1945's "Woman Who Came Back" was an independent feature filmed as simply "The Web" before being picked up for release by Poverty Row Republic, among the few directorial outings for little known producer Walter Colmes. The Massachusetts town of Eben Rock is the setting, 300 years after the fabled Judge Elijah Webster condemned 15 women to death for practicing witchcraft in league with the devil. Nancy Kelly stars as Lorna Webster, descendant of the judge, who is engaged to wed prominent physician Matt Adams (John Loder), only to vanish for two years to get away from the town's morbid talk of witches. On her way home by bus, she is accosted by a mysterious old lady (Elspeth Dudgeon) with a dog who claims to be a witch that knew Judge Webster 300 years earlier, an encounter that ends abruptly and tragically with the driver losing control and skidding into a nearby lake. Curiously, Lorna is the sole survivor, while everyone else is accounted for except the old witch, leaving behind the supposed hound from hell, literally dogging our distraught protagonist for the rest of the picture. All the locals continue to wallow in the past, treating poor Lorna like an outcast to be feared in working up a frenzy for mob violence after a young child comes down with pneumonia from walking in the rain, a malady laid at Lorna's feet out of sheer ignorance. The ingredients are there for a genuine Val Lewton chiller, but the clunky script is so heavily burdened with coincidence that unexplained events produce fits of laughter as the screen repeatedly fades to black, no one behaving in believable or even likable fashion. Otto Kruger's minister comes off as the only rational resident, while Nancy Kelly is such an easily deluded milksop that no man would be smitten with the likes of her, steadfastly refusing to be honest about her bewildering actions so that Loder's doctor even resorts to shaking her in mild fury. This film has received a number of accolades over the years by people who likely encountered it in younger days, but beware the unwary adult indulging in its exacerbating, overwrought, and undernourished plotline, no witchcraft involved for its beleaguered heroine, who collapses like a house of cards with every turn of the screw. Not the most legendary cheat that audiences endured at the time, that honor earned by THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS and its waste of a Peter Lorre performance, blatantly exploiting the supernatural while relentlessly beating down a hysterical neurotic who earns not a whiff of sympathy.
Review of Woman Who Came Back
