weezeralfalfa This Gothic drama is set primarily in the upper Hudson valley in the castle-like manor house of Dragonwyck, beginning in the year 1844. It's based on the novel of the same name. It seems evident that this estate is modeled after the huge estate which was derived from the Dutch feudal-like estate Rensselaerswijck. Dragonwyck suggests to me its late medieval origins, with perhaps an ominous master or wife. Clearly, that master: Nicholas van Ryn(Vincent Price), still thought of himself as a feudal lord, and the maintenance of that status for himself and a hopeful successor seemed to be his chief purpose in life. Thus, he is the natural villain of the story. The hero is Dr. Jeff Turner(Glenn Langan), who is the self-appointed leader of rebellion by the many tenant farmers. He also saves the heroine: Miranda Wells(Gene Tierney), from an untimely death by poisoning by her husband, Nicholas. Initially, Miranda had been chosen to be the new governess for the daughter(Katrine) of Nicholas and his wife Johanna(Vivienne Osborne). But, after Nicholas secretly poisoned Johanna, he soon asked Miranda to marry him. He was desperate to have a son so that his estate could be passed on to his heirs. Johanna had provided him with a daughter, instead of a son, and was constitutionally unable to have further children. Besides, the two had never been happy together. Thus, it was time to replace her with a younger, prettier, woman who could bare him a son. But, Miranda, her successor, also failed, initially. She bore a son, but with a defective heart, who soon died. Apparently, Nicholas decided she must be cursed, thus must be done away with, for another replacement. Besides being cruel to his wives and child, and to his tenants, he complained that the new maid that Miranda had chosen was unworthy because she had a bad limp. Miranda pointed out that this was how God planned her to be, not being her own fault. When he lost his son, and a new law was passed giving his tenants the right to buy the land they had been tilling, he saw his main purpose in life going down the drain. Thus, he shut himself up in a remote room in the manor and soothed his worries with opium, which made his behavior more bizarre. Inevitably, he would clash again with Dr. Turner in a final confrontation which would end his misery.I have several questions or comments about the screenplay:1)It seems odd that Nicholas should request that a distant small farmer relative he has never met, in rather distant Greenwich, Conn., should send him one of his daughters(how did he know he had daughters)to be governess to his daughter. He must have been planning even then that this girl would be his replacement wife. As it turned out, Nicholas seemed to be exactly what Miranda wanted in a husband and vice versa.2)Why was Oleander chosen as the mode of poisoning? The fact that Johanna dies soon after the plant was brought into her room suggests that a volatile component was involved. But the poisons are not volatile. They must be ingested. And it's not just of matter that the person succumbs within a few hours with no preliminary distressing symptoms. Thus, she probably should have made a commotion about her symptoms before dying.3)After Nicholas is shot dead, who inherits Dragonwyck? Doesn't Miranda, as his wife. Or weren't women allowed to own property in this circumstance? Or perhaps his daughter, if he so willed it? In any case, Miranda clearly has had enough of Dragonwyck, and returns to her native Greenwich. By the way, why did daughter Katrine disappear from the story not long after she was introduced? Was she sent to a boarding school?With these caveats, I can recommend this film for those interested in Gothic stories and history. See it at YouTube.

clanciai Joe Mankiewicz's first film as a director is like all his subsequent ones a paragon of clarity and thoroughness, attaching much attention to every detail, while at the same time the actors are generously given free room to reign. Consequently in all his films, all actors appear outstanding, especially in his early ones. His next film was even darker than this one, maybe his deepest dive into the noir genre, "Somewhere in the Night" about the mystery of a lost identity and even more intriguing than this one - here Vincent Price completely dominates the drama by you in suspense as you never can know or even guess what he is up to. He appears as the perfect gentleman, and yet you must suspect that he has terrible secrets to hide, which don't become evident until the very end, as he masks them so well. Gene Tierney is equally good, and they match each other perfectly - just previously they had been together in Otto Preminger's priceless "Laura".The other actors are good as well, especially Walter Huston as the terrible but honest father, while you must observe the young Jessica Tandy entering the scene after Gene Tierney has been married. You can't recognize her, but her performance as a cripple is quite remarkable.Alfred Newman's music is equally perfect, never too intrusive but properly enhancing the Gothic atmosphere whenever it is stressed. Only Glenn Langan as the doctor is a bit simplistic, while the tenants are impressive in every scene. A special tribute to the always admirable Anne Revere as Gene Tierney's wise and hardy mother.

