Film

The Queen of Spades (1949)

Director: Thorold Dickinson

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

A pleasingly macabre fantasy, brilliantly designed by Oliver Messel, whose sets show rare imagination in evoking the suffocating decadence of imperial Russia. Expansion of Pushkin's short story, about an impecunious young officer's obsessive attempts to wrest the secret of winning at cards from a diabolical old countess, means that the first half never seems to be getting anywhere (there are cast problems, too, with Walbrook at his most sibilantly melodramatic, Evans coated in rubberised make-up, and the support variable to say the least). Yet Dickinson's elegantly prowling, darting camera, and his marvellously eerie sound effects (like the rustle of silk and the tapping stick that herald the ghostly presence of the countess) pull it all together in an impressive crescendo.

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