Classic Films in Focus: DRAGONWYCK (1946)

Although it’s not as well known today as Gothic thrillers like Rebecca (1940) and Gaslight (1944), Dragonwyck (1946) sprang from the tremendous vogue for romantic thrillers that those movies helped to establish during the 1940s. The picture was adapted from a 1944 novel by Anya Seton, and the late date of the source material helps us understand the story’s obvious affinities with du Maurier and her own muse, Charlotte Brontë. One of the first films directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Dragonwyck boasts all the flourishes of the classic female Gothic, but its chief attractions are the exquisite Gene Tierney as the imperiled heroine and Vincent Price as her broodingly Byronic spouse.

Tierney stars as Miranda Wells, who thinks her dreams have come true when a distant relative summons her to serve as a companion to his young daughter (Connie Marshall). It soon becomes apparent, though, that the imperious Nicholas Van Ryn (Vincent Price) has other designs on his beautiful cousin, especially after his wife (Vivienne Osborne) mysteriously dies. Despite the romantic overtures of a handsome local doctor (Glenn Langan), Miranda falls under Nicholas’ dangerous spell, and soon her own life is threatened as Nicholas becomes increasingly deranged.

Both Fox players, Tierney and Price had already appeared together in films like Hudson’s Bay (1941), Laura (1944), and Leave Her to Heaven (1945), but Price has a much larger role in Dragonwyck and therefore gets more opportunity to exercise his tremendous screen presence. His Van Ryn is more restrained than the horror characters he would eventually play, but already the outlines of the later Corman characters are clear. Price was handsome enough for a leading man, as Dragonwyck proves, but his particular talent for a cruel twist of the mouth made him far more entertaining as an antagonist. He has an undeniable sexual appeal that makes Miranda’s attraction to him credible, even though the lines of his face and the sarcastic light in his eyes inform the audience of his character’s true nature. Tierney has a complex heroine to play, for Miranda has to remain sympathetic in spite of the flaws that lead her to her fate. Her beauty encourages us to forgive her, and Tierney is at her most lovely in her gorgeous period gowns. The two stars find capable support in the secondary cast, with Glen Langan as the opposite of Price in nearly every way, Walter Huston fiercely righteous as Miranda’s God-fearing father, and Anne Revere kindly as Miranda's loving mother. Spring Byington provides a delightfully creepy performance as the housekeeper, Magda, who ominously warns Miranda of the mansion’s dark past.

Like most of the Gothic thrillers of the era, Dragonwyck has its roots in Jane Eyre, which had gotten its own big Hollywood treatment in the 1943 picture starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine. Miranda differs from Jane because she has the benefit of concerned, practical parents who worry over her dreamy notions, but still we have the unhappy first wife, the brooding anti-hero, and the lonely child populating the shadowy, history-haunted halls of the ancestral estate. Dragonwyck breaks away from the narrative arc of the earlier work in its second half, but its deviations still draw upon the conventions of the traditional Gothic, particularly in its use of the vengeful, wandering ghost and its evocation of the old story of Bluebeard and his wives. Those who are interested in the Gothic tradition will find its parallels and variations fascinating, although the film occasionally errs, especially when it drops characters like Magda and the little girl, Katrine, without explanation about halfway through the story.

Look for beloved character actors Harry Morgan as tenant farmer Klaas Bleecker and Jessica Tandy as Miranda’s Irish maid, Peggy O’Malley. For more from Joseph L. Mankiewicz, try The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), All About Eve (1950), and People Will Talk (1951). See Vincent Price in iconic horror roles in House of Wax (1953), House on Haunted Hill (1959), and Corman films like The Raven (1963) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964). In addition to her previously mentioned roles, catch Gene Tierney in the wonderful Ernst Lubitsch classic, Heaven Can Wait (1943).

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

Classic Films in Focus: THE BIRDS (1963)

The Birds (1963) was Alfred Hitchcock’s next theatrical project after the popular success of Psycho in 1960, and like Psycho it delves more thoroughly into the horror genre than the director’s earlier pictures. Although some of its special effects show their age, The Birds remains one of Hitchcock’s best known films, in part because the deranged title creatures have become such a commonplace in modern popular culture, with references and allusions everywhere from High Anxiety (1977) and The Far Side cartoons to episodes of Animaniacs (“The Boids”) and even Arthur (“The Squirrels”). Based on a story by Daphne du Maurier, The Birds is also famous for its introduction of Tippi Hedren as one of Hitchcock’s most inscrutable icy blondes, but its real appeal lies in its unnerving depiction of a natural world in revolt, a theme that would be picked up in countless horror films that followed.

Hedren stars as Melanie Daniels, a mercurial socialite who meets Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) in a San Francisco bird shop and decides to pursue him to his home in Bodega Bay. There she meets Mitch’s former girlfriend, Annie (Suzanne Pleshette), whose own feelings about Mitch complicate the development of a friendship between the two women. Melanie’s arrival in the community coincides with the beginning of a series of deadly bird attacks, and she eventually ends up barricaded inside Mitch’s home with his mother, Lydia (Jessica Tandy), and young sister, Cathy (Veronica Cartwright). As the birds violently descend on the house in repeated waves, the survivors’ nerves weaken, but there appears to be no cause or explanation for the assault.

The human performances are solid in terms of building our own anxiety about the unfolding events, with Jessica Tandy especially good as Mitch’s needy mother. Hedren plays Melanie as a generally unlikable character, but if we liked her too much we would not perversely root for the birds to get her. The famous closet scene is really about giving the audience what it wants, which creates a different and more subtle kind of horror if we stop to think about it. Pleshette’s Annie strikes a more sympathetic chord, which the director promptly plucks in the most disturbing manner, while Taylor’s Mitch wrings our pity as the only level-headed man surrounded by all of these hysterical women. He brings new meaning to the term “hen-pecked” as he tries to wrangle his flock of helpless but emotionally demanding biddies.

The actual birds represent the upheaval of natural order, a theme with a long history going at least as far back as Shakespeare and the Elizabethan world order. In the modern context, however, we see nature as inherently rebellious, liable to rise up and strike without warning or obvious reason. Natural order simply collapses, and our delusions about being the dominant species are laid bare. Hitchcock provocatively uses the birds to create a visual vocabulary that presages things to come, particularly the rise of the zombie as popular culture’s most horrific symbol of nature out of joint. The birds have a great deal in common with the zombies in George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), which would arrive just five years later to define the conventions of its specific genre. Watch the sequences in which the birds attempt to break through the barriers into the Brenners’ home, for instance, or the moment when Mitch has to reach out through the window while the birds mass around it, viciously pecking his vulnerable flesh. Hitchcock seems to be trying to give birth to the zombie movie without realizing that one might actually use zombies to do it.

You’ll never look at pigeons in the park in quite the same way once you’ve seen the film. See more of Hedren with Hitch in Marnie (1964), and catch Rod Taylor in The Time Machine (1960). Oddly enough, Taylor also provides the voice of Pongo in the Disney classic, 101 Dalmatians (1961). If you want to explore the diverse range of animal attack movies, you might try fan favorites like Jaws (1975), Cujo (1983), and The Ghost and the Darkness (1996), or even cult classics like Them! (1954) and Night of the Lepus (1972).