The Red House
Delmer Davies (1947)
A tale of what lies hidden within dark woods, Delmer Davies’ black-and-white thriller begins in open country and bright sunshine. A male voiceover – assured, amiable, never identified – describes the rural setting: how this land, once covered in forest was tamed and darkness expelled – except, that is, for the Oxhead woods. One of several trails crisscrossing the woods leads to a farm, a place with, according to the voiceover, ‘the allure of a walled castle that everybody knows about but few have entered’. The farmer is Pete Morgan (Edward G Robinson), who lives with his sister Ellen (Judith Anderson) and works the land alone despite the handicap of a wooden leg. The household’s third member is Meg (Allene Roberts), the Morgans’ ward. She’s one of the teenagers seen travelling home on a school bus in the prologue to The Red House, which Delmer Davies adapted from George Agnew Chamberlain’s novel of the same name. Meg’s companions on the bus include the school flirt, Tibby Rinton (Julie London), and clean-cut Nath Storm (Lon McAllister), who are going steady. It’s soon clear, though, that Meg is keen on Nath, too: she brings him back to the farm and persuades Pete, in whose eyes Meg can do no wrong, to take Nath on as a part-time farm hand, outside school hours. As for Tibby, she alights from the bus and bumps into a man slouching at the roadside. This is Teller (Rory Calhoun), a disreputable local, paid by Pete to patrol the woods with a rifle to keep trespassers away. ‘I’m good at things they don’t teach at school’, Teller insolently tells Tibby. She acts demure in his presence – at first, anyway – but is clearly attracted to him.
It’s revealed at an early stage that Pete lost his leg in an accident in the Oxhead woods, where the title location is situated – and decidedly out of bounds. On Nath’s first evening at the farm, after supper with the Morgans, he prepares to start his long walk home and decides to take a short cut through the woods. Pete warns him not to because ‘the screams from the Red House … will lodge in your bones all your life’. He shouts this warning outside the farmhouse, in a howling gale. Nath ignores it but soon loses his bearings in the dark, is spooked by the sounds he hears and turns back; he eventually makes it to the farm, where he stays the night. For Meg, locating the Red House exerts a growing and an irresistible fascination – the result of her uneasy intuition and Pete’s increasingly disturbing behaviour. She and Nath start searching the woods on Sundays – Nath’s day off from the farm – until, one Sunday, he can’t get out of a date with Tibby and Meg goes it alone. She finds the Red House but, as she hurries back home, Teller fires several shots to scare her away; terrified, Meg falls down a slope and breaks her leg. When Nath learns that she’s missing, he ventures into the woods to find Meg and carries her back to the farm. Pete is enraged that his orders were disobeyed – even more enraged when he finds out that Nath has climbed a tree to visit Meg in her bedroom. He fires Nath on the spot.
The main locations work splendidly as expressions of psychological planes and, in Pete Morgan’s case, pathology. For Pete, the farm is a safe, virtually private world: a newcomer even there, let alone in Oxhead woods, is tantamount to a trespasser. Nath’s arrival destroys the homestead’s, and its owner’s, equilibrium – heralds a loss of innocence. Pete’s view of his farm isn’t shared by other locals. The opening voiceover, referring only to the place’s shadowy seclusion, contrasts it with Tibby’s father’s farm – the words ‘Joe Rinton, like the other farmers hereabouts, is up and coming – raises good apples …’ accompany a sunlit shot of cantering horses and trees in blossom. At that first supper with Pete, Ellen and Meg, Nath genially reveals that they’re known as ‘the mysterious Morgans’ and, when Pete asks him to explain what he means, the local gossip that Meg’s ‘real mother and father left her when she was a baby’. The dense, uncultivated woods are the realm of irrational forces – and, in the person of Teller, someone of sexual experience beyond that of the uninitiated Meg, Nath and, for all her sexpot posturing, Tibby.
All but one of those trails that crisscross the Oxhead woods ‘wander vaguely’ there, and the same goes for Freudian intimations in the narrative. Meg’s de facto parents are a brother and sister. Pete, in his desperate desire for the world of the farm not to change, is a limping case of arrested development: his influence certainly arrested the development of his sister. We learn that Ellen was in love with the local doctor (Harry Shannon, seen briefly when he treats Meg’s leg injury), as he was with her; instead, she stayed single to keep house for her unmarried brother and raise Meg. Even the occasional and lightweight scenes between Nath and his widowed mother (Ona Munson), who runs a small convenience store, strike some curious notes. When Nath is encouraging his mother to remarry, their conversation sounds, paradoxically, like that of a married couple; when she ties the knot and prepares to go on honeymoon with her new husband (Walter Sande), Nath and his mother, after exchanging meaningful looks, kiss each other on the lips. Not one of these Freudian hints is overworked by Delmer Davies; together, they contribute to The Red House’s highly charged and confounding atmosphere.
In comparison, the uncovering of Pete Morgan’s dreadful secret is protracted and the nature of the secret conventional. Pete and Ellen claim that Meg’s parents left the area in search of a new farm, leaving their infant in the Morgans’ care, but died shortly afterwards, after which Pete and Ellen legally adopted Meg. The truth is that Pete rented the Red House to Meg’s parents. He was in unrequited love with the woman, Jeanie, before she married; his obsessive desire for her continued to grow; Jeanie and her husband therefore decided to move away; in a showdown, Pete killed them both and buried their bodies in an icehouse adjoining the Red House. To cut what becomes a long story short, things end fatally for Pete and Ellen, badly for Teller, and happily for Meg and Nath who, in the film’s closing scene, look to the future together. Tibby, who had tried to elope with Teller, is presumably meant to have learned the error of her irresponsible ways.
It’s not quite fair, though, to distinguish The Red House’s undercurrents and denouement as sharply as this. Although Pete Morgan wants Meg to remain the young girl he has always loved and who has loved him back, he’s increasingly delusional and starts seeing her as Jeanie – and calling her Jeanie. In one sense, it’s just as well that he does; if he didn’t, the sequence in which Pete stands beside the lake where Meg has been swimming and tells her, ‘This is the way it could always be’ would be too creepy. As it is, Pete adds the word ‘Jeanie’ to that remark; Meg is still understandably disturbed but the film’s audience rather less so. A few plot elements don’t add up but you accept them because the narrative momentum is so strong. The melodrama of The Red House reaches such a pitch that this is an instance where a Miklós Rózsa score doesn’t seem excessive, even when Rózsa brings in a theremin.
The acting is variable. Judith Anderson plays Ellen rather emphatically. As Teller, Rory Calhoun is less a hunk than a block of wood. Julie (‘Cry Me a River’) London, though rather better, is an effortful vamp – and you never feel this is because her character is working too hard to be vampish. It never makes sense that Tibby and Lon McAllister’s neat, faintly prim Nath are an item but he and Allene Roberts’ very pretty, long-suffering Meg are made for each other. Roberts is sometimes a bit too pained so it’s a real help that McAllister also brings mild quirky humour to proceedings. It’s no surprise that Edward G Robinson, small of stature, towers over his fellow cast members. Almost every time I see a Robinson performance, I’m struck by how ahead-of-its-time his acting seems. That’s certainly the case here. He describes Pete Morgan’s journey from wary suppression of his past into resurgent mania with extraordinary skill and inner force.
Robinson was a favourite actor of the late Ray Deahl, to whose memory this BFI screening of The Red House was dedicated. A BFI member for more than fifty years (and for six of those a BFI Member Governor), Ray Deahl died last year. When I read about this special event, his name meant nothing to me. As soon as I sat down in NFT1 and saw his image on the screen, I recognised him – especially the mac he always seemed to wear to screenings. The introduction to The Red House, comprising assorted memories of Ray Deahl, was a classic example of how BFI membership can be exasperating and enjoyable at the same time. The supposedly ‘brief’ intro went on far too long and was sloppy in several ways. But it was also highly informative and entertaining – thanks chiefly to Ray Deahl’s sister Karen (?), who was on stage to answer questions. The best moment of all came when she illustrated her cineaste brother’s educational influence on several generations of their family. When Karen’s granddaughter was still only a young child, her school class was asked by a teacher to name their favourite film. Except for one, they all came out with the latest blockbuster or similar. Ray Deahl’s grand-niece went for All About Eve.
30 May 2025