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Between Suspicion and Notorious, a domestic Gothic to darken the MGM gloss. The strangled diva's niece (Ingrid Bergman) moves to Italy but the traumatic London memory lingers, falling in love with the pianist (Charles Boyer) weakens her grasp of tragic opera. ("You look happier and you sing worse," notes her instructor.) Coming home means returning to the scene of the crime, "a house of horror" suits the husband in search of his victim's jewels, the attic is boarded up like Bluebeard's forbidden room. A visit to the Tower of London showcases medieval axes and racks, the spouse's instruments of torture are more politely insidious—an insinuation of his wife's wandering psyche, a gaze that grows cold over a misplaced object, disembodied footsteps to push her to the edge of madness. "Are you becoming suspicious as well as absent-minded?" The married state and the war at home, a harrowing portrait shaped by George Cukor's splendid control of form and mood. Nocturnal fog outside and oppressive Victorian décor indoors, the bedroom gas lamp dims ominously while the camera descends upon the feminine figure supine and rigid with fear. (Polanski in Repulsion re-imagines the image so that the ceiling lowers on to his prone heroine.) "Nothing real, from the beginning." Bergman's touching hysteria is matched by Boyer's masterful curdling of his romantic persona, his continental charm gives way to a vicious glare and hands as beastly as Jack the Ripper's. Joseph Cotten's stolidness as the Scotland Yard deus ex machina and Angela Lansbury's erotic insolence as the young maid are on opposite sides of the trenches, Dame May Whitty's dotty murder buff adds jocular seasoning. "And you thought I was being cruel to you..." The best study is Lewis' My Name Is Julia Ross, unless it's Fassbinder's Martha. Cinematography by Joseph Ruttenberg. With Barbara Everest, Emil Rameau, Edmund Breon, Halliwell Hobbes, Tom Stevenson, Heather Thatcher, and Lawrence Grossmith. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |