Director Robert MulliganDirector Robert Mulligan’s masterpiece based on Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird
Based on actor/author Thomas Tryon’sbest-selling novel, about the duplicity of innocence and evil in the incarnation of twin boys. Set in the Depression era during a hot and dusty summer of 1935. The atmosphere of rural quaintness is painted beautifully by cinematographer Robert Surtees.
Niles and Holland Perry (Chris and Martin Udvanoky) live with their extended family on a rural farm. The boys are looked after by their old world and arcane, loving Russian Grandmother Ada (the extraordinary icon Uda Hagen.)
The sagely mysterious and angelic Ada has taught the boys a special and esoteric gift from the old country she calls ‘the game.’
When several inextricably grotesque accidents beset the town, the clues start to point toward Niles’ wicked brother Holland who may be responsible for the gruesome deaths.
Also starring Diana Muldaur as the boy’s hapless mother Alexandra.
Norma Connolly plays Aunt Vee, Victor French co-stars as the drunken swarthy handyman Angelini, Lou Frizzell is Uncle George, Portia Nelson as the uptight Mrs. Rowe, Jennie Sullivan as Torrie, and a young John Ritter as Rider.
Tryon’s story is a most hauntingly mysterious journey through the eyes of a child, a macabre and provocative psychological thriller from the 70s that has remained indelible in triggering my childhood fears, filled with wonder and the impenetrable world of the supernatural. I plan on doing a broader overview of this film as I am prone to be long-winded. But for now, The Film Score Freak would like to focus on the film’s hauntingly poignant score contributed by one of my favorite and in my opinion one of THE BEST composers of all time, Jerry Goldsmith.
Mervyn LeRoy’sbold psychological thriller adapted from Maxwell Anderson’s play.
Nancy Kelly confronts her crispy clean dress wearin’ skipping little psychopathic child Rhoda (Patty McCormack) in a scene where both mother and child devolve into the realm of ‘hysterical’ over the truth behind poor Claude Daigle’s brutal death, prompted by his winning the penmanship medal.
“I have the prettiest mother in the world”
I was going to use Eileen Heckert’scompelling performance as the besotted mournful Hortense Daigle, but I couldn’t resist this climactic scene instead…
What’ll you give me for a basket of kisses?, I’ll give you a basket of hugs -MonsterGirl
Directed by Barry Shear, (Wild in the Streets 1968,Across 110th Street 1972) written by Joel Oliansky, Dennis Murphy and Mann Rubin. It stars Robert F. Lyons  as the infamous true life serial killer (Charles Schmid) Skipper Todd. The film hosts an incredible cast of actors, Richard Thomas, Belinda Montgomery, Sherry Miles, Joyce Ames, Holly Near, James Broderick, Gloria Grahame, Fay Spain, Edward Asner, Barbara Bel Geddes, Michael Conrad and Meg Foster.
Based on the real life character of 60s thrill killer, Charles Schmid also dubbed the Pied Piper of Tucson who was found guilty of murder in 1966 and sentenced to death, but wound up getting 50 years to life, when the state of Arizona temporarily abolished the death penalty in 1971. Eventually Schmid himself was murdered in prison.
Lyons worldly ruthlessly inhospitable persona channels a charismatic young philosophical misanthrope who embodies the 60s attitude of the anti establishment credo, taking it to a violent level of psychotic abandon. Todd becomes an anti- hero to the local youth who worship him, in particular the very young women he easily beds, who treat him like a deity. He exhibits the qualities of a Svengali as he manipulates both male and female devotees. Todd is cool and urbane, charming his way into the lives of several high school teenagers in a small California town. There is a jaundiced atmosphere to this community, as the complacency and rumbling undercurrent of disturbed restlessness paint a very uneasy portrait of American life off kilter.
When the film opens, Todd has killed a 16 year old girl named Sue Ellen Mack, having recruited two other teenagers to help cover up the crime by burying the body in the vast and ceaseless desert, the perfect place to lose a body. One teen is an overweight girl Norma (Holly Near) who hangs on Skipper like a minion, clinging to him like a swooning groupie and the other a scraggy termite called Andy.
