In what is said to be her best, and favorite, role, Ida Lupino plays an impoverished woman who takes a job as companion to an aging music hall actress living in a cottage on the misty English moors. When the camera moves from the opening shots of the desolate moors, crows flapping in the mist, to the inside of the remote house, where it remains, the stage is set for suspense, psychological terror, and murder. Lupino brings down from London her two weird sisters (Elsa Lanchester and Edith Barrett) who clutter up the house with sea shells and driftwood and other found objects, such as dead birds. The actress, none too stable to begin with, becomes furious, threatening to send the sisters to an asylum. Her death at the hands of the anguished nurse is one of the great off-screen murders: pearls, dropping one by one onto the carpet, tell the tale.
At 23, Lupino was a good deal younger than the star of the stage production, but (with hair pulled back and without make-up) she achieves a level of authority and compact intensity that augments director Charles Vidor's slow, nuanced build-up of suspense. (JB)