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Three years ahead of Olivier, the gentle joke of a noir Hamlet. A prologue keyed to Rimbaud ("Strange rumors to your dreaming mind..."), a faceless usurper, a lion's head on a bracelet, Freud's train off the rails amid swirls of fog and Schumann. The young prince is a California smarty-pants (Jimmy Lydon), an aspiring criminologist shaken by the death of his judge father. His reverie is recounted to the doctor (Regis Toomey) on the way to a fishing lake, a letter from the beyond brings the boy home for the holidays and a splash of Oedipal intrigue. Mom (Sally Eilers) is rich and lonely, catnip for the lizard (Warren William) who turns out to be her late husband's nemesis; her son uncloaks him as the shadowy figure of his nightmare during a dinner party, a "mental shock" revisited by Bertolucci in Luna. "I'd take it easy on that intuition business. It can become an obsession, you know." Edgar G. Ulmer and the Poverty Row subconscious, "fools and children" to foil the perfect crime. Reason can only go so far, thus an incantatory anecdote shot by moonlight and reflected on dark waters or a jalopy racing across nocturnal woods like a memory of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. The neurotic hero reads aloud the unfinished file on the scoundrel and the camera slowly pans over the office desk and tilts up to meet the stern gaze of the paterfamilias on a looming painting. A villainous psychiatrist figures in the year of Spellbound, naturally, the sanitarium is a sparse labyrinth with barred windows and something rotten in the barn. Pure delirium on a shoestring, an Ulmer wonder, "just nuts looking for a padded cell." The dissipation of the oneiric realm might be a happy ending or it might be a juvenile's perishing vision. With Charles Arnt, George H. Reed, and Jayne Hazard. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |