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This film has often been unfairly branded as the weakest of the Joan Bennett-Fritz Lang collaborations. It's not. While I loved SCARLET STREET, I may have even enjoyed this film even more. Even if it does share many of the plot elements to films such as REBECCA, Lang's film actually feels very original in both look and concerns, and it's one of the most Freudian-laden (though in a good way- it escapes much of the psychobabble that dogs SPELLBOUND)films of the 1940's.
The film follows Celia (Joan Bennett), a spoiled heiress who takes a last-fling holiday to Mexico before she marries her dull, yet good-natured and secure fiancé. We soon learn that Celia, a rather expressionless and laconic beauty (Bennett's special persona, the lazy beauty, was rarely used so well) on the outside has many emotions running under the surface after she witnesses the thrill of a knife-night. She tells us in voice-over (as she will for most of the film) of her hidden excitement. Mysterious, seductive architect Mark Lamphere (Michael Redgrave)notices this too, and is quickly drawn to Bennett.
After a whirlwind courtship they marry, yet not long after the wedding Redgrave begins acting strangely. He takes Bennett back to his huge Gothic mansion (a superb piece of set design) and a house full of strangers, namely his helpful yet controlling sister Caroline (Ann Revere), his very strange house-keeper Miss Robey (Barbara O'Neil, evoking memories of Judith Anderson in REBECCA) and his unsettling son, David. Celia is at a loss to figure out her husband's strange bursts of temper, his aversion to lilacs, his reasons (or lack of) for not telling her of his first marriage (that produced the son, who blames his father for his mother's death)and his 'felicitous' rooms, which turn out to be grisly, unnerving reconstructions of rooms where women have met their death. All this mystery leads up to the final, "unfinished" seventh room, which Redgrave won't show his wife or guests. Celia decides that she must find out the "secret beyond the door" in the seventh room of she has any chance to unlock the secret to Mark's neuroses. She sees what is in the room, and becomes convinced that Mark intends to kill her.
As you can see, it's a very "different" film, yet so atmospheric that it's almost impossible to look away from it. The film uses every Freudian trick in the book, what with the obsession with doors (unlocking the secrets of the subconscious), dreams (Bennett dreams of daffodils instead of boats, supposedly an ominous sign), mirrors, the number seven (presumed to have some sort of mystical importance, with other Freudian-heavy 40's films such as the British productions MADONNA OF THE SEVEN MOONS and THE SEVENTH VEIL using the number in their title), Redgrave's neuroses and unhealthy attitude towards women, particularly his dead mother (a bit of an Oedipus complex I believe), his controlling sister, his dead first wife- whom he didn't love- and the housekeeper who has a strange hold over him (culminating in a revealing mock-trial scene taking place in Redgrave's mind, where he reveals his love for Bennet yet also his urge to kill her), and Celia's acceptance of death at the hands of her husband (she would rather he kill her than live a life without him). Quite a Love-Death trajectory, isn't it?
However, despite the film's reliance on the audience's belief in Freudian theories to make the events plausible, Lang also aims an arrow at those who purvey psychoanalytic theory as the "cure" for everything. An annoying woman at the Lamphere's party (where Mark reveals his rooms) superciliously announces that all these murders that Mark has patterned his rooms after could have been prevented if the murderer had simply undergone a bit of psychoanalysis. Indeed. And Bennet tries to psychoanalyze her husband just as he is walking towards her, hands outstretched, ready to strangle her....
The acting is generally pretty good (Redgrave suggests his character's neuroses quite nicely), yet the real winner in this film is the directing and the cinematography. Stanley Cortez, who would go all out in beautiful weirdness in the stunning, nightmarish NIGHT OF THE HUNTER seven years later, makes this an eerie dream of a film with his cinematography. The scene of Bennett running through the ghostly night fog is haunting. I have a feeling that this film was cut towards the end- the final 15 minutes seem jarringly paced, and there are precious few solutions given to the fascinating questions posed earlier on in the piece- yet (dare I say it?), as with THE LADY OF SHANGHAI, it's cuts enhance the film's noir atmosphere, the sense of a world out of control, where events are non-sequential and not everyone's true motivations are fully revealed.
score 9/10
jem132 1 March 2008
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1831263/ |
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1-3-2021 00:06:13