The Woman in White

At least you have to give Warner Bros. credit for trying to film THE WOMAN IN WHITE, taken from the famous Wilkie Collins novel about an evil man (SYDNEY GREENSTREET) and his equally cunning wife (AGNES MOOREHEAD), along with more conventional romantic characters, ELEANOR PARKER (in a dual role), ALEXIS SMITH and GIG YOUNG.

They only partly succeed, due mainly to Greenstreet's histrionic finesse as Count Fosco, seething with villainous intentions and stealing every scene he's in. Eleanor Parker, even though she has a dual role, gives one of her weaker performances as the dull heroine Laura and is only slightly more interesting in the title role. Gig Young is handsome as her suitor but looks a bit uncomfortable in his costume role.

If you like Gothic romance, you'll find plenty to admire here, especially the low-key lighting, the costumes, the quietly menacing music and the overall atmosphere of this period piece. But the resolution differs from the novel and goes for an artificially contrived happy ending.

Trivia note: When the film was released, the poster art showed all the actors in modern costumes to disguise the fact that the story took place in Victorian times. Warner Bros. frequently misled their audiences in this manner, particularly with films like DEVOTION (the Bronte sisters) showing the actresses in modern dress.

Over the weekend, I saw two wonderful films, both of the English Gothic variety. The first was Guillermo del Toro's marvelous "Crimson Peak" (2015), which must surely go down as one of the most gorgeous-to-look-at horror films ever made, but one that is surely not for the squeamish. And the second film was also a decidedly Gothic affair, "The Woman In White" (1948), a product of the Warner Brothers studio. This is an Eleanor Parker film that I had never seen before, and costars Alexis Smith, Gig Young, the great Sydney Greenstreet, John Abbott (who most viewers, including me, will probably best remember as the bearded Organian Ayelborne in the classic "Star Trek" episode "Errand of Mercy") and Agnes Moorehead. Yes, it really is a terrific cast. Eleanor, who has rarely looked more beautiful, plays two roles in this one; twin cousins. The FX used when the two appear on screen at the same time are very convincingly brought off, I might add. Here, Gig plays an art instructor who goes to a lonely English estate, Limmeridge House, to tutor Laura (our Eleanor). But on the road there, he is approached by the ghostly woman in white of the title (Eleanor again), who would seem to be an escapee from a lunatic asylum. What later develops is a scheme by Greenstreet and some others to marry Laura off and strip her of her fortune, replete with poisoning, murder, hypnotism, blackmail, family secrets, secret passageways, etc. The film's plot is marvelously complicated, thanks to the Wilkie Collins novel of 1859 on which it was based, and the script is deliciously literate, delivered by that great cast of pros. The film was directed by somebody named Peter Godfrey, with whom I was not familiar, but who does a terrific job here. And the film's music was provided by Max "King Kong" Steiner, so say no more, right? Alexis Smith is given top billing in the film, although Eleanor does get top billing on the poster, as you'll notice. And for me, she easily steals the film, with her extraordinary beauty and double role. This is the first time that I had seen an Eleanor film from the '40s--previously, 1950's "Chained Lightning" and "Caged" were my earliest films of hers--and it was interesting to see how wonderful she could be at this younger stage in her career. She and Moorehead were excellent together in "Caged," and are terrific paired in this earlier picture, as well. This film comes more than highly recommended by yours truly....

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.

One of the quintessential novels of the Victorian era, 'The Woman in White' features sensational aspects that were common to books originally published in weekly installments - in this case, false identities, secrets, crime, and adultery. It also includes the belief in mesmerism, with the evil Count Fosco exerting mind control over many characters, as well as the practice of committing those who were troublesome to one's plans - usually women - to asylums, both of which were real trends in the 19th century. It was highly popular in its day, with a readership approaching 100,000 copies a week.

Unfortunately, the movie adaptation from 1948 is a mixed bag. It stumbles early with the initial meeting of the 'woman in white' by a man on a road at night. Wilkie Collins' friend Charles Dickens considered it to be one of the most dramatic descriptions in literature, but in the film, there is no ethereal shock, and it comes across as a pretty simple meeting. The film captures the dress and language reasonably well though, and there are a couple of excellent performances - Sydney Greenstreet as the mastermind Count Fosco, and John Abbott as Frederick Fairlie, lord of the estate, who is demented, highly eccentric, and fragile. Some of his lines early on to his beleaguered servant Louis are quite funny. I should also say that Eleanor Parker is also fine in her dual role, and Alexis Smith is pretty good as her cousin too - so there are no issues with the cast.

There are two main problems as I see it, and the first is with the story itself, which asks the viewer to swallow a somewhat convoluted plot with some pretty big coincidences. What worked in installment form, or even in the published novel in 1860, is hard to translate successfully to film. The second issue is in cinematography, and overall tone. While it has a few nice moments, it's just not striking or tense enough, starting with that scene on the road at night, and continuing on through the movie. The result is that you've got a story teetering on the edge of being creaky, filmed in a way that pushes it over that edge. Watch it for the performances, or if you're a fan of the novel and want to see an old film version, maybe to compare it to the 2018 BBC mini-series version.

Notice how fluidly the one-and-only Sydney Greenstreet moves his prodigious bulk across drawing-room floors, like a greedy shark among stumbling minnows. No movie with him can be ignored, especially one that showcases his heavyweight talent. Here, as Count Frasco, he schemes ruthlessly to cheat hapless Eleanor Parker (in a dual role) out of her family fortune. And he does it with such style and civilized malevolence. Without him, the film would amount to little more than a well-mounted and occasionally engaging Gothic mystery. With him, it appears better than it is.

Except for a few grotesque close-ups of Greenstreet, director Godfrey films the scenes in straightforward fashion, as though they come straight from the pages of the Collins book. Thanks, however, to Warner's art department and set designer, the visuals come across as generally atmospheric and evocative of the period. Nonetheless, someone should have told composer Max Steiner that not every scene needs scoring, especially when the notes sound as if they thunder from the bottom of a well. Then too, the script should have made better use of the great Agnes Moorehead (just count her lines), one of the few actresses with enough gravitas to go toe-to-toe with the formidable Greenstreet. You just know at first glance, she's no one to mess with.

Somehow, I kept wishing Val Lewton ("Cat People", "Seventh Victim") had gotten hold of the material first. This movie could have used his eye for combining the literary with the uncanny, which would go beyond atmosphere to cast a much-needed hypnotic spell, particularly in Anne's outdoor scenes (the actual woman in white). As things stand, the movie's an okay entertainment, with a chance to view some of Warner's leading contract players, circa 1948.