Dragonwyck

Welles and Wyler are duly emulated for the ornamental exoskeleton, the nucleus is already distinctly Joseph L. Mankiewicz's: "A lot of pretty words. Too many for me." A tenuous lineage, cf. Polanski's Tess, thus the farm maiden (Gene Tierney) out of Connecticut and into the New York manor of the rich relation (Vincent Price). (As her Bible-thumping father, Walter Huston is reluctant to let her go until pacified by a verse about Abraham and Hagar.) The cousin turns out to be a Hudson River despot, perpetuating Old World feudalism as patroon lording over local farmers, ancestral throne and all. His wife (Vivienne Osborne) has a sweet tooth and an unfortunate fondness for oleanders, their daughter (Connie Marshall) is a doleful moppet hearing spectral voices from the staircase. Haunted painting on the wall, "Marble Halls" on the harpsichord, a tower for the master's Byronic moods. "Are you enjoying the kermis of the upper classes?" A defiant twirl before the bluebloods, an heir who barely survives being baptized, all part of the heroine's darkening dream life. The housekeeper (Spring Byington) is generous with omens and the confidante (Jessica Tandy) limps pluckily, the doctor (Glenn Langan) plays smitten mediator. Plenty of plot in this Gothic change of regime, enough for a smart-aleck bit player to zing one of the protagonists upon delivery of one of many missives: "Who's it from?" "I don't know, but I can tell you how to find out. Read it." Mankiewicz reshapes a good deal of the material into The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and Price rehearses his skulking for Corman's Poe visions. "Some good may come out of this venture after all." With Anne Revere, Harry Morgan, and Trudy Marshall. In black and white.