The Devil’s Stairway
Maui gyuedan
Lee Man-hee (1964)
BFI’s current two-month ‘Echoes in Time’ programme comprises Korean films of the 1960s and of more recent vintage. Some of the latter are the work of famous names like Park Chan-wook but The Devil’s Stairway (originally released in Britain as The Evil Stairs) is the first film I’ve seen from the so-called ‘golden age’ of South Korean cinema. It’s therefore hard to judge in what ways Lee Man-hee’s psychological thriller is and isn’t typical of contemporary Korean films. Shot in black and white, The Devil’s Stairway is certainly absorbing – though partly because it’s such an odd combination of elements.
Hyeon Gwang-ho, an ambitious surgeon, is having an affair with Nam Jin-suk, a nurse in the hospital where they both work. Keen to ensure his own professional advancement, he ditches her to court the daughter of the hospital director. Jin-suk tells Hyeon that she’s pregnant by him and ready to tell others. He remonstrates with her as they stand on a staircase; she puts her hand on a broken section of banister and falls, breaking her leg and losing the baby. As Jin-suk lies in a hospital bed, Hyeon devises a plan to kill her. He carries the plan through, marries the director’s daughter but is driven mad by self-reproach. His career and marriage in ruins, he’s eventually arrested for the crime that he committed.
The deeply shadowed visuals, lit by Jeong-min Seo, are decidedly noir and The Devil’s Stairway repeatedly suggests features of particular films from post-war Hollywood and French cinema. There are times when Jeong-geun Jeon’s score seems to be channelling Bernard Herrmann’s music for Hitchcock – the disorienting harp glissandi of Vertigo (1958), the jabbing, screeching violins of Psycho (1960). As a man eager to better himself but hindered by a pregnant, resentful girlfriend, Hyeon calls to mind the Montgomery Clift protagonist of George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun (1951). The fateful flight of stairs somewhat echoes that inconvenient elevator in Louis Malle’s Lift to the Scaffold (1958). Jin-suk’s watery grave and the story’s climactic twist both evoke Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les diaboliques (1955). Even though such connections are hard to miss, the overall style and mood of Lee Man-hee’s film are quite different from those of his evident influences.
Strong naturalistic performances and their melodramatic context are held in increasing tension. Hyeon (Kim Jin-gyu) gives Jin-suk (Moon Jeong-sook) medication to ensure that she’ll be unconscious when, under cover of darkness, he carries her down a different staircase before dumping her in a pond in the hospital grounds. The aftermath to her disappearance, for guilt-ridden Hyeon, includes doors creaking open and Jin-suk as an apparition. Perhaps Kim Jin-gyu’s ordinary-man looks help him make his character’s predicament more believable but his actor’s imagination is the main contributor to this. In the early scenes, when Hyeon and she are still an item, Moon Jeong-sook’s Jin-suk appears so pleased with herself it’s surprising the other nurses don’t ask why. The contrast between this smug vibrancy and Jin-suk’s fearful loneliness as a suddenly bedridden patient is powerful and poignant, though. Another standout is the staircase itself, first seen when a carpenter apparently repairs the dodgy section of handrail: as events prove throughout The Devil’s Stairway, appearances can be deceptive. In the circumstances, the staircase can hardly be described as a supporting character but another non-human element can be – the pouring rain that temporarily threatens to thwart Hyeon’s wicked plan.
As will already be clear from mention of Les diaboliques, the crime with which the surgeon is eventually charged is not murder but attempted murder: Jin-suk turns out to be more than a ghostly reminder of Hyeon’s evildoing. She tells the police that she too deserves to stand trial for attempted murder, having tried to kill her ex-lover by driving him insane. The explanation of how someone else’s corpse was wrongly identified as Jin-suk’s lands rather heavily in the denouement: to be honest, I didn’t follow the details of this but they seem almost a minor consideration. The same applies to some of the hospital’s more implausible aspects: it seems, for example, that the entire medical staff routinely goes off duty during the night. There are a few other things in Lee Jong-taek’s screenplay that don’t make sense, and surely matter more. After Hyeon has disposed of Jin-suk, the action jumps forward six months. A few remarks at this stage imply that her fate might have been forgotten about by now – hard to credit that such a traumatic happening, in an apparently small community, would be effaced so soon. But Lee Man-hee’s realisation of the hospital as sinister locale and surrealisation of the place as an infernal state of mind make for exciting cinema.
16 December 2024