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The woman is Joan Crawford, disfigured for her (and George Cukor's) art. The uncovering begins with a silhouette behind a scrim, then a medium shot and a turned-away profile, finally a close-up for a full view of the melted rubber. (Conrad Veidt's smile at the sight clinches the frisson.) "The world was against me? All right, I'd be against it." She hides behind a slanted chapeau or a curtain of hair and presides over a blackmail ring, one of her victims is a straying wife (Osa Massen) whose prettiness amplifies her fury. The dapper cuckold (Melvyn Douglas) is a plastic surgeon who promises to make the heroine whole again: "Now... I unveil my Galatea. Or my Frankenstein." Tracking shots and dissolves are prevalent at the Stockholm murder trial, where Thoreau's "beauty as moral test" is the theme. Veidt's scheming aristocrat is used as a thinly disguised Nazi ("The world belongs to the devil and I know how to serve him if can only get the power") and, more surprisingly, as the linchpin of Cukor's oneiric study of Ufa Gothic, complete with the hands of Orlac himself superimposed over Crawford's eyes. The wordless ski-lift sequence with the cherubic heir suspended above the void is a Hitchcockian set piece that, in the sustained image of a clouded visage clearing into grace, suddenly points to Ingrid Bergman's awakening at the edge of Rossellini's volcano. Elsewhere, there's Donald Meek's nimbleness as a maître d' with a mocking streak, Albert Bassermann's joviality with a Groucho jest ("To be 60 again..."), Marjorie Main's fierce jealousy, Connie Gilchrist's poker face exhaling cigarette smoke. The flashback structure in the year of Citizen Kane goes into Les Girls, the folk dance at the chalet is something for Polanski to make fun of. With Reginald Owen, Richard Nichols, Henry Kolker, George Zucco, Robert Warwick, and Henry Daniell. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |