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Bookmark this pageThe Queen of Spades (1949)
Director: Thorold Dickinson
Movie review
From Time Out London
Pushkin’s marvellously histrionic tale of cupidity and terrible vengeance gets a suitably wild-eyed treatment in Thorold Dickinson’s 1949 film. In Tsarist Russia, Captain Herman Suvorin (Anton Walbrook) watches enviously as aristocratic officers lose more at the card table than he can expect to see in a lifetime. He hears of an old countess (the wonderful Edith Evans) who knows the secret of winning at cards, and determines to use her pretty ward to force her to reveal it. The upshot is a tense, increasingly scary battle between good and evil that – despite Walbrook’s Austrian accent and everyone else’s cut-glass RP – displays excesses which feel authentically Russian enough to have made Eisenstein proud.Author: Nina Caplan
Time Out London Issue 2053/2054: 17–30 December, 2009
User reviews of this film
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- John-Niles of California said...
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Posted on Oct 18 2010 06:54
I saw this magnificent film when I was around 11 years old and it has haunted and captivated my imagination since then! I love this masterful interpretation of Pushkin's tale. I love this film.
John-Niles of california - Report as inappropriate
Cast & crew
Director: Thorold Dickinson
Producer: Anatole De Grunwald
Cast: Anton Walbrook, Edith Evans, Yvonne Mitchell, Mary Jerrold, Ronald Howard, Anthony Dawson, Miles Malleson, Athene Seyler, Michael Medwin full cast
Genre(s): Period/Swashbucklers
Duration: 95 mins
UK Release: Dec 26 2009
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