By Noel Vera
Television
The Spiral Staircase
Netflix
Robert Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase, an oddly neglected noir, begins with an act of shared voyeurism: people gathered together at a hotel’s darkened dance hall to watch the latest of novelties, a motion picture (D.W. Griffith’s 1912 silent The Sands of Dee, doubling as William Heise’s 1896 The Kiss*). Siodmak’s camera rises to the upper floor to witness another wordless drama unfold; a young woman with a slight limp preparing for bed. She opens her closet door, pulls out a nightgown, steps back; the camera closes in on the row of hung dresses, and Siodmak cuts to a close-up of an eye, zooms in on the eye ostensibly glaring at the woman though we aren’t fooled for a second: the eye is really glaring at us, daring us to cry out in warning.
A pair of hands struggle to find their way out of a nightgown’s sleeves. Suddenly they flutter like a pair of distressed sparrows; on the makeshift screen down below a drowned woman is carried out of the ocean. The watching audience hears a loud thump and crash and looks up; the movie is stopped as the noise is investigated.
The Spiral Staircase — often cited as one of the best thrillers Alfred Hitchcock never directed — is arguably also one of the earliest if not the earliest example of a thriller whose potential victim is handicapped in some way, “flawed” if you like (not acceptable terminology today, but likely the thought on everyone’s minds at the time). Beautiful Helen (Dorothy McGuire) is the mute live-in companion of wealthy Mrs. Warren (Ethel Barrymore) in the latter’s mammoth Victorian mansion. She’s alternately the object of pity or desire, pitied by nearly everyone (Rhys Williams and Elsa Lanchester as handyman and housekeeper Mr. and Mrs. Oates; Rhonda Fleming as the harassed [in several senses] secretary Blanche; George Brent and Gordon Oliver as Professor Albert Warren — the mansion’s acting patriarch — and his dissipated brother Steve; Sara Allgood as Mrs. Warren’s sorely tried nurse; James Bell as the dim local constable), desired by at least two (Kent Smith as the blandly handsome Dr. Parry; and, presumably, the killer). Parry’s professed love for Helen seems particularly problematic: at one point he starts bullying her, hoping to replicate the trauma that rendered her mute,** and only ends up seeming pointlessly cruel.
Only one person seems to regard Helen as a person, Mrs. Warren herself. As Barrymore plays her she’s a magnificent monument of a lady, every bit as storied and detailed as the mansion itself, and easily the most perceptive person in the household except perhaps for Helen. She bosses Helen around it’s true, but the bossing is more playacting than anything abusive. The chemistry between Barrymore and McGuire is a delicate joy to watch — without uttering an explicit word they sketch their mutual affection, with Helen willing to spoil Mrs. Warren and Mrs. Warren worried about Helen to the point of urging the latter to leave the house forever, for safety’s sake.
More than any other relationship in the family (of which there are several: problematic, decadent, perverse) Helen’s and Mrs. Warren’s is the most deeply felt (even more so than the obligatory love affair with Dr. Parry) and speaks of their respective characters better than any number of lines of dialogue. It’s this care for characterization — the “slow” stuff, as viewers nowadays might complain — that distinguishes classic thrillers from their louder, dumber descendants: with the patience to build and develop people that can engross or even enchant the audience the emotional stakes are that much higher, the question of who lives and who dies all the more urgent.
It’s not all about people, or at least not entirely; there’s one other major character, the mansion itself, dressed in intricate tapestries and ornate railings and massive mirrors that double the size of the cavernous spaces beyond. But Siodmak does more than clutter his sets with carvings and bric-a-brac; the house breathes, and its inhabitants are constantly being startled and oppressed by banging shutters, creaking joists, vast velvety shadows punctured by sharp lightning flashes.
The house’s heart, its immobile yet alert nerve center is Mrs. Warren sitting upright in her wide canopied bed, a black widow feeling the fibers of her far-flung web for evil, possible danger. At one point she looks at everyone gathered round her and significantly lowers her gaze. “There’s been another murder hasn’t there?” she guesses. Dropped jaws all around.
I’ve mentioned Hitchcock, and Siodmak — to some measure unfairly, I feel — is often considered his low-budget acolyte, but I would cite at least one other major influence: Fritz Lang. Lang was the master of not just noirish lighting (back when it was known as German Expressionism) but the expressive use of architecture, yet another aspect of his awesome auteurial control. More arguably than even Hitchcock (who would borrow stairs and eye close-up for his late masterpiece Vertigo, and a diminished version of the mansion for the Bates residence in Psycho), Siodmak was skilled at setting and mood, at executing a suspense set piece (see for example the sequence early in the film where the killer stalks Helen in a rainstorm) fully integrated into its character-driven plot (Hitchcock’s constant flaw and lasting glory was to do things the other way, often privileging set piece over story).
Siodmak was a master filmmaker, a sorely underrated one, and this, I submit, was one of his very best: the deftly sketched portrait of a brave pair of women — one bedridden, the other mute — looking out for each other in a forbiddingly hostile world. Great noir thriller, absolutely.
* Interesting exercise trying to winkle out the reason for the substitution: presumably Siodmak wanted to cut from the image of a woman strangling to the image of a woman drowned in The Sands of Dee, same time he needed an excuse for a woman to undress above a movie audience, one silent event suddenly connecting with another thanks, significantly, to a sound (hence the repurposed hotel ballroom).
** Like Hitchcock, Siodmak was a great believer in inserting psychologically handicapped characters in thrillers, as (I assume) a way of making either the killer more interesting or the potential victim more helpless.
