Lewis Gilbert (1955)
This crime thriller is adapted from a stage play, and it shows. The play, Murder Mistaken, was by Janet Green, whose screenwriting credits included The Clouded Yellow, Sapphire and Victim, but who didn’t work on Cast a Dark Shadow: the adaptation is credited to John Cresswell alone. Cresswell did a good job on Yield to the Night, released the following year, but not here. Lewis Gilbert’s unimaginative direction doesn’t help. Except for the opening sequence (see below), all the scenes that take place outside the room that was presumably the stage set, lack atmosphere. The main characters’ entrances and exits, especially in the film’s climax, are decidedly stagy. But the fundamental problems are the screenplay’s construction and the filmmakers’ failure to grasp the implications of opening out the material.
Edward Bare (Dirk Bogarde) has married Monica (Mona Washbourne), a much older woman, for her money, the fruits of a successful family business. He’s under the impression she hasn’t made a will and that, if Monica dies intestate, he’ll inherit her fortune as next of kin. When he learns that her lawyer, Philip Mortimer (Robert Flemyng), has drawn up a will, now ready to be signed and sealed, Edward anxiously speeds up plans to bring about his wife’s death. He doesn’t realise she’d already made a will. She was on the point of amending this to Edward’s advantage, so that he inherited everything immediately. Since she dies before signing off the revised will, Edward inherits Monica’s big house and smaller second home but no cash. The remainder of her estate will be held in trust for the lifetime of her sister Dora, who now lives in Jamaica. Only on Dora’s death will it pass to Edward. Jamaica’s a long way away so he sets his sights on another well-off older woman, the widowed Freda Jeffries (Margaret Lockwood). It’s not long before she becomes the second Mrs Bare.
The film starts with the end of a holiday that Monica and Edward have been taking in Brighton, as she recuperates from a bout of flu. The couple then return home, where Philip has turned up with the draft will for Monica’s approval. The marital relationship appears to consist of mutual infantilising – Monica affectionately calls her toyboy husband Teddy (Bear) – and Mona Washbourne plays this very well: you feel how much Monica enjoys both indulging her Teddy and being indulged by him. (The interactions are reminiscent of those between Dan and Mrs Bramson in Emlyn Williams’s Night Must Fall.) This can only be speculation but it’s easy to imagine that Janet Green’s stage play is structured so as to show the Bares at first as odd-couple sweethearts – and shock the audience when Edward is revealed in his true uxoricidal colours.
That’s not what happens in Cast a Dark Shadow. The theatrical release poster shown on the film’s Wikipedia entry features, along with remarkably garish colouring, the question ‘What was in his heart – love, greed or murder?’ (Actually, there’s no question mark and four ellipses.) Lewis Gilbert answers this immediately. In the opening sequence, Monica screams in terror. We then realise she and Edward are in a funfair ghost train. The camera moves from her face to his, highlighting Edward’s eyes in the darkness. If looks could kill … The moment has terrific instant impact – it’s perhaps Dirk Bogarde’s best in the whole film – but it gives too much away. Once the Bares are back home, Edward keeps plying Monica with spirits, even in her cups of tea. You don’t wonder if he’s trying to inebriate her; you know he is, because Gilbert repeatedly shows Bogarde’s face signalling malice aforethought. Edward offers to go to the public library to change Monica’s book; it’s 7.30pm, the library closes in half an hour but he assures her he can easily get there in time. He tells Monica’s loyal, simple-minded maid Emmie (Kathleen Harrison) where he’s going and leaves the house by the front door. He reappears at the French windows and re-enters the drawing room to set up his wife’s death, staged to suggest that she tried and, blind drunk, failed to light a gas fire, and asphyxiated.
From-the-get-go exposure of Edward’s murderous intentions needn’t have been a weakness if Cast a Dark Shadow had developed into a character/case study but that doesn’t happen either. Once an inquest into Monica’s death has confirmed it as accidental, his malignant personality goes on the back burner until the melodramatic business end of the film. Instead, there’s just underpowered plot. Edward meets and seduces Freda; once they’re married, she rules the domestic roost and frustrates his plans. Another woman, Charlotte Young (Kay Walsh), appears in the locality, wanting to buy a house. Edward worked in an estate agent’s office before he married Monica, and he shows Charlotte round properties, which raises Freda’s suspicions that they’re having an affair. Edward does have designs on Charlotte but of an unromantic kind. He discovers that she’s really Monica’s sister Dora, who smelt a rat even from the West Indies and has come to England incognito to pursue her suspicions of her brother-in-law. Edward lures Dora to the house while Freda and Emmie are elsewhere. Only when they unexpectedly return, along with Philip Mortimer – in other words, when all the main dramatis personae are gathered on stage together – is it time to bring Edward’s villainy back into the spotlight, and give him his comeuppance.
Cast a Dark Shadow is moderately entertaining but next to nothing rings true. Edward should be devastated, rather than mildly exasperated, by his impatient miscalculation in getting rid of Monica just before she makes a will that would have left him the lot. Instead, he puts an affectionate hand on what used to be Monica’s favoured chair and confides in his late wife that he’s made things tricky for himself. He talks to her several times after her death. This might make blackly comic sense if his behaviour towards her in life had been different – if he’d seemed to have a soft spot for Monica at the same time as knowing he’d have to kill her. His many ominous looks make clear, however, what a tiresome effort it is for Edward to be nice to his wife: so the post-mortem chumminess is wholly artificial. Although he can attract a soft-hearted, needy woman like Monica and, as he says, a woman of his own class like Freda, Edward thinks his ladykilling potential is circumscribed by his social position. In the climactic showdown, reference is made to his past life in Acton and Romford, the choice of place names meant to announce the wrong side of the tracks. Yet the supposedly significant class distinctions are muffled in a way that’s familiar in British films of this vintage: except for Kathleen Harrison, the downmarket characters sound too upmarket.
This is especially true of Dirk Bogarde – and puzzling, when you bear in mind his work in The Blue Lamp (as opposed to his work in The Sleeping Tiger). In the opening sequence in Brighton, Edward has a London accent. It returns occasionally but he mostly speaks RP. The inconsistency isn’t explained by Edward’s putting on an act (in which case he’d drop the posh accent at times other than the times that he actually does). It is, rather, part and parcel of Bogarde’s oddly indifferent performance. He’s magnetic but overdoes Edward’s telltale shadow movements as if unable to come up with anything more. Margaret Lockwood was box-office poison by the time she made this picture (which didn’t help the cause: she won some critical praise but the film failed at the box office and Lockwood didn’t appear in another picture for twenty-one years). Although she still seems a bit too classy for a barmaid who married the landlord and inherited his pub, Lockwood gives Cast a Dark Shadow what energy it has. She’s quite a coarse actress but does well to transmute that coarseness into Freda’s brassy, no-nonsense bossiness. Though you don’t believe it when Freda admits that, for all his faults (and she doesn’t know the half of them at this stage), she’s in love with Edward.
The ending is crazy. His crimes exposed, Edward dashes out of the house and drives off. Having disabled the brakes on Charlotte/Dora’s car, he seems to think that, if he can make good his escape, he’ll inherit the money held in trust once Dora drives to her inevitable death – confident that Freda won’t testify against him (as his wife, she can’t be forced to). He finds both Dora’s car and Philip’s blocking his getaway, and switches from his own car to Dora’s. Even a motor-ignoramus like me recognised the number plate from an earlier scene; assuming Edward couldn’t fail to identify Dora’s vehicle, I thought I’d misunderstood his state of mind. As he speeds off, I took his cackling glee to be you’ll-never-catch-me-alive bravado. Not a bit of it – he’s just got the wrong car and realises too late … (It’s possible that, like the beginning of the film, this might work a bit better in the theatre, ie with another character simply reporting what happened to Edward. I wouldn’t put money on that, though.) Lewis Gilbert certainly gives the protagonist a big exit: you’d be forgiven for thinking he made the film purely in order to show the car plunging from a cliff edge, smashing to smithereens, bursting into flames. It’s a pity Gilbert didn’t devote more of his energies to animating the rest of Cast a Dark Shadow.
22 June 2020
