The Spiral Staircase (1946)

For Gothic atmosphere on film, Robert Siodmak's The Spiral Staircase can scarcely be bettered. I remember very well the first time I saw this film. One summer during the early Seventies, ABC ran a series of black and white classics from the Forties era in prime time, between four and six in all (my memory's a little hazy). One was Portrait of Jennie, another was The Spiral Staircase; right now I forget the rest (and I haven't had much luck finding details about this venture). The series was my real introduction to classic American cinema, film noir, and the possibilities of black and white cinematography, so I will be forever grateful to whoever it was at ABC that came up with the idea.

The Spiral Staircase is based on a mystery novel by Ethel Lina White (who also wrote the novel on which Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes is based). Frankly, the mystery angle doesn't amount to much, at least in the movie; an astute viewer should be able to figure out the identity of the killer by process of elimination fairly early on. A serial killer is picking off all the physically and mentally challenged young ladies in a wholesome American town in 1916; the obvious next target is a mute girl who works as a companion to a dowager who lives in a magnificent old house with several other family members and servants on premise. There are only so many people the killer could be; once you get it down to two and eliminate the one the folks in the movie are suspicious of, you're done!

But the real joy of the movie is in the sheer skillful spookiness of the direction. The widow's house on the "dark and stormy night" of the action provides Siodmak with wonderful opportunities for shadowy and threatening mise-en-scene, not one of which he wastes. The look of the house perhaps bears a slight indebtedness to the Amberson mansion in Orson Welles's The Magnificent Amberson, which had appeared a few years before and which no gifted film-maker like Siodmak could fail to profit from. But the mature mastery of technique here is quite unmistakable.

Siodmak had an odd directorial trajectory -- he "careered from career to career," to borrow a phrase from Stephen Sondheim. He began making films in his native Germany and later in France in the Thirties; spent 12 years (1941-1952) cranking them out in Hollywood (including such noir classics as The Killers, Criss Cross, and The Dark Mirror); them moved back to Europe and closed out his career with twenty more years of film-making in Germany, France, and England (with only a couple of U.S.-financed projects). About half his Hollywood films, mostly very good indeed, are the visible portion of this output; the rest are currently almost impossible to see, so it is very hard to assess Siodmak overall.