THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 378, 20 September 1946, Page 33

THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE

(RKO Radio)

E have in our time met plenty of movie heroines who were dumb. It is, indeed and unfortunately, almost their natural state. But to meet one who is literally

dumb in the old-fashioned sense of the word-that is to say, who cannot speak -is unusual enough to call for comment. She is the héroine of The Spiral

Staircase, a modest young maidservant who has been bereft of the power of speech since she suffered a shock in her childhood, but who regains her voice after a series of other shocks sustained during one exciting night in an eerie old mansion. Even so she utters only nine words during the whole film-a record in taciturnity which I commend to the notice of some others of her sex. Dorothy McGuire (of Claudia, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and The Enchanted Cottage) plays this role and is clearly by no means as dumb as she acts: her performance is, in fact, a brilliant piece of pantomime, since she is called on to express, speechlessly, all kinds of emo-tions-and particularly terror. This terror is occasioned by the knowledge that she is marked down for killing by an’ unknown but highly efficient maniac who makes a speciality of strangling young women with physical defects. .We moviegoers are now right on the crest of the cinema’s crime-with-psy-chology wave. Everywhere we turn we see diseased minds. And in The Spiral Staircase, Director Robert Siodmak gives us just about the whole works, not tossing the shocks at us crudely, however, but building them up neatly and with infinite patience and resource. It is very old’ stuff really, of course: a large, grim New England mansion at the turn of the century, gaslight and candles, flickering shadows on the walls, twisting staircases, the huge cellar, a violent storm raging outside, and the hapless victim imprisoned within, waiting for the terror to strike. But Siodmak gets the most out, of these time-honoured ingredients, thanks to expert photography, good timing, and a sure knowledge of how to make an audience enjoy being frightened. | His cast gives him every help. There is, come to ‘think of it, not a major character in The Spiral Staircase who could rightly be described as normal, Miss McGuire’s dumb performance being paralleled by Ethel Barrymore’s paralysed portrayal of the aged bedridden mistress of the household, who knows what is about to happen but cannot apparently stir hand or foot to prevent it. Miss McGuire must express emotion without speech: Miss Barrymore must do it almost without movyement. It is, I feel, just as well the afflictions were not reversed, for Miss Barrymore (who has appeared in talking-pic-tures only twice before) has a voice which it would be a pity to miss. This, then, is a jolly good film of its kind. The only thing is that we have lately been having altogether too many of the kind.