Movie Review: The Man Who Knew Too Much

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Leslie Banks, Edna Best, Peter Lorre

(Note: This is my submission in the Fabulous Films of the 30s Blogathon, Hosted by the Classic Movie Blog Association.)

Happily married Bob and Jill Lawrence (Leslie Banks and Edna Best) are on a winter holiday at a European ski resort with their young daughter Betty (Nova Pilbeam). While there, they laugh and dance and intermingle with all kinds of interesting new people, from the suave Louis Bernard (Pierre Fresnay) to the strange, funny Mr. Abbott (Peter Lorre). But their vacation suddenly turns into a living nightmare one night when Louis falls to the ground, shot by an unseen enemy. It turns out that Louis Bernard was in fact a government agent and before he dies, he passes on a vital secret to the Lawrences. The secret is an imminent assassination in London, one that threatens to start a second world war. But before the couple can act on the information, the assassins, led by the ever-smiling Abbott, kidnap young Betty. This forces the couple to keep their mouths shut, even as the danger draws closer. However, they refuse to give up and instead, choose to search for Betty on their own. Bob and his trusty brother-in-law Clive (Hugh Wakefield) take to the back alleys of England, hunting down leads that range from the weird to the truly bizarre. Still, Abbott is onto them and so are the rest of the assassins. The family will have to find the strength and courage to save Betty and somehow do it without betraying their own country. It's a battle of wits and wills and there's no telling what could happen...

For someone who likes to introduce herself as an Alfred Hitchcock super-fan, to the point that I wrote my college admissions essay on him, it's taken me an amazingly long time to catch up with this film. It's strange, but while the 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much was ridiculously easy for me to catch on TV during the periodic Hitchcock marathons, its older (and thoroughly British) sibling from 1934 has been elusive. The experience of finally seeing the original film however, gave me a renewed understanding for why both movies are so inextricably paired together in critical discussion. Comparing them is irresistible but deciding between them is very difficult. The two films are such a perfect encapsulation of their respective decades and countries, with all the attending strengths and weaknesses, that preferring one to the other seems to be less of an aesthetic judgment and more like an epicurean deciding which tickles his palate. They're equally delicious.

Both films tell the tale of a more-or-less ordinary married couple who stumble into a dangerous world of espionage and assassins. Despite their naivete and seeming helplessness, the couple find new reserves of strength and determination when their own child is kidnapped to keep their mouths shut about an impending assassination.
 
In the 1934 film, the Lawrences are a sophisticated English couple vacationing at a Swiss ski resort with a young daughter. The husband is well-off and contented; the wife is flirtatious and happens to be a crack shot. In the 1956 film, the McKennas are a cheerful but sometimes hapless American couple traveling through Morocco with a freckle-faced son. The husband is a blunt, guy-next-door doctor who doesn't quite fit into his foreign surroundings any more than his long legs fit under Moroccan tables. His wife is a famous singer who gave up her career for the sake of her marriage. In both films, it's the husband that takes the active role in searching and fighting while it's up to the wife to use her great talent (sharpshooting and singing, respectively) to save the day. And in both films, it's the couple's very unassuming ordinariness that causes the ruthless villains to fatally underestimate them.
 
The great dividing line between the 1934 film and the 1956 remake is the tone. In the brightly colored and much more expansive remake, Hitchcock gives us a fresh-faced American couple, so complacent that they can crack morbid jokes over the various patients whose ailments funded their vacation ("You know what's paying for this three days in Marrakesh--Mrs. Campbell's gall stone"). He then proceeds to torment them 'til they crack. The fact that all of this is happening to James Stewart and Doris Day, two beloved Hollywood superstars, puts the frantic emotions of the couple front and center. All of this even while Hitchcock dazzles the eye with exotic settings and amazing set pieces. Everything is so immense that even Stewart and Day can unravel without anyone noticing. The 1956 movie sort of takes the  rotten-apple-core mentality of Shadow of a Doubt, in which another innocent American goes up against ruthless villainy and pairs it to the giddy visuals of something like To Catch a Thief.

The 1934 film on the other hand, is like the speedy little roadster next to the 1956 cruise ship. It's a much compacter version of the same tale, clocking in at a mere 75 minutes. It also is much sharper in the twists and turns of its moods, careening from lightweight comedy to tense thriller and back again. It doesn't linger nearly as much on the parents. To a large extent, Leslie Banks and Edna Best are just there to keep the story moving along. They keep the stereotypical stiff upper lip to the point that even when Banks reunites with his daughter, in the middle of a group of assassins, he tries to make light of the entire situation. The one government representative we meet is coolly annoyed with the couple's secretiveness, barking at them to put their country first. And in the end, the film's most memorable character is not the couple nor any of their friends. It's the villain. 

For all those who like to harp on Hitchcock's onscreen infatuation with his blonde leading ladies, I say that Hitchcock was just as enamored (in a cinematic way) with his villains. Peter Lorre, playing the kidnapping assassin Abbott, sets a template for the charming villain that Hitchcock would repeat again and again with actors like James Mason, Ray Milland and Robert Walker. 

The story goes that Peter Lorre had to learn his lines phonetically in order to play the mysterious Abbott. Not that anybody cared because, after his indelible performance in M, they were eager to get him. Lorre's acting here is really a marvel of assurance; it's a complete 180 degree turn from his cringing, desperate performance in M. Abbott is smooth and confident, with one of the most beautifully beaming smiles you could ever hope to see. When you put him up against the bluff, so-very British Leslie Banks, Lorre almost looks like the mischievous schoolboy tweaking the nose of the headmaster. He's the guy who tosses in a Shakespeare quote as a threat ("A long, long journey 'from which no traveler returns'") and then caps it off with the deadpan aside, "Great poet." 

And yet, I think the key to Lorre's brilliance in the role is his unpredictability. Just when you think you've gotten used to Lorre as the impeccably polite villain, he turns the tables and gives you moments of sadistic menace or even, in a startling scene, genuine grief. When his creepy female accomplice dies in a shootout, Lorre holds her and looks, for a moment, like a brother holding the body of his sister. And then the moment's gone. We never learn what they were to each other. We never really understand Abbott, who smiles innocently in moments where he should threaten and looks angry in moments when everything's going his way. But Lorre is so good in the role that he eclipses everyone else. Because of him, the film ends up less as a tale of two ordinary people up against evil and instead, becomes a briskly unsentimental film which sets up scenes and knocks them over like dominoes. This is pure suspense, with no more character development than absolutely necessary.

In comparing the 1934 film and the 1956 remake, it's quite striking to see how the role of the wife evolved over the course of two decades. In the first film, Edna Best carries on in the tradition of the sprightly, sophisticated wives of '30s films. There's something a little Nora Charles-ish about her in the way she sails through rooms, cheerfully flirts with other men (in the full confidence that her husband is watching and smirking) and shoots down clay pigeons with cool panache. 

However, once her child is kidnapped, Best is pushed to the side of the story. Her own grief at the loss of her child is relegated to one scene, in which Best staggering with the news of the kidnapping, turns glassy-eyed and spins into a faint, while Hitchcock briefly cuts to a whirling POV shot. From there, her husband's off to do the work of tracking down their child, with the brother-in-law along as the trusty sidekick. Best is benched for a good chunk of the movie from then on; she reappears for the famous Albert Hall sequence and then for a final shootout with the assassins. It's in those final moments that Best seizes her own action-hero moment, grabbing a rifle and delivering the shot that will save her daughter. Even if you could see it coming (Why else establish the wife as a crack shot?), it still comes off as an exhilarating bit of physical heroism, all the more so because none of the characters treat it as anything odd.

The 1956 film, by contrast, knows it's got Doris Day and a star gets a star part. Day's emotions are given much more depth and attention than Best's. The British film treats Best's motherly anguish as so much inconvenient baggage, with the government man basically snapping at her and husband for being so unpatriotic as to, you know, care more about the life of their child than the life of a statesman. The 1956 film by contrast has a prolonged, deeply uncomfortable scene of James Stewart drugging Day to calm her; the chin-up-old-girl spirit of the original has turned into cruelty. Day's torment during the Albert Hall concert scene is also drawn out much more than Best's. In addition to being a more openly emotional character, Day's housewife is a famous singer whose ambitions have been subtly snuffed out in favor of marriage. The irony is that, despite the fact that she seems, on the surface, like a much more retrograde archetype than the earlier Best character, Day does in fact use that same powerful voice to save both her child and the statesman. She's so much more repressed than Best's action hero and yet, because her film pays more attention to her, she comes off as much more heroic.

Now that I've finally crossed the 1934 film off my list, I can say with confidence that it's a sparkling, smart movie in its own right. It's the work of a young filmmaker just discovering the full range of what he can do and the mesmerizing shifts of tone, the charismatic villain, and the quirky bursts of humor all come together perfectly. Really, when I think about it, the experience of watching both versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much is like visiting their respective locations. The 1956 film is a trip through a dazzlingly colorful, overcrowded marketplace. The 1934 original is like a trip down a snow-covered mountain. Cool, exhilarating and all over in a rush.

Favorite Quote:

"You know, to a man with a heart as soft as mine, there's nothing sweeter than a touching scene. Such as a father saying goodbye to his child. Yeah, goodbye for the last time. What could be more touching than that?"

Favorite Scene:

The scene in which Edna Best is dancing with the spy. Her husband, playfully pretending to be jealous, takes her knitting and turns it into a unraveling bit of thread that quickly entangles her and her dancing partner. It's all light and romantic. And then in one of those perfect bits of Hitchcock turning on a dime, her partner falls down, mortally wounded, and the light thread that entwined them together has suddenly become a trap. It's really the ultimate metaphor for the Hitchcock movie. 

Final Six Words:

A champagne bubble balanced on knives

Movie Review: The Queen of Spades

The Queen of Spades (1949)
directed by Thorold Dickinson, starring Anton Walbrook, Yvonne Mitchell, Edith Evans

(Note: This is my entry in The British Invaders Blogathon, hosted by A Shroud of Thoughts.) 

Night after night, Captain Herman Suvorin (Anton Walbrook) goes with his fellow officers to a club, where the laughing sons of nobility stare at the gypsy dancers and play the card game faro until the sun rises. Suvorin, a strange, solitary man, never spends any time with the dancers and never spends any money, but there's a furtive hunger in his eyes as he watched the cards. Andrei (Ronald Howard), the only one in the company nice enough to try to be Suvorin's friend, is puzzled by his behavior, but Suvorin, a poor man who despises his wealthier comrades, is determined not to play faro until he's certain he'll win.

One night, Suvorin discovers a book that promises him the key to unbelievable wealth. The book tells the story of the Countess Ranevskaya, a beautiful, desperate woman who sold her soul to the Devil in order to win the secret of the three winning cards. With the secret of the cards, she won enough money at faro to keep herself from ruin. Suvorin is excited beyong measure at the story, especially when he discovers that Ranevskaya is still alive now an old and irascible crone (Edith Evans) who's never once breathed a word of the secret cards to anyone. Suvorin becomes obsessed with learning the three cards at any price. Even if it means seducing the countess's innocent young ward Lizaveta (Yvonne Mitchell). Even if it means loss of life or sanity. Even if he throws his own soul onto the fire...

 
For a film that Martin Scorsese himself referred to as a "masterpiece," The Queen of Spades has been strangely overlooked for decades. Even now, while it's attained a certain small cult status with those who've seen it, in the U.S., it still only pops up on a dual DVD with Dead of Night (not that Dead of Night isn't a good film in its own right) and it doesn't usually pop up when people are chatting about all the great films of Britain's postwar period. Maybe it just has too much competition; The Queen of Spades was nominated for a BAFTA in 1949, the same year as another little film you might recollect, oh, The Third Man that was it. Maybe it's because Thorold Dickinson, the film's director was born under an unlucky star since despite his own good reputation, his movies (the 1940 British Gaslight, Secret People, Hill 24 Doesn't Answer) haven't always been the easiest to get a hold of. Or maybe it's because The Queen of Spades is easy to mistake for just another cozy British ghost story. 

In fact, the film is tremendously arresting in its visuals, its set design is amazingly elegant for its shoestring budget, and its performances are all topnotch. It's creepy, it's thrilling, and it horrifies in all the right place. Finding The Queen of Spades kicking around on Youtube or in out-of-date DVD releases is like realizing that the eccentric little old lady neighbor you've been ignoring for years was really Miss Havisham all along.

Adapted from a Pushkin short story, The Queen of Spades tells the story of Herman Suvorin, a man who becomes convinces that the riches and esteem he craves will be his if he can learn the secret of how to win at cards. It's a simple enough tale that teases you as to whether our hero is literally selling his soul or just going completely off his head. But for me, The Queen of Spades takes that simple story and makes it beautiful. Despite the fact that director Thorold Dickinson was given the assignment only five days before it started, despite the fact that they had the budget of a mayfly supper, and despite the fact that it showcases little actual horror, The Queen of Spades is a visual feast, creating a cold, haunted vision of Imperial Russia that could rival The Scarlet Empress.

Much of the credit has to go to Dickinson, who's endlessly inventive in his distorted camera angles, twisted mirror shots, and imagery. In one moment that made me literally catch my breath, he goes from a shot of Herman Suvorin scratching out a love letter while a spider spins a web in his dusty room to a shot of Lizaveta swooning away on her bed, her fingers suggestively reaching under the pillow to caress his letter as the transposed image of the spider keeps spinning over her face. 

In another sequence where a younger and more beautiful version of the Countess makes her bargain with the Devil, Dickinson blurs the edges of the scene, as if we're watching something not quite of this world. To hint at the doom that will befall her, all he has to do is show a shot of some mysterious figure's gnarled hands slowly working out the details on a tiny doll, a little miniature of the Countess. And when the Countess does make her fateful visit to the place that, in the film's cryptic words, "left a mark on her soul," Dickinson leads up to it by showing us the Countess walking through a shadowy tunnel, coming to a door that enters into pitch blackness. We hear her scream and we hear the scream of her horses but nothing more. And when the light comes back,  the tiny doll is being trapped under a glass bowl by those same unknown hands. When the movie cuts to the real Countess, she's pleading to a painting of the Virgin Mary for mercy but in a merciless answer to her prayers, the faces of Virgin and Infant slowly turn to black. It's as great as anything you'll find in a Val Lewton film.

The legendary stage actress Edith Evans, here playing the old, crabbed Countess Ranevskaya, is the film's most impressive visual effect. Just watching her hunch across the screen, with her huge powdered wig teetering on her head and her eyes darting around suspiciously is like watching some grotesque oddity from Alice in Wonderland come to life. The Queen of Spades was actually Evans' screen debut, but she's so assured onscreen that you'd think she'd been doing films for years. In her line delivery, Evans is a perfectly banal, constantly complaining old woman, but you can't help but notice something haunted and despairing in her eyes. She strikes the perfect balance, keeping you guessing as to whether Evans is an ordinary woman who's become the unfortunate target of Suvorin's delusions or a soulless crone who knows far more than she's telling.

Dark-eyed, regal Yvonne Mitchell, also making her screen debut after years on the stage, is surprisingly very good as the naive, romantic Lizaveta, the Countess's companion. She's lovely and good-hearted, but her life with the Countess has kept her sheltered from the outside world. Despite Suvorin's brusque manners, poor situation, and unattractive appearance, his ardent love letters (diligently copied out of books) are enough to set her head spinning. It would be easy to write off Lizaveta as just another ingenue, a helpless pawn in Suvorin's schemes. But Mitchell has too much dignity in her manner to let you dismiss her entirely. Instead, you get the sense of a woman who could very well grow into strength and intelligence, given the chance to experience the world. By forcing her ward into seclusion and servitude, the Countess has ironically turned her into the same reckless, unhappy woman she herself once was, seeking relief in a faithless lover.

Ronald Howard, son of Leslie Howard, gets the film's most thankless role as the pure-hearted Andrei, Suvorin's aristocratic foil. As the only character not to originate from the original Pushkin story, his main purpose is to provide Lizaveta with a happy ending. Still, Howard shows more than a few sparks of his father's talent, giving Andrei a genuine warmth and sensitive watchfulness that makes you root for him to bring Suvorin down. Judging by his work here, Howard should have had more of a career.

Like his other great obsessive role, Lermontov in The Red Shoes, Anton Walbrook is again the cold, vaguely inhuman creature whose eyes light up and whose hands tremble, not for a fellow human being, but for something intangible. In this case, it's privilege, not art. He looks at the beautiful, adoring Yvonne Mitchell as if he can stare right through her to the life of wealth that awaits him. Considering that the only other character he spends any time with is an attractive young man, who seems rather fond of him for no apparent reason, it's tempting to try to work in a gay subtext here. However, Walbrook doesn't play it that way; he's just as bored making small talk with Andrei as he is writing love sonnets to a woman. 

That chilly detachment certainly fits for the character, but it did leave me feeling a little removed from Suvorin for a good part of the film's runtime. Unlike Lermontov, who can at least boast that he's bringing beauty into the world, Suvorin's concerns are all wrapped up in himself and so his downfall doesn't feel particularly tragic or shocking. I'm not one to complain about characters being likable or not, but I couldn't help wishing for a little more insight into Suvorin.

Still, that minor complaint aside, Walbrook's performance is knock-out spectacular once Suvorin goes from pinched misanthropy to complete insanity. Intensity was Walbrook's great gift as an actor and he brings it full-force to this role, commanding your attention simply because his needs are so raw. He wants the secret of the cards and he wants it so much that everything else in the world has turned to ashes for him. His one scene with Edith Evans is a stand-out, but I'm also enthralled by the moment when he finally feels he's won. Walbrook mutters to himself, hardly daring to believe it. He closes his eyes in relief. And then he stands up as if to stretch but instead, Walbrook put his hands to his chest, clawing at his own skin in some kind of bestial triumph and then makes this undefinable noise. It's like a bird of prey cawing, I quite literally can't think of another actor ever doing anything like it. And then to cap it all off, Walbrook lifts his hands up, lets out a few hysterical sobs, and ends with a glass-rattling scream that would unnerve even the most jaded horror fan. You don't know whether to be more terrified of him or for him. There's plenty of actors who can make a meal of a mad scene, but Walbrook truly makes this unique and memorable.  

In a lesser film, the director would have just let Walbrook's performance carry the whole thing, but Thorold Dickinson creates a movie that's just mad enough to keep pace with its feverish hero, using mirrors, shadows, sounds, and eyes to tell the old story of what happens when we want too much. More people should know it and more people should talk of it. And more people should be talking about Thorold Dickinson, a man who played his best even when fate dealt him an unlucky hand. The ghosts of the other great movies he could have made haunts The Queen of Spades just as much as the story's ghosts do.

Favorite Quote:

"Take life as you find it."
"I'd rather take it by the throat and force it to give me what I want."

Favorite Scene:

For me, the most thrilling scene in The Queen of Spades comes when Suvorin hides in the Countess's room in order to beg the secret of the cards from her. Dickinson carefully draws out the suspense. He shows us every slow step of the Countess being made ready for bed, her body suddenly shrunken without the weight of her wig and jewels. She mumbles to herself the same prayer we heard the younger Countess make, "Holy virgin, have mercy on me." In the darkness, Evans' eyes look like two black holes. Suddenly she sees a black apparition next to a painting of the Virgin. She rears up and the shadow steps forward to reveal himself as Suvorin. He comes forward, pleading, presenting himself as a supplicant. The Countess looks away from him, mute. Suvorin falls to his knees, asking her to help him in the name of God and any human feeling, but she moves away. Suvorin's pleas turn to demands and then finally to threats. And still the Countess refuses to answer. By this point, the audience is almost as maddened as Suvorin, wanting desperately for this woman to share what she knows. But what if he's a madman tormenting an innocent old woman? The film doesn't tip its hand either way and it ups the tension immensely, as you keep trying to figure out who's most in danger here.

It's hard to overstate just how brilliantly matched Walbrook and Evans are in this scene. Walbrook brings all his vocal gifts to Suvorin's shifting, increasingly savage speech and Evans uses the power of her face alone to show both great dread and a strange, mute contempt. I won't give away how the scene ends or the little shock coda afterwards, but it left me very grateful for directors who know how to let actors bring the horror all on their own. Sometimes you don't need CGI demons coming up through the floorboards or overacting Satans (actually scratch that--you practically never need that). Sometimes all you need is the terror in two people's eyes as they slowly realize they're staring into the face of their own damnation.

Final Six Words:

Sends shivers of delight and horror

Movie Review: The Wicked Lady

The Wicked Lady (1945)
directed by Leslie Arliss, starring Margaret Lockwood, Patricia Roc, James Mason

We open upon the sweet, chaste, 17th-century courtship of Caroline (Patricia Roc) and Sir Ralph Skelton (Griffith Jones) as they ride through his estates, singing and laughing. Caroline is especially eager for Ralph to meet her exciting and beautiful cousin Barbara (Margaret Lockwood), who's coming to visit before their wedding. When Barbara arrives, however, she quickly proves to be a far more exciting guest than Caroline expected. In short order, Barbara seduces Ralph away from her cousin, forcing the heartbroken Caroline to be her maid of honor.

But Barbara can't enjoy her victory for long. On her wedding night, she meets the dashing Kit Locksby (Michael Rennie) and it's love at first sight--right before Barbara is dragged off to her waiting husband. Her nighttime duties aside, Barbara has no interest in all the boring responsibility that comes with being Lady Skelton. She leaves all the housekeeping to the ever-masochistic Caroline, while she sighs and frets and dreams of London.

One night, while playing cards with Sir Ralph's catty sister Henrietta (Enid Stamp-Taylor), Barbara impulsively bets it all and loses her dead mother's brooch. Determined to get it back, Barbara poses as the notorious highwayman Captain Jerry Jackson and robs Henrietta on the road. The adrenaline rush of robbery turns out to be just what Barbara was craving and she takes to the roads again. Only this time, Barbara meets the real Jerry Jackson (James Mason). Jackson is taken aback, but is quickly won over her beauty, spirit and black little heart. They become partners in crime...and in the bedroom. Finally, it seems like Barbara has found her true place in life.

But, as wicked and wily as Barbara is, she soon becomes reckless. She wants more gold, more thrills and even Jackson thinks she's taking it too far. Then one night, a high-stakes robbery turns into murder. And that murder soon necessitates another murder. Barbara's schemes spiral out of control and she finds herself in a fight, not for money or a man, but for her very life.

Imagine those tired British audiences of 1945,  piling into movie theaters to escape from the horrors they had lived through and the long rebuilding that would follow. Life was harsh and they wanted something to help them through it. But what?

Well, if the runaway box-office success of The Wicked Lady is any indication, what they wanted was kinky sex. Lots of kink. They wanted to see Margaret Lockwood in corsets so tight they had to be censored for U.S. audiences. They wanted to watch her do wicked, awful things like shooting people and poisoning them and sleeping with James Mason outside on the grass. They wanted to see Patricia Roc and Margaret Lockwood get into a slap-fight. They wanted to see cross-dressing and secret passages and noblewomen seducing robbers. The Wicked Lady was the box-office smash of 1946, outdoing its more serious competition by a mile. Critics hated it, audiences loved it. And looking at it now, over 60 years later, I have to side with the audiences. This movie is pure fun from start to finish.

The Wicked Lady was based on a novel called The Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton. (You have to wonder why the author didn't just go all the way and call it "The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy"). The novel was itself inspired by an old English legend about a noblewoman who secretly spent her nights as a highway robber. That was the hook of the story; from there, it spiraled into a melodrama about a treacherous woman, her outlaw lover, and their bloody romance. Considering its plot elements, The Wicked Lady should play as pure camp. And yet, thanks to the deft hand of the Gainsborough studios and a talented cast, the film somehow avoids this. It's sharp, funny, fast-paced, and not above winking at its own silliness.

A strong share of the credit must be given to Leslie Arliss, who both wrote and directed the film. In 1943, he had directed the smash hit The Man in Grey, cited as the first of the Gainsborough melodramas. For The Wicked Lady, Arliss repeated many of the same elements that had made The Man in Grey a success: period setting, a sexy and violent plot, alluring costumes, and a witty, unpretentious screenplay. It was a critic-proof, audience-friendly formula. And to cap it all off, he had the benefit of two great stars, both of whom had seen their careers skyrocket after The Man in Grey: James Mason and Margaret Lockwood.

 

Margaret Lockwood delivers a knockout performance here as the evil but irresistible Barbara. It's all but impossible to watch her sailing through this film, merrily breaking hearts and bodies and bank accounts and not root for her to get away with it. Just watch her in the scene where she convinces her cousin Caroline to give up the man she's engaged to so that he can marry Barbara instead. Barbara plays on her cousin's sense of honor until the tearful girl has promised, not just to give up Ralph, but to be Barbara's maid of honor. "And you can have my wedding dress, too, if you like," Caroline tells her, fleeing the scene in tears. At this, Barbara's back straightens and her eyes twinkle. "Wear that? I wouldn't be be buried in it."

Barbara may not be the most threatening or subtle of 40's femme fatales, but few actresses seemed to take so much sheer sensual pleasure out of their own wickedness as Margaret Lockwood does here. She devours each scene with such glee you half expect her to be licking her fingers after each take. And she isn't shy about playing up the sexual nature of the character either. In a scene where Barbara must convince a suspicious old man that she has found religion, Lockwood kneels and looks up at him through her lashes in a way that suggests, not repentance, but bedroom roleplay. And in the scenes when Lockwood struts around in male attire, brandishing a pistol, it's hard not to look at her and think that Barbara is indulging her inner dominatrix.

With the exception of James Mason, the other actors have the unenviable task of playing clueless pawns in Barbara's schemes. And considering just how obvious Barbara's bad intentions are, that's really clueless. Griffith Jones, as the unhappy Sir Ralph and Michael Rennie, as the dashing Kit, are both effective in their small roles as men who are all too easily enraptured by Barbara (At times, Jones looks like a nervous schoolboy who got caught sneaking a peek down a girl's blouse). But it's Patricia Roc, as the requisite good girl Caroline, who gets the best moments.

Like Margaret Lockwood and Jameson Mason, Patricia Roc was one of the stalwarts of the Gainsborough studios. In spite of her own sensual beauty, Roc has to play the good girl here and she does some interesting things with it. Even though her character is written as sweet and innocent, Roc projects a kind of brisk intelligence and discomfort . She understands what's happening pretty early on, but keeps trying to pretend that everything is fine.  And in the scene where Caroline, as Barbara's maid of honor, has to invite the man she loves into another woman's bed, Roc's heartbreak is utterly convincing. For a moment, Barbara's cruelty doesn't seem so fun.

However, the machinations of the plot mean that Roc has to act pretty spineless for a good part of the movie and sympathy shifts back to Lockwood. Still, at least Roc gets one good scene where she gets to slap the husband-stealing bitch right across the face (a moment that no doubt thrilled the 1940s audiences). In real life, Roc and Lockwood were great friends. And, as often happens, cinema inverted reality as it was Lockwood who was the reclusive, maternal teetotaler and Roc who was the sexually voracious good-time girl (her numerous affairs with married men earned her the nickname "Bed Roc").

The major scene-stealer to watch out for here is James Mason as the roguish bandit Jerry Jackson. Well, perhaps scene-stealing isn't the correct word as it's fairly clear that Gainsborough Studios were counting on Mason being the prime attraction for female moviegoers. Mason was fresh off his success in The Man in Grey as a cruel but dashing gentleman; a scene in which he beat Margaret Lockwood with a horsewhip had electrified audiences. His dark and brooding appeal had made him the most popular male star in Britain. The Wicked Lady even pokes fun at Mason's image with his character here. The female aristocrats gossip excitedly about what it would be like to be Jerry Jackson's next "victim." ("Is he very dashing? Did he make any ungentlemanly advances?" they ask one woman eagerly ) When Jackson is sentenced to hang, he's surrounded, not by jeering crowds, but by adoring female fans.

It's a shame that Mason's only around for part of the movie because he's got crackling chemistry with Lockwood, far better than any of the other characters. His character Jackson is the only one who truly understands Barbara. He knows she's no good and will probably ruin him, but hell, at least they'll have a good time while it lasts. The headlong sexual relationship between Lady Barbara and Jackson was pretty risque by 1940s standards. "Do you always take women by the throat?" Barbara asks him, after one rough encounter. "No, I just take 'em," Mason replies, deadpan.

Halfway through this film, I had an epiphany: "Great shades of Scarlett O'Hara, I'm watching Gone with the Wind!" Well, Gone with the Wind if you kicked it back two hundred years and smushed it together with "The Highwayman." You have the bitchy, green-eyed brunette (Scarlett/Barbara), who loathes her sweet, smiling friend (Melanie/Caroline) and angles to steal her man (Ashley/Sir Ralph). The man is weak and even though he loves the good girl, still helplessly lusts after the bad one. But the bad girl is the one we root for and the more outrageously she acts, the more enjoyable she becomes. However, The Wicked Lady splits up the Rhett role between Michael Rennie as Barbara's true love and James Mason as the one who truly understands her. Which was a mistake since Michael Rennie has less screentime with Margaret Lockwood than anybody else and yet the film would keep insisting that he and Lockwood were star-crossed lovers, that he was the only one who could change her nature. Very strange.

In one sense though, Gone with the Wind and The Wicked Lady are polar opposites. Because while Gone with the Wind's characters are intractable, stubbornly clinging to their ideas until the final reel, The Wicked Lady cast seems to change motivations with every breeze. Oh, Barbara saw Jackson with another woman so she betrays him. Whoops, five minutes later, she realizes he will now go after her so she is sorry. Oh, Ralph and Caroline have confessed their love. Wait, they can't be together. So Caroline's going to marry Kit. Oh no, she's going to marry Ralph after he divorces Barbara. Which is weird because five minutes ago Ralph was telling Kit he would kill him if he ran off with Barbara. Whew. See what I mean? It's the one glaring weakness of The Wicked Lady; it rounds the plot twists so quickly that sometimes things like character and common sense are left by the wayside. And yet, the film is so witty and fun that you have to forgive it.

I've heard some reviewers argue that The Wicked Lady is in fact a a hidden social commentary on the roles of British women. After all, we have a strong female character who merrily breaks every rule of the male-dominated society which tries (and fails) to control her. But for me, the social commentary of The Wicked Lady, especially when compared to films like Jezebel and Leave Her to Heaven, is about as incisive as an Archie comic. That's not a criticism. The Wicked Lady is smart because it knows what kind of story it is and it works to make that story as entertaining as possible. And it doesn't feel like a movie made by bored, indifferent people. Watching this film, you just know the cast and crew were having a blast.

Some films are so bad, they're good. But in this case, the lady is so very wicked that the film is very good indeed.

Favorite Quote:

"He's very lucky with the weather. Must be depressing to be hanged on a damp day."

Favorite Scene:

In a film with so many outsized dramatic moments, it's odd that my favorite scene is relatively normal. But I absolutely love the card game between Barbara Skelton and her most hated rival, Sir Ralph's sister Henrietta. These two are a delight in every scene they share, because they can't resist throwing jibes at each other, all the while keeping up the sweetest-possible smiles. It's like watching two Bengal tigers at a tea party. Example below:

Henrietta: "It’s hard to believe that six months could have changed you so much. You know, I used to quite envy you. You used to look so young and lovely.”
Barbara: “Oh, is it only six months? Then it must be the journey that tired you out. Traveling makes one look so bedraggled.”

And back and forth. But Henrietta's cleverest and darkest moment comes when she plays Barbara at cards. The impulsive Barbara is fast losing everything to her rival and, true to her nature, bets her most prized possession on a single turn of the cards. She loses and Henrietta smiles at her softly, with an expression a cat might give to the canary between its claws. She picks up her prize, a ruby brooch, and asks Barbara, "Your mother's wasn't it?" Barbara stiffens and you can see the light going out of her eyes. And right then and there, you know that Barbara will turn completely to evil. It's that look in her eyes. She would murder that woman for a brooch. Nothing Barbara does later, whether it's robbery or shooting or slow, cold-blooded poisoning, comes as a surprise after that moment.

Final Six Words:

A wicked, rollicking ride to hell

Movie Review: Pandora and the Flying Dutchman

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951)
directed by Albert Lewin, starring Ava Gardner, James Mason

Pandora Reynolds (Ava Gardner), a beautiful, bored singer, lives amongst the expatriates that flit along the European coastline in the 1930s. No man can resist Pandora's charms--one even commits suicide over her--but she remains unmoved. One night, one of her suitors (Nigel Patrick) decides to prove his love by pushing his beloved racing car off a cliff. Pandora is impressed by his sacrifice and agrees to marry him. In the words of her friend Geoffrey Fielding (Harold Warrender), "The measure of love is what one is willing to give up for it."

But fate has other plans for Pandora. On the night of her engagement, Pandora spots a yacht out in the harbor and impulsively swims out to it (stark naked).  There she meets Hendrik van der Zee (James Mason), mysteriously the only man on board. He is completely unsurprised by her entrance, turning away from her so that he can finish painting a portrait. But when Pandora goes to look at the painting, she finds out that it looks exactly like her. How can that be, when she has never met this man, and he claims not to know her?

Intrigued, for probably the first time in her life, Pandora draws this mysterious stranger into her circle of friends. The attraction between Hendrik and Pandora is obvious to everyone, even as the date of Pandora's wedding draws closer. But Pandora's friend Geoffrey starts to suspect that there is something extraordinary about Hendrik van der Zee. 

On a hunch, he asks Hendrik to translate an old Dutch manuscript for him. Hendrik obeys, reciting the dark, strange tale of a sea captain who killed his wife for her infidelity. Arrested for her murder, the captain swore to the heavens that no man could ever find a truly faithful woman, if he sailed the seas for all eternity. That night, the captain found his cell door unlocked and a voice whispered to him the truth: his wife had never been unfaithful. Heartbroken, the man stumbled back to his ship and discovered that it now sailed by itself, manned by a crew he could neither see nor hear. Soon, the captain discovered the true nature of his punishment: he would sail until the end of time, looking for a woman who loved him enough to die for him. Every seven years, he would be allowed to go ashore and spend six months there, looking for such a woman. If he did not find her, he would be cursed to wander, immortal and alone, forever.

The emotion in Hendrik's voice as he reads the story convinces Geoffrey that this is the very same sea captain, the Flying Dutchman of the story. He also suspects that the captain has fallen truly in love with Pandora, that she might be the one to rescue him from his bondage. But even if Pandora were willing to sacrifice herself, how could the Dutchman ever allow her to do it?

