Der Tod wohnt nebenan

A governess walks into a situation that tests her mettle. The father is cold and unfriendly and while she makes friends with the little girl, the boy immediately despises her. The pacing is weak and the plot rather stretched, but it keeps one's interest. There is some gaslighting going on, but mostly its a very basic mystery. The little boy is really quite good in his derisive role. Some of the significant events unfold too fast and we really don't understand why people keep coming and going.

Gail Russell becomes governess to Joel McCrea's two motherless children. McCrea is a moody fellow. He gets sleeping pills from neighborhood doctor Herbert Marshall, and says that his children were spoiled by their unseen grandmother. The girl, Nona Griffith, is a sweet little thing, but the boy, Richard Lyon, takes a dislike to Miss Russell, seems to have a lot of money, and makes phone calls he says he didn't. Miss Griffith also tries to keep secrets. The house is an old, gloomy, run-down place, and after midnight there are signs that there's some stranger there.

It's an Old Dark House movie, and the unraveling of its mysteries make up the bulk of its length. Miss Russell goes through the movie with an expression of wide-eyed innocence that formed the basis of her star persona in this period. She stands in for the audience as a spectator to the disquieting behavior around her. McCrea shows that his distracted comedy shtick can be applied to drama as well.

Despite Raymond Chandler being one of the screen writers of this movie, I thought it depended far more on the atmosphere of the movie than the substance of its plot. Director Lewis Allen and cinematographer John Seitz offer that in gobs, and the actors so their jobs well enough to provide a good movie, if the audience be willing. It's an efficient studio picture that kept me interested through the end.

This film was clearly based on a rather feeble story about an empty house, mysterious lights in the cellar, vicious murders committed by a shadow in an alley, and so on, and although Raymond Chandler was brought in as a screenwriter to try to give it some muscle, that effort failed. The direction by Lewis Allen is clearly hopeless. All the cast look ill at ease, as if they had no idea what the director expected of them, and they found the story unconvincing. Herbert Marshall is stiff, and we can see him thinking: 'I'm getting too old for this kind of thing,' and his body language suggests he is resenting the weak direction. It is tragic to see the soulful, velvety-eyed 21 year-old Gail Russell looking so sad and so lost in this film. As for Joel McCrea, not only was he miscast as the grumpy widower whom Russell is meant to fall for, he looks even more lost than Gail Russell does, and flounders around not knowing how to behave. Lewis Allen had the previous year directed the delightful OUR HEARTS WERE YOUNG AND GAY (1944), where Gail Russell played the young Cornelia Otis Skinner with charm and conviction. And it was only two years later that Russell made what was probably her finest film, ANGEL AND THE BADMAN (1947, see my review), which is one of the greatest classics of the screen and captures all of her magical charm. So what went wrong this time? How did the rapport between Russell and Allen collapse? Why does everyone look so uncomfortable? Russell died of alcoholism at the age of only 36 in 1961. By 1950, her drinking was already so serious that she was becoming unemployable. But surely she cannot have become an alcoholic already by the age of 21, in 1945, so that cannot be the cause of the malaise seen in this picture. We know that Russell received a lot of moral support from John Wayne in ANGEL AND THE BADMAN, so that would have pulled her through. In this earlier film, the lack of even the most rudimentary chemistry between her and Joel McCrea is palpable, and it must have thrown her into a depression that she could not relate to him at all, and he refused to relate to her. And, as already noted, Herbert Marshall was 'getting too old for this kind of thing' and probably did not have the energy to try to prop up Russell as he might have done when younger. The two children in this film do very well, and Phyllis Brooks is excellent as the venomous, scheming Maxine. Maybe it could have worked. But it didn't.

1945 Paramount production with a very impressive cast headed up by winsome, lovely and sadly tragic Gail Russell, here barely 21 if that.

Joel McCrea, Herbert Marshall and Norman Lloyd all on hand to add to Miss Russell's ethereal charms and give the film class.

A 'Dark Old House' mystery as most other reviewers have mentioned.

It kept me happily entertained during a snowy December day and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys the genre. Just don't expect the top notch original storytelling of a 'Gaslight' or 'Turn of the Screw' or 'Spiral Staircase' because this one is a shameless hybrid taking from the best.

Still, I give it a 7.

In an older London neighborhood beset with strange deaths and a spooky, abandoned house with boarded-up windows, Gail Russell arrives via Boston to accept job as governess to widower Joel McCrea's two precocious kids; quickly, she begins to realize McCrea's little boy is in-cahoots with the previous nanny and may be covering up a dangerous plot which ties in with the old house--and also with McCrea, whose mysterious comings and goings spell trouble. Over-plotted and yet ultimately slim-seeming co-feature from Paramount, stiffly directed and not very exciting. Heavy-lidded Russell, fresh off her triumph in "The Uninvited", was never an exceptional actress, but here she gives hint she may have become a very good one, and her terse exchanges with McCrea show a much more confident performer than in "The Uninvited". The screenplay, adapted from Ethel Lina White's novel "Her Heart in Her Throat", falls rather early into a disparaging rut, what with Russell continually reporting peculiar happenings to people who don't believe or listen to her, and that final clinch nearly comes out of nowhere. However, for fans of 1940s potboilers like the not-dissimilar "Gaslight", this provides minor enjoyment. ** from ****