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The "atmosphere of depression and the slightly demented quality" begin with a sardonic inspiration: Transistor radio and rowboat, Luana Anders' platinum mane against an inky chiaroscuro, the corpse sinking to aquatic depths followed by the gadget still squeaking a rockabilly tune. Three brothers in a "kind of haunted castle" in Ireland, the oldest one who keels over in the aforementioned introduction (Peter Read), the sculptor with a welding torch (William Campbell), and the dreamer who never grew up (Bart Patton). The matriarch (Eithne Dunne) is locked in morbid rituals for her dead daughter, Anders the New York gold-digger has her eyes on the family will and takes an ax to the face for her trouble. "One of you has a brilliantly imaginative and sadistically effective mind," turns out it's Francis Ford Coppola in his first picture, delighted like Welles with new toys. (One is a wind-up doll that fills the screen with buzzing hatchet.) The Cat and the Canary, surely, an affair of avarice and guilt and sunken secrets, Bava shocks for days (cf. Holt's Taste of Fear). Manor corridors are for creeping along, as any Corman student knows, pond water is muddy until a lass in bra and panties dives in and suddenly it's a Cocteau trance. The Godfather is inescapably visible in this fable of old and new orders, the family wedding ends in violence and in the middle of it a premonition of Brando's Corleone makeup in Patrick Magee's thin mustache and overhanging brow. "Quite a simple principle, isn't it?" Far from mere juvenilia, it's such fecund terrain that Coppola returns to it nearly five decades later (Twixt). With Mary Mitchel, Karl Schanzer, and Ron Perry. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |