The Queen of Spades

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.