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The Old Testament in 19th-century Maine, mayhem and incest and all. ("Squeamish?" the merchant asks his son, like Edgar G. Ulmer to his audience.) The waterfront boom-town is a church community that lights up like Gomorrah once invaded by roistering lumberjacks, the shopkeeper (Gene Lockhart) kicks out the town drunk and sighs, "it's his little girl I feel sorry for." Dissolve to said little girl by the river, learning about the power she exerts over boys by holding her sweetheart's head under water with her dainty foot. Once grown into a thrift-store Scarlett O'Hara (and blessed with the unearthly beauty of Hedy Lamarr), she marries Lockhart, seduces his son (Louis Hayward) into patricide, and steals her friend's fiancé (George Sanders). Accusations swirl, she's "a wanton" and a succubus and "not even a human being," singled out by the traveling preacher with a fire-breathing sermon. And yet there she is in the final close-up, her raven gaze as frank as Coleridge's Geraldine or Pabst's Lulu. Despite its fancier sheen, an Ulmer hallucination through and through—one character's scarred back inflames another's libido, water engulfs like quicksand, fires and tempests materialize as manifestations of a world of contradictory impulses. The camera follows Lamarr from the dinner table up the staircase to Hayward's room as a single candle illuminates the chiaroscuro composition, suddenly it's like an outtake from Day of Wrath. Above all, a vindication of the femme fatale, investigating the anti-heroine's manipulative, generous, predatory and vulnerable sides as the complicated "strangeness" perpetually threatening to expose the town's stability as the crust it is. Vidor and Davis in Beyond the Forest expand most extravagantly on it. With Hillary Brooke, Rhys Williams, Moroni Olsen, Dennis Hoey, June Storey, and Alan Napier. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |