Director Max Ophüls( Letter From An Unknown Woman 1948, The Reckless Moment 1949) offers a gritty and volatile film noir starring James Mason, Barbara Bel Geddes, and the imposing figure of Robert Ryan. With an uncredited assistant directorship by Robert Aldrich. Based on the book Wild Calendar by Libbie Block
Written by Arthur Laurents (The Snake Pit 1948, West Side Story 1961, The Way We Were 1973)
Interesting question: If Howard Hughes gained control of RKO in 1949, was Robert Ryan’s characterization of Smith Ohlrig truly based on Hughs?
A young Howard Hughes…Ryan was perfect for the part of Smith Ohlrig.
Also stars Frank Ferguson (regular on Andy Griffith Show) as Quinada’s partner Dr. Hoffman, Art Smith as Ohlrig’s psychiatrist who knows Ohlrig is a walking powder keg, Natalie Schafer as Dorothy Dale and Curt Bois as Ohlrig’s personal assistant, and like many a good Film Noir delivers, the snarky gay cipher – Franzi Kartos, who’s incessantly calling Leonora DARLING… that if subtitled would read ‘you bourgeois cow…’
One of the staples of the Noir catalog, Caught is a brutish and self-contained story about an egomaniac, hungry for power and consumed by a nasty possessiveness that borders on the psychotic.
Paging Dr. Freud… a classic case of overcompensation and oh yes… this man is a ticking time bomb.
Robert Ryan is chilling as the Neanderthal bigwig worth millions of dollars, with an explosive rage that rests on simmer until something sets him off when it doesn’t go his way. Oh, and Ohlrig also suffers from panic attacks, which he believes is truly a heart condition and not a nervous disorder.
Barbara Bel Geddes is the naive Leonora Eames, who has childlike fancies of marrying a wealthy man and living a life of luxury. Invited to a party on a boat one night, she meets Smith Ohlrig outside on the pier, near his yacht. Although Ohlrig could have any woman he chooses, something about Leonora sparks on him. From the very first encounter, we can see that it’s not a romantic chemistry that stirs Ohlrig, but something more forbidding and sinister.
Once he sets his sights on her, taking her for a ride in his car, he decides there and then, to marry this plain girl, whom he doesn’t love but knows he can possess easily.
Leonora soon realizes that her dream has become a nightmare and that Smith is a menacing character who treats her like part of the furniture and is not quite right in the head.
Ohlrig refuses to give Leonora a divorce, so she decides to leave her opulent home on Long Island and take a job as a receptionist in the city working for a doctor who runs a free clinic in a very poor neighborhood.
Perhaps this is Leonora’s way of cleansing her soul for making the mistake of marrying for money and not for love.
James Mason is Dr. Larry Quinada the absolute antithesis of Smith Ohlrig. He’s genteel and compassionate, and soon the two fall in love, though Leonora is held captive by her dominating husband.
Leonora Eames: Look at me! Look at what you bought!
Complicating matters is the fact that Leonora becomes pregnant by the sadistic Ohlrig who would rather see her a prisoner in the sterile palace that is her home rather than let her go free… Is the threat of financial security and the welfare of their unborn child that which will chain her to him forever…?
Smith Ohlrig: Is she coming down? Franzi Kartos: [Stands silent, knowing that Leonora is not coming down] Smith Ohlrig: [Getting angrier] Why the devil do you think I sent you up there, you dirty little parasite? Get her down here! Franzi Kartos: [Long pause] I think I prefer to be a headwaiter again, Mr. Ohlrig. Franzi Kartos: [Heads for the door, then stops] You know, you’re a big man, but not big enough to destroy that girl. Goodbye.
Franzi Kartos tinkling the ivories…darling.
There are thousands of fabulous films in my collection just as thrilling, this is one of them! Don’t you get caught-MonsterGirl
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
Directed by Michael Gordon, Produced by Ross Martin, based on a play, and adapted to the screen by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts, this crime melodrama is filled with all the right tawdry drama and campy dialogue that makes watching films from the fabulous 60’s so much fun!
Starring Lana Turner as Sheila Cabot a woman who is married to a dying shipping magnate Matthew Cabot ( Lloyd Nolan). Anthony Quinn portrays Dr. David Rivera, Matthew Cabot’s attending physician. The wealthy couple lives in a sumptuous home in San Francisco.
Sheila and the good Doctor, begin having an affair, and soon after their sparks fly, the lovers decide to murder Sheila’s nasty yet, terminally ill husband.
But as often the way these juicy tales of murder and passion go, someone knows the lovers have killed off the rich old Cabot, and begins blackmailing them.
Sandra Dee plays Cathy, Cabot’s daughter from his first marriage. Richard Basehart is Howard Mason, Cabot’s greedy business partner. John Saxon plays Blake Richards, the chauffeur, who is pursuing Cathy, and Ray Walston, Virgina Grey and Anna May Wong fill out the cast of dubious characters, all of whom might be the ‘one’ who knows about their crime!
Oh the flashy melodramatics, Oh Turner’s wardrobe! There are thousands of films in my collection, this is just one of those deliciously trashy ones.- MonsterGirl…
Urbane master of horror Vincent Price stars in one of William Castle’s atmospheric carnival rides as Dr. Warren Chapin, a pathologist whose milieu is the autopsies of executed prisoners from the State prison.
Chapin is driven by a curiosity to find out the source of the mysteriously evil force that creates the SENSATION of fear, and so he sparks a theory that there is an organism called… The Tinglermanifests itself at the base of the spine when one is experiencing abject fear. The Tinglerhowever is subdued by the act of screaming. This nightmare from the vertebral id looks like a giant centipede or a flat lobster with mandibles, lots of legs, and armored scales.
Each of us is inhabited by one of these creepy crawling death grippers, which grow larger as our fear expands, but because of our ability to scream, it lays dormant, incognito, and in repose at the base of our spines.
At first, Chapin locks himself in his lab, experimenting by taking doses of LSD and trying to induce fear first in stray cats and then in himself.
So it goes until Chapin meets Ollie and Martha Higgins who own a revival silent movie theater, and oh yes, Martha happens to be a deaf-mute, who also has an extreme phobia of the sight of blood.
As you know, I adore Judith Evelyn and am not very happy when it’s suggested that Chapin injects her with some LSD instead of a sedative in order to induce some nightmarish experiences, in which Martha will not be able to ‘scream’ therefore unable to suppress the little monster waiting to grip her when the moment of fear takes hold…
Click on the image, to see the ghostly chair at work…
In one of the most memorable classic horror movie sequences, Martha (Evelyn) during her presumed lysergic acid journey is stalked through her modest, bleak, and sinister apartment by a ghoulish phantom, who hurls a hatchet at her and then maneuvers her into the bathroom, where blood runs from the sink taps and the white porcelain tub fills with actual red-colored blood (the film is of course in B&W) An arm rises from the tub and clutches toward Martha, who is in the throws of primeval fear, made all the more brutal by the fact that she cannot utter a sound thus not… scream out!
Dying of fright on the bathroom floor, Ollie wraps her up in a sheet and brings her to Dr. Chapin’s house. Sensible, skip the police and straight to the autopsy I say!
Chapin had figured that Martha’s extreme fear would enable the Tingler to grow to its veritable actual size, and thus give him the opportunity to catch a living specimen, by slicing open Martha’s back and peeling the monster from her spinal column.
Having set out to try his experiment, he was unaware that husband Ollie equipped with a ghoul mask, axe, and tub filled with tomato red blood ( in a B & W film, using special focus lenses for the colored sequences) was plotting to scare his poor wife to death, and appropriate Chapin’s LSD inducing experiment to frighten Martha to death.
Once Chapin has the Tingler, Ollie takes his de-tinglered wife back home and Chapin’s wife Isabel (Price always seems to have a scheming hussy for a wife in these flicks) slips him a Mickey and lets loose the Tingler on her unconscious husband, which proceeds to clutch at his throat like a tick on a sunny august hound dog. Luckily sister-in-law Lucy arrives just in time to… SCREAM!
“Don’t you hate it when your neighbor’s dog fluffy humps your leg whenever he’s out for a walk!”
The Tingler lets go of its death grip, Chapin puts the thing in a pet carrier and goes off to Ollie’s apartment to put the darn thing back onto Martha’s backbone. He soon realizes that Ollie murdered his wife, a fight ensues, and the Tingler gets loose, slipping through the floorboards, and is now inside the movie house looking for someone to death grip!
From Guilty Pleasures of The Horror Film page 137- Article by Tom Weaver
William Castle had told Price that:
“Usually people who are frightened scream, and that keeps their Tingler from growing. Judith Evelyn will play a deaf-mute who runs a silent movie theater. Experimenting you scare the hell out of her, but because she can’t utter a sound she’s unable to scream-her Tingler grows, crushing her to death, you operate, remove the Tingler from her spine, but it escapes and gets into the silent movie theater. Well then, make believe that the theater is actually where the picture is playing…all hell breaks loose!”
In Weaver’s article, he discusses the waning horror movie genre after WWII and how Henri-Georges Clouzot’sDiabolique in 1955 was at the vanguard of cinema.
Vera Clouzot in her husband’s masterpiece Le Diaboliques 1955.
Castle was so impressed with how much the younger audiences had a hunger to be scared pantless, that supposedly it was this French thriller, that inspired Castle to try scaring the pants off audiences as well.
Many a Film Noir was tinged with elements of the horrific, with dark undertones and psychological angles that became very influential in American and British cinema. Where else did darker cinema have to go in order to funnel its often transgressive, unorthodox, taboo energies but through the Psychotronic, Cult, or B-Movie horror genres?
The very bizarre, disturbing, and surreal Shanks directed by William Castle.
Just a little later in the early 60s, I think of The Stranglerwith Victor Buono in 1964 or Grant Williams in The Couch in 1962, The Nanny in 1965, or The Naked Kiss 1964 which filtrated pretty grotesque narratives of, Pedophilia, deranged psychosis, incest and again, the Oedipus complex.
Aldrich had ushered in a whole new persona for Bette Davis and Joan Crawford with his Grand Dame Guignol tour de force, What Ever Happened To Baby Jane 1962.
The trumpets were hailing for Castle to step up and create his own uniquely tacky ballyhoo! While not Freud in the inkwell, certainly at least some kitschy Schadenfreude.
Castle could see that young Americans were starving for entertainment that was part horrific and a little exhibitionist. He purchased a copy on the cheap of a horror/mystery novel called The Marble Forest and got television writer Robb White to put a screenplay together, and hey while they were at it, why not give it a french sounding title as a tout to Diabolique!
That’s when they released Macabre 1958which actually didn’t come until 3 years after the release of Diabolique. Weaver doubts Castle’s accuracy about certain details in his relatings about the series of events but then again William Castle was admittedly a showman, a huckster, the PT Barnum of Horror films, and didn’t deny that he could tell big whoppers at times. It was all in fun…!
William Castle and Mia Farrow on the set of Rosemary’s Baby!
There are even conflicting stories as to how the project for The Tingler came about. White who also wrote the script for House on Haunted Hill claims that it was makeup man Jack Dusick who showed White a foot-long rubber worm that he had created. “This worm, it haunted you… it scared you!!!”
White thought about the idea and went to Castle and told him that they should find out “where fear comes from” and they’ll use the WORM!
