The Red House (1947)

***
Country: US
Director: Delmer Daves

A strange family living in self-imposed isolation, carefully guarded family secrets, an eerie forest rumored to be inhabited by spirits, a sinister abandoned house deep in that forest, a teenage girl with hazy memories of something terrible happening in that house—these are classic elements of Gothic melodrama found in the atmospheric 1947 thriller The Red House. The family in question are farmer Pete Morgan (Edward G. Robinson), his unmarried sister Ellen (Judith Anderson), and their adopted daughter Meg (Allene Roberts). Into their lives comes Meg's high school classmate Nath Storm (Lon McAllister), hired to help out on the Morgans' farm. His curiosity aroused by Pete's dark warnings to avoid the neighboring forest, Nath determines to get to the bottom of whatever Pete is concealing about the mysterious red house in the woods, persuading Meg to defy Pete and help him.

In The Red House Edward G. Robinson turns in another of his memorable performances of the 1940s. His Pete, a brusque man with a soft spot for his adopted daughter Meg, at first seems not too different from the loving father Robinson played a couple of years earlier in Our Vines Have Tender Grapes. His desire to shield Meg from the danger he perceives in the forest seems a genuine one, the result of an overly protective attitude understandable in the parent of a young woman on the verge of adulthood. But faced with the challenge presented by Nath's presence on the farm, Pete begins to show a darker side as he grows almost neurotically possessive of Meg. As it becomes more apparent that she is experiencing an adolescent sexual awakening and transferring her feelings of daughterly love for Pete to romantic love for Nath, can Pete be viewing Nath as a rival? Several scenes—such as the one where he jealously confronts Meg in her bedroom late at night after he realizes Nath has just left by the window, threatening to kill him if he ever catches him in her room again—clearly hint at this. If he does see the young man as a rival for Meg's love, what is the true nature of his feelings for Meg?

Robinson subtly conveys Pete's conflict over his confused feelings for his adopted daughter as well as the mounting agitation Pete feels as he comes to look upon Nath as an interloper trying to steal Meg away from him. By the end of the picture, Pete has become completely unhinged by the tensions of dealing with his feelings for Meg, the consuming guilt he feels over his past misdeeds, and his desperate attempts to keep his secrets buried by placing the red house off-limits. In portraying Pete's final break with reality, Robinson avoids histrionics, and his restraint makes Pete's madness seem all the more convincing and pathetic. It's a wonderful performance that shows how skilled Robinson was at plumbing the contradictory emotions and the self-delusion of a man like Pete, almost certainly bringing greater complexity to the character than was originally intended.

The other standout performance in the film is by Allene Roberts, who was only seventeen years old when the picture was shot. Roberts is especially good at suggesting Meg's dawning awareness of sexuality. Nath has a girl friend, a sluttish classmate named Tibby, played with feral intensity by an impossibly young-looking Julie London. In one scene, Meg watches from the shore as Nath and Tibby go swimming in a nearby lake and observes with obvious fascination the sexually charged interplay between them. Like Robinson, Allene Roberts makes Meg, who might otherwise have been a superficial character, someone unexpectedly complex. In the early part of the film she seems naive and biddable, devoted to Pete. Later, as she tries to break free of Pete's domination, she begins for the first time in her life to question what she has been told about her history rather than simply accepting it. Roberts does a remarkable job of depicting this transition from girlish credulity to adult skepticism. Scene by scene, you can sense her growing more assertive and independent and less inclined to blind faith in the man she has always considered her father.

The film takes its time setting up the situation and seems a bit lethargic for the first twenty minutes or so. But as the characters' relationships begin to shift and re-form and more details are revealed about the events at the heart of the mystery, the pace picks up and the mood grows more portentous. The brisk conclusion, with its noir-influenced framing and lighting, in particular is well mounted. The location photography by Bert Glennon (The Scarlet Empress, Stagecoach) in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in northern California adds a great deal of verisimilitude to the picture. The small town where Nath's mother runs the general store, the gentle countryside of dairy farms and apple orchards, the tangled forest with its streams, lakes, and stark outcroppings of rock give an authenticity often lacking in the studio product of the time. The highly dramatic music score by Miklos Rozsa with its subtle use of theremin effectively underscores the strangeness of the plot.

The Red House is unlikely to make anyone forget Rebecca, but it's a satisfying movie that succeeds on the strength of its ominous atmosphere and a pair of quietly powerful performances. It takes the Arthur Conan Doyle device of miscreants creating the illusion of the supernatural to direct attention away from their all-too-human crimes and updates it with a large dash of Freud.

Allene Roberts discusses her brief Hollywood career in a 2009 interview at the website Films of the Golden Age. Click here to read it.

A Classic Western Tale, Part 1: 3:10 to Yuma (1957)

The directing career of Delmer Daves lasted more than twenty years, from 1943 to 1965. The first movie he directed was the WW II submarine picture Destination Tokyo (1943). Other directing credits include several Westerns in the late 50's, a series of good-looking but slick and almost camp soap operas starring Troy Donahue (beginning with A Summer Place) in the early 60's, and the far-fetched film noir Dark Passage, starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Agnes Moorehead, released in 1947. Earlier in his career he contributed to a number of screenplays for Warner Brothers, including the musicals Dames and Flirtation Walk (both 1934) and the gangster melodrama Petrified Forest (1936). His most notable writing contribution was to Leo McCarey's delightful sentimental romance Love Affair (1939).

