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 Paula Alquist hears footsteps in the attic that is closed off. She sees lights
flicker and dim. This is making her think she is losing her mind, but that is
precisely what what "her treacherous husband Gregory hopes will happen." This
movie is "steeped in escalating dread" and contains "flawless portrayals."
Ingrid Bergman is noted for this role winning her the first of her three
Academy Awards and Charles Boyer is credited as playing against type as the
"smoothly evil Gregory." They also tell you that the movie was nominated for
seven Oscars including Best Picture and for Angela Lansbury's debut (when she
was only 18!). 1944, 114 minutes, VHS
This is the Hollywood version of a movie made over in Britain back in 1940
(didn't they have a war to fight?) about a wife, her new mysterious foreign
husband and some stolen jewels (are the alarm bells ringing yet?). Since no
one ever saw the original, I guess that makes this one the definitive version.
It probably also helps that this one stars Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, and
Joseph Cotten, while the other one stars a bunch of British citizens that
should have been off keeping Jerry out of France or something. This is one of
those movies that seems to have a reputation for being a high class,
psychological thriller that will take your breath away and leave you wondering
how you made it through so much of your life without ever having seen it. I
know this sounds like the prelude to some kind of snarky put down, but I liked
this movie. You have good performances particularly from Boyer as the slimy
villain that can switch with ease from being the smoothly handsome husband
with a good set of manners to being a controlling maniac that has only one
thing on his mind (its jewels, but not Ingrid's jewels, if you catch my
meaning) and will stop at nothing, no matter how complicated and far fetched,
to get what he wants. There's some decent atmosphere as well, with a London
from the 1870s that looks like Lucio Fulci left his fog machine rolling the
last time he visited Big Ben. Shoot, this movie even has Angela Lansbury in
one of her prehistoric roles (she may have not been a hundred years old back in
1944, but she still had the face of an old busy body). The movie realized that
since Angela would still need to ferment a bit before she became an old busy
body, they needed to throw in an old broad to fill that role (though she was
little more than comic relief) giving this movie two busy bodies for the price
of one. This may not be 1878 or even 1944 and it really
isn't the fault of this movie, but you can't help but feel the story is a bit
minor league. "Guy tries to drive wife insane for monetary reward" reeks of one
of those TV movies with Kate Jackson and/or Jack Wagner. These still make it to
the big screen on occasion but they usually end up starring someone like Ashley
Judd or Tom Berenger. I suppose the person I blame the most is Alfred
Hitchcock. His movies trained you to expect the unexpected and dealt with
truly dangerous people. I never got the impression that Boyer was that
dangerous (his character killed someone years ago off-screen, but he spent most
of his time playing mind games with Ingrid when he could have been burying her
in the basement). The other thing was that nothing unexpected took place.
Everything unfolded like you expected it to, right down to the hunky police
captain or lieutenant or whatever he was jumping in to save the day.
Expectations aside though, the movie is enjoyable for what it is: the
exploration of an out of balance relationship and the trust you place in the
ones you love the most (and stolen jewels, too!)  Young Paula is hustled out of London after the death of her beloved aunt, who
just also happens to be some kind of singing sensation. As is the case with
most survivors of violent crime, Paula has won herself an all expense paid
trip to beautiful...Italy! Yes, you and the raving maniac piano player of your
choice will get spend several years in the land of Argento, Fulci, and Bava
(both of them!). While there, you will try and follow in the melodic footsteps
of your aunt, but be sidetracked by the smooth-talking Charles Boyer who is
after a bunch of really sweet jewels that your dead aunt got from some shadowy
royal figure. Or you can pass and bid on Showcase #2. So, Paula is now living
in Italy years later and spends her days having her voice trained by her
aunt's old teacher. It becomes apparent however that her singing is not up to
snuff and her teacher, being the kind grandfatherly type all of us would desire
to have instead of the dried up old witches that tried in vain to teach us how
to play the piano, he immediately discerns that her caterwauling is not the
result of being a better actress than singer, but instead is because she is in
love. She breathes a sigh of relief now that she can quit her gig as crappy
singer and start her new job as wife to crazy guy she barely knows. But who is
this guy that she is willing to ditch an unfulfilling and probably doomed
career as a singer? Why he's the piano player that has been accompanying her
practice sessions! His name is Gregory and they are in love and he wants to
marry her right away, but she needs time to think about it so she does what any
of
us out of work singers would do and takes the train to some Italian resort
(unconvincingly played by a soundstage somewhere in California). On the train
she
meets up with an old gossip named Miss Thwaits and in one of those
coincidences that only happens in suspense movies about women in danger, she
happens to live in Thornton Square right across the street from where Paula
lived and where her aunt was killed! Paula doesn't let on about her connection
to Thornton Square and gets off at the resort only to find Gregory waiting for
her. It's still early in the relationship so she's really excited to see him
instead of being pissed that now she won't get to watch HBO in the air
conditioned hotel room by herself. They decide to hurry up and get married and
somehow they decide to move back to London right smack into the same old
house as the one her aunty was bumped off in. It always amazes me in these
movies how readily people are to move back into the place where something
heinous (and always unsolved!) has taken place in. I guess it just shows how
strong these people are. Or how contrived the plots of these things are.
Either way it gets them back into the thick of...terror!  Once they get back home to their comfy and very dusty place on Thornton Square,
we see that everything is just how it was left after the unsolved murder of her
aunt all those years ago (well everything that is except for the presence of
her aunt's strangled corpse - good taste would dictate that that would have
been removed discreetly through the back entrance). We get to see a painting
of her aunt in some gaudy costume from one of her cabaret shows or whatever it
was she did (new hubby Greg has that monstrosity tagged for the attic
immediately) and Paula whips out a glove that her aunt wore on one of the
performances. The other glove in the pair was given to an adoring fan way
back when. If I was Greg, I'd be thinking that all this bric-a-brac was going
to find its way onto ebay in a hurry and that the house would be re-decorated
with a Chicago Cubs theme or something. Everything is going okay until, Paula
finds a letter to her aunt written two days before her death, from some admirer
named Serges. Greg goes nuts and grabs the letter from her and then tries to
play it off that he was upset because all the memories were upsetting her.
Greg then starts putting his dastardly plan into action. First he hires a tart
named Nancy (Lansbury) to be the maid. Nancy is not the highest class type gal
you could hope to meet and she spends most of her time being snooty and trying
to get laid by the cop that walks the beat by Greg and Paula's house. Greg and
Paula decide to go on a little tour of London to see the crown jewels and the
Tower of London with all the torture devices (that's a romantic getaway for
you!). Before going out, Greg makes a big show out of giving Paula some ugly
broach and tells her not to lose it like it was her mind or something. Greg
comes off as a smarmy jerk, even in the early going as he continuously puts
Paula down for losing things and forgetting things and basically treats her
like she was his slow daughter or something. They go out for their little trip
and sure
enough, that crazy dame has gone ahead and lost the broach! Or has she? And
who is that mysterious stranger that is hunkily tipping his hat to her? Why
it's Brian Cameron, the not-at-all-British-sounding assistant to the head of
Scotland Yard! 
Brian turns out to be one of the dead aunt's biggest fans and he thinks he has
seen a ghost since Paula looks exactly like her (except for being all strangled
and stuff). Naturally, since she's hot and married to a mysterious foreigner,
Brian decides that it is time to re-open the case. Not just the murder case
mind you, but the case of the missing jewels as well. It turns out that the
public was never told that some royal guy gave the aunt some jewels and that
those jewels were never recovered. His superior tells Brian to back off the
case and it turns out not because of any sinister involvement of the higher
ups, but just because they don't feel like dredging up a case they couldn't
solve before. Being the hunky rogue cop he is, he gets another cop transferred
to
Thornton Square to walk the beat, lay Nancy, and get all the dirt on what's
going on with Paula and her husband. Meanwhile, Greg is turning up the heat on
Paula, telling everyone (and by everyone, I mean that gossipy old hag from
across the street) that Paula is too sick to come out and play. He is also
ratcheting up his psychological warfare on her by moving pictures around and
then blaming her. Paula begins to fear that she is losing her mind. If that
seems far-fetched, that someone could be driven slowly insane like that, then
you've never been in a relationship with someone that you would trust with your
life. If you're convinced that the other person is telling the truth about all
this crazy crap that you're supposedly doing, the only option is to believe
that you yourself are going nucking futs. The movie does a good job at showing
us the scary things we potentially set ourselves up for when we enter into a
relationship with someone we don't truly know (for a far more graphic and
interesting version of this situation see Audition). There are other things going on that don't help Paula. The gaslight
flickers and gets lower when it shouldn't and she hears footsteps in the closed
off attic. Adding to the mystery is that her husband goes out every night to
supposedly practice his music at some little room he's rented that she's never
seen (he needs to be by himself to work). It turns out that Brian is the guy that the aunt gave the glove to and that he
has kept it all these years. As scary as that is, he apparently still likes
women, so he and his beat cop pal follow Greg around at night in the mists of
London and figure out that he is going back into a vacant house near his own
and then crossing over on the roof and getting back into the attic to look for
the missing jewels. Makes sense to me. The movie has a fairly anticlimactic
ending where Brian tells all this to Paula and then has a brief and mostly
off-screen confrontation with Greg that ends with Greg tied up in the attic.
The movie should be about over here, but they let Paula go in to confront Greg
for no real reason but to give the audience the catharsis from him tormenting
and tricking her for the last ninety minutes. The whole thing feels tacked on.
It would have been more effective if she had actually done something to get
herself out of things, like investigating or subduing the guy, but she
basically sat around all movie waiting for Prince Charming to bust in and save
her bacon. I'm not sure how likely it is that some guy would wait ten years to
marry the niece of the woman he killed for some jewels that he doesn't know
where they're at, especially when he could have just done the same plan of
running around the attic without waiting. If he could get into a vacant house
next to the aunt's, then he could get into the aunt's house while it was vacant
and searched to his greedy little heart was content. Bergman won an Oscar for
her role, an Oscar that should have gone to Barbara Stanwyck for her much more
memorable role as the soulless wife in Double Indemnity, but Bergman manages
to take the weak-willed woman role and give more layers than is usually the
case. Frequently, Greg thinks he has her under his thumb, but then she'll show
a little spine and demand to go out somewhere or she'll continue to have doubts
that she truly is insane, so she isn't the total doormat you usually see in
films like this. Boyer is effective, though he's another one of those screen
villains that unnecessarily complicates things for the sake of drama. Couldn't
he just tell Paula he was going through her aunt's things to sort out what
needed to be kept and what needed to be stored or sold? This is a solid, if
overrated film with stars that knew how to wring the most out of the material
they were given. I was probably guilty of going into this with too high of
expectations, but I can't say that I didn't enjoy what was up on the screen.
Good performances by Boyer and Bergman illuminated the isolation and mental
domination that mark dysfunctional relationships though the finished product
was marred a bit by the rather unremarkable (and hokey) story.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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