Daughter of Darkness

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.

For a film of absolutely no reputation, with zero out of four in Halliwell's, directed by a man regarded with as much respect as Ed Wood, this Gothic psychodrama is really rather good. I'm not suggesting that it's in any way a classic - the acting , if I may say so under IMDb guidelines, is indifferent, the pacing in the second half is less than exciting - but as far as scope, subject matter and ambition are concerned, there are few low-budget British films to match it. Imagine a more modestly skilled admirer trying to make a B-movie Powell and Pressburger film replacing genius with added hysteria, then you've some idea of this amazing oddity.

The film opens at a febrile pitch, and barely relents. The opening credits, accompanied by a highly strung score, features Gothic tableaux that give a grotesque precis of the subsequent story - distorted, sharp-edged follies with witchlike fingers, ancient houses, Leroux-like organs, frenzied screams, rabid religious imagery.

The action proper begins in a church, the departing congregation unaccountably demanding the removal from the village of a young woman, Emmie, who remains behind praying. The irrational hatred in their demands is shocking - all we can glean is the supposed effect on men. Two spinster matrons demand her exile from a priest who seems neurotically ragged, probably because of his lust for the girl, who is meanwhile playing a dismally murmuring lament on the organ, having some sort of psychosomatic fit. This is a sequence of remarkable Franju-like beauty, Siobhan MacKenna's fragile, quivering mask evoking great sorrow and distress.

The picture of gentle innocence, it's difficult to see what danger anyone sees in Emmie, but so loaded have been both the accusations and the relentless style, that we shudder when she bends down to talk with a little, shaking girl, who has been warned off by her mother. When Emmie offers her flowers, there is an ominous FRANKENSTEINish (James Whale) frisson, but her mother, terrified, reefs her away, and brings her into a shop. A circus has set up tent nearby, and one of its members, a boxer Dan, has watched this scene, kicks the shop's door down, and asks Emmie to watch him fight tonight. She coyly agrees.

Besotted with lust, Dan turns what is supposed to be a fixed match into a farrago to impress Emmie. They later enjoy themselves throughout the fair, and we see Emmie happy for the first time. The pair venture to a quiet space just outside the fairground. Dan's intentions are clear, but when Emmie professes innocence, he turns nasty. In the next shot we see a petrified Emmie running through the fair, followed by Dan, whose eye has received a violent wound.

The priest succumbs to the public pressure, and sends Emmie to stay in England with a wealthy landowner, Mr. Tallent. She fits in well enough, but one daughter, Bess, views Emmie with an hostility even she can't explain, although intensified by the effect a much more brazen Emmie seems to have on the men folk. One day, Dan's circus comes into town, and Dan reimposes himself on Emmie. We see his injury, a loathsome scratch gashing his eye. He determines to avenge himself on Emmie, and chases her to an isolated barn. Later Emmie is found by her employer running home dazed. The next morning Dan is found dead. (The film isn't even halfway there by this stage!)

DARKNESS is considered notable as the first in-depth treatment of a female serial-killer, but it is much more than that. On an abstract level, Emmie is an embodiment of the Id, the unconscious desires that, if acted on, could result in the destruction of civilised society. This nearly happens as the women intuit, and Emmie is a remarkably subversive presence, linked to the carnivalesque, fairground atmosphere, all the more powerful in that she doesn't seem to understand her own power.

In the conservative societies she disturbs, sex is linked to fertility, reproduction, continuity and the land - Emmie offers a destructive opposite, all-consuming, disruptive and fatal. This allegory is heightened by conscience, the only bind on the Unconscious, here an almost supernatural Alsation that preys on Emmie (a pun on prey and pray pervades the film).

The resolution of this problem might seem reactionary, if it wasn't for the fact that Emmie is so sympathetically portrayed, and her malady is never explained away, its inexplicability making it all the more disturbing; while her enemies are repulsive, intolerant, in both societies becoming a lynch mob.

The film's abstract elements are matched by very real traumas - that of a parentless (she is a daughter of darkness; she calls the very disturbed priest Father, he calls her child) young girl, hounded and lonely in strange lands; class issues (the demonisation of a working class girl by her aristocratic employers), as well as being a returning of the Irish repressed on a complacent, historically amnesiac England (and a new Ireland that is beginning to repeat its repressions).

The portrayal of Emmie's disturbed mind is given a Romantic/Gothic framework (her only peace is facing the ocean on a lonely crag) that is very reminiscent of the Archers. Lance Comfort may not be a 'good' director in the conventional sense, but his seeming fausses pas contribute to the film's disorientating effect. He even pulls off the old heroine trapped by shadow of barred staircase shot with a vivid tangibility not even the great noir directors could quite manage. He follows this with that noir scene's seeming antithesis, a sun-dappled, pastoral idyll, site perhapse of Emmie's rebirth, except for one, very natural shadow, of a gate, with bars. Comfort's use of Gothic and animal imagery as well as some chilling ghost-story effects (see Emmie run away from Dan to the barn, or the whole organ playing sequence), are brilliantly successful.

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 is directed by Lance Comfort and adapted to screenplay by Max Catto from his own play titled They Walk Alone. It stars Anne Crawford, Maxwell Reed, Siobhan McKenna, George Thorpe, Barry Morse, Liam Redmond, Cyril Smith and Honor Blackman. Music is by Clifton Parker and cinematography by Stanley Pavey.

Emmie Beaudine (McKenna) isn't liked by the women folk of the Irish village community where she lives. There's something about her that riles them, frightens them even. So when the women of the village round up on her keeper, the priest, she is sent off to live on a farm in a North Yorkshire county of England. Which is timely as she has had an altercation with one of the men from a travelling fair. Once at the "Tallent" family farm, Emmie settles in well and seems genuinely happy, but still some of the women folk in the vicinity view her with suspicion, and when a face from Emmie's past shows up, it's the catalyst for doom and desperation.

It's an odd chiller of a movie, something of an acquired taste, it's hard to pigeonhole. Never overtly horror, noir or otherwise, it's not hard to see why some specialist genre fans have found it a disappointment. Yet if you can buy into Comfort and Catto's ethereal world there's a picture of great rewards here, a complex character study mingling with asides on sexual empowerment, even a story with supernatural leanings, the edges of which are deliberately shaded in grey. And of course there's the crime factor bulging at the seams, Emmie Beaudine a cold murderess, her rhyme and reason for being so repulsed by male sexual contact is again deliberately left floating in an emotionally distorted purgatory.

Nicely photographed in black and white, the visual atmosphere is very tight to the murky themes swirling around the plot. There's also a number of memorable scenes, the hurly burly of the carnival sequences, the hauntingly troubling playing of an organ, and some super scenes featuring Thorn the Alsatian dog, a real life war hero (look him up, amazing animal) who is also very much a key character here. Strong acting performances around McKenna are a bonus (including the beautiful Blackman in her first credited role), but it is the Northern Irish actress who spellbindingly holds court, with much of her visual acting stunning in its execution.

Love it or hate it, you wont be able to ignore it. 9/10