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"Life is short and art is long. Decision difficult, experiment perilous." To wake up in a night train during a thunderstorm is the proper introductory note for an oneiric investigation (cf. Sirk's Sleep, My Love). The physician (George Brent) has written on the Napoleonic complex, he's a rather dull fellow who finds himself pulled into New York private worlds ca. 1903, "something out of Jules Verne." He hears about the domineering aesthete (Paul Lukas) from the frail sister (Olive Blakeney) before she dies, and he sees his isolated wife (Hedy Lamarr) first as a painted portrait in a museum. She's but one item in his collection, a Vermont jewel polished with a Parisian education, neurotically besieged. (Their son is kept in the attic nursery, cowering from tales of witches.) "There's something fateful about her," the husband meanwhile is "a chord of music with a basic note missing." Beauty is an ornamental shell to be pierced, Jacques Tourneur's visual complexity builds splendidly toward the explosion of release. The rival is a smitten poet (George N. Neise) whose murder momentarily restores the madman's mojo, the child shares his name in ghoulish tribute. Darkening clouds over the daisy field, the diary in the dressing case, "a life of terror" meticulously studied. The observer is a sculptor (Albert Dekker) who presents a staring Medusa bust. "What is it?" "What is it? Woman!" Up and down the spiral staircase, the Gothic mansion where a row of aquariums blows up amid flames. (The Magnificent Ambersons is acknowledged with a view of the fire truck reflected on a storefront window.) Hitchcock returns the Suspicion compliment with Under Capricorn, Polanski reaps it all for Rosemary's Baby. With Carl Esmond, Margaret Wycherly, Stephanie Bachelor, and Mary Servoss. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |