Think of a cross between Alan Mowbray and John Barrymore in his last, eyebrow-wagging years and you might have some idea of Tod Slaughter. He was a large, fleshy man with, when he lowered his head, a magnificent double chin. Not a man to hide his hamminess under a cloak of talent, he brought delight to evil with lip-smacking relish in any number of British movies and stage plays. As the false Sir Percival Glyde in Crimes at the Dark House, he brings to mustache-fingering and lascivious chuckling a kind of lovable, horrid fascination. We learn the kind of role Slaughter was noted for when, at the start of Crimes at the Dark House, in the year 1850, he uses a mallet to drive a chisel into the neck of the real Sir Percival, all the while snickering with pleasure.
The movie is based, sort of, on Wilkie Collins' grand old Victorian melodrama, The Woman in White. It races by in just 69 minutes, far too fast for us to be bored. Is the movie as bad as some of the acting? Not at all. In fact, like the book, it's quite a page turner, complete with lethal stratagems, a mad woman roaming the grounds of a lonely mansion, one hidden marriage and an unwelcome one, strangled women and cold cells in an insane asylum. Of course, there is love as well as death, and cleansing retribution comes in the engulfing flames of, what else, a family church.
Above all, there is the great, hammy performance of Tod Slaughter. He chisels to death the real Sir Percival Glyde in the Australian outback, then assumes Sir Percival's identity when he returns to England to his victim's' ancestral home, Blackwater Park. He expects to find an inheritance of great wealth. Instead he finds nothing but mortgages and debt. Ah, but then he learns Sir Percival and the lovely Laura Fairlie long ago had been pledged to marriage...and Laura will have her own riches when she marries. He also learns that Sir Percival may have married a woman before he left years earlier for Australia, a woman who bore a daughter...a daughter who now is mad and confined to an insane asylum...an insane asylum run by the unctuous and unprincipled Dr. Fosco...the same Dr. Fosco who...you get the idea. Laura Fairlie hates the idea of marriage to this portly, maid-groping, leering degenerate. She has discovered real love with her art tutor, a young man with impeccable upper-class enunciation. Yet she does what her guardian and propriety insist. She weds the false Sir Percival and, with her sister Marion, comes to live at Blackwater. It's not long before the mad girl escapes, Sir Percival and Fosco plan a cruel deception, and Sir Percival chortles his way through three more murders. If this sounds like lip-smacking Victorian melodrama, it is. And it's not bad for, as some critics like to say about popular melodrama, what it is.
Crimes at the Dark House is a Tod Slaughter potboiler, but my favorite in the cast is Hay Petrie as Dr. Fosco. He was a very short man and a versatile actor who caught Michael Powell's attention. Petrie played small but notable parts in the Powell/Pressburger movies Contraband, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, A Canterbury Tale and The Red Shoes. He could give a pungent, memorable performance when it was called for. Just watch him in One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing, Contraband and A Canterbury Tale - Criterion Collection.
If you're interested in just how good a Victorian melodrama The Woman in White can be when adapted with style, you need to watch the fine, multi-part BBC production from 1997. Marion Fairlie is our narrator, and she takes us into a more restrained but just as dangerous, moody and threatening a world. You'll be impressed, I hope, with Marion's (Tara Fitzgerald) bravery and resourcefulness; you'll sigh along with Laura Fairlie's (Justine Waddell) fears and hopes; be impressed with her tutor's (Andrew Lincoln) steadfast love; loathe Sir Percival's (James Wilby) ruthless caddishness; be fascinated by Count Fosco's (Simon Callow) cruel stratagems and be captivated by the hypochondria of the Fairlie sisters' scene-stealing guardian (Ian Richardson).
The movie is based, sort of, on Wilkie Collins' grand old Victorian melodrama, The Woman in White. It races by in just 69 minutes, far too fast for us to be bored. Is the movie as bad as some of the acting? Not at all. In fact, like the book, it's quite a page turner, complete with lethal stratagems, a mad woman roaming the grounds of a lonely mansion, one hidden marriage and an unwelcome one, strangled women and cold cells in an insane asylum. Of course, there is love as well as death, and cleansing retribution comes in the engulfing flames of, what else, a family church.
Above all, there is the great, hammy performance of Tod Slaughter. He chisels to death the real Sir Percival Glyde in the Australian outback, then assumes Sir Percival's identity when he returns to England to his victim's' ancestral home, Blackwater Park. He expects to find an inheritance of great wealth. Instead he finds nothing but mortgages and debt. Ah, but then he learns Sir Percival and the lovely Laura Fairlie long ago had been pledged to marriage...and Laura will have her own riches when she marries. He also learns that Sir Percival may have married a woman before he left years earlier for Australia, a woman who bore a daughter...a daughter who now is mad and confined to an insane asylum...an insane asylum run by the unctuous and unprincipled Dr. Fosco...the same Dr. Fosco who...you get the idea. Laura Fairlie hates the idea of marriage to this portly, maid-groping, leering degenerate. She has discovered real love with her art tutor, a young man with impeccable upper-class enunciation. Yet she does what her guardian and propriety insist. She weds the false Sir Percival and, with her sister Marion, comes to live at Blackwater. It's not long before the mad girl escapes, Sir Percival and Fosco plan a cruel deception, and Sir Percival chortles his way through three more murders. If this sounds like lip-smacking Victorian melodrama, it is. And it's not bad for, as some critics like to say about popular melodrama, what it is.
Crimes at the Dark House is a Tod Slaughter potboiler, but my favorite in the cast is Hay Petrie as Dr. Fosco. He was a very short man and a versatile actor who caught Michael Powell's attention. Petrie played small but notable parts in the Powell/Pressburger movies Contraband, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, A Canterbury Tale and The Red Shoes. He could give a pungent, memorable performance when it was called for. Just watch him in One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing, Contraband and A Canterbury Tale - Criterion Collection.
If you're interested in just how good a Victorian melodrama The Woman in White can be when adapted with style, you need to watch the fine, multi-part BBC production from 1997. Marion Fairlie is our narrator, and she takes us into a more restrained but just as dangerous, moody and threatening a world. You'll be impressed, I hope, with Marion's (Tara Fitzgerald) bravery and resourcefulness; you'll sigh along with Laura Fairlie's (Justine Waddell) fears and hopes; be impressed with her tutor's (Andrew Lincoln) steadfast love; loathe Sir Percival's (James Wilby) ruthless caddishness; be fascinated by Count Fosco's (Simon Callow) cruel stratagems and be captivated by the hypochondria of the Fairlie sisters' scene-stealing guardian (Ian Richardson).