Albert Lewin, the man behind Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, was one of the most unusual directors to come out of mid-century filmmaking. He only directed six films, all of which he wrote and produced himself. In defiance of mainstream tastes, his films were erudite, highbrow, and fiercely intellectual. Lewin was also an art collector, with a taste for the surreal (his friends included Man Ray and Max Ernst) and his films frequently reflected this fascination. Pandora and the Flying Dutchman was his fourth film and many consider it the culmination of Lewin's obsessions: a proudly romantic, visually fascinating attempt to bring his love for myths and art to cinematic life. 

Talk about an embarrassment of riches--Pandora and the Flying Dutchman might be considered an embarrassment of references. The film takes the original legend of the Flying Dutchman and combines it with the Greek legend of Pandora, the fabled "darling of the gods." The name of the village in which the film is set is Esperanza ("hope"), famously the only thing Pandora had left after she opened the box. And the Dutchman is given a backstory straight out of Othello, with a chance at redemption that hails from Heinrich Heine's classic opera. 

Lewin threads the film with other, smaller details. The film opens with lines from the Rubaiyat. Hendrik the Dutchman recites Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" at one point. Hendrik's painting of Pandora is an actual painting by Man Ray, who also designed a chess set for the film. The cast roams over beaches strewn with broken statuary. This last detail leads to one of the film's more memorable setpieces, as a crowd of partygoers dance and laugh amidst the statues, the new merrily tramping all over the old. It's like a sequence straight out of La Dolce Vita.

As if to complicates matters further, Lewin sets the whole film back in the 1930s and then promptly disregards his chosen time period in order to dress his cast of expats in the latest fashions. The 1930s time period only makes sense as a reference to Hemingway and Fitzgerald's crowd. The way Lewin lingers over a car racing scene and a bullfighting sequence leaves little room for doubt that he had Hemingway in mind. Within this confusion of time and place, Lewin sets the impossible love story of the Dutchman and the nightclub singer. 

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman is a film that announces from the very first scene that this will be an epic love story, a tale of delirious and sacrificial love that lasts beyond death. Unfortunately, all the delirium exists within Lewin's frenzy of art and myth; when it comes to the real emotional heart of the story, the film falters. The love story between Ava Gardner's Pandora and James Mason's Hendrik is incredibly, epically dull. How can such an ambitious film, beautifully lensed by the legendary Jack Cardiff, fail so miserably on its most important point?

Well for starters, Gardner and Mason have almost no chemistry together. But that's the least of the love story's problems. For reasons best known to himself, Albert Lewin decided to keep the development of Pandora and Hendrik's relationship mostly off-screen. We rack up more minutes on Hendrik's backstory and the shallow lives of Pandora's friends than we do on the lovers themselves. If not for a stray comment by Pandora's friend Geoffrey (who seems to exist for no other reason than to be our narrator, a kind of bargain basement Morgan Freeman), you would never know that Hendrik and Pandora were falling in love. The only hypothesis I can make for this is that Lewin thought the grandeur of their love was best left to the imagination. Unfortunately, this tactic means that the audience doesn't have any emotional stake in their love. We don't know what they talk about, what they're like together, or why they love each other.

In the few moments where they do interact with each other, Lewin saddles the actors with very flat, portentous dialogue. For example:

Hendrik: Perhaps you haven't found what you want yet, perhaps you're unfulfilled. Perhaps you don't even know what you want, perhaps you're discontented. Discontentment often finds vent through fury and destruction.

Pandora: Fury and destruction, is that what you think? Well perhaps I can find something here to destroy...Would you like me to destroy your painting?

Hendrik: If it would help to quiet your soul.

(a few lines later) 

Pandora: You've made me feel ashamed of myself. It's a new emotion, I'm not sure I like it. 

Here's another example:

Pandora: It's as if everything that happened before I met you didn't happen to me at all but to someone else. And in a way that's true. I've changed so since I've known you. I'm not cruel and hateful as I used to be, hurting people because I was so unhappy myself. I know now what destructiveness comes from, it's a lack of love.

These aren't characters talking, these are concepts. It makes me feel like the Robot Devil from Futurama. "You can't just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!" It's flat enough on paper, but in the mouths of actors it's just painful. What makes it even worse is that Lewin doesn't bother to leaven it with any humor or uncertainty. It's all formal declarations in tones of deadly seriousness. In his attempt to impress on us the importance of his ideas, Lewin bypasses both realism and poetry and comes up with something that's neither. Mason and Gardner do their best, but you can feel the wheels grinding.

Ava Gardner is heart-stoppingly beautiful in this film; she seems to glow from every angle. It's her beauty more than anything that makes Pandora's La Belle Dame Sans Merci reputation seem utterly plausible. Who wouldn't be tempted to throw their racing car off a cliff for that face? Unfortunately her personality doesn't match up to her looks.  Pandora the person is cold, distant, and callous; you have to wonder if her suitors ever bother to actually listen to anything she says. When one of her smitten gentlemen friends offs himself in her presence, Pandora's response is little more than a shrug ("Reggie was always talking about suicide...it's over now and I'm not sorry"). 

I can't help wondering, given Lewin's choice of setting, if he wasn't influenced by the Zelda Fitzgeralds and Duff Twysdens that haunt Jazz Age literature. If he was, he forgot to give his protagonist the charm and lust for life that made these women so unforgettable. It's bold of him to make his heroine so unlikable, but the expected payoff of the selfish Pandora being reformed by love isn't convincing. We aren't given any indication that Pandora has the deeper feelings that would make such a transformation possible. 

Gardner's performance doesn't smooth the transition any. She floats through most of this film, speaking her lines in a hypnotized monotone. The few times she struggles for more emotion, she just sounds petulant. This isn't entirely her fault, as Lewin's script doesn't give her many chances to explore her character. Too much is given to exposition and grandeur. Gardner ends up looking lost, unable to find a foothold in her own film.

James Mason fares somewhat better than Gardner if only because he can deliver Lewin's granite-faced dialogue with complete conviction. Hendrik van der Zee is a man out of his time, haunted by past regrets. He is drawn to Pandora, but his tormented face and demeanor don't exactly fit in with her party-loving crowd. Faced with both long stretches of exposition and long stretches of silent glowering, Mason does both admirably.

It's funny, though. Mason cut his teeth on dark, romantic roles (the Gainsborough melodramas and his string of Ophuls films come to mind). If anybody could unlock the swoon-worthy, Gothic-hero potential in Hendrik van der Zee, you'd think Mason could. Instead, he comes across as rather stiff and remote. Lines like, "I was angry once, I can never be angry again," make him seem less like Heathcliff and more like Bruce Banner. If the studio executives were hoping they could market this film on Mason's appeal to women, then this was a serious misfire.

