Gig Young and his magnificent sideburns are hired as Eleanor Parker's drawing instructor. Walking to the big house in the dark, he encounters Miss Parker all dressed in white, but it's not the Miss Parker he will be tutoring. Once at the house, he meets the various occupants: the glittering-eyed, hypnotic, Italian Sidney Greenstreet and his wife, the silent Agnes Moorhead; the hypochondriac John Abbott (he makes John Ruskin look macho!); Miss Parker, as the center of this tsimmis; Alexis Smith, as a beautiful plot device; and Curt Bois, Abbott's portfolio stand.
Wilkie Collins is interesting in literature because he took the model of the detective story that Poe had invented and turned it into a genre. This was not one of those, but a melodramatic story of beautiful women being menaced, and people explaining the major plot points in poorly written monologues to Miss Smith. Peter Godfrey was never one of Warner's stronger directors. What chance would he have against Greenstreet anyway? Instead, he seems to have turned the entire shoot over to DP Carl Guthrie. Every shot looks like an illustration tipped into those cheap sets of 200 Great Novels By People You Never Heard Of that could be found in every suburban home of pretension half a century ago: bound in fake leather, from slightly worn steel plates. You could write your name on the bookplate that was glued to the insider of the cover, announcing "This book is from the Library of" and then a large space, so that everyone would know this copy of ESTHER WATERS was yours, and not your brother's. If anyone wanted to know about Victorian baby farming, you were the man.
Apparently the Warner Brothers felt about this movie the way I do about that last paragraph (and ESTHER WATERS), because it sat on the shelf for a couple of years. Mind you, it's fun in a "what were they thinking?" way, and Guthrie's camerawork is amazing. Pause the film at any moment, and you get a fine image, just right for a steel-plate illustration.
Wilkie Collins is interesting in literature because he took the model of the detective story that Poe had invented and turned it into a genre. This was not one of those, but a melodramatic story of beautiful women being menaced, and people explaining the major plot points in poorly written monologues to Miss Smith. Peter Godfrey was never one of Warner's stronger directors. What chance would he have against Greenstreet anyway? Instead, he seems to have turned the entire shoot over to DP Carl Guthrie. Every shot looks like an illustration tipped into those cheap sets of 200 Great Novels By People You Never Heard Of that could be found in every suburban home of pretension half a century ago: bound in fake leather, from slightly worn steel plates. You could write your name on the bookplate that was glued to the insider of the cover, announcing "This book is from the Library of" and then a large space, so that everyone would know this copy of ESTHER WATERS was yours, and not your brother's. If anyone wanted to know about Victorian baby farming, you were the man.
Apparently the Warner Brothers felt about this movie the way I do about that last paragraph (and ESTHER WATERS), because it sat on the shelf for a couple of years. Mind you, it's fun in a "what were they thinking?" way, and Guthrie's camerawork is amazing. Pause the film at any moment, and you get a fine image, just right for a steel-plate illustration.