A Film Canon

This Victorian noir effectively takes place in one house, and the square that surrounds it, both of which are enlivened in a manner that prevents the plot becoming too stagebound, to the extent that they tend to surpass their inhabitants as protagonists. As the "house of horror", 19 Thornton Square possesses secrets of a sufficient magnitude - especially those pertaining to the mysterious murder of Paula Anton's (Ingrid Bergman) aunt, and her husband Gregory's (Charles Boyer) fascination with the property - to constitute a mnemonic presence; an awareness of free-floating, elusive recollections. More specifically, playwright Patrick Hamilton structures the narrative around a series of events that emphasise the house's organic continuity, both in itself as well as with the other terraces adjoining the square - most explicitly in the omnsicient tread of Gregory's footsteps across the attic floor, but most poetically in the shared gas system, which ensures that his ominous passage causes all the other fixtures in the house to flicker, paving the way for a series of hallucinatory tracking-shots. These form part of Cukor's contribution to this enlivening - a pervasive condensation of the house to so many vertical sight-lines, such that the province of the action takes place along a trajectory encompassing the front door, stairwell, ceiling of Paula's bedroom, attic and skylight of the attic, as if to hypothesise a point-of-view shot of the entire house; or, rather, a point-of-view shot from the perspective of it. Unfortunately, the flipside of this enlivening is a tendency towards one-dimensional human characterisation, with the result that the talents of Bergman, Boyer and Joseph Cotten (as a detective who takes a slightly implausible interest in Paula) are subordinated to a melodramatic imperative that finds clearest expression in the former's madness, and means that the charismatic contributions tend to come from the supporting cast, especially Angela Lansbury and Mary Whitty. That said, this one-dimensionality nicely reflects the mercilessness with which Gregory objectifies anyone who stands in the way of his plans; or, rather, his reduction of their eyes to so many ciphers for the jewels he hopes to locate.