With all the charges I've laid against Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, what could redeem it? Answer: the visuals. This is one of the most stunning Technicolor films I've ever seen. The nighttime scenes glow sapphire blue, purely unreal, while the daytime colors blaze hot. The shadows soften the actor's faces until they seem to shimmer in and out of the fantasy dreamscape that Jack Cardiff crafts from the Spanish coast. Cardiff's cinematography here could stand up alongside any of the films he made with Powell and Pressburger. And when you consider that Cardiff helmed both the on-location photography of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman and the largely setbound camerawork of Black Narcissus, well, the time has come to throw up your hands and declare Jack Cardiff the master of all.

This is not to discount Lewin's hand in the visuals. Lewin directs with a painter's eye; he has the ability to wed small details to strong, dynamic lines. Look back to that still of the musician leaning up against the statue, the line of his trombone against the diagonal of the column. Or the one of Mason being held by guards as the floor pattern stretches beyond him to infinity. Actually most of the Dutchman's backstory is cleverly photographed by Lewin and Cardiff to look like a series of Baroque paintings. Lewin wasn't afraid to reach for the obscure or the strange in his visual work and it works greatly to the film's advantage.

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman is a film about timeless passion, the kind that would make a man kill the wife he loves, that would make a faithless woman risk death. And it was a film driven by the passion of one man, Albert Lewin, who wrote, directed, and produced it. How odd then, that the film ultimately feels so empty of passion or feeling. Jack Cardiff's color cinematography is a gift from heaven, but that isn't enough to keep the fires burning. I watched it with clinical, Pandora-like detachment, all through the two-hour running length.

And yet, somehow I can't call it a waste of time. It's a strange mixture of the sublime and the dull. It reaches astonishing heights of beauty through Cardiff's colors, Lewin's compositions and Ava Gardner's genetics. But they're laid at the service of a self-important, humorless script and pacing that just plods along. Still, if Lewin doesn't succeed in making a masterpiece, he does create a memorable and utterly unique film. How can you help but tip your hat to Albert Lewin, the man of many dreams? 

Favorite Quote:

"No work of art is complete until the element of chance is entered into it."

Favorite Scene:

The film's most magical moment comes when Pandora decides to swim to the Dutchman's empty ship. Leaving her bewildered companion behind on the crumbling steps, she slips out of her clothes into the shimmering blue water. When she reaches the ship, she calls out her hellos. Confident, as always, of her welcome. Confused at the lack of response, she swims to the side, peeking her head over and looking, for all the world, like a mermaid. Pandora looks in vain for crew members, but sees only the moonlight glinting off the railings and boards. But then, she sees a light from one doorway. Too curious to back down, Pandora wraps herself in a sail and looks through the window. She sees a man painting, his back to her. A normal woman would leave then and there, but Pandora isn't normal. She saunters through the doorway, only to find the painter, his back to her. He doesn't acknowledge her. She doesn't know what's happening, we don't know what's happening. And in that moment, the film vibrates on the edge of the extraordinary. 

Final Six Words:

This sleeping beauty never wakes up

Note: Astute viewers will note that five of my screencaps come from the DVDBeaver website. Normally, I wouldn't use so many, but I did want to give a sense of Cardiff's visuals and on this occasion, I wasn't able to use my own screencaps.

Movie Review: Night of the Demon/Curse of the Demon

 

Night of the Demon/Curse of the Demon* (1957)

directed by Jacques Tourneur, starring Dana Andrews, Peggy Cummins, Niall MacGinnis

*Night of the Demon was the original British title. For the American release, the film was edited and re-titled Curse of the Demon. For clarity's sake, I'll refer to the film in my review as Night of the Demon since I chose to view the original, uncut British version.

(Note: This is my entry for the '50s Monster Mash Blogathon, hosted by Forgotten Classics of Yesteryear.)

The renowned Dr. John Holden (Dana Andrews), an expert on hypnotism and superstition, flies to England to attend a symposium on the supernatural. Holden plans to participate in an investigation of a mysterious devil-worshiping cult and their eccentric leader Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis). However, when Holden arrives, he finds out that one of his colleagues, Professor Harrington (Maurice Denham), has died under mysterious circumstances. Karswell appears to Holden and warns him away from proceeding with the investigation, but Holden laughs it off. His skepticism is challenged by the arrival of Joanna Harrington (Peggy Cummins), Professor Harrington's niece, who believes her uncle was killed by something supernatural, something to do with Karswell's cult. The two team up to find out the truth. 

Holden refuses to admit the existence of the supernatural, but how does he explain the strange events happening around them? Why does he feels chilled when the weather is hot, why does he see visions of living smoke, and how does Karswell appear to summon wind storms and wild cats? Holden is further puzzled by finding a scrap of paper slipped in amongst his things, with runic inscriptions on it. Holden and Joanna discover that Professor Harrington received a similar paper, three days before he died. With the furtive help of Karswell's elderly mother, (Athene Seyler), the pair find evidence to suggest that Holden too is doomed to die in three days. Unless he can find out the secret of the runes before it's too late. Before he is caught by Karswell's curse. The curse of the demon.

Night of the Demon was based on M.R. James' classic story, "The Casting of the Runes," often acclaimed as one of the greatest scary stories of all time. In James' original tale, the focus was on a mild-mannered academic named Dunning, who becomes the target of the mad and bad Mr. Karswell, after Dunning rejects Karswell's rather incoherent paper on alchemy. Mysterious things begin to happen to Dunning. He sees cryptic messages, he feels nervous all the time, his servants mysteriously develop poisoning symptoms. It's only after he encounters John Harrington, brother of the late Henry Harrington, that he begins to understand what happens to the enemies of Mr. Karswell. And what may happen to him. The power of James' story comes from the dry, understated way these unsettling details begin to pile up, the way the darkness peeks out between the cracks of the maddeningly deliberate prose. 

Jacques Tourneur's film takes this story and manages to craft a great horror film that honors its original source material while managing to deepen and enrich the story's themes. Night of the Demon changes the protagonist from a conventional British academic to a hard-headed American scientist named John Holden, whose journey to England results in a clash not just of culture, but of science against superstition. As one of his colleagues tells him, "Take it kind of easy on our ghosts. We English are sort of fond of them." The John Harrington of the story becomes Joanna Harrington, the niece of the mysteriously dead Professor Harrington. She helps Holden try to uncover the mystery of Mr. Karswell, who has been promoted from the frustrated academic of the James story into a powerful cult leader. James' story clung to the ordinary trappings of English life; the action was confined to railway cars, hotels, and small private rooms. Tourneur's film ranges all over, taking Holden from apartment buildings to isolated farmhouses to a spooky manor house, even to Stonehenge. And unlike the original story, which plays as an exercise in "is it or isn't it," Night of the Demon boldly opens with the gambit of actually showing the reality of its supernatural threat, as personified by the demon.

The question of the demon has plagued fans of this film since the very beginning. There is one camp, let's call them Anti-Demon, who swear up and down that Jacques Tourneur never planned to actually show the demon in the movie and that its actual appearance is a serious letdown from a subtle psychological horror film. For the record, Tourneur himself was in the Anti-Demon camp and remarked in interviews that the creature's appearance was forced on him by producer Hal E. Chester. But there's also a Pro-Demon camp, who insist that the demon is genuinely frightening and that the movie wouldn't be nearly as satisfying without it. Author Tony Earnshaw, in his book Beating the Devil: The Making of the Night of the Demon, claims that the demon's appearance was planned from early on, rather than shoehorned in at the last minute.

For myself, I have to stand in the Anti-Demon camp. It isn't because I think the monster shouldn't have been shown, it's because of how it's shown. At first when we see the demon, it always appears from a distance, shrouded in smoke and slightly blurry, so that it could be mistaken for an illusion. In those moments, it's genuinely unsettling, this strange black something that's coming closer and closer. Tourneur, quite craftily, always places the demon in settings where its appearance echoes something more ordinary. There's not much difference between a monster and the flash and smoke of an oncoming train. Or much difference between a demon and the sparks of a crashing telegraph pole.

It's only when the film suddenly zooms into a close-up of our monster, as in the still above, that all mystery vanishes and it becomes just another '50s movie monster. And it's not bad by '50s movie monster standards, it's just that it seems so out of place with the almost subliminal glimpses we were getting before. There's one lingering shot of the demon shaking a man like a rag doll that veers straight into comedy. It doesn't feel organic to the film, it feels like a money shot, like the filmmakers are telling us we got our money's worth in special effects horror. There's a similarly silly moment earlier in the film, when Dana Andrews is attacked by a cat that morphs into a leopard (call-back to Lewton and Tourneur's Cat People?) and the camera lingers long enough for us to realize that Andrews is fighting a stuffed cat. And I think these problems aren't because of bad special effects (Modern CGI would be just as much of a let-down), it's because these shots don't fit with an otherwise suggestive film. Night of the Demon ends on the words, "Maybe it's better not to know," and in this case, the film should have taken its own advice.

 

  

That complaint over with, I am free to linger over the many strengths of this film. Aside from the demon itself, Night of the Demon's production design is gorgeous; each set we see is carefully detailed and feels exactly right for the character that inhabits it. The strange geometrics of Karswell's mansion with its spiral staircases, Holden's cramped apartment, Joanna's striped wallpaper in the firelight, it's all fantastic. I kept wanting to pause the movie to linger over the details and I'm sure there are worse ways to spend an afternoon than in trying to parse the visuals of this film. 

Jacques Tourneur's direction here is on par with his best work. Night of the Demon creates a mesmerizing, disquieting world, in which every shot seems designed to constrict your breathing. You can spot a lesser horror film by the way the movie deflates in between shock moments, as if the director doesn't know what to do when there's no big scary thing to shake in your face. Here though, Tourneur never loosens his grip. The echoing corridors, the barren countrysides, everything reflects back the fear and paranoia that slowly begins to grip our protagonists. Even a library becomes a horrifying labyrinth straight out of Crete. Tourneur mainly eschews "gotcha" tricks in favor of a suffocating sense of unease that occasionally veers into the hallucinatory. The way Holden's point-of-view sometimes blurs; is it a sign that he's losing his hold on reality? The way a hand appears on a balustrade, seemingly out of nowhere. In Night of the Demon, there's no easy distinction between the ordinary and the supernatural. They exist together.

At this point in his career, Dana Andrews was very much a sideliner, his alcoholism having relegated him to B-parts. In her brilliant essay on the career of the fascinating and vastly underrated Andrews, Imogen Sara Smith writes, concerning his work in Night of the Demon, that "the slur in his voice and uneasiness in his manner make him intriguing in a role that could have been played by Kent Smith." There was always that unease to Andrews, that lurking discomfort underneath the surface, so it's interesting here to see him play a character who is so determined not to look beneath the surface. The hyper-rationalist character of John Holden is, in fact, so stubborn, so smug and self-assured, that the film's sympathy often shifts away from him to the side characters. Even a group of daffy seance-seekers singing "Cherry Ripe" seem more reasonable. It's only by admitting his fears and doubts, however, that Holden can find a way to fight Karswell. And their battle of wits is something to see, indeed.

It's always a treat to see the talented Peggy Cummins although she doesn't really get to stretch herself as the "horribly bright" Joanna Harrington. Joanna, the professor's niece, is a bit of a stock character. B-movie scientists always seem to have a surplus of beautiful nieces/daughters/granddaughters that pop up out of nowhere, carrying research notes and ready to risk their lives. Still, Cummins adds some spark to the character and Joanna's willingness to accept the supernatural is the necessary foil to Holden's skepticism. Her best moment is when she snaps at the perpetually condescending Holden, "Please don't treat me like a mental patient who has to be humored. I also majored in psychology."

But the real treasure of this cast is Niall MacGinnis as the charming but sinister Julian Karswell. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that this has to be one of the great horror movie villains of all time. At first glance, he's like a cross between Clarence the Angel and Mephistopheles. He threatens, but with a smile and a joke. He's fond of children and his mother, but he also summons demons from hell. He seems confident in his dark powers but to his mother, he confesses the terrible cycle he's caught in. "My followers who pay for this do it out of fear. And I do what I do out of fear also. It's part of the price." Unlike the Karswell of the original short story, a "horrible man" who combines the evils of devil worship with the evils of badly written papers and whose only actions are malignant and petty, the movie Karswell is more fascinating. He's unpredictable, which makes him all the more powerful as an enemy. But there's also a shred of sympathy for his character, who must continually find new victims or else become a victim himself. Ironically, our hero Holden has to find that same ruthlessness within himself by the finale, if he plans to survive.

It's hard to write a review for a film like this without feeling you've only barely scraped at the surface; it's just that fascinating. You could watch it solely for the beauty of Tourneur's visuals. Or you could watch it for the sly humor of Charles Bennett's script. Or for the moment when Dana Andrews stands next to Stonehenge, utterly dwarfed by the mysteries he knows not. Or watch it so that you and your friends can have a rousing debate of Pro-Demon/Anti-Demon. It's a fine horror film and eminently worthy of its cult status.

Favorite Quote:

"How can you give back life? I can't stop it. I can't give it back. I can't let anyone destroy this thing. I must protect myself. Because if it's not someone else's life, it'll be mine. Do you understand, Mother? It'll be mine."

Favorite Scene:

For my money, the party scene at Karswell's house is just about perfect. Holden and Joanna go to Karswell's property to question him and are taken aback by the luxury and size of the place, hardly appropriate for the home of some crackpot con artist. And when they find Karswell, what is this master of dark magic doing? Why, he's dressed up as a clown and doing magic tricks for the local children ("A magic puppy! Now, who'd like to stroke a magic puppy?"). And his mother's even making ice cream. This is one instance of the film completely reversing a scene from the original story. In "Casting the Runes," Karswell is a sadist, who gives the local children a gruesome slide show in order to terrify them.  Here, Karswell is genuinely sweet to them, which makes the underlying menace of his character all the more interesting. As he and Holden pass by a pair of kids playing a game of Snakes and Ladders, Karswell remarks whimsically that he always preferred sliding down the snakes to climbing up ladders. Holden responds that maybe it means Karswell's a good loser. Karswell turns to him, coldly serious. "I'm not, you know. Not a bit of it."

Final Six Words: 

It's in the trees! It's coming!