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The pictorial bedrock is Hogarth, a portrait of the Age of Enlightenment permeated with postwar trauma. The asylum in 18th-century London is a tour house for aristocrats to gawk at "loonies in cages," the Apothecary General (Boris Karloff) uses inmates as amusement at a nobleman's fête. The gross lord (Billy House) enjoys a quick wit, the courtesan (Anna Lee) cloaks her empathy behind a flinty veneer, "a kind heart butters no parsnips." Bitten by the reformist bug, she becomes an inconvenience and has her sanity questioned by judges, into the snake pit she goes. "They have their worlds, we have ours... Separate dreams," a Val Lewton specialty. Every madhouse has its hierarchy: Ian Wolfe's paranoid lawyer (and flipbook projectionist) and Jason Robards Sr.'s silent, alcoholic writer comprise the "upper classes" of the catacombs, a cell with a chained Goliath tests the limits of the heroine's compassion. (Karloff watches gleefully from the sidelines, like a Buñuelian sinner savoring the degradation of a saint.) "There's much to be said about our national institutions." The villain is just another man vying for power amid refined cruelties, the outsider's perspective is that of a Quaker handyman (Richard Fraser). This is where Lewton's apprenticeship on A Tale of Two Cities comes into play, to Mark Robson's painterly method he adds dissolves to engravings between sequences, further elaborated by Clayton in The Innocents. Japing parrot and stabbing trowel, the Voice of Reason as a youth asphyxiated by a skin of gold, "that's a Tory joke for you." Shock Corridor, Marat/Sade, Amadeus... "The fear within" is the defense before the kangaroo court, a note from Poe follows the verdict. With Glen Vernon, Leyland Hodgson, Joan Newton, and Elizabeth Russell. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |