The Dark at the Top of the Stairs

A family in Oklahoma in the 1920s. The father sells harness and his trade is dying because of the automobile. The mother covers her own unhappiness by clinging to her children. The boy is afraid of the dark, the girl goes to her first dance. Something that happens at the dance breaks the balance of the house. The film is not interested in family drama. It is interested in the pressure of what is not said: the dark at the top of the stairs is less the boy's fear than what the people in the house cannot tell each other. The antisemitism of the town and the difference in class belong to the same silence. The form comes from the theatre: despite widescreen and colour, the scenes advance room by room and dialogue dominates. Delbert Mann directed, from the play of the same name by the Pulitzer-winning William Inge. Inge's plays were being filmed one after another in those years. Robert Preston plays the father, Dorothy McGuire the mother and Eve Arden the aunt. Shirley Knight, as the daughter, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Who it is for: viewers who like late-fifties American family drama and play adaptations. Who it is not for: anyone after cinematic narration. The film never hides its stage origin and some scenes stand as straight theatre.