Reflection of the Moonlight on a Loose Pane of Glass
Tormented (1960)
directed by Bert I. Gordon
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
This low-budget delight is everything a ghost story should be: the low-end microcosm of a love affair gone bad to The Fog's moneyed sets and rich nautical history. Shot by Ernest Laszlo, Tormented can't match RKO for shadows sets, and apparently Bert Gordon never spent a dollar he didn't have to on actors or time. I'm reading a book about Val Lewton, and author Alexander Nemerov makes the case for a moment at the end of World War II when children began to deal more directly with death in films. Meet Me in St. Louis is perhaps the most famous example of this, and Nemerov writes - correctly, I think - that "Minnelli represents Halloween as the natural condition of a child's mind."
In Tormented, a child named Sandy is in love with her older sister's fiancée. He's a jazz pianist with a house by the sea, and the little girl - whose family is rich and lives nearby - comes to visit him when he practices. But before Tom can marry Meg, he has to break up with his old flame Vi, who visits the island where the movie takes place to tell Tom that she won't go quietly. She doesn't, but Sandy - the girl - is the only one willing to deal with Tom as he is.
There are few scenes in the movie without apparitions, voices from beyond, or the drift of coastal breezes through open windows. Tom breaks up with Vi in a lighthouse and runs into trouble with a local grifter who overhears the wrong piece of news at an open-air grill where Tom orders Pacific-side hamburgers. Between the guilt-stricken protagonist, a lost ring, and the Malibu and Catalina Island sets, you can almost conjure the sounds of the Casino Ballroom in the still of a Pennsylvania evening.
It's cheap to be sure, but it never relies on effects when a blind woman with a story to tell about a dead boy and his dog will set the scene better. It isn't a sense of humor you need to see past the surface (MST3K was wrong to lampoon this one), but lantern-light from Halloween. There aren't many movies I can imagine taking Orson Welles, Duke Ellington, and John Carpenter to see, but Tormented is one of them.
directed by Bert I. Gordon
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
This low-budget delight is everything a ghost story should be: the low-end microcosm of a love affair gone bad to The Fog's moneyed sets and rich nautical history. Shot by Ernest Laszlo, Tormented can't match RKO for shadows sets, and apparently Bert Gordon never spent a dollar he didn't have to on actors or time. I'm reading a book about Val Lewton, and author Alexander Nemerov makes the case for a moment at the end of World War II when children began to deal more directly with death in films. Meet Me in St. Louis is perhaps the most famous example of this, and Nemerov writes - correctly, I think - that "Minnelli represents Halloween as the natural condition of a child's mind."
In Tormented, a child named Sandy is in love with her older sister's fiancée. He's a jazz pianist with a house by the sea, and the little girl - whose family is rich and lives nearby - comes to visit him when he practices. But before Tom can marry Meg, he has to break up with his old flame Vi, who visits the island where the movie takes place to tell Tom that she won't go quietly. She doesn't, but Sandy - the girl - is the only one willing to deal with Tom as he is.
There are few scenes in the movie without apparitions, voices from beyond, or the drift of coastal breezes through open windows. Tom breaks up with Vi in a lighthouse and runs into trouble with a local grifter who overhears the wrong piece of news at an open-air grill where Tom orders Pacific-side hamburgers. Between the guilt-stricken protagonist, a lost ring, and the Malibu and Catalina Island sets, you can almost conjure the sounds of the Casino Ballroom in the still of a Pennsylvania evening.
It's cheap to be sure, but it never relies on effects when a blind woman with a story to tell about a dead boy and his dog will set the scene better. It isn't a sense of humor you need to see past the surface (MST3K was wrong to lampoon this one), but lantern-light from Halloween. There aren't many movies I can imagine taking Orson Welles, Duke Ellington, and John Carpenter to see, but Tormented is one of them.
posted by NPK at 12:32 AM
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