Wilkie Collins’ seminal 1859 novel was a nexus for one literary genre that was fading off, the gothic novel, and another just gaining impetus, the detective novel. This adaptation was directed by Peter Godfrey, a former actor who had broken into directing with films like the good-looking fin-de-siecle melodrama Hotel
The mystery then of the woman’s identity, and why she was so terrified, begins to consume Hartright as he becomes infatuated with Laura. She’s engaged to the absent Sir Percival Glyde (John Emery), who appears just in time at Fosco’s behest to remind Laura of her obligations. Marian, after hearing Hartright’s anecdote and put on the trail by the memory of one of the servants, sifts through old family letters, and unearths evidence of another family relation who had stayed at the house for a time as a girl, bearing an extraordinary similarity to Laura. This girl was one Anne Catherick, and she’s now being victimised because she knows about the scheme Fosco is trying to put over on Laura. He wants to marry her to his confederate Glyde, a dissolute playboy acquaintance from the gaming tables in
The tension and the originality of Collins’ tale was in the disparity between the domesticated, settled, yet deeply hypocritical order of the English landscape, producing coddled, childish heiresses and neurotic messes like Laura and Frederick, and the intricate sadism of Fosco’s plot. Collins had made Fosco an Italian because he felt his readers could not swallow an English villain with such an elegantly cruel mind. Fosco then purposefully contrasts Glyde, the quintessential callow English thug in fine clothes. The doubling of Laura and Anne, mirror images on either side of a social divide and a wicked scheme, evokes the interplay of surface stability and hidden truths which conceives of a world full of such secreted horrors, which only Hartright’s artistic eye can at first properly discern. The latter stages of Fosco’s plan see Laura locked up in the asylum herself, steadily tormented into accepting the alternate identity of Anne, a fate that positively reeks of both psychological rape and also of commentary on the forced normalisation of the psyche in a repressive society. Glyde plays up to Laura with honeyed words, acting the most caring and respectable man in the world for her, and in secret fretting about his desperate need for cash and constantly demanding of Fosco why he can’t put use more direct means to solve their problems. The brilliance of the story is in how their machinations are both persuasive on a purely technical level, and yet feel only like slight exaggerations of a metaphor for domestic, professional, and institutional abuse. No-one can possibly believe that the witty and endearing Fosco is a sleazy lecher with a mind of bottomless depravity, that Glyde is a brute, and their predations are allowed by Fairlie because it will ensure his own fiscal well-being.
The impetus for the drama is, then, rooted in a web of sex, secrets, and money, which can barely be separated. Fosco is actually married to Frederick Fairlie’s sister (Agnes Moorehead), who gave birth to Anne out of wedlock. He keeps the now Countess Fosco in a dazed state of mesmerism and pinioned by a cruelty that surpasses all understanding, and yet which seems perfectly logical in Fosco’s world, taunting her with the promise of jewels which he’ll give to her when “her generosity positively overwhelms me”, meanwhile having tortured her daughter to the point of psychic collapse. The Countess steps in and out of psychotic distraction, helping her daughter to hide in the house’s basement and make use of secret passages, but sometimes abandoning reality altogether, at a turn that proves all too vital. Marian, famously described in the novel as unattractive to the point where she has a hairy lip, is played here by the definitely non-ugly Smith, whose own physical perfection is emphasised to the point where Fosco covets it. When Marian tries to intervene she finds herself the subject of Fosco’s attentions. He secrets himself in her bedroom and watches her change clothes. When she discovers his presence Godfrey cuts acutely between their faces, Smith’s comely shock at the bulbous mound that’s been spying on her as keen as if he was one of M. R. James’ ectoplasmic presences. Later on she offers herself to him as a reward if he’ll sign a confession and leave the country with her, an offer even the eminently crafty Fosco can’t bring himself to resist, even if it puts him squarely in a trap. Fosco is a part that Greenstreet was born to play, lack of an Italian accent notwithstanding, and not only because Fosco was actually the original model for such corpulent, suggestively sensualist bad guys, as Greenstreet had become famous for playing since The Maltese Falcon (1941). The relish with which Greenstreet exposes Fosco’s inner kinkiness and almost awe-inspiring sadism without any overt actions pushes the film along as if it was his own private buffet cart.
What The Woman in White needed to become the classic it could have been, armed with such a cast and material, was a director with a sense of how to stoke the hysteria and menace in the story to a high pitch. One ponders happily the thought of David Lean bringing some of the cinematic relish of his Great Expectations (1946), or even the gothic gusto of Charles Frank’s near-contemporary Uncle Silas (1947), not to mention Hitchcock. Instead, Godfrey’s direction ambles along, offering minor moments of coherent mise-en-scene with DOP Carl Guthrie’s camera sweeping elegantly over the gardens and balconies of Limmeridge’s environs which gleam in the pale moolight, lending proceedings an elegantly theatrical sense of space. But Godfrey allows much of the film’s first half to indulge face-value Victorian prettiness, in Hartright and Laura’s romancing and excessive drawing room chit-chat. The finale, especially Glyde’s comeuppance, is a bit disappointingly rushed and lacks force. There’s one terrific moment late in the film in which Anne, having risen from her hiding place to try and make contact with Laura in her afflicted state, tries to make her own contorted mind recollect the vital point, so confused that she doesn’t at first recognise the voices of Fosco and Glyde, offering prompts from out of shot, as the real men and not her own memory. Then, the moment of realisation, as Anne turns, spies the two vicious creeps, and promptly drops dead from pure fear.
To a certain extent Godfrey’s deceptively calm approach suits the material, for the menace that slowly oozes out of the situation demands something of the same carefully padding style as Fosco himself prefers. But the miasma of evil and dread resurgence is provided chiefly by the dialogue and not by visual mood. Godfrey’s acting background expresses itself mostly in the strong performances he coaxes from the cast, especially in the free reign he gives to Greenstreet and Abbott to play their grotesques with aplomb. The screenplay, by Stephen Morehouse Avery, gives them plenty to work with. Abbott’s Fairlie is a particular highlight, denouncing his manservant Louis (Curt Bois) as a dunce and telling off Marian for calling him a man (“Whatever can you mean by calling poor Louis a man? He’s a portfolio stand!”), or regretting his not being able to fly into a fine rage as he does just that. Young is oddly cast as the proper young hero, but he looks the part, and Parker is lovely and affecting in her dual role. Smith gives possibly her best performance as the plucky Marian, whose hale and hearty manner effectively contrasts the scarecrow Fairlie and the wet and indecisive Laura, and squirms most prettily under Fosco’s over-attentive eye. Moorehead’s uneasy volatility sharpens the edge of the blade, and the audience’s pleasure, when her character finally sinks into her husband’s back, the grotesque savant still spouting encomiums to his own brilliance even as his life flows from his overstuffed flesh. And who can resist reading a little alternative lifestyle fulfilment into the final image of Hartright, Laura, and Marian living together in blissful happiness forever after? Such questions aside, whilst the film as a whole is no classic, it is what people mean when they talk about a good old-fashioned yarn.