#mel dinelli

Beware, My Lovely premiered in New York City on 12 September 1952 (on a bill with eight vaudeville acts).

Mel Dinelli adapted his 1945 short story, “The Man “(which he had adapted in 1950 as a stage play) for the screen for Collier Young’s production company, The Filmakers, which was also co-owned by Young’s then wife Ida Lupino (the couple divorced shortly after Beware, My Lovely had finished filming). The film was Harry Horner’s directorial debut.

Cinematographer George E. Diskant had worked with Lupino and Robert Ryan in On Dangerous Ground, and is known for his work in film noir: They Live by Night (1949), The Narrow Margin (1952), Kansas City Confidential (1952).

Noirvember hits the Scream Scene team with THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE (1946), a film noir combining Gothic horror & slasher tropes.

Starring Dorothy McGuire, George Brent & Ethel Barrymore, this old dark house flick comes from RKO and director Robert Siodmak.

Early in his THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE (1946, watch it on YouTube rather than Plex, which has a dreadful print blown up to fit widescreen televisions and with some timing issues in the first reel), director Robert Siodmak cuts from an audience watching a silent film to a killer spying on his next victim from her closet. There’s a tight closeup of his eye (actually the director’s, to disguise the man’s identity) that seems to link us with the killer. We’re all watchers in the dark in this old, dark house thriller, a theme and location that seems to anticipate the greatest of all old, dark house thrillers, Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960). And if Siodmak doesn’t stage any sequences to match the bravura of the murders in that film, at least he and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, one of the patron saints of film noir, create two evocative on-screen killings in which the only part of the victims you see is their hands, underlining their helplessness.

That opening murder is one of a series afflicting a 1906 Vermont small town, all of them targeting young women with some kind of disability. The local constable has traced the killer to the vicinity of the Warren home, an isolated mansion occupied by a dying matriarch (Ethel Barrymore), her professor stepson (George Brent), dissolute son (Gordon Oliver) and a small staff. Helen (McGuire) — who’s been mute since childhood, when she saw her parents killed in a house fire — is companion to Barrymore, who fears the young woman’s disability has made her a target for the killer. With her encouragement, Helen plans to leave with Barrymore’s doctor (Kent Smith), but a medical emergency keeps him from getting to her in the middle of a raging storm.

Siodmak, writer Mel Dinelli (his first screenplay) and Musuraca work overtime to give the film a strong sense of atmosphere and psychology. Musuraca makes the house another character in the film, a threatening and isolating presence. Nor does he tip his hand. The shadows aren’t overwhelming at first, only growing as McGuire’s situation becomes increasingly dire. And Dinelli carefully constructs his script (from Ethel Lina White’s “Some Must Watch”) to point suspicion to one character and set up the dramatic climax. The script also makes the characters so normal (even the eccentric housekeeper played by Elsa Lanchester is totally believable), the horror becomes a fact of life rather than some exotic incursion, another parallel to PSYCHO and a lesson too many horror writers tend to forget.

Since the script transposed White’s novel from the present to the past, it’s a little easier to accept Helen’s being treated as an object. Barrymore and the men keep debating about what she should do with her life without really consulting her. It’s not as easy to dismiss the film’s sentimentality, which is chiefly the fault of Roy Webb’s score. He lays on the treacle a bit thick, and you may start wishing the project had gone to a Miklos Rozsa or a Bernard Herrmann.

The Spiral Staircase (1946)

My rating: 6/10