mark.waltz Welcome to Dragonwyck, the American, Hudson River Valley version of "Rebecca's" Mandalay where secrets go way beyond the walls of that driveway with long, tenacious fingers. A suicide centuries before of one of the wives put a curse on the wealthy family now lead by the cool, calm and collected Vincent Price, gentle on the outside but quite sinister on the inside. When it comes to his farmers, he has no intention of giving them the land that their families have been farming for generations, even though their tributes to his ancestors have certainly paid off the land. He believes through entitlement alone, he's obligated to keep it, and with his unattraction to his wife (Vivienne Osborne), he's obviously determined to find a new wife who can produce him a son and heir, and that's where impetuous beauty Gene Tierney comes in.The story focuses on Tierney's exotically named Miranda Wells, a farmer's daughter from Connecticut, a 9:00 girl on a 5:00 farm, determined to find something better than the dirty hands of the farmboys nearby. Parents Walter Huston and Anne Revere are decent, God-fearing Christians who are perplexed by distant relative Price's letter asking for one of their daughters to come to Dragonwyck to be companion to his young daughter (Connie Marshall). Tierney persuades the strict Huston to allow her to go, and gets more than she bargained for. Words of caution from housekeeper Spring Byington aren't enough to warn her against falling in love with Price, and even if its his title and position that she's really interested in, she allows herself to fall under his spell. This continues even after she overhears the farmers confront him at the annual Fourth of July celebration.Lavishly produced and tightly directed by Joseph Mankiewicz, "Dragonwyck" takes the usual Gothic thriller of the European setting and moves it to two of the original American colonies. It's obvious just from the way that Tierney is made up and dressed that she is not meant to be a country girl and that even if it wasn't Dragonwyck, some millionaire's mansion would certainly have her as a resident. As for Price, this is basically the same type of melodrama that he would do much later over at American International in a series of Gothic Edgar Allan Poe tales, and at more than a decade younger in this part than those, he is appropriately cold even when complimenting his bed-ridden wife. The only time he comes alive is when he sees the feisty Tierney telling off some local social snobs and his delight in squiring her around the dance floor even though she's just witnessed him being attacked while demanding tributes from the farmers.Byington's housekeeper is mysterious, but not dire like "Rebecca's" Mrs. Danvers, mixing kindness into her forbidding warnings. Osborne has been made up to look like a living corpse, obviously very unhappy in her marriage and consumed with an unknowing sense of doom. She's also rather cold to daughter Marshall as if knowing that she's not going to be around to see her grow into a young woman. The painting of the wife who committed suicide generations before almost resembles her as if to insinuate that the family curse is about to explode in Price's face. It is obvious that Tierney is the key to which the curse will be unlocked. There are also excellent performances by Huston and Revere, and Henry Morgan is also memorable in a bit as the farmer who vindictively attacks Price, although his motives are certainly understandable. Glenn Langan is the one weak element as the overly noble doctor who pleads the farmer's cases towards Price and is manipulated by Price into treating the ailing Osborne which leads to tragic occurrences.A gripping epic of evil hidden underneath the nobilities' belief that they hold dominion over the poor people around them is a deeply felt drama that grabs you from the moment Tierney grabs the telescope to witness Dragonwyck off in the background, just like Joan Fontaine's first spotting of Mandalay in "Rebecca". There may be some slight unbelievable situations, but for the most part, it really is an intriguing look at sinister intentions disguised by seemingly noble behavior and the destruction to the soul this ultimately causes. It really is Price's show, and he fortunately avoids the over melodramatic line recital that would turn his American International Gothic horror films into unintentional camp.

James Hitchcock The romantic-historical novelist Anya Seton can be seen as an American equivalent of her British contemporary Daphne du Maurier, and Seton's novel "Dragonwyck" has a lot in common with du Maurier's "Rebecca", including the fact that both books are clearly influenced by Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre". All three novels have at their centre a young woman from a relatively humble background who marries a wealthy and charismatic older landowner belonging to the gentry or aristocracy. In each case the older man has been married before and is hiding a guilty secret connected with his first wife. "Dragonwyck", like "Jane Eyre" but unlike "Rebecca" which has a twentieth-century setting, is set in the first half of the nineteenth century. The story takes place in upstate New York during the 1840s, a period when the Hudson River valley was still dominated by the Patroons, the descendants of wealthy seventeenth-century Dutch settlers who owned large tracts of land which they controlled in a similar manner to European feudal aristocrats. By the 1840s, however, the autocratic power of the Patroons was being challenged by their tenant farmers, who resented paying what they saw as exorbitant rents and tithes, in what have become known as the "Anti-Rent Wars". The heroine, Miranda Wells, is the daughter of a poor Connecticut farmer. She is invited by Nicholas Van Ryn, a Patroon and a distant cousin of her mother, to come and live at his country house Dragonwyck Manor as a companion to his daughter. Dragonwyck, as one might expect in a melodrama of this nature, is an immense, gloomy Gothic mansion, even though we learn that it dates back to the seventeenth century when Gothic architecture was out of fashion. (Any Gothic building in 1840s America would probably have been of very recent construction). On the surface Nicholas seems charming and sophisticated, but he soon reveals a darker side to his character. He ignores his wife Johanna and his daughter Katrine, and treats his tenants with an arrogant condescension. Something else which shocks Miranda, who has grown up in a deeply religious family, is that in private Nicholas makes no secret of his atheistic opinions, although in public he tries to keep up the image of a devout churchgoer. The servants hint darkly that both the house and the Van Ryn family are cursed. And yet, despite all this, Miranda falls deeply in love with her cousin and, after Johanna dies of a sudden illness, marries him despite the vehement opposition of her parents and despite the fact that she has another admirer in the handsome, politically radical young doctor Jeff Turner. The plot then develops as one might expect, with Nicholas turning out to have a sinister past and the marriage proving to be far from happy. The ending of the film, however, is not that of the novel, probably because the producers felt that Seton's denouement, which involved a steamboat race on the Hudson River, would be too costly to reproduce on screen. The film is not the sort of "heritage cinema" costume drama with which we are familiar today. Ever since late fifties, and certainly since the sixties, it has been customary for films set in the 1800s to be made in colour, often sumptuous colour, with an emphasis on a detailed recreation of the costumes and furnishings of the era. "Dragonwyck" would doubtless have been more visually attractive had it been made in this way, but in 1946 the economics of film-making meant that colour was still the exception rather than the rule and it was still common for period dramas to be made in black-and-white, despite the precedent of "Gone with the Wind" from several years earlier. (Gene Tierney, who stars as Miranda here, was to act in another example, "The Ghost and Mrs Muir", the following year). Vincent Price succeeds well in conveying both sides of Nicholas's personality, the charming and the sinister. This was one of his early roles, but one that looks forward to the sort of parts in melodramas and horror movies he played later in his career, such as the Poe/Corman cycle of the sixties. (There are certainly similarities between Nicholas and Roderick in "The Fall of the House of Usher" or Verden Fell in "The Tomb of Ligeia"). Gregory Peck was, apparently, the first choice for Van Ryn, but in this period of his career he was not an actor normally associated with villains- his Mengele in "The Boys from Brazil" came much later- and I cannot help feeling that he would not have been nearly as convincing as Price. Tierney- as she generally did- makes an adorable heroine, and there are also good contributions from Walter Huston as Miranda's strait-laced old father, nearly as autocratic as van Ryn, and from Spring Byington as the old maidservant Magda. This was the first film to be directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who took over when Ernst Lubitsch dropped out because of ill-health; he was also to direct Tierney in "The Ghost and Mrs Muir". It is not, by any means, one of Mankiewicz's greatest films, certainly not when compared to something like "All about Eve", but it is still a very decent one, a dark and haunting Gothic melodrama. 7/10