Farm gal Gene Tierney, whose naïveté is exceeded only by her ambition, gets transplanted from her pious Connecticut clan to vast Dragonwyck manor in Hudson Valley, courtesy of aristocratic relative Vincent Price. Arriving full of dreams of splendor, she's instead met with Byronic brooding, harpsichord tickling in the middle of the night, servants whispering dark secrets, and murder via oleander -- the usual Gothic jazz. Joseph L. Mankiewicz made his directorial debut with this corseted 1800s drama, filling in for the ailing Ernst Lubitsch. The sub-Brontë material, adapted from Anya Seton's novel, can't help but invite links with Rebecca: like Olivier's Maxim, Price's patroon hauteur is built on generation after generation of patriarchal oppression, both sexual (vide the deathly chilliness toward wife Vivienne Osborne when she fails to bear him a male heir) and political (exploited peons toiling the land are a constant reminder of the depths of rot behind the luxury). Of course, Mank is no Hitch -- less prolix and more moody than the director's better-known epigram-a-tons, the film remains stunted by visual inefficiencies. (The society ball, virtually a gift to any filmmaker with the slightest understanding of the camera's affinities with dance, is staged with lead in its wings). As result, the themes (including such pet Mankiewicz motifs as the clash between new and old order and the dreams of a woman) are never dramatized beyond novelettish dressing. With Walter Huston, Glenn Langan, Spring Byington, Anne Revere, Jessica Tandy, and Henry Morgan. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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