Daves's directing career was dismissed by Andrew Sarris in The American Cinema as one of "stylistic conviction in an intellectual vacuum." However, one Western Daves made in mid-career, 3:10 to Yuma (1957), based on a story by Elmore Leonard, belies this assessment. Tightly structured and psychologically probing, it stands as one of the best Westerns ever made. In the movie Van Heflin plays Dan Evans, a homesteader and cattle rancher who lives with his wife and two young sons in Arizona. While out with his sons one day looking for a missing herd of cattle, Evans finds that the cattle have been "borrowed" by outlaw Ben Wade (Glenn Ford) and his gang of outlaws to use as a diversion while holding up a stagecoach carrying gold.

When Wade is later captured in a nearby town, Evans, an expert marksman, is offered a reward of $200 to make sure that Wade is delivered to the train that will take him to the prison in Yuma, where he will be jailed until he stands trial. Evans agrees because he desperately needs the money to buy water for his cattle, for there has been a drought in the region for several years and Evans is in real danger of losing his herd and his ranch, everything he has worked to get. To conceal their plans from Wade's gang, his captors stage an elaborate ruse, in which Wade is secretly removed from the stagecoach transporting him, and another man is substituted for him while his gang looks on from a distance. Wade is then hidden out at Evans's ranch until he can be transferred at night to the nearby town of Contention to wait for the train to Yuma the next afternoon. This plan requires Evans and Wade to spend several hours, most of them alone, secreted in a hotel room in Contention until the train arrives. During this part of the movie—and this section occupies roughly the entire second half of the film—Wade uses all of his considerably persuasive psychological skills to pressure Evans to let him escape. Evans resists and does eventually succeed in delivering his adversary to the train, as thunder rumbles in the distance and rain begins at last to fall.

This synopsis sounds like a relatively straightforward plot of a righteous man resisting the blandishments of a villain and being rewarded for it. But in its details 3:10 to Yuma is far more complex than this synopsis would indicate. The first intimation that the morality of the tale is not as simple as it seems comes during the stage holdup. Instead of attempting any kind of intervention, Evans and his sons observe passively from a nearby hillside. Evans is not about to risk dangerous heroics for devotion to any abstract notion of justice, even after the stagecoach driver has been coldly murdered by the gang. Practicality trumps idealism. When Evans's wife hears of this she is clearly displeased with what she sees as behavior bordering on cowardice, but his choice of non-intervention doesn't seem to disturb Evans at all.

Later, the supposed villain of the story, Ben Wade, turns out to be a far more complex and ambiguous character than in the conventional Western. He is no Robin Hood. His criminal motivation is strictly for his own gain, and his anti-social behavior is without moral compunction. But he seems at times to be almost a gentleman outlaw with a veneer of gracious nobility and a genuine respect for the feelings of others. Nowhere is this more evident than during the evening he spends with Evans and his family while waiting for darkness to fall so that the two men can leave for Contention. Most of this time is spent at the dinner table. As in the films of John Ford, the act of dining with others is steeped in the humanistic symbolism of civilization and fellowship. During the meal Wade's behavior is subdued, polite, and considerate, the very opposite of villainous. He tolerates with amused equanimity the taunts of the younger son, who is chided by his parents for being impolite. When the boy observes that Wade has begun eating before his mother has said grace, she tells her son it is discourteous to impose one's beliefs on others, whereupon Wade stops eating and invites her to say grace anyway. During this entire sequence it is clear that Wade is captivated by the easy intimacy and civility of the family.

The next day in the hotel room in Contention, it is Evans's turn to reveal unexpected subtleties of character during the intensive psychological cat-and-mouse game Wade plays with him there. As the clock ticks closer to 3:10 (shades of High Noon?) Wade begins to revert to his coolly manipulative villainy, exerting every inducement in his arsenal in his attempts to persuade Evans to let him escape. First he tries outright bribery, offering Evans far more money than he has already been promised. But Evans, having admitted that he accepted the job only for the money, is nonetheless not a greedy man. Next Wade appeals to Evans's feelings for his wife, and by implication to his sexual urges, by tempting him with all the things he could buy for his wife with the money. But Evans is a family man for whom love suffices. Even the promise of wealth for his sons fails to entice him. Finally, Wade tries an appeal to Evans's sense of self-preservation, by pointing out that his gang is certain to attempt to rescue him and that Evans stands little chance against a dozen or so outlaws. This tactic again fails, not because of nobility on Evans's part, but because he has accepted a job and is determined to honor his contract, even though by this point he has been released from his contract and offered his payment anyway by the owner of the stage line who hired him.

By the time Evans and Wade must leave for the train station, Wade's gang has arrived, and to get to the station they must run the armed gauntlet of the outlaws. This would seem a doomed undertaking, but again Wade's moral ambivalence kicks in and after initially resisting Evans's tactics to hurry him along, Wade begins to co-operate and willingly runs along with Evans. It is clear that somewhere along the way Wade has developed a respect for Evans, not because of any nobility or idealism in Evans, but in recognition of the man's simple decency, his transparent and modest ambitions, his lack of ego, and a skill at problem-solving that in Wade expresses itself as self-serving, criminal guile.

A fraternal bond has occurred between the two men, for each has come to find in the other qualities that he can recognize and admire. Evans was never a hero, but he is in the end an ordinary man with some heroic traits. And Wade is not the thorough villain he at first appeared, but has found within himself some measure of respect for the ordinary life and values of Evans.

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Next week I will be writing about director James Mangold's 2007 remake of 3:10 to Yuma.