Quote:
Originally Posted by AllAboutMatt
I'm currently on an ebay hunt, trying to cut down though since I already have many Fox Blu-Rays on my radar. I'm currently trying to decide between Whirlpool and Dragonwyck...
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Besides being Fox releases starring Gene Tierney, the two films are quite dissimilar.
Dragonwyck is a Gothic romantic thriller set in the 1850's, adapted by the best-selling novel by Anya Seton. It's well-acted, and was the first film to give Vincent Price a chance at a meaty leading role. His performance is deliciously hammy, and was very well-reviewed; either
Life or
Look (I can't remember which off the top of my head) suggested that he would be a deserving Best Actor Oscar nominee. The film itself has been criticized for being "episodic," and I think that description is accurate: it was Joseph L. Mankiewicz' directorial debut, and he apparently shot a lot of footage that didn't make it into the finished film. I own over 75 publicity stills from
Dragonwyck, and about a fourth of them are shots of scenes that didn't make the final cut. Gene Tierney is lovely, as always; the cinematography, musical score, and set decorations are outstanding; and the supporting cast, which includes Walter Huston, Henry Morgan and Jessica Tandy, is excellent. On an historical note, this was the film Gene Tierney was making when a young man named John Fitzgerald Kennedy visited the set, sparking a brief-but-passionate romance that ended when Kennedy's family made it clear that they would not approve of him marrying a divorcee.
Whirlpool was the film that reunited three key personnel from the masterpiece,
Laura (1944): star Gene Tierney; director Otto Preminger; and composer David Raksin, each of whom is at the top of her, or his, game. The script is a bit of hokum about a nefarious quack who hypnotizes a woman who comes out of a trance in strange house, standing over a dead body. "Can a man make a woman do things she shouldn't?" was the tagline on the posters and advertising slugs. But the real subject of the movie is how trying to fulfill the stereotypical role of the "perfect wife" could cause a woman to become emotionally ill. Tierney is really superb in the leading role, and is ably supported by Charles Bickford as a police detective and Barbara O'Neil as an aging society woman who is desperate for a mate. Richard Conte is a little (okay, a lot) wooden as Tierney's psychiatrist husband, and Jose Ferrer is way over the top as the ne'er-do-well who takes advantage of Tierney's fragile psyche. The film's reputation has steadily improved since critic Molly Haskell first analyzed it from a feminist perspective in her groundbreaking 1974 book,
From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies; today it's considered a key film in Preminger's oeuvre, and a fine example of the film noir genre.
So which one should you choose? You already know the answer: both of them! Get them now while they're readily available, and save yourself the chore of kicking yourself later. And then start shopping eBay for one you may have already missed and shouldn't have: Otto Preminger's
Where the Sidewalk Ends, a bona fide noir classic starring Tierney, Dana Andrews, Gary Merrill, Craig Stevens, Karl Malden and Ruth Donnelly. Andrews is an unjustly underrated actor, and this one gives him one of his juiciest starring roles.
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