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"Wicked very young, wicked very old." Diplomas in hand, the heroines (Merle Oberon, Miriam Hopkins) are "two well-educated young women, neat and clean" and ready to turn the dilapidated farmhouse into a boarding school. (Joel McCrea, the middle term of the equation, enters by poking the rooftop in a beekeeper's suit, just a foretaste of the swarms to come.) The turning point for the unconsolidated triangle is a night innocently spent together, a shattered glass of milk rouses the malefic student (Bonita Granville) next seen garbed like Melville's Dargelos (Les Enfants Terribles) and twisting with "secrets, funny secrets." A whisper is all it takes, the dowager (Alma Kruger) triggers a wave of outrage and William Wyler works out the consequences in his preferred battlefield—drawing rooms arranged like Grimshaw interiors, figures trapped at 45° from a neutral camera that cuts sharply. Lillian Hellman herself dilutes her play's lesbian transgression into a clandestine straight crush, yet there's no mistaking the air of Mädchen in Uniform amidst the rumors and accusations, sublimated tensions subtly cracking the smoothness of Gregg Toland's surfaces. "The test of a great actress," decrees the histrionic aunt (Catherine Doucet), so it goes with Wyler on his leading ladies: He feeds Oberon sandwiches and milkshakes then suddenly engineers a quiet declaration of love while she's still dizzy from a carousel ride. (Later, while embracing McCrea, all she needs is a gaze slack from doubt.) Hopkins meanwhile conducts a symphony of suppressed longing around the scraping of a wall poster, practically an extension of her work with Lubitsch. A schoolgirl's campaign of terror is a patrician overlord's "first dishonorable mistake," the ending in Austria is an incidental reminder of another brand of ominous groupthink going on next door. With Marcia Mae Jones, Margaret Hamilton, and Walter Brennan. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |