Rip Van Brett must wake from his moral slumber, a man whose family jewels are locked away in a vault, which is analogous to his own “family jewels” being sadistically kept by his evil stepsister Victoria. Rip must make a choice between the family (mis)fortune and his lovely new bride Anne. Wonderfully directed by Charles Vidor and photographed by Harry Fishbeck (who shot one of the best Pre-Code films The Eagle and the Hawk), this stagey melodrama opens with Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor as an elderly woman, her expression one of hatred and contempt, stares in extreme close-up directly at the audience and shatters the fourth wall that separates us!
The plot involves the matriarch of a wealthy 5th Avenue family Victoria Van Brett (Marry Morris) and her machinations to control her stepbrother Rip (Kent Taylor) and younger sister Caroline (Anne Revere) by dismissing blue-collar bride Anne Darrow (Evelyn Venable) using any means necessary. This would enable the jewels, a pearl necklace worth $500,000 (in 1934 dollars!) to stay in her possession instead of being gifted to the adorable new bride. But the necklace is really the MacGuffin, as the story is really about the clash of Victorian Age principles versus Jazz Age morality: Hell, the despicable woman’s name is even Victoria, so it’s not really subtext. After the terrifying opening credits, Vidor shows us a close-up of a car’s license plate as the camera pulls back focus and tracks right, as the car pulls away from the curb to be replaced by a horse-and-carriage. Commoners (as Victoria no doubt would refer to them) crowd the street to see who’s attending the famous Van Brett wedding which is being held right here in their 5th Avenue home. In the first few scenes Vidor subtly reveals the conflict without yet taking sides, but as the story progresses our sympathies fall squarely upon one couple.
I’ve advocated for many years that the most evil and amoral woman in a fiction film was Mrs. Eleanor Shaw Iselin (from the original The Manchurian Candidate) played wonderfully (and despicably) by Angela Lansbury, who sacrifices her own son upon the alter of Authoritarian power, but now I’m not so sure. Victoria Van Brett is the Wicked Witch of the West-side, an aging widow whose black heart seeks complete domination over her staff and family, and any others she can manipulate for her own purposes. There is not one fucking redeeming quality to this wretch, and as she destroys Anne Darrow bit-by-bit and subjugates Rip, we cheer for the thought of her violent demise. Rip is portrayed as a good man who dearly loves his new wife but he’s sleepwalking through the tempest, impotent to roust himself to action. The story takes pains to portray Anne as genuine and affectionate, a loving soul and not a gold-digger. As Victoria punishes her own sister Caroline, a meek spinsterish woman whose willpower has been whittled away until she’s barely an individual anymore, Victoria grows in power but diminishes in humanity. But she grasps too tightly and it’s not just her moral code that is her undoing, it’s a “combination” of factors, if you get my drift!
Vidor and his cinematographer light the set and characters like a Gothic horror film. Though it’s a stagey housebound film, the low angles of our domineering matriarch as she towers above her victims and the low-key lighting are visually exciting. One shot in particular that foreshadows the vault’s revelation is a high angle shot from behind the wall, with a funeral urn in the center of the composition: on one side is the maid and the other Victoria, warning her that the ashes of the family scions haunt this shelf! Mary Morris in her only film, reprises her stage role as Victoria and plays it to excess, which allows us to commiserate appropriately with the newlyweds and cheer at her self-owned demise. How many times have you cheered a young man twisting and old lady’s arm until he nearly rips it from her shoulder? You will here. Sometimes poetic justice is a dish best served cold.
Final Grade: (B)