Film

A “film noir in color” (per Martin Scorsese) and a masterpiece of post-WWII American cinema (premiering just months after the August 14 armistice), this poison-apple parable contains at its center a slinky femme fatale with a steadfast belief in all-embracing damnation. The problem with Ellen Berent (Tierney), as her self-deceiving mother attests, is that she loves too much. It’s implied that this very attribute all but killed the family’s never-seen patriarch, whose ashes Ellen scatters from high-galloping horseback in one of the film’s iconic scenes. And this black widow’s fervid devotion proves to wreak havoc on her author husband, Richard Harland (Wilde), whose crippled younger brother and unborn child are destined to meet the wrong ends, respectively, of a lake and a staircase. The onscreen melo boils, but director John M. Stahl’s gaze remains spare and precise, very Japanese in its effects, like an acidic fusion of Ozu and Naruse. (A few of Tierney’s gowns, stained with psychic-wound red streaks, even resemble kimonos.)

The glamour of the film’s palette (courtesy of cinematographer Leon Shamroy) is but a bandage on a festering canker, and a late courtroom scene in which Ellen’s former fiancé (Vincent Price) interrogates the film’s surviving parties seems more a Torquemada-like spiritual purge than a crusading search for justice. If God is in the details, he remains tauntingly at the margins: Blue skies never seemed so coldly distant and on-high critical, especially in the deceptively redeeming final shot, one of the few compositions captured, tellingly, from an emphatic low angle.