Saturday, February 2, 1974 (Noon): The Strange Door (1952) / The Spider Woman Strikes Back (1946)

Synopsis: Noble-born Denis de Beaulieu (Richard Stapley) is a hard-drinking wastrel and libertine who lives only for boozing and wenching. His boorishness in various French public houses brings him to the attention of the wealthy Alain de Matetroit (Charles Laughton) who decides the young cad will be perfect for the plot he is about to set in motion. He arranges for de Beaulieu to get into a barroom brawl, have a pistol pushed into his hand and — apparently — shoot his opponent to death. With de Beaulieu soon on the run from a mob, it is simple enough to drive him onto de Maretroit’s land and then corral him into de Maretroit’s castle through a trick door.

Once there, de Maretroit explains the situation — at least in part. He wants de Beaulieu to marry his beautiful niece Blanche (Sally Forrest). In return, he will be provided a lavish residence, a generous allowance and freedom to do whatever he wants as her husband. If he refuses, de Maretroit will see that de Beaulieu is handed to the mob that is hunting him.

For a wastrel like de Beaulieu, this might seem like a pretty good set-up regardless of the motives of his blackmailer, but he proves to be made of sterner stuff and refuses to cooperate. Meanwhile, fearsome shrieks are heard from a distant part of the castle. We learn that these are the cries of Edmond de Maretroit (Paul Cavanagh), the older brother of Alain.

It turns out that Edmond has been held prisoner in the castle’s dungeon for years. Sire de Maretroit likes to visit the dungeon and torment his older brother, though his enjoyment is blunted somewhat by the fact that Edmond is stark raving mad. But today he gamely tells Edmond his plan to marry Blanche off to an odious ne’er-do-well in order to exact revenge on his brother for marrying the love of his life 20 years ago — the woman who died in labor giving birth to Blanche.

But — plot twist — Edmond is only feigning madness, and he conspires with dungeon keeper Voltan (Boris Karloff) to free himself from captivity and defeat his brother’s plans.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Alain de Maretroit, de Beaulieu and Blanche have been meeting in secret, and have begun to fall in love….

Comments: I will admit that I’d never even heard of this gothic Universal costume drama before it popped up on this week’s schedule. It’s a bit of a stretch to call it a horror movie. But there’s a castle with a dungeon, and lots of secret passages. So let’s give it a chance, shall we?

It’s a throwback to Universal melodramas of the 1930s like The Black Room, which featured Boris Karloff at the peak of his career. And indeed Karloff can be found here skulking along secret passages in this picture, but in a minor role despite his prominent billing.

The centerpiece of the film is a waaaay over-the-top Charles Laughton, who seems to be having an enormously good time as the sinister Sire de Maretroit. We also get a strong supporting cast, which includes Michael Pate (whom we saw recently in Curse of the Undead) and Alan Napier (House of Horrors, The Invisible Man Returns).

It’s loosely based on the Robert Louis Stevenson story “The Sire de Meretroit’s Door”. Having a literary pedigree lent movies in the 1950s a sheen of respectability and boosted box office appeal. And Stevenson’s name in particular promised audiences a ripping adventure yarn.

It all works pretty well, despite problems caused by the story conventions of the time. de Beaulieu is first presented to us as a cruel, wenching drunkard and libertine with a weakness for brunettes, but in order for him to be acceptable as a protagonist, he must suddenly change his ways when an attractive blonde is set in front of him. The sudden turnaround in his character is bit difficult to believe. Nevertheless, it’s a good melodrama, with plenty of twists, turns and escapes.

The movie was directed by Joseph Pevney, an actor in a number of 40s noirs who turned to a successful career in directing. He was a solid craftsman of B-pictures who never had an identifiable style, and he became a prolific director on TV, doing a great many episodes of 1960s shows like Star Trek, Bonanza, The Virginian and others.

The Spider Woman Strikes Back

Synopsis: Jean Kingsley (Brenda Joyce) arrives in the small town of Domingo. She’s been hired as a nurse / companion to a reclusive blind woman, Zenovia Dollard. Moments after the bus has dropped Jean off in town she bumps into Hal Wentley, an old school friend who has long carried a torch for her. Jean seems uncomfortable seeing him again, and Hal is disappointed that she isn’t in town to visit him. But when the expected car from the Dollard mansion doesn’t arrive to pick her up, Jean accepts a ride out to the place from Hal.

Dollard’s place is far out of town, a creepy house complete with a creepy mute servant named Mario (Rondo Hatton). It seems Miss Dollard has trouble keeping assistants on staff, which might seem surprising given the light duties involved, but might not when you consider there’s a freakish-looking manservant skulking around in the shadows. Miss Dollard is troubled to hear that Jean knows someone in town, and expresses the hope that Jean will stay for a long while. She certainly doesn’t want Jean to run off and get married, as her last assistant did.

Meanwhile, the local farmers are upset at a wave of cattle deaths that have been occurring throughout the area, deaths that have been left the local soil expert (Milburn Stone) baffled; the cattle deaths indicate that poison plants are growing in the area, yet there are no such plants to be found anywhere. One by one, the farmers conclude that they must sell out before they’re ruined.

Back at the mansion, Jean settles into her new duties, which prove to be less than taxing. But she is alarmed by the baleful stares and the unwelcome attention from the grotesque Mario, and puzzled that she sleeps so soundly during the night, almost as if she were drugged.

What she does not suspect is that she is being drugged, every night; what’s more, the sinister Miss Dollard is draining her blood each night in order to feed a brood of carnivorous plants in the basement, and that she is using the plants to make a deadly poison….

Comments: Minnesota native Gale Sondegaard must have made an impression at Universal when she appeared in the 1944 Sherlock Holmes movie The Spider Woman, because the studio decided to use the same character again in a different setting.

Not exactly the same character, mind you; instead of Adrea Spedding of London, Sondergaard was now playing the allegedly blind Zenovia Dollard of Domingo, a wealthy small-town recluse with evil on her mind.

She’s trading in poisonous orchids rather than poisonous arachnids this time, but never mind — Sondergaard was quite good at projecting an outwardly friendly demeanor while suggesting something sinister lurking just beneath the surface.

And she projects just the right sort of menace for this creepy little mystery story, which cleverly uses Jean’s vulnerability to ratchet up the suspense. Both Miss Dollard and Mario are interested in Jean for different reasons, neither of which can be described as wholesome.

And the small town of Domingo is shown to add to Jean’s sense of isolation and paranoia: when she wants to quietly mail a letter to her predecessor, who left a forwarding address in New York, she is thwarted by the nosy denizens of small-town America, ca. 1946. The Domingo postmaster is suspicious even of her request for an air-mail stamp (“Air mail? Goodness! What’s your hurry, miss?”).

If I have any complaint about the character of Dollard, it’s that she’s a little too evil. Don’t get me wrong, I love evil women*, but she seems to be trying too hard. Zenovia, honey, isn’t it evil enough to drug your hired help so that you can drain her blood in order to breed carnivorous plants so that you can poison the local cattle population? Must you pretend to be blind as well? That’s just showing off, darling.

But she is by far the most interesting character in the movie, even more intriguing than Rondo Hatton’s glowering Mario. We must fill in a lot of the blanks in Mario’s background, and this ambiguity serves the plot well. The movie suggests that he had an overweening interest in some of Miss Dollard’s past caretakers; but beyond that we have little to go on. Hatton’s performance here is somewhat better than that in House of Horrors; he makes the most of a non-speaking part, conveying a wide range of emotion with some very subtle body language.

Brenda Joyce is best-known as the second actress to play Jane in the Tarzan movies. About her performance in The Spider Woman Strikes Back, I can only say that she is best-known as the second actress to play Jane in the Tarzan movies.

Interestingly, there were originally twelve speaking roles in Spider Woman Strikes Back; five of them were cut out prior to release, and the film was trimmed down to less than an hour. I can’t say the brief running time hobbles the narrative. The movie moves along at a good clip, and none of the scenes appear to be superfluous.

The Spider Woman Strikes Back was never released on home video, but there are businesses that will burn DVDs for you from old 16mm prints. The quality isn’t stellar, but most of these movies can be had if you are persistent and willing to pay.

The truth is, there is very little you can’t find online. One thing I’ll say about the internet — for better or worse, it’s good at bringing obsessive people together.

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*I even married one! Ha ha! Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week.