Shear directs each scene with a heartless realism. The three while leaving the desert just having buried Sue Ellen, pick up Billy Roy ( Richard Thomas) who is hitchhiking, just having been released from reform school. There is the sensibility to the film that exposes a mob mentality. This heightened sense of a younger fringe craving to dwell aimlessly outside of society, the phrase used often to signify an opposition to society or being a ‘citizen’ is prevalent in sub genre films, such as the biker genre. In this environment it is feasible that an awakening adolescence would be mesmerized by an outlier, a bad boy, and therefore aide in concealing the crime. It’s conceivable that a flock of youths could be present at the scene of a murder, not only do nothing to stop it, and in fact, help in it’s surreptitious design to cover it up, and allude the police. The unrepentant complicity to the crimes bares a similarity to the working dynamic of the 1986 film The River’s Edge
Robert Thom wrote Angel Angel Down We Go. He envisions the anti hero as a guitar strumming Svengali-Here Robert F.Lyons is the songwriting/psychopath Skipper ToddJordan Christopher portrays the similarly brutal misanthropic sociopath Bogart Peter Stuyvesant in Robert Thom’s Angel Angel Down We Go 1969. Both peddlers of sex and death, wielding guitars as their weapon of seduction.
Skipper Todd manipulates Richard Thomas‘ character Billy like a master puppeteer, dangling the potential for romance with his former classmate Amata. Billy has been obsessed with Amata since High School. Unfortunately Amata only has eyes for Skipper, and poor naive Billy is so easily influenced and blinded by his attraction to this girl that he doesn’t see how Todd is using him as yet another pawn in his coterie.
Belinda Montgomery plays Roberta a pretty 16 year old girl from an affluent family, who is less pliant and impressionable at first. It is her rebellious attitude and her blatant defiance toward Skipper’s malevolent magnetism, which charge his advances which become more potent, as he becomes drawn to her the more she resists.
She’s the one female who appears immune at first to Skipper’s charms. Although she restrains from falling into the same infatuated vapidness like the other girls, ultimately after Skipper breaks into her house one night, beats and rapes her, she finally breaks down and succumbs to his control and decries that she loves him. The manifest use of violence against women as sexual stimulation, and the tenet of annihilating women’s power through control, not love is another inherent trope of the story. Skipper mother as a role model only teaches him to take, to make money, and skews the boundaries of love for him by bestowing upon him an odd, underlying sexualized affection.
We are clued into Skipper Todd’s evolution as a misogynist, as an Oedipal nightmare, who fancies himself an elitist an Ãœbermensch, Friedrich Nietzsche’s superman who poses as anti-hero, bemoaning the state of society and it’s lemmings who conform, yet ironically depending on the very thing he condemns in order to suck the life force out of it. This he needs for his egoist dogma to be able to thrive, feeding off the susceptible, and violating the vulnerable, just as Mrs. Todd picks the bones clean of the elderly men she is charged to take care of.
Though living as an outsider, he needs followers to facilitate his crimes. To help him bury the bodies. He espouses that people have ‘stale dreams’ and that society is riddled with lying and selfishness. In this he is a true Sociopath, as he is the most selfish phony of them all. As self deluded as was Charles Manson who consider himself to be a songwriter and profit, Todd also writes songs on his guitar, recording himself singing glorifying lyrics about his strangulations of the girls he kills. A minstrel madman, strumming and fucking his way through Tucson.
As I’ve said earlier, Todd’s followers include a young Richard Thomas as Billy Roy a guileless yet loyal young man, who unwittingly enables Todd to continue his blood lust and ravaging of young girls. Billy remains naive until the end, when he finally sees the true evil nature of his friend Skipper Todd, and ultimately turns on him.
Shear’s The Todd Killings conveys the feeling of hopelessness and hollow confinement which pervade much of the film and the collective scenes of impulsive brutality. Whether or not the story is historically accurate to the events that led up to Scmid’s capture is unclear, regardless the narrative is a somber, chilling mood piece about society and the attractive monsters it sometimes breeds.
The film creates an eerie, often brutally unsettling tone that unleashes a sense that there is no way out of conformity. You either live an existence of an ugly sterile complacency or wind up being sacrificed on the altar of individual freedom.
The use of the desert as a playground/killing field for Todd and his followers creates an alienating environment. Todd’s compulsion sets the tone for a fraying wire of isolation, in which a barren land of free love and reckless idolatry ultimately lead Todd and his followers to devolve by the film’s tragic end.
At the root of Todd’s twisted nature lies that hint of Oedipal fixation, as his relationship with his mother portrayed by Barbara Bel Geddes bares the reflections of an incestuous partnership. Todd’s conflation of sex and violence, his natural adeptness at manipulation and psycho-sexual violation ultimately make him a serial killer who thrives on destroying that which he is fixated on. The film provides us with an insight into his hatred of women, American motherhood, and the society that engenders both to be simple offerings for the slaughter.
Bel Geddes as Mother Todd –“I could use a little of your help around here you know” Skipper-“robbing the cadavers?”Mrs. Todd’s unbounded greed in one single minute-“now that juice comes to forty cents a quart young man so drink up “Mrs Todd-“the lord put me on this earth, just to support you”"¦. Skipper “If I do not get my allowance in four seconds flat I’ll (he whispers in her ear, then she smiles ) Mrs Todd- “uh hum, I think you’re capable of that.”Mother giving her little angel his milk money for the week
Mrs. Todd’s, Skipper’s money hungry mother owns a nursing home for elderly men running it like a military complex, all of who’s family members never visit. She manages this ‘institution’ like a waiting room for decaying livestock, providing minimal comforts, she’s more militant in her administrations than compassionate as a care giver. For her this is nothing but a business arrangement that supports her simple lifestyle. She shows no emotional connection to the elderly men in her care, nor for her son, who visits periodically, skulking around for hand outs. No emotional maternal outpouring, yet a queer romantic sort of banter.
Skipper tells her that he would ‘rather die than make my living that way.’ She tells him that he is in fact ‘living off them…We all make our lives that way, that’s what life is all about.”
Skipper treats her more like one of the many girlfriends he uses in order to cop some ready spending money. Mrs Todd spouts off about life like an unemotional puritanical hen, urging him to find employment or at least help her out there at the home, which he violently rejects.
The entire atmosphere of the old age home and the town, is disparaging of the human condition and gives us a little insight into Skipper Todd’s lack of empathy, largely pronounced by the contrasting verve of the youth culture shown asphyxiating by the small -town’s conservatism.
Todd’s mother is a clinically acidic detached, and cold-blooded ‘mother figure’ and a reminder that though Skipper seems repulsed by the way the old men have been abandoned by their families, it is still their money that he virtually parasites off of when he comes calling for a hand out from his confederate mother.
Without giving away the climax of the film, I will say that there is a particular scene towards the end that is so savage, framed with such a starkly simple realism, that it is utterly jarring.
The Todd Killings creates a story telling that fuses together our very real fears of the social boogeyman who lurk amidst all us ‘normal’ seeming folk, and although filmed in the 70s, it makes a timeless leap into a contemporary arena without loosing any of its thrust. It tells the story of a monster like Charles Schmid, without feeling outdated or hazy around the edges due to lack of a more graphic or gore drenched narrative.
The film also doesn’t rely on police procedural to fill us in on the details, it is told partly from the perspective of Todd’s own dystopian psyche and partly from the victims themselves. In particular Montgomery’s portrayal of Roberta which is nuanced, strikingly dramatic and ultimately heart wrenching.
The film also stars one of my favorite unsung actresses Gloria Grahame as Billy Roy’s mother. It also co-stars the wonderful Edward Asner, Fay Spain, James Broderick, Michael Conrad as Detective Shaw, and good old Holly Near as Norma ( just can’t forget her in Angel, Angel Down We Go 1969)as one of Skippers nubile sycophants.
Holly Near as Norma
“Teenage girls looking for the body of Alleen Rowe, in connection with murderer Charles Schmid.” Photo from LIFE magazine., via Sweetheart of the Rodeo’s blog post: Hell among the yearlings
On March 10, 1975, Schmid was stabbed 47 times by two fellow prisoners, he died almost a month later.
Notorious Pied Piper of Tucson killer of teenage girls-Charles Schmid
Skipper Todd: I try not to. But sometimes there’s a guy who’s really sweet… it’s so easy. We’re both men… we both know where it’s at. Personally, you’re not giving anything away.
Skipper Todd: I can sleep with them once because it degrades them. It makes them dirty. The worst thing about it is… you meet a chick who isn’t… bad. You can’t screw her because you don’t want to make her “dirty.”
Belinda J Montgomery 70s staple television actress and film star. Giving a brilliantly nuanced performance as Roberta, the object of Skippers affection/annihilation desire.
Roberta: You actually came to see me without any of your baby-pimps? Wow. How do I rate that honor?
Skipper Todd: I just loved your performance at the pool.
Roberta: So, you’re the one who rides the dune buggy and “services” the little girls huh?
Skipper Todd: Oh yes… and speaking of little girls, how old are you?
Suddenly, Last Summer was a one-act play by Tennessee Williams. It opened off-Broadway on January 7, 1958. It was part of a double bill with another one-act play of Williams’ called Something Unspoken. Suddenly, Last Summer is considered one of Williams’ starkest and most poetic works, and I tend to agree.
While writing this post, I discovered the same story surfacing about the working atmosphere on the set of the film, concerning the tensions between film stars Katharine Hepburn as well as Liz Taylor toward Mankiewicz’s abominable treatment of actor Monty Clift who had been struggling on the set with alcohol and drug use due to a car accident that disfigured his face. The actors had grown increasingly disgusted with the director’s blatant homophobic abuse of Clift who was openly gay.
Film director-Joseph L. Mankiewicz.Montgomery Clift in I Confess (1964).Dr. Cukrowicz talks with Catherine at the convent.Liz and Monty on the set of Place In The Sun 1950
Apparently, this tension culminated in a moment of rebellion by Ms. Hepburn, who waited til the final scene was shot, and then proceeded to spit in Mankiewicz’s face. I have to say, that while Hepburn is not on my list of actors that I idolize nor whose film career I follow closely, I commend her intrepid defense, and would have expected more of a face slap with a long white linen glove. I am saddened by the revelation, if it is accurate that Mankiewicz was a homophobe. I just finished watching his film, Letter to Three Wives 1949 with 3 of my best-loved actresses Ann Southern, Jeanne Crain, and Linda Darnell. Not to mention his contribution to All About Eve 1950. It’s often hard to separate the person from the work, and while I will always admire his work as a director, it does taint the waters to think that Mankiewicz could be a Neanderthal in his thinking.
Letter to Three Wives (1949) starring Ann Southern, Linda Darnell, and Jeanne Crain.All About Eve 1950.Joseph L. Mankiewicz on the set of Suddenly Last Summer with Elizabeth Taylor.
Producer Sam Spiegel submitted Gore Vidal’s screenplay to the MPAA’s review board before production began, the board having expressed objections to the story’s subject matter. Spiegel wanted to let Joseph Mankiewicz shoot the film as it was intended. Although the board first refused to approve the film, they gave the go-ahead, after a few minor changes were made. Thus, the word homosexual never materialized at any time in the film.
The movie supposedly differs from the stage version, using added scenes, and characters. Also adding a few subplots. Due to the strict Hollywood Production Codes that were enforced, they had to cut out any explicit references to homosexuality.
Elizabeth Taylorconjures the psychically injured Catherine Holly with a volatile poignancy, Katharine Hepburn icy and filled with misconstructions about the relationship with her son Sebastian, emerges from her gilded elevator like a throne, as Mrs.Violet Venable. Both stars were up for Academy Awards for Best Actress in A Leading Role that year, but both lost to Simone Signoret for her role in Room at The Top (1959).
Billy Wilder’s Ace in The Hole (1951) Starring Kirk Douglas and Jan SterlingJules Dassin’s prison noir masterpiece-Brute Force 1947 starring Burt Lancaster, Hume Cronyn, and Charles BickfordOrson Welles- Citizen Kane (1941) also starring Joseph CottenWilliam Dieterle’s The Devil and Daniel Webster 1941Directed by John Brahm-Hangover Square 1945 starring Laird Cregar , Linda Darnell and George SandersFritz Lang’s House By The River 1950 starring Louis Hayward, Lee Bowman and Jane Wyatt.I Cover the Waterfront 1933- Claudette Colbert, Ben Lyon and Ernest TorrenceRobert Aldrich’s Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte 1964 starring Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Joseph Cotton, Mary Astor, Agnes Moorehead and Cecil KellawayJohn Huston’s Key Largo 1948 Starring Edward G Robinson, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren BacallStanley Kubrick’s Killers Kiss 1955 Starring Frank Silvera and Irene Kane.Orson Welles penned the screenplay and stars in iconic film noir The Lady from Shanghai 1947 featuring the sensual Rita Hayworth, also starring Everett SloaneLady in a Cage 1964 directed by Walter Grauman and starring Olivia de Havilland, James Caan, and Jennifer Billingsley.The Long Dark Hall 1951 Starring Rex Harrison and Lilli PalmerFritz Lang’s chilling M (1931) Starring Peter LorreMark Robson directs, Val Lewton’s occult shadow piece The Seventh Victim 1943 Starring Kim Hunter, Tim Conway and Jean BrooksKirk Douglas in Ace In The Hole 1951 written and directed by Billy WilderAkira Kurosawa’s film noir crime thriller Drunken Angel (1948) starring Takashi Shimura and Toshiro MifuneElia Kazan’s socio-noir Panic in The Streets 1950 starring Jack Palance, Richard Widmark, Paul Douglas, Barbara Bel Geddes and Zero MostelIngmar Bergman’s Persona 1966 starring Liv Ullmann and Bibi AnderssonThe Queen of Spades 1949 directed by Thorold Dickinson and starring Anton Walbrook, Edith Evans and Yvonne MitchellDirector Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s beautifully filmed Mother Joan of The Angels 1961 starring Lucyna Winnicka.Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express 1932 Starring Marlene Dietrich, Clive Brook and Anna May WongThe Devil and Daniel Webster 1941Robert Wise’s The Haunting 1963. Screenplay by Nelson Gidding based on the novel by Shirley Jackson. Starring Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, and Russ TamblynMichael Curtiz’s The Unsuspected 1947 starring Claude Rains, Joan Caulfield and Audrey TotterLuis Bunuel’s Viridiana 1961 Starring Silvia Pinal, Fernando Rey and Fransisco RabalRobert Aldrich’s cult grande dame classic starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford-What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? 1962
1) The tragically poetic Pete Krumbein in Edmund Goulding’sNightmare Alley 1947 played by Ian Keith.2) The flamboyant Franzi Kartos in Caught 1949 portrayed by Curt Bois ‘darling’3) Stauffer, alias Fred Foss in The Dark Corner 1946-played by the wonderful William Bendix in the white linen suit…4) Good-hearted kite hanger, Brenda Martin in Women’s Prison 1955 – the eternal pixie Jan Sterling.5) Jeff Corey, as the cringing, cowardly informer ‘Freshman’ Stack in Brute Force 1947.6) Beulah Bondi as spiittin’ Granny Tucker in Jean Renoir’sThe Southerner 1945 ‘Ah shuckity’7) Ma Stone in William Dieterle’sThe Devil and Daniel Webster 1941– the grand Jane Darwell.8) Cecil Kellaway as Harry Wills and Mary Astor as Jewel Mayhew in Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte 1964.9) Cliff the jazz sexed drummer in Phantom Lady 1944– the ubiquitous Elisha Cook Jr.10) Quirky sisters Louisa and Emily Creed in Ladies in Retirement 1941–Edith Barrett & Elsa Lanchester.11) The wonderful stoolie Mo whose saves for her headstone and plot out on Long Island played with that razor-sharp wit of Thelma Ritter in Pickup on South Street (1953).12) Jack Oakie as Slob in Jules Dassin’s realism masterpiece Thieves’ Highway (1949).
Directed by Reginald Beck, and Anthony Bushell. Written by Nunnally Johnson, Edgar Lustgarten is based on his book “A Case To Answer” and W.E. Fairchild. With cinematography by Wilkie Cooper (Stage Fright 1950, Jason and The Argonauts 1963), granting wisps of shadowy montages that are equally noirish, suspenseful, and simply splendid.
Patricia Cutts gets no sympathy from me after slipping him a mickey and letting loose that darn Tingler on poor unsuspecting Vincent Price.
Yielding and obsessive Rex Harrison plays Arthur Groome a London gentleman married to the devoted and lovely Mary (Lilli Palmer.)Unfortunately, Arthur becomes consumed by a flirtatious showgirl Rose Mallory (Patricia Cutts), who winds up being brutally knifed in her boarding house room, and left for the credulous Groome to become suspect one. First gets the splatter of Rose’s blood on his jacket, but then fails to prove his innocence in a sea of circumstantial evidence.
Condemned to hang, this allows the real serial killer played by the tall and eerie Anthony Dawson who looks frightened all the time, a destroyer of wanton women who sees himself as ‘an instrument of justice‘, still lurking about, first at the trial spouting off about his obvious philosophy on sexually independent women, and then creepily shadowing poor Mrs. Groome, whom he idealizes as the perfect woman.
I’ll be up the long dark hall til next time! -Yours always- MonsterGirl
La Belle et la Bete (1946)Caged (1950)Criss Cross (1949)Devil Girl From Mars (1954)Les Diaboliques (1955)Experiment in Terror (1962)Les yeux sans Visage (1960)Les yeux sans visage (1960)Gloria Grahame The Cobweb (1955)I Bury The Living (1958)Island of Lost Souls (1932)Kiss The Blood Off My Hands (1948)Lady in a Cage (1964)Mother Joan of The Angels (1961)Belle et la Bete (1946)Strait-Jacket (1964)Sunrise (1927)The Haunting (1963)The Queen of Spades (1949)Vampyr (1932)The World’s Greatest Sinner (1962)
Lee Remick plays bank teller Kelly Sherwood who is being terrorized by ‘Red’ Lynch (Ross Martin) a psychopath with an asthmatic voice like sandpaper who schemes to use her in a plot to steal $100,000 from the bank where she works. Lynch kidnaps Sherwood’s younger sister Toby played by Stephanie Powers, and then threatens to kill her, if she tells the police. Enter Glenn Ford as F.B.I. agent Ripley who is now on the case… setting off a feverish game of cat & mouse between Remick, Martin and Ford.
Directed by Blake Edwards, this is one hell of a gripping Film Noir/ Thriller, with a screenplay by The Gordons, based on Mildred and Gordon Gordon’s 1961 novel Operation Terror.
I love Ross Martin’s portrayal of the murdering, smarmy crushed velvet jacket wearing, tv host art critic Dale Kingston in Columbo’s “Suitable for Framing”
… and Martin inhabits ‘Red’ Lynch giving him a most bizarre sort of vicious earning him the persona here as Fiend of The Day!
Directed by Charles Vidor the man responsible for the eminent noir classic, Gilda 1946 and no relation to the more well know King Vidor. With a screenplay byReginald Denham (The Mad Room 1969 a modern reworking of the same play, Suspense, Kraft Theater and Alfred Hitchock Presents)
The Mad Room 1969 a modern reworking of Denham’s Ladies in Retirement starring Shelley Winters and Stella Stevens.
The film is a suspenseful story with tremors of ethical dilemma, evocative of pity and encompassed by the moor like fog of madness and desperation.
Ida Lupino plays the reticent Ellen Creed, housekeeper to the colorful Leonora Fiske (Isobel Elsom) who has retired from the music hall stage. Ellen is the obsessive guardian of her two loosely screwed sisters Emily and Louisa portrayed deliciously vague sort of loony by Elsa Lanchester (Emily) and Edith Barrett (Louisa).
Ellen manipulates Leonora to allow her quirky siblings to come and visit, well aware that she has no intention of making it a temporary stay. Once Leonora realizes that the two are batty, she demands that they leave forcing Ellen to do the unthinkable, to not only murder her employer, but create a deceptive strategy that will allow the sisters to dwell in sanctuary at the cozy manor house by the moors.
Unfortunately, Ellen not only has the full time job of wrangling her nutty sisters, she becomes the target of her blackmailing nephew Albert Feather, played with a dash of charming malevolence by Louis Hayward. ( And Then There Were None 1945, Ruthless 1958, House By The River, Night Gallery: Certain Shadows on The Wall.)
The film is moody, macabre, theatrical, with a musty air of Gothic as Leonora’s remains lay hidden in the coal bin behind the bricks, near the grand piano where she once boisterously sang Tit -Willow from The Mikado…
The atmosphere stays closed in, as all three sisters flit about exposing their disconnection to reality. Evelyn Keyes is Lucy the house maid who brings a bit of naivete to the atmosphere as she too falls prey to Albert the ‘charming rogue” who gets her to participate unwittingly in his ruthless scheme of blackmail.
A quiet and delicately creepy hybrid of the old dark house sub genre of horror, mixed with suspenseful psychological thriller as it whimsically touches on the subject of mental illness and the darker sides of human nature.
The brooding Lanchester and the chattering, guileless Barrett (I Walked With A Zombie, The Ghost Ship, Jane Eyre all 1943) are wonderful as the one who is intense and a compulsive collector, to the one who is as fay as an aged wood sprite, wide eyed and childlike.
In contrast to the flightiness of her two sisters, the tightly coiled Lupino is beautiful and menacing as she anguishes over the fate of the peculiar pair who act more like undisciplined children, and less the blatant lunatics.
It’s the subtle intrusions of reality that impinge on the character’s terminal state of fantasy,which brings out the self-centered, insulated psyches of the two sisters. This creates the environment of insanity, and while they cause the situation to ignite a criminal conspiracy because of their unchallenged instability they are essentially harmless ultimately exposing Ellen as the most dangerous and cunning in the family.
Albert charms his way into Leonora’s home and heart!
Louisa Creed: I hate the dark. It frightens me. Sister Theresa: It shouldn’t, my dear. Don’t you believe we’re watched over? Louisa Creed: Oh yes. But I’m never quite sure who’s watching us.
Ida Lupino on the set of Ladies in Retirement 1941
There are thousands of films as fabulous as this in my collection, this is just one of them!-MonsterGIrl
