Fille maudite

Siobhan McKenna is the lead in this extraordinary film and yet the IMDB does not give her top billing. I wonder if they could rectify this. The last film I saw was directed by Lance Comfort and I was able to see another of his films. It is truly terrifying because it shows how not so long ago, and even now, how men want to possess a woman's body simply for sexual gratification and are allowed to do so. Ireland and the UK are presented as having a lynch mob mentality towards any woman who has a naturally strong sexuality to be hunted down for it, and left literally to be mauled by a dog. The girl Emmie played beautifully by the fine actress Siobhan McKenna is the young woman and because she is considered sexually dangerous ( mainly by conformist and possibly sexually repressed women ) she is driven out of Ireland to England. Here the pattern begins again, and her own internalised fear that she is ' evil ' causes her to repulse and kill the seducer who has followed her and even the men she either likes or desires. Again the women in this scenario sense her ' wickedness ' and one of them takes a final and horrifying revenge from a church which Lance Comfort maybe hinting is a place worthy of causing sexual repression and non-conformity. My one criticism is that possibly because of the censors the supposed evil is given too strong a Gothic feel and as much as I like the genre it seems at the same time to be undermining the premise that all this does not come from the young woman, but the societies in which she has been thrown into by life itself. The acting is good and as in a previous review of a Lance Comfort film accentuate how excellent he could be. An uncomfortable film for some, but it is unique in portraying ( for 1948 ) how destructive men's desires can be when unleased from their choirboy clothes. Literally so in this forgotten and fine film.

The story sees an Irish girl Emmie (Siobhan McKenna) driven from her community and relocated with a farm family in England. Other women can sense evil around her yet she seems innocent to the viewer. However, by the end of the film, it's pretty clear that Emmie is bad news as the body count increases! Throughout the film, Bess (Anne Crawford) senses that there is something wrong about the girl. She finally fires her to which the response is "You'll be sorry". You just know that there is going to be a repercussion .... and there is.....

Siobhan McKenna is creepy in the lead role - she looks weird. The English family that she stays with is pretty ghastly with their extremely posh accents and enthusiasm for everything (among the guilty for inappropriate posh dialect is Honor Blackman) yet this doesn't distract from the story. It's a good film with some genuinely creepy scenes.

"Daughter of Darkness" begins with some very cool opening credits. The font and backgrounds are quite striking and work well with the rest of the film. As for the rest of the movie, it's an odd little story about a strange woman who rubs other women the wrong way. While I thought this aspect of the story was overdone, the overall film is worth your time.

The story begins with a bunch of sexless old biddies approaching the local priest. They think that his housekeeper, Emily, is evil. Why exactly they think that is a bit vague--but apparently they hate her because men are inexplicably attracted to her (she's not THAT pretty by the way). Regardless, the priest is a wimpy guy who just wants things to be quiet, so he sends her to work for some far off folks. However, once in the new locale, once again the local women inexplicably grow to hate her. The problem is, you learn later that they have darned good reason--though they have no idea how bad she really is!

This is a good film but I think some of it was overdone. The way women almost automatically hate Emily seems ridiculous and making all this more subtle would have worked much better. Still, it is an enjoyable little film and worth seeing despite a few limitations.

The servant girl most of the women hate but all the men cannot resist is neither especially pretty or flirtatious...she does not even wear provocative clothes and the film never really explains why she is supposedly so evil. Based on her interactions with men in the movie, it seems like each man tried to rape her and thus they got what they deserved. I was expecting she was a vampire/Dracula's daughter but no such thing. I felt sorry for her. Having said that, the movie was quite suspenseful and well photographed...it just made little sense without any explanation of her "evil" and why men were drawn to her.

I am dismayed by just about all the reviews which precede mine, mainly due to the fact that they seem seriously involved with the film only when trying to psychoanalyze the title character, which simply cannot be done because the screenplay never really gets very involved in doing so; this actually makes the nuanced performances of all concerned that much more admirable and certainly does so with the direction of the film by Lance Comfort.

This may not be LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, but I think the dismissal of it as a quota quickie or a British B film is a bit much. The carnival scenes alone seem to demonstrate that some expense was gone to in the film's making and, in pure size at least, compare well with those in Hitchcock's STRANGERS ON A TRAIN. And while Comfort may not be David Lean, it is obnoxious to call him, as one commentator did, the English Ed Wood, as this bespeaks a total lack of knowledge of either man's work. Comfort achieves a tremendously atmospheric production throughout, and is hampered in suspense only by the holes in the screenplay, which simply do not give any indication of what forces drive the title character. (He does similar and excellent work in BEDELIA.)

As for the acting, which is excellent on everybody's part, someone complains about the 'posh' accents used in the farming family for whom the Irish girl goes to work, but he should be advised that not every farming family in England is the British equivalent of the Joads, especially in the post WW2 era. Many of those families were quite wealthy and educated - this particular family seems to have at least 15 or 20 farmhands working for them and are leaders in the community. Also, with the exception of some undeservedly nasty remarks about Maxwell Reed (who could hardly be better at playing a lowlife than what we see here), and a couple of mentions of this being Honor Blackman's first movie (actually, it was her second), the important considerations about most of the cast go unmentioned. The first may be that we get a look at a very young Barry Morse (later, of THE FUGITIVE TV fame), more importantly at the very stylish Anne Crawford, who was a fairly major English star of the day and who tragically died of leukemia at 36, and most particularly, at Siobhan McKenna, who was quite arguably the greatest Irish actress of the entire twentieth century (and certainly of the second half of it) and regarded so by critics and audiences alike, but who, with the exception of not more than a half-dozen times (mostly early on), eschewed film appearances almost entirely in favor of stage work on both sides of the Atlantic and a very occasional TV appearance. Do most of the correspondents here even know that? It would seem not. That all of this about her (and to some extent the others) goes unmentioned, while commentators waste their time with gratuitous attacks on even the unnamed wife of one of this film's stars, does not say a great deal of good about much of what appears in these reviews.

This is a rock-solid film made less than it might have been by an unclear screenplay; it might have been something of a masterpiece if made by an Alfred Hitchcock, but to blame Lance Comfort for not being Alfred Hitchcock is like blaming Cary Grant for not being John Gielgud - in other words, just plain silly.