If you want to understand movies, among other necessities you have to understand horror, how a story told in movies pictures can terrify you as badly as any nightmare.
You have to spend time, therefore with these guys, Tourneur and Woolrich. This is classic stuff and a real lesson because the important things are done excellently and the unimportant it seems deliberately done poorly.
The unimportant part of the movie is the story and everything that supports it. A leopard escapes and is blamed for three deaths. The story grinds to an offhand and dramatically weak conclusion.
The important part is the deaths. Three deaths, one girl and two women.
The first case is perhaps the most chilling because the storytelling is so tight. We haven't met these characters before and won't subsequently. They are there only for the killing. A little girl is sent out in the dark to get a minor grocery by her bitchy mother. She is afraid of the dark and needs to go much further than planned. On the way home, she encounters the beast and is terrified. The cinematic horror comes from us knowing what the mother does not. The girl pounds on the door, pounds for her life and the mother refuses.
The second case is more long form: the victim is introduced with amazing efficiency. We learn a huge amount about her in a few minutes. This is a creature that we understand: the character development is far better than anything else in the movie. She goes a graveyard to meet a clandestine lover of a lower class. She gets locked and encounters the beast. She similarly pounds the door in horror and this murder inherits all the terror of the one before.
The final case is quite different. It involves a character we know, at least we have encountered her in the "main" story. Her sound has permeated the entire movie. The horror of her death isn't portrayed as in the other two cases, and there are lots of details about this death (like the lipstick) that don't add up.
Long before this, we've suspected the truth about the murders, but this shift in narrative signals that the characters will come to a similar revelation.
This business about showing us things the characters don't know isn't all that old. It developed well before these guys got it. But they knew how to use it. Its not a good film, but important in the history of horror.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
You have to spend time, therefore with these guys, Tourneur and Woolrich. This is classic stuff and a real lesson because the important things are done excellently and the unimportant it seems deliberately done poorly.
The unimportant part of the movie is the story and everything that supports it. A leopard escapes and is blamed for three deaths. The story grinds to an offhand and dramatically weak conclusion.
The important part is the deaths. Three deaths, one girl and two women.
The first case is perhaps the most chilling because the storytelling is so tight. We haven't met these characters before and won't subsequently. They are there only for the killing. A little girl is sent out in the dark to get a minor grocery by her bitchy mother. She is afraid of the dark and needs to go much further than planned. On the way home, she encounters the beast and is terrified. The cinematic horror comes from us knowing what the mother does not. The girl pounds on the door, pounds for her life and the mother refuses.
The second case is more long form: the victim is introduced with amazing efficiency. We learn a huge amount about her in a few minutes. This is a creature that we understand: the character development is far better than anything else in the movie. She goes a graveyard to meet a clandestine lover of a lower class. She gets locked and encounters the beast. She similarly pounds the door in horror and this murder inherits all the terror of the one before.
The final case is quite different. It involves a character we know, at least we have encountered her in the "main" story. Her sound has permeated the entire movie. The horror of her death isn't portrayed as in the other two cases, and there are lots of details about this death (like the lipstick) that don't add up.
Long before this, we've suspected the truth about the murders, but this shift in narrative signals that the characters will come to a similar revelation.
This business about showing us things the characters don't know isn't all that old. It developed well before these guys got it. But they knew how to use it. Its not a good film, but important in the history of horror.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.