GUEST IN THE HOUSE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 339, 21 December 1945, Page 18

GUEST IN THE HOUSE

(United Artists

T might almost appear as if there were something in the suggestion (made about Lady in the Dark) that the psychiatrists have shares in Hollv-

wood studios, for their science has certainly been given a thrashing (or should one Say an airing?) in recent movies. Whether this interest in minds instead of bodies is to be regarded as an indication of Hollywood’s belated approach to maturity may well be a matter for argument-especially as Guest in the House, though heavily psychological, does not entirely neglect the physical side, in the shape of a comely artist’s model-but it does at least give audiences a chance to vary their entertainment diet. Guest in the House is intended to be a study in neurotic invalidism. I say "intended to be" because the director’s habit of putting his foot down on the melodramatic loud pedal at crucial moments, particularly in the finale, tends to obscure the central theme. What with thunderstorms and shots of Aline MacMahon standing like one of the Furies on a cliff against a menacing sky, with the waves breaking on the rocks beneath, you sometimes cannot be quite sure .whether you are supposed to be watching an eerie thriller or simply an unusual drama about the effect of abnormality on the lives of normal people. Its menace is a slight, chocolate-box- pretty girl named Evelyn Heath (Anne Baxter), who suffers from a weak heart, a highly neurotic temperament which includes an obsession about birds, and a lust to dominate and disrupt the lives of those who are stronger and happier than she is, Sickness, which turns some persons into saints, has turned her into a subtle tyrant, ruthlessly exploiting the kindness and sympathy which her condition arouses. When she enters the household of Douglas Proctor (Ralph Bellamy) and his wife, Ann (Ruth Warwick), for the purpose of convalescing, she has the effect of a spiritual atomic bomb on the domestic harmony that prevails before her entry. Within a week she has set wife against husband, and the servants against both, by contriving to let drop a few nasty innuendos about the relationship of the husband, a commercial artist,

towards his shapely model; she poisons her little niece’s mind with a premature and unpleasant introduction to the facts of life; and with studied cruelty she drives her lovesick fiancé to distraction. Even good old Aunt Martha (Aline MacMahon) is taken in at first; but it is Aunt Martha who finally exorcises the fiend in the Proctor household. In spite of the defect I have mentioned, which is simply another example of the cinema’s common reluctance to tackle a tricky and unorthodox subject in a simple and straightforward manner, Guest in the House is a picture which I can recommend. The pill would be better without the gilding, but it is still palatable,