The Photograph

Watching this as an "extra" on the DVD of Arne Mattsson's thriller Morianna, I was bored by the very lame treatment by Siodmak of a familiar psychological story.

This made-in-Sweden episode of the Lon Chaney Jr.-hosted series has a Maine backdrop, after all - snow is snow. The poorly developed script has world-famous photographer Don Powell asked by his agent to take a vacation and revive his talent by doing some art shots up in Maine, a respite from shooting fashion & glamor (unfortunately for the viewer no cheesecake) shots of women in his NYC studio. It's a long way from Bob Cummings.

He sees a tall, remote looking beauty leaving a mansion in Maine and she won't acknowledge his horny advances at all -just walking past him as if he wasn't there. Don rapes her (off screen) and leaves her for dead. All in a day's work, apparently.

Back in NYC he finds to his dismay that the agent has arranged an exhibition of his work and a planned magazine spread saluting his greatness. Don sees the photo of the Maine mansion magically "come to life" -every time he looks at the photo, selected for the exhibition, he sees the dead woman walking closer & closer. The ending is ludicrous and anticlimactic.

This sort of morbid, guilt-ridden tale is perfect for horror but botched by writer-director Curt Siodmak here. The Swedish supporting cast has some striking beauties in it, but overall the English dialog delivery is halting; at the museum a guy pronounces "forté" all wrong and it's downhill from there.

Eva Hassner as the mystery woman has a Sophia Loren-type regal beauty, but John Crawford as Powell is dull and uninteresting -now if they had cast Timothy Carey this could have been, with proper rewrite, a home run.

"The Photograph" remains a weak episode, despite the presence of veteran character actor John Crawford in the central role of photographer Donald Powell, famous enough for his agent (Ralph Brown) to arrange an exhibition of his best work. A womanizer who beds all of his models, Powell is sent from New York to Maine for a much needed vacation, and spies a house from which a pretty young woman exits as he's taking pictures, silently ignoring his pleas for her attention, causing him to follow, rape (unseen) and kill her, leaving the body in the snow. A nervous wreck after returning home, he is startled to see the girl in his photograph of the house, which no one else can see, yet each time he checks her image grows larger as she nears the camera lens. An unsympathetic protagonist makes for dull viewing, especially when the finale proves sadly predictable. Still, it's one of the better known episodes, as it was one of the three to form the basis for Kenneth Hartford's 1961 compilation feature "The Devil's Messenger," along with "The Girl in the Glacier" and "Condemned in Crystal," expanding Lon Chaney's role as host to becoming the Devil himself in exclusively shot new footage.