L'Invisible Meurtrier

Wealthy widower "Fielding" (Joel McCrae) hires "Miss Howard" (a rather bland Gail Russell) to be the governess to this children - the rather obnoxious "Barnaby" (Richard Lyon) and the rather more benign "Ellen" (Nona Griffith). The young boy likes to wind her up, he has secret telephone conversations and those, coupled with stories about a mysteriously empty house next door, set the scene for a rather torrid time for the young woman who is gradually falling - "Jane Eyre" style - for her boss. He is friendly with a local doctor (Herbert Marshall) and she is befriended by "Marian" (Isobel Elsom) but can either of them help to assuage her incrementally increasing fears as she is certain that something terrible has happened - and may be about to happen again! McCrae doesn't actually feature so much here and when he does he isn't quite the character he needed to be to make this rather ordinary story deliver. The young Lyon is probably the stand-out actor - he really does manage to get under the finger nails, but otherwise it's all rather too easily guessable with performances that are very much join-the-dots. Eighty minutes felt quite long, and though it's not dreadful, it's just all a bit routine with shades of "Gaslight" (1944) to it.

Lewis Allen brilliantly succeeded in his fantasy and horror movie "the uninvited" which avoided the paraphernalia of the genre: the threats were suggested, the ghosts were never shown ;the atmosphere,the noises created anguish , and it paved a reliable way to superior works such as Wise' s 'the haunting" (1963)

"the unseen " is more of the same ,but it's less successful ; there's similarities with Henry James ' "turn of the screw " tranferred to the screen by Jack Clayton as "the innocents" (1961) starring Deborah Kerr ,the children are not unlike Miles and Flora.

"The unseen" creates a disturbing atmosphere (helped by Gail Russell's superb eyes ) but the screenplay drags on and the denouement is finally rather disappointing ,considering the good ideas which promised more : the little girl's scrapbook with fairy tales (Snowwhite) pictures which ,unexpectedly,contains a news item depicting a murder in the house next door .

The fans of the unfortunate Russell would not want to miss this one, but they should see "the night has a thousand eyes" (1948),based on a William Irish novel,where her eyes match the stars in the dark night.

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.

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 ****

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.