest. "One must have courage to really live in the world." The Palladists, "very real and earnest" devil-worshipers squeamish about violence, not Polanski's sardonic gargoyles but depressives struggling to fill the void, plenty of them in Val Lewton's cosmos. Donne's sonnet, Cyrano's sword in the night sky, a soupçon of Puccini... Cat People's line of thought is continued, though where repressed sexuality was Tourneur's phantom, Mark Robson here deals with the pull of the Reaper. The sister (Jean Brooks) is revealed at last as a "sensationalist" sleepwalker lost in a private danse macabre, Gibran's "bride of Death standing like a column of light between the bed and the infinite." The astonishing final movement sends her to her chamber while her dying neighbor takes to the streets, different roads into the night. With Isabel Jewell, Evelyn Brent, Ben Bard, and Elizabeth Russell. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |