The Spiral Staircase

Adapted from an Ethel Lina White novel, Robert Siodmak's The Spiral Staircase (1946) is an effectively chilling Gothic film noir with an ominous, expressionistic atmosphere. With its questionable group of residents and servants, headed by Ethel Barrymore's crusty matriarch, the Warren household is already as twisted as the title stairs even before they suspect that a murderer is in the house. Enhancing the visual menace of the old, isolated mansion and the climactic dark and stormy night, Siodmak reveals the sinister presence of the killer targeting Dorothy McGuire's mute maid solely through close-ups of his crazed, peeping eyes -- the same eyes that already killed several other pretty young things with physical infirmities. As McGuire skillfully communicates a wide range of emotions through pantomime, and her impairment increases the suspense, her reaction to the final threat becomes all the more potent. It was Barrymore, however, who earned an Oscar nomination for her Grande Dame acting. Greeted in 1946 as a solid thriller regardless of its gestures towards explaining a pathology, The Spiral Staircase was remade, with considerably fewer chills, in 1975. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide