Classic Films in Focus: THE WOMAN IN WHITE (1948)

The 1948 adaptation of Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White features some notable character performances and plenty of Gothic mystery, but it isn't an ideal picture or a very faithful treatment of its source material. Its appeal depends mainly on its sinister figures, particularly the always memorable Sydney Greenstreet as Count Fosco, but its leads are less interesting, and they get the majority of the screen time. Classic film fans will find the movie worth watching for Greenstreet, Agnes Moorehead, and John Abbott, but devotees of the original novel will find the changes problematic, especially where the romantic plot is concerned.

Gig Young plays the painter Walter Hartright, who gets drawn into intrigue when he becomes a drawing master to pretty heiress Laura Fairlie (Eleanor Parker) at Limmeridge House. Walter falls for Laura but is warned of her engagement to Sir Percival Glyde (John Emery) by Laura's cousin, Marian (Alexis Smith). When Walter accuses Sir Percival and Count Fosco (Sydney Greenstreet) of a diabolical plot involving a mad girl who strongly resembles Laura, Marian tells him to leave, but both Laura and Marian soon discover that Walter's suspicions were correct. Reunited some months later, Walter and Marian realize that Laura's double has died and been buried as Laura herself; together, they set out to rescue Laura from an asylum and restore her true identity.

The most appealing of the novel's sympathetic characters is Marian Halcombe, and the film recognizes this fact even as it rewrites much of her role. Alexis Smith gives a fine performance as the intelligent, capable Marian, who serves as a foil to the delicate and rather insipid Laura. Eleanor Parker is actually more interesting as mad Ann, Laura's double, than she is as Laura herself, and sadly that's a fault that the film keeps from the original text, in which Laura is a demure Victorian angel made damsel in distress. Both actresses give better performances than poor Gig Young, whose Walter seems very stiff for a lover who can't decide which girl he likes. Walter's role in the novel as de facto detective doesn't really carry over into the movie, and this leaves Young with little to do but strike poses and lock eyes with both of his leading ladies.

The action depends much more on the heavies, especially Greenstreet's Count Fosco as the prime mover of the plot. Greenstreet has just the combination of charm and menace, as well as the impressive girth, that make Fosco so fascinating as a literary villain, and if you like Greenstreet in other films you'll enjoy his performance here. John Emery's Sir Percival is just a thug in comparison, always eager to jump into murder, while John Abbott is delightfully awful and ineffectual as Laura's hypochondriac Uncle Frederick. Only Agnes Moorehead enjoys any ambiguity about her character's intentions; her Countess Fosco is an odd, repressed figure who has her own reasons for hating Fosco and pitying the plight of poor Ann. Fans of the actress will be sorry that she doesn't have more scenes, but she gets quite a moment in the film's climax as compensation.

The problems with The Woman in White might lie more with Stephen Morehouse Avery's screenplay than Peter Godfrey's direction or any actor's performance, but flaws it definitely has, although some of them are only apparent to those familiar with Collins' source material. Godfrey's best film, Christmas in Connecticut (1945), also stars Greenstreet, but most people remember the rotund actor most for his appearances in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Casablanca (1942). You can see Alexis Smith play nasty in Godfrey's 1947 picture, The Two Mrs. Carrolls. Eleanor Parker went on to earn three Best Actress nominations for her roles in Caged (1950), Detective Story (1951), and Interrupted Melody (1955). Gig Young gets more to do in The Three Musketeers (1948), Torch Song (1953), and Desk Set (1957), and he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969).

Classic Films in Focus: DARK PASSAGE (1947)

Delmer Daves' Dark Passage (1947) is the third picture to pair Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, who had become Mr. and Mrs. Bogart in 1945, after their steamy introduction to one another and the world in To Have and Have Not (1944). Dark Passage is not as celebrated as that first film or The Big Sleep (1946), but it represents another opportunity to see the couple heat up the screen with their legendary chemistry. In spite of its emphasis on the romance between its two leads, the movie takes a deeply cynical view of the justice system and provides enough murder and mystery to satisfy film noir fans.

Bogart stars as Vincent Parry, who escapes from San Quentin after being wrongly imprisoned for the murder of his wife. He gets unexpected help from Irene Jansen (Lauren Bacall), a sympathetic and very attractive young woman. Irene hides Vincent in her car and then her apartment as the cops search for him all over San Francisco. With a new face molded by an eccentric plastic surgeon (Houseley Stevenson), Vincent sets out to learn who framed him for the killing of his wife and his friend, George (Rory Mallinson), who turns up dead just after Vincent makes his escape. His efforts are complicated by Madge (Agnes Moorehead), a former acquaintance who testified against him in court, and by a cheap crook (Clifton Young) who hopes to blackmail Vincent and Irene.

The movie opens with the unusual and not entirely successful gimmick of making the camera show Vincent's perspective rather than Vincent himself, a trick also used the same year in Lady in the Lake (1947). It takes more than a third of the movie for us to get our first real glimpse of Bogart. The justification is that it takes that long for Vincent to look like Bogart, since he has to have the plastic surgery to hide his identity from the cops, but it still seems like a long time to run with this approach. It also delays the signature banter and sexual sparks that fly between Bogart and Bacall, which is why most people watch the movie in the first place. Once we finally have the leading man in the camera's view, the movie picks up, and the two stars get their much anticipated scenes together.

When Bogart and Bacall aren't busy with their romance, Dark Passage turns its attention to darker themes, namely the total absence of justice in a system that treats innocent men as killers and lets guilty people get away. The rotten characters, played with malevolent energy by Agnes Moorehead and Clifton Young, use that broken system for their own benefit, and only poetic justice ever catches up with them. Sympathetic characters immediately side with Vincent, even if they don't know anything about him. Irene knows from personal experience that the law is good at going after the wrong guy; her own father died in prison under similar circumstances, and she has followed Vincent's case from the beginning. Vincent also gets understanding assistance from a cab driver (Tom D'Andrea) who arranges the appointment with the plastic surgeon and doesn't even expect anything in return. Vincent quickly realizes that it's up to him to figure out who really murdered his wife and his friend, since the cops are only interested in catching him, but even when he gets the answer he can't fix a system that never looks beyond the easiest, most obvious suspect.

For the fourth and final pairing of Bogart and Bacall, see Key Largo (1948). Bogart, a noir icon, plays more hard-boiled characters in High Sierra (1941), The Maltese Falcon (1941), and In a Lonely Place (1950). Catch Bacall's solo appearances in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), The Shootist (1976), and The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996). For more from Delmer Daves, try Destination Tokyo (1943), Broken Arrow (1950), and 3:10 to Yuma (1957). Don't miss Agnes Moorehead in Citizen Kane (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), and Jane Eyre (1943); the actress had a long and successful career before she stepped into her most famous role on the television series, Bewitched.

Classic Films in Focus: HUSH... HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE (1964)

Southern Gothic is all about collapse, moral, physical, and psychological, but it clings to its faded charms. It's a painted blush on a corpse's cheek, a courtly bow from the Grim Reaper, a wrinkled hag in a debutante gown. We understand the connection between decadence and decay in this sort of tale, dripping with Spanish moss and smiling cruelty. In Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), director Robert Aldrich brings all of these elements into play to create an intelligent horror movie for adults, those who can understand that the real terror lies as much in the sagging lines of Bette Davis' aging face as it does in the gruesome shadows of the summer house.

Davis plays Charlotte Hollis, the last remnant of a wealthy Louisiana family, who is stubbornly rotting away in her ancestral mansion, despite the fact that the government is about to tear the house down in order to build a bridge. She has her own reasons for clinging to her home, all stemming from the brutal murder of her lover (Bruce Dern) that took place there nearly forty years before. Everyone in town thinks that Charlotte did it, but of course there's a lot more to the story than that, and all of the long hidden details begin to seep out with the arrival of Charlotte's cousin, Miriam Deering (Olivia de Havilland). Soon the house is full of strange sights and sounds. Is Charlotte finally losing her mind, or is something sinister at work in the dark rooms of Hollis House?

The film brings Bette Davis full circle from Jezebel (1938), an idea hinted at in the portrait of a young Davis that decorates Hollis House in the later film. It is actually a painting of the star in her earlier role as Julie Marsden, and, indeed, Charlotte is a lot like what Julie might have become, brittle, stormy and willful, a difficult woman aging badly and at war with the world. The movie was meant to capitalize on the success of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) by reuniting stars Davis and Joan Crawford, but Crawford left just a few days into filming and was eventually replaced by Olivia de Havilland. The change was a boon to the film, since de Havilland makes for a much more interesting counterpoint to Davis, and it makes a wonderful ironic statement to have the angelic martyr of Gone with the Wind (1939) play Jezebel's duplicitous foil.

The other players hold their own against the two leading ladies. We get Joseph Cotten drawling away as the scheming Drew Bayliss, Agnes Moorehead feisty and hard-faced as Velma, Mary Astor as the dying Jewel Mayhew, and Cecil Kellaway as the kindly insurance agent, Harry. Bruce Dern looks suitably tragic and troubled as Charlotte's lover, John Mayhew, and Victor Buono is terrific as her overbearing father, Big Sam. Moorehead won a Golden Globe and was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her part. Watch the studied lethargy she adopts whenever prying outsiders come around, the way she shifts her body language and facial expression between secret humane energy and assumed assumed insolent sloth.

Stunning visual compositions make full use of the black and white medium and suggest the themes and subtexts of the narrative. We see many instances of characters looking through windows or framed by windows and doors; the camera also emphasizes the opening and closing of doors in several key scenes. These images remind us how trapped Charlotte feels in Hollis House, but they also symbolize her imprisonment within her own mind; her antagonists make use of both of her prisons in their efforts to destroy her. Charlotte wanders through the faded rooms of the house at night, calling out for her murdered lover, herself a mere specter of the tragic girlish heroine she once had been. This house is definitely haunted, and the camera work builds our sense of dread beautifully, until we are fully prepared to be drawn into Charlotte's dreamlike vision of the ghostly party, where faceless revelers await the lovers' dance.

Nominated for seven Academy Awards, Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte is a rarity among horror films, although it has its peers in the likes of Gaslight (1944), Dragonwyck (1946), and The Night of the Hunter (1955). All of these Gothic thrillers have more in common with early horror than they do with the genre's modern incarnation. If you like goosebumps without gore, then these are the films for you. Try the sadly overlooked Lady in White (1988) for a modern revival of the classic Gothic style.

An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Examiner.com. The author retains all rights to this content.