Morte no Inverno

Well acted,well directed, suspenseful thriller. Mary Steenburger at her best.

In New York, the unemployed actress Katie McGovern (Mary Steenburgen) is invited to an audition to replace the actress Julie Rose that had a nervous breakdown in the middle of a filmmaking. She gets the job and travels with Mr. Murray (Roddy McDowell) to a remote manor upstate to meet the producer Dr. Joseph Lewis (Jan Rubes) that prepares footage with a test to be sent to the director. She is lodged in the mansion but when Katie sees her driving license burning in the fireplace, she finds that all her documents and credit cards are missing from her wallet and the telephone line is actually cut off the wall. Soon she finds that she was lured by the two men and is trapped in the house in a blackmail scheme.

"Dead of Winter" is a great suspense in one of the best performances of Mary Steenburgen in a triple role. Despite a couple of bad reviews, the theatrical and claustrophobic dark story of murder, greedy, blackmail and a stiletto is one of the best thrillers of the 80's. The few external locations are awesome and unfortunately the VHS does not highlight the cinematography. This is the fourth or fifth time that I watch this film and I still like it. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Morte no Inferno" ("Death in the Hell")

Note: On 23 January 2021, I saw this film again.

The critics for this movie in the local newspaper and also on IMDB said this movie is a give away thriller. I totally disagree. It may be true that it takes too much time before we are confronted with the new personage Steenburgen has to play, but overall this is a nice Mousetrap. The actors are very well casted on I was sometimes surprised with the plot twists. Music helps keeping up an eerie atmosphere. Don't watch this movie if you're alone at night

In terms of camera work, lighting, pace and direction in general, this is a fine piece of film-making. Penn knows all the bells and whistles as usual and Mary Steenburgen is quite amazing in her roles. I'm put off as I am so often by the many critics who look to film for verisimilitude (the "if it couldn't or wouldn't ordinarily happen in real life" brigade) that sets us so far behind our European counterparts. The film has a remarkable sense of entrapment and claustrophobia in the dead of winter in the middle of nowhere. As far as whether the events really could happen like that, I suppose I was more interested in the style, craftsmanship and general concept than of probabilities or even possibilities. The camera work and rhythm at the end of the film are magnificent. As for the "damsel in distress" nonsense, how many thousands of movies fall into that genre anyway? Are they all uniformly bad because they use a successful formula? This is the kind of movie where it's fun to sit back and enjoy the fireworks without bothering about split infinitives and the like.

Curtis Stotlar

This Arthur Penn-directed remake of My Name Is Julia Ross represents yet another attempt to revive an old Hollywood formula, in this case the lady-in-distress thriller. There are of course some new, kinky wrinkles in this film, which has some grisly moments. For the most part the movie worked well for me. Mary Steenburgen makes an attractive and sympathetic heroine as a woman trapped in a snowbound mansion by two very strange men. There are some shocks along the way but in the end the movie is fairly conventional, a technical exercise, if you will, featuring some good, offbeat performances. The movie, in other words, delivers the goods, and is unashamedly old wine in a new bottle. It's no classic, but if its genre appeals to you, it's reasonably effective in its quiet way.