Actually, the concept of FEAR itself becomes a vital character to the narrative of The Tingler, although I’m sure Castle couldn’t give a hoot about the real ‘why’ more likely it was the ‘how’ to go about doing the ‘how’! He was more of the discount provocateur than an auteur. He had vision, it was just in 3D.
According to Castle, he asked an artist at Columbia’s art department what a Tingler should look like, ” Sort of like a lobster but flat, and instead of claws, it has long slimy feelers!”
Of course, the cast thought the script preposterous, but Price always approached anything he did with style, and an urbane dignity.
For the promotion of The Tingler, some theaters even had boxes in the lobby, where a live Tingler was being held. You were warned not to panic, but to SCREAM if it breaks loose!
White had written that they couldn’t find anything to make the Tingler look more frightening until Castle (Bill) came in one morning with a small vibrator which eventually saved the picture.
It was his idea to take out all the motors from thousands of vibrators and screw them under the theater seats, then rig everything up at crucial moments so that the audience would suddenly begin vibrating in waves, six rows at a time!
Again, whether this is true or not, Castle claims he got the idea one night after he got a violent electrical shock from changing a light bulb on his bedside table. William Castle wrote in hisStep Right Up! “I’m going to buzz the asses of everyone in America!”Â
By installing little motors under the seats of every theater in the country, the projectionist would get the special cues on the film itself, then press a button once the Tingler appears on screen to ‘jolt’ the audience, leading them to believe that the Tingler was loose in the actual theater!
Dona Holloway the Associate to the Producer dubbed the process PERCEPTO!
Now that I’m back in the NYC area, I have to see if the Film Forum on Houston Street still runs their horror/sci-fi/fantasy Festivals. Years ago, I happened to catch a showing of The Maze 1953 where they passed out 3D glasses to the audience. At one time the Film Forum ran The Tingler complete with Percepto! I would love to have had my ass in one of those seats…
As far as Robb White, he considered these films dumb, “I hated ’em” and “And for years didn’t see some of the films I made with Bill Castle. I mean they’re so dumb God!- there’s not a worm in your backbone when you get scared.”
Based on a true crime, A nice suburban family man Gene Courtier makes the mistake of picking up a hitch-hiker who turns out to be dangerous escaped convict Victor Gosset, on the run from the police.Â
His gang proceeds to hold Courtier’s family hostage at their home at gunpoint.
As time ticks on, the situation becomes more tense and volatile culminating into a living nightmare!
Directed and written by Andrew L. Stone as a crime noir thriller, it stars Jack Kelly and Hildy Parks as the Courtiers and Vince Edwards as the ruthless woman hungry Victor Gosset.
At first Gosset wants Courtier to sell his car for the cash, but Batsford (Cassavettes) wants to hold the family hostage for the ransom money instead…
Also stars John Cassavettes as Robert Batsford. and David Cross as Luther Logan the other two men in Gosset’s gang. A real gripping thriller!
“With a gasp in your throat… and a gun at your back!”
Don’t pick up any hitch-hikers, but of course you knew that by now-MonsterGirl cares!
Val Lewton’s short story ‘The Bagheeta’ appeared in Farnsworth Wright’s July 1930 issue of Weird Tales Magazine. Lewton was dabbling in concepts of terror, before he even got to RKO.
The story takes place in Ukraine (from which MonsterGirl’s people hail!) and is a coming-of-age story about a 16-year-old boy named Kolya who helps his Uncle forge armor. Someone comes into the village with a slaughtered sheep, who claims to have seen a Bagheeta, a monstrous black leopard that can change its form into a beautiful woman. Only one person can kill a Bagheeta, and that is a virgin male, for he needs to be able to resist her seductive powers. If he is seduced, the woman will change back into the black leopard and kill the boy and eat him! Lewton would eventually adapt and produce his story for RKO in the form of Cat People in 1942 starring Simone Simon, the suggested embodiment of a Bagheeta.
The Panther
His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over, the movement of his powerful, soft strides is like a ritual dance around a center in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Only at times the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly — An image enters in, rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles, plunges into the heart and is gone.
Curse of the Cat People is filled with poignant original music by Roy Webb and with Cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca (Cat People 1942, The Fallen Sparrow 1943, The 7th Victim 1943, The Spiral Staircase 1945Bedlam 1946 and Out of The Past 1947) It’s no wonder Curse of The Cat Peoplehas many of the elements of a classic film noir piece.
After the tragic death of his wife Irena, played by the beautiful Simone Simon, Oliver Reed, once again played by Kent Smtih, has remarried his co-worker Alice (Jane Randolph). They now have a very serious yet gentle six-year-old girl named Amy (Ann Carter) who is taken to daydreaming and being a loner.
She does not mix in well with the other children at school who do not understand her sensitivity or her private world of fantasy that she has built around her as a survival mechanism.
“My beautiful friend”
Symbolic of Amy’s free spirit, the little boy captures her ‘beautiful friend’ and crushes it. Thinking that this would make her happy, he destroys the very thing that symbolizes her own spirit and her connection to the natural world.Amy is framed here in absolute alienation from the rest of the world.
Amy’s father, Oliver, constantly wields authoritative criticism of his daughter’s daydreaming and wants her to play with the other children and exist in the ‘real’ world. Amy has a birthday party for which she invites the children in her class, but no one shows up that day, and Oliver discovers that she has mailed out the invitations by placing them in the magic wishing tree, which is a hollowed-out knot of the large tree out behind the house.
Waiting for her classmates to share her birthday wishes. But no one ever comes.
Oliver reaches into the wishing-tree and pulls out the birthday invitations.
.
Amy is again admonished for believing that the tree was a real wishing tree. Something he himself had told her not too long ago.
Oliver had told Amy this was a magic spot when she was younger, and she remembers it, understanding it to be true because her father told her it was. She was taught to believe in magic and then, without preparation, was expected to denounce all things wondrous without any serious provocation on her part. She is only six years old, after all.
Saddened by her classmates’ absence at her party, Oliver, Alice, and Edward, the manservant from Jamaica, throw Amy a smaller party instead, complete with a birthday cake decorated with six little candles.
Amy is told to make a wish but not to tell anyone what it is, or it won’t come true. Again, Amy is conflicted by the mixed messages the adults in her life are giving her. She tells her father that wishes don’t come true. Oliver tells her, “Some do.” Her mother, Alice, embellishes by saying that you just can’t say it out loud, or it will nullify the magic wish.
Once again, there is a suspension of disbelief on their terms, disavowing Amy and her ability to develop a clearly defined sense of fantasy and reality. How can she properly order her world?
The children at school are furious with Amy for not inviting them as promised. As they shun her, they lead her to an old, sinister-looking mansion, where someone calls to her from the window. A voice calls out to her to come closer. Amy looks around, and the unseen person throws down a white handkerchief threading a gold ring.
Directed by Terence Young, and starring Eric Portman, Edana Romney, and Barbara Mullen. Edana Romney co-wrote the script.
Eric Portman plays Paul Mangin, who thinks he is Cesare Borgia reincarnated and that Mifanwy Conway (Edana Romney) is his lost love from a previous life. Corridor of Mirrors also showcases appearances by Christopher Lee and Valentine Dyall. A table at a nightclub with Mifanwy and her companions offers a fleeting glimpse of an astonishingly young Christopher Lee in his film debut, marking the beginning of a legendary career.
Terence Young’s film is a masterpiece of exquisite British filmmaking, immersing us in a rich atmosphere and evoking a mood that rivals the best psychological suspense thrillers and horror films from the forties, like the shadow plays of Val Lewton and the Gothic dark romances such as Wuthering Heights 1939, Rebecca 1940, and Jane Eyre 1943.
