Rent Cast a Dark Shadow (1955)

Shocking - That It's So Good. - Cast a Dark Shadow review by NC

'Cast A Dark Shadow' is one of those drawing-room murder/suspense/thriller/dramas, based on a stage play, which, when very well done and very well acted, provide riches greater than an unsurprising plot and the date (1955) may make the audience expect.

Ed (Teddy) Bare has a charm which fools older women into thinking he isn't courting them solely for their money. When his marriage to 'Monnie' ends in a deadly misunderstanding, he is on the look-out for his next sugar-mummy. Enter Freda Jeffries. But Teddy Bare has made another false step...

Lewis Gilbert, later to make 'Alfie' and 'The Spy Who Loved Me', keeps the tension taut. Plenty of shadow, and deep-focus photography encourages an appropriate atmosphere. Dirk Bogarde may not do anything you haven't seen before from him - but by crackey does he do it better than almost everybody else. Yes, the eyebrows may work overtime a little too much, but the subtle change of expression, the small alteration of voice register, the total conviction that he is that character whether he's spreading the soft-soap on thick or raging in a demented fury, are a privilege to behold. Bogarde is so great that I've never seen him upstaged by another actor - until now. Margaret Lockwood is an utter revelation. Forget any notion (such as I had) about the type of acting seen in routine costume romances, or the big-budget, star-studded blockbusters of the day. I had an idea of what she would be like in the film, but she blew all that out of the water, acting her socks off as a hard-as-brass, seen-it-before widow, unwilling to shake off her ordinary background, contemptuous of the rich but wanting to live their lifestyle. And she patently will not take any baloney from new husband Ed about needing money for this or that. Teddy Bare has met his match. Kathleen Harrison has often seemed too shrill, too deliberately the simple, working-class archetype. But here she gets it bang on the money as Emmie, the maid of all work, used and exploited by 'Mr. Bare' in such an underhand way she still regards him as a kind and considerate gentleman. His frequent 'Toddle, Emmie' will live with me for quite a while.

Interesting hints there may be a latent homosexuality to Teddy Bare lie scattered across the film. His repugnance when it comes to hugging and kissing may not be just because of the age gap. His constant referral to 'Monnie' sounds remarkably like 'Mommy'. Most overt of all is the body-building magazine he browses as he awaits his opening shot with Freda Jeffries.

I came to 'Cast A Dark Shadow' expecting a lightweight but reasonable potboiler. I came away thinking there really can't be all that many better films of its kind.

Stagey Melodrama. - Cast a Dark Shadow review by Steve

Slim gothic thriller which updates the classic themes of the Edwardian gaslight melodramas to a sunny Brighton in the 1950s. So there is an endangered female, (Margaret Lockwood) the latest older bride of a psychopath (Dirk Bogarde) who murdered his first wife for money. When the inheritance turns out not to be all he hoped for, he decides to kill again.

Director Lewis Gilbert dials down the atmospherics. So there isn't much of an expressionist look, or any thunderstorms. It is an adaptation of a stage play (by Janet Green) which alludes to the genre conventions of period melodrama. So the first wife is killed with gas. And there is the usual country mansion with a locked room.

The main pleasures are the performances of the small cast. Lockwood is easy to root for as a brassy, pragmatic widow who gratifyingly pushes back against her idle new husband's manipulations. Bogarde pulls off the trick of being foul, without being too loathsome to bear. Though Kathleen Harrison plays the most idiotic servant in fiction.

There is a mood of malign decadence, principally generated by Bogarde's dark charisma. His trophy husband's homosexuality may be a banal motif, but Dirk absorbs it perfectly into his portrayal. The characters are archetypes, but enormous fun to watch. The public stayed away and it flopped. They missed a grand melodramatic entertainment.

Beyond the Front - Cast a Dark Shadow review by CH

Dirk Bogarde was among those who divided his films into those made for Rank during the Fifties and those with Losey, Visconti and others in subsequent decades. This was to simplify matters. His earlier work is more varied, and complex, than such a reductionist approach suggests.

Take Cast a Dark Shadow (1955). From a play - Murder Mistaken - by Janet Green a few years earlier, it opens with Bogarde and Mona Washbourne upon a ghost train at the end of Brighton’s Palace Pier with some seafront scenes afterwards. All looks to be the stuff of light comedy until the scene moves inland, to a large house with a gravel path on which their impressive car comes to a halt.

For all the smooth talk, it is clear that he is a wide boy who has married this older women with any eye on inheritance, a process which he, shall we say, accelerates, and escapes prosecution but does not ease her lawyer’s suspicions. Such apparently practised ease soon finds him back in Brighton and making the acquaintance of sharp-talking former barmaid Margaret Lockwood who herself has come into money.

They join nuptial forces, their life together still under the innocent gaze of his housekeeper Kathleen Harrison. All this could spring from the novels of Patrick Hamilton, and Bogarde delivers a terrific performance as an increasingly troubled chancer. No need to say more about the way in which events turn out. Director Lewis Gilbert handles it all with eighty minutes’ aplomb. There are some who automatically reach for the word stagey when a film is based upon a play. Much of this one does take place inside but Jack Asher’s cinematography makes these dark spaces feel as infinite as the mind itself can become.

Badinage, and brusquer, finds its place in this but the real fascination is in the way the ground is crumbling beneath them all. Asher is adept at catching facial expressions as they change from moment to moment - it can almost appear Expressionist as darkness takes over on the final day.

It was far safer on the ghost train.