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The opening view of South Pacific shores is at once rattled by shelling amid palm trees. "Don't he know there's a war goin' on?" Epistolary romance helps the sergeant (William Terry) keep his mind off the shrapnel in his back, the correspondent is a California gal with a similar taste in poems. The way home is a train derailed mid-sentence, at the cliffside mansion he meets not the pen pal but her mother (Helene Thimig). With hobbling cane and frozen smile, the recluse shows him the absent daughter's painted portrait and welcomes him into her bedroom-shrine. "She has beautiful taste in everything... Can you smell the perfume?" His ally in the mausoleum is the local doctor (Virginia Grey), who shares his growing unease and feels the old woman's icy gaze: "Somebody just walked over my grave." A sinister coup from Anthony Mann's expressive-esoterica period, the equal of Castle's concurrent When Strangers Marry as a hungry filmmaker's showcase of angles and shadows. The Guadalcanal vet in a Gothic new battlefield, the Teutonic matron demanding fresh flowers for a phantom ingénue, the physician and her private combat against sexism. Borrowings from Rebecca and Suspicion are prevalent, "I know that technique!" Edith Barrett as the trembling companion cements the Val Lewton link, Anne O'Neal as the wisecracking nurse adds a drop of vinegar. And then there's Thimig's gorgon crumbling as Mann's camera tracks into a dolorous close-up, her terror and delusion towering over the antiseptic normal couple. "There's always one in every town." Dieterle's Love Letters the following year moves the premise into prestige territory without deluding the delirium. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |