Rent The Spiral Staircase (1945)

Stunning - The Spiral Staircase review by sb

FILM & REVIEW Siodmak’s gothic masterpiece has McGuire as Helen a live in servant who has been struck mute by a previous trauma who works at the Warren house. The roost is ruined over by the formidable matriarch (Barrymore ) who is now bedridden but still exerts control over her two half-sibling sons Albert (Brent) and Stephen (Albert). Someone in the local town has been murdering local girls all of whom have some physical affliction so it’s obvious Helen is next on the list. Stephen has been away and the killings have only resumed on his return and he seems a shifty character so the audience are pointed in his direction - but are things that simple….. Fine supporting turns by Lanchester as the housekeeper more than a little keen on nip of brandy and Smith as the local doctor who is the subject of Helen’s affections. McGuire is very good in the role using her eyes and gestures to convey what she cannot express - one key scene in which she has to make a phone call but cannot is almost painful to watch. What lifts it into the realm of the sublime is the deep focus Chiaroscuro photography of Nic Musaraca - the king of noir lighting. The way he lights the set giving each huge room almost an extra spatial quality with superb use of shadow and contrast is just genius. Love the way apart from the prelude the entire film is set in the house over a single storm- tossed night the raging weather reflecting the suppressed emotions inside - just brilliant - 5/5

Gothic Horror - The Spiral Staircase review by NO

Very melodramatic with excellent B&W photography illustrating the film noir.Lots of cliches which were later copied.Brent playing against type & Mcguire using her eyes for a

voice.

Period Horror. - The Spiral Staircase review by Steve

This is an expressionist horror about a serial killer who is strangling women with physical infirmities. Hitchcock himself must have been impressed by the voyeuristic theme suggested by the huge closeups of the killer's eye observing his victims. The murderer ritualistically pulling on his leather gloves before asphyxiating his victims is a  motif we often see again in seventies Italian giallos.

The story is set in New England in the 1910s. The film opens in a cinema with a silent melodrama showing a heroine in peril, anticipating the terror of Helen (Dorothy McGuire), a mute servant in a gothic house of shadows. When she closes the heavy door of the old, dark mansion it becomes evident that rather than barring the killer's entrance, she has locked him inside.

The madman's obsession is that he must rid the world of people with disabilities. There is a brilliant point of view shot through his eyes of Helen without a mouth which reveals his insanity in an instant. Surely the intension was to critique the cult of eugenics, fashionable in the Edwardian era, which had nourished Nazi ideology.

This is film noir, visually rich in gothic atmosphere and suspense. There is a long, showstopping electrical storm! McGuire is the opposite of the old horror scream-queen. She tries to shout for help, but... nothing is heard. It's easy to guess the murderer, and Ethel Barrymore is rather too annoying as the infirm, irascible matriarch but Elsa Lanchester provides comic relief as reliably as ever and McGuire suffers in silence magnificently.