Corridor of Mirrors evokes an atmospheric, hallucinatory spectacle akin to Henri Alekan’s cinematography as he follows Josette Day’s travels through the mansion in Cocteau’s 1946 fable-like masterpiece Beauty and the Beast, imbued with its baroque, gilded, and ornate set design. Andre Thomas’s poetic lighting and camera angles suffuse the landscape of labyrinthine corridors, creating a somber and otherworldly landscape that evokes traces of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland as Edana Romney journeys through the dreamy complexity of the mansion, trying to break free of the spell, as she pursues the white cat, who is an emblem of Alice’s white rabbit.
Terence Young’s haunting directorial debut is one of those rare films that sweeps you straight into its opulent, unsettling dreams. It is a stunning and dreamlike gothic noir steeped in romantic obsession, sorrow, and psychological unease. At the center of it all is Paul Mangin, an enigmatic, larger-than-life artist absolutely obsessed with the past. The story spirals around this mysterious figure who cloaks his mansion and himself (in velvet capes), in Renaissance grandeur and holds the profound certainty that his soul has spent lifetimes, shaped by love and loss, echoing across centuries. Paul’s interest in Mifanwy is nothing more than a reflection of a cherished image, a portrait whose allure her appearance unsettlingly echoes, devoid of true understanding or affection.
Edana Romney wasn’t just cast as Mifanwy; she shaped the role herself, working closely with co-producer Rudolph Cartier to adapt Chris Massey’s novel into the screenplay. Watching her on screen, she moves almost like she’s sleepwalking, and while her acting is somewhat restrained, it actually adds to the film’s hypnotic, dreamlike quality. Throughout, she’s shadowed by a mysterious woman and a fluffy white cat, both quietly watching, which only deepens the sense of eerie voyeurism and subtle unease.
When Paul meets the beautiful Mifanwy Conway, lovely, possibly shady, and just curious enough to get drawn into the sinister spell, his fixation deepens. He’s convinced she’s the reincarnation of a long-lost lover from centuries ago and seeks to shape her to fit this spectral ideal. She rides beside Paul through shadowed London streets, the horse-drawn cab winding toward a vast, brooding mansion at the city’s heart. Paul, a forbidding aesthete veiled in grand delusions of a past life as an Italian noble, seeks to ensnare the sensuous Mifanwy in the dark embrace of his twisted reverie.
From its shadow-drenched corridors and warped reflections, the film blurs the boundary between reality and hypnotic fantasy. Corridor of Mirrors is a wild, shadowy fever dream drenched in mystery and illusion. It carries you from these dark, mirror-lined hallways and the lavish costume balls right into haunting galleries filled with faceless mannequins. Reality and fantasy melt together here; sometimes, you aren’t sure which is which. It’s like stepping into a twisted fairy tale. Each scene pulses with the quiet torment of lives trapped in mirrors, echoes of Pygmalion, Bluebeard, and Cocteau’s haunted fairy tales. It is as if the characters are caught in a maze of glass, unable to escape their own reflections and obsessions.
Paul Mangin’s obsession leads to madness, murder, and a shattering denouement amid wax effigies in Madame Tussauds, where the film’s onyx gloom gives way to truth and a tragic sense of justice.
The film’s Gothic atmosphere occupies a rare and haunting space, yet it draws subtle echoes from both Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958)and Fritz Lang’s eerie 1947 thriller, The Secret Beyond the Door.In the latter, a new bride, Joan Bennett, uncovers a chilling secret: her husband’s obsession with recreating rooms where murders have taken place, a macabre blurring of the lines between love and death, passion and violence.
André Thomas’s cinematography is a world unto itself, with its eerie, poetic visual style transforming the film into a hypnotic dreamscape. He plays with light and reflection brilliantly so that you almost lose track of where the real world ends and fantasy begins, those iconic mirrored corridors, where characters and their secrets multiply endlessly in flickering candlelight, and movement, fracturing reality and plunging the film’s characters into a labyrinth of shifting perspectives. Thomas’s cinematography exquisitely captures the film’s sumptuous costumes and intricate décor, draping each scene in a play of shimmering shadows and delicate highlights. His lens lingers on textured fabrics and ornate surroundings, bathing the opulence in a luminous glow that feels both intimate and grand, inviting us to step into a world where every detail is a visual feast. Thomas bathes the set in a chiaroscuro haze in key sequences, such as Mifanwy’s passage through the mansion’s long, mirrored hall lined with faceless mannequins. Nothing is quite what it seems. This approach blurs the line between fantasy and reality, uniting the film’s aching romantic longing and its creeping psychological dread. In every veil and distortion, the characters’ tangled obsessions and fractured selves mirror each other.
George Auric’s (who scored Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bête) score for Corridor of Mirrors flows like a dark, Gothic, melancholic river beneath the film’s haunting imagery, its melodies rising and falling with the rhythm of obsession and longing. The music is at once ethereal and grounded, shimmering with delicate strings that weave through shadowy passages and shadow-drenched ballrooms, while moments of brooding brass and subtle piano suggest the deep undercurrents of psychological unease and brooding desperation. The late moments, underscored by sweeping, delicate orchestration, evoke the grandeur and tragic beauty of the unfolding drama, making his score an essential part of the film’s haunting allure. Auric’s composition turns every whispered secret and silken touch into a symphony of passion and peril. The gowns were designed by Owen Hyde-Clark and constructed by French couturier Maggy Rouff.
“In projecting the slow abandonment of one’s identity, her third and final performance on the big screen evokes the pleasure, and the terror of romantic submission, Smith says — Mifanwy is a princess who, unlike Cinderella, who waits for a prince, or Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, immobile without the touch of a man’s lips, must break her own spell.” (Imogen Sara Smith for Criterion)
Corridor of Mirrors is a lush, visually extravagant meditation on identity and desire, where the past’s spectral grip suffuses every candle-lit room and character’s haunted gaze. The artistry of set and cinematography deepens its poetic melancholy, making the film a rare British gem, finely blended of exquisite and unsettling, and forever suspended between passion and despair, somewhere between the promise of love and the weight of memory.
Howard W. Koch directed this bit of Film Noir/Thriller and stars Lex Barker, Anne Bancroft, Mamie Van Doren, Marie Windsor, John Dehner, Ron Randell, Stuart Whitman, and Diane Van der Vlis.
A party girl is murdered, and everyone at a Utah motel is a suspect, and they all have something to hide!
Lex Barker plays David Hewson, a lawyer passing through the small town in Utah, who finds the mutilated body of party girl Marcia Morgan, one of the guests staying at Parry Lodge.
The wonderfully dry John Dehner plays Sheriff Jess Holmes, who is looking at everyone at the motel as a possible suspect. While Holmes investigates, the killer strikes again!
WHO WILL BE NEXT?
“She’s every inch a teasing, taunting “Come-on” Blonde.”
Written and Directed by Robert Thom who is perhaps best known for his Wild In The Streets 1969. For me, the film that really struck a chord was his configuration of childhood abuse in , The Witch Who Came From The Sea 1976 while a little fractured, and slightly queasy in its linear storytelling, was a startling, unsettling, imaginary, and often disturbing piece of work, much thanks to Millie Perkins’performance.
Consider that Thom also wrote the scripts for Bloody Mama 1970,Crazy Mama 1975, and Death Race 2000 (1975). Angel Angel Down We Go is perhaps a psychedelic take on the Rasputin archetype with a modern conflation of the Svengali mystique.
RASPUTIN-Mad Monk, Religious Pilgrim, Elder, Psychic, or Faith Healer?Stick an unkempt beard on him, a shabby coat…the dark piercing eyes say it all…Egomaniac!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The film opens with Tara Nicole revealing to us, through Tara’s childlike imaginings, her childhood, and the mythical parentage by the outre wealthy Steeles, they are as Demi-Gods from Mount Olympus. We see her musings in flashback and via graphic collage work that depicts her life as it was, as it is now, and as it will be.
