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The remarkable opening posits cinema ("The Wonder of the Age") as an art suspended between romantic and predatory gazes: A melodrama screens at a hotel parlor, the camera tilts from the rapt audience to the gargantuan chandelier hanging above them, a dissolve to the room upstairs reveals a limping girl and a killer in the closet, close-ups of her hands as she's strangled segue back to the projection room, the screen-within-the-screen heroine is no more. (When Robert Siodmak equates the culprit's staring pupil to a silent-film iris, at once you recognize Psycho, Peeping Tom, Deep Red...) The maiden (Dorothy McGuire) is a servant mute from childhood trauma, she works for a crabby widow (Ethel Barrymore plays the bedridden lioness with a deft trigger finger) and dreams of genteel love with the country doctor (Kent Smith). The late patriarch's bellicose motto weighs heavily on the "meek" stepbrothers (George Brent, Gordon Oliver), tippling cook (Elsa Lanchester) and stern nurse (Sara Allgood) and baleful groundskeeper (Rhys Williams) add to the suspicion over the course of one stormy night. Amid corpses and thunderclap, Barrymore waxes otherworldly about creeping terrors of her own: "Too many trees stretch their branches... knock the windows... try to get in." Feminine beauty is a flickering candle in the cellar, the monstrous aesthetic mind at the top of the stairs envisions the lass sans mouth (Un Chien Andalou). "There is no room, in the whole world, for imperfection." The psychopath is unmasked, the dowager rises once more, the lost voice returns as a scream—founded on expressionistic Gothic menace, Siodmak's fable also gazes ahead to the questioning horrors of the slasher subgenre. (Wiederhorn's estimable Eyes of a Stranger in particular benefits from it.) Cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca. With Rhonda Fleming, James Bell, and Erville Alderson. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |