Dragonwyck

Miranda grew up on a farm in Connecticut. A letter arrives from a distant relative: Nicholas Van Ryn is looking for a governess for his daughter at his great estate on the Hudson. Miranda goes. Dragonwyck is another world; the house is the seat of a landholding dynasty and the farmers around it pay rent. Nicholas is courteous, cultivated and entirely cold. His wife is ill. Miranda stays in the house and the house closes around her. The farmers rise against the rent system. Something else is happening at the estate, and there is a poison inside the house. Joseph L. Mankiewicz wrote and directed it; it is his first film as director. Gene Tierney plays Miranda, Vincent Price plays Nicholas and Walter Huston her father. The source is Anya Seton's novel. Its ground is a real historical matter; the tenant risings against landholders in New York state in the nineteenth century. The film is built in the shape of gothic romance; the great house, the closed rooms and an ill fortune carried from the past. Vincent Price settled into the shape of the villain with this part and his later career followed that line. Oleander is used as the poison and the narrative gives it as information rather than a mystery. The photography and the design are its strongest side; the house works like a character. Its limit is structure; the tenant rising and the gothic strand do not fully fuse and the ending speeds up. Who it is for: viewers who like classic gothic romance and studio period productions. Who it is not for: the pace is slow, the shape familiar, and the passivity of the woman uncomfortable.