Astrid Steele, ex-stag film actress, cigarette girl, and all-around whore to the masses. “Whoever said they slept with me, didn’t!”Willie Steele, a closet homosexual and absent father.Gazing into her mirror Tara Nicole Steele. the richest girl in the world recalls her childhood…
Tara Nicole recites a glorified fantasy completely contrary to what her life truly is. She is being sarcastic, she is teasing us with the truth. She is the cultivation of a female monster, whose lack of nurturing, and exposure to abuse and mistreatment has manifested something abhorrent to the world, but mostly to herself, a self-loathing, loveless thing, vulnerable to the dark prince in Bogart Peter Stuyvesant, who will come to the palace and awaken her sleeping rage.
On the surface, A perverse, grotesque fairy tale, about an over-weight heiress whose parents are hypocrites and superficial, living in a psychologically toxic battlefield of emotional turmoil, self-serving, repressed, and angry enough to create a bitter, ugly, and lonely world for their only child, a life Tara cannot live up to, nor can she satisfy the expectations put upon her nor fit into this artificial world.
Enter chaos, enter entropy, enter Bogart Peter Stuyvesant. Tara meets him at her coming out ball, a party was thrown by her mother Astrid, not to celebrate her glorious daughter’s coming of age, but as a showcase for Astrid’s bejeweled necklace that ‘Marie Antoinette wore at her beheading’. An opulent bauble, a shiny thing, a symbol of the empty and idle collectors, wealthy Americans become with their plunder of the poor masses. So the film will inform you over and over again.
A lysergic cinematic (ACID CINEMA) tale about a tragic fat princess who refers to herself as ‘Virgin Americanis.’ Until she sees Bogart gyrating his pelvis in skin-tight leather hip huggers on stage, she nearly swoons at the sight of his crotch. He is singing the film’s theme song, “Angel Angel Down We Go”. The theme is the Fall of The American Empire. The fall of the Steele family, the American Imperialist hypocrites who languish in their wealth, and self-hating misery. Hallucinogenics for the now generation, and booze and pills are still the drug of choice for the breed of uptight Americans.
Is there anti-fat sentiment in the film or is it as offensive as it intends to be so? As Tara represents the spoiled ‘fat’ and languid American Bourgeoisie when Roddy McDowall paws at Tara on the bed and spews out “God is America FAT!” while pawing her like a piece of meat.
“Only the poor know what’s really real. America doesn’t know. America’s FAT baby, good and FAT!… Oh God is America FAT… and Bogart Peter Stuyvesant love’s his country-he’s a patriot!”
Kristina of the Speakeasy Blog and Stephen also know as Classic Movie Man will be co-hosting this marvelous event!
There’s just sooo much that can be said for Val Lewton’s contribution and influence on cinema. I have been dragging my feet with a feature, myself, but this years blogathon gives me a chance to talk a little bit about the man who truly created several masterpieces of cinematic history. So join Kristina, and Stephen and all the other bloggers who will be contributing their coverage.
Simone Simon
I am working on a piece for Curse of The Cat People 1944 which was the follow up to Cat People, still appearing is Simone Simon as the ghost of Irena. I’ll be discussing a few things, The Merging of Reality and Fantasy,
The Fear and Threat of Children, the corruption of their innocence, imagination and how their freedom of expression challenges us to either push the boundaries of belief or succumb to Christian myth that would crush it, deem it evil, or call it mental illness.
Also I’ll talk about the Fear of The Female Monster and The Feminine. Especially in this case, a female child….!
And of course being an avid cat worshiper I’ll address that absurd superstitious malarkey centered around fear of cats being servants of the Devil… in particular black cats. So, stay tuned for a very informative and beautiful ride through the Shadowlands of one of the greatest film makers of all time-
