|
|
Psychiatry, plus a suggestion of the Bluebeard legend, plus a lot of Gothic glooms, was the essence of Fritz Lang's thriller
The situation is the familiar one of the girl who falls in love and marries a millionaire about whom she knows little, and finds that the home to which he takes her is one of those gloomy mansions which seem to have been built for the mysterious shadows they throw
She meets there three people whose existence she had not suspected: her husband's sister, who has been running things and wants to carry on (does anyone remember Judith Anderson's Mrs. Danvers in 'Rebecca'?); his secretary, who had hoped to marry him, and always wears a scarf round her face to hide scars from a fire; and his rather hostile son, who had no more been mentioned than the fact of a previous marriage
The moody husband (with a death fixation
) has a 'collection' of reconstructions of rooms in which murders have been committed
We visit them all except one: this is kept hurtfully locked
Is this the room of the first wife, and did her husband murder her? Well, although he too has a guilt complex, he did not kill her. Not loving her, he wished her dead and blames himself
To get this across, Lang stages an imaginary trial, with the husband as both accuser and accused
We end up, many shadows later, with Redgrave and Bennett having a showdown in the locked room
score /10
Nazi_Fighter_David 5 December 2004
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0972701/ |
|
1-3-2021 00:06:08