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Citizen Kane profits mightily from the overture, so does La Belle et la Bête, as befits a marriage fantasy. The couple meet on the edge of the abyss, the meek traveling companion (Joan Fontaine) is not quite sure why the moneyed widower (Laurence Olivier) is by her side in Monte Carlo until he abruptly proposes. ("I always did say that Englishmen have strange tastes," ventures Florence Bates' society gorgon, who chases a spoonful of medicine with bonbons.) The Cornish manor is glimpsed through the half-iris of a rain-speckled windshield, the second wife rattles within, squashed by the imperious shadow of the late first wife. The drowned beauty dominates still, the housekeeper (Judith Anderson) might be a fellow phantom. "She's not exactly an oil painting, is she?" Brontë by way of Daphne du Maurier, Alfred Hitchcock in his Hollywood debut envisions it as an intimate, perverse reverie inside Selznick's vast prestige package. Variously referred to as Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland and Little Red Riding Hood, the nervous ingénue is just the docile pet needed by an emasculated brooder still recovering from a provocative virago. Mental spaces reign, the lusciousness of form is not averse to surrealism, "you know, portrait of a lampshade upside-down to represent a soul in torment." The ocean shack in disarray, the boudoir like a glittering shrine, the sunken past pulled to the surface. The camera slips into a spectral drift during the extended confession, the blur of guilt and love as the best marital therapy is taken up by Chabrol. (George Sanders brightens the perfunctory mystery that follows with his pronunciation of "foul play.") Fontaine's look of uncomplicated purity vanishes ("You know, you've grown up a bit since I last saw you"), Anderson's glance of incendiary exaltation lingers. The Hitchcock-Lang dialogue continues with Secret Beyond the Door. Cinematography by George Barnes. With Reginald Denny, C. Aubrey Smith, Gladys Cooper, Nigel Bruce, Melville Cooper, Leo G. Carroll, and Leonard Carey. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |