Preserving the restricted point of view of Pushkin’s original story, in which Suvorin the narrator almost seems to ill-fatedly will the narrative towards the turning of the winning “ace” at the story’s conclusion, Walbrook as the cursed captain, like the actor himself, a displaced ethnic German living for political reasons in a foreign state, dominates every story-twist and -turn with the narratively- and thematically-appropriate, Napoleonic will of a would-be conqueror. As one of the more effective evocations of the supernatural on film, the uncanny nature of Suvorin and Countess Ravenskaya’s trio of morbid interactions depicted in the film are most astonishing for their dramatic, psychological, and indeed metaphysical ambiguity. These exchanges between the barely-living and the near-dead include a both silent (on her part) and shrieking (on his), pistol-bearing interview in the countess’s chambers the aforementioned, funeral-set encounter between a live corpse and a dead one and finally the visitation of the roaring midnight voice, fire-breathing the cards’ winning secrets through Suvorin’s darkened chambers like a hurricane inferno. Soon ingratiating himself with the countess’s young ward Lizavetta Ivanova (Yvonne Mitchell) as a means to gain entrance to the house, Suvorin one evening secretes himself in the ancient countess’s private chambers for a similar exchange to that of eighty years before one that, past death and further encounters beyond the grave, will ultimately lead to the fated, dissolving faro table turn-up of the title card.īased on Alexander Pushkin’s 1834 story, which evoked the dire uncertainty of a previous generation of Russian history in its tale of dark obsession, grim inheritance, and thwarted ambition, the 1949 British filming of Queen of Spades, displanted by distances of two continents and one century, nevertheless spiritually (dis)embodies its moribund milieu, polyphonic vocalizations ringing spectrally throughout an Expressionist Orthodox cathedral, with the startling creepiness of an open-casket, postmortem transaction between a live soul and a dead one. Petersburg who is rumored to have attained her fortune from supernatural knowledge of “the secret of the cards”. Nursing financial and militaristic ambitions on a scale equal to the meteoric rise of his similarly lowborn hero Napoleon, international scourge of European power and privilege, a casual visit to a musty bookseller’s shop, where an accidental unshelving of his military idol’s campaigns lurches forth a volume of a decidedly different character to the dust-covered floor below, seems to answer his own fixation on attaining wealth and power.Ĭontaining a lengthy account of one “Countess R.”, who in the hair-pilloried and hoop-skirted days of the mid-eighteenth century sold her soul to a mysterious foreign dignitary in exchange for gambling riches, Suvorin connects the legend with the near-century-old Countess Ravenskaya (Edith Evans), the wealthiest woman in St. Considering himself too impoverished to participate in these games of reckless chance and feverish play, Suvorin, overhearing stories related to the Curse of the Queen of Spades, looks hungrily over the hunched shoulders of his aristocratic betters and imagines himself in their place particularly in the oft-occupied seat of his friend, the wealthy and well-connected Andrei (Ronald Howard). Petersburg, the exotic faro dens presided over by gypsy singers and dancers (Maroussia Dimitrevitch, Violette Elvin) are haunted by a lowly captain in the Engineers division of the Tsar’s army named Herman Suvorin (Walbrook). Opening on a (historically accurate) gambling craze sweeping 1806 St. Eschewing the “stiff upper lip” style of his national contemporaries, British director Dickinson (1940’s original Gaslight also starring actor Walbrook) casts a very different spell on lush yet chiaroscuro-soaked mise en scene that brilliantly matches the tortured yet relentlessly self-driven mental state of its anti-hero protagonist. Austrian actor Anton Walbrook, Czech cameraman Otto Heller, French composer Georges Auric, Russian producer (and uncredited co-writer) Anatole de Grunwald, working on sets extravagantly designed by Walbrook’s fellow countryman William Kellner, collaborate to raise the spirit of a dead world with the dread intensity of prewar European cinema. Shot entirely on cramped sound stages in postwar Britain, Thorold Dickinson’s The Queen of Spades almost inexplicably recreates the artistic shadow of early nineteenth century Russia in all its terror and glory. STREET DATE: OCTOBER 15 TH, 2019/KINO LORBER STUDIO CLASSICS Would-be Conqueror In Tsarist Russia Turns Up Losing Card
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