Woman Who Came Back (1945)

Fresh and Exciting

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

THE WOMAN WHO CAME BACK is a 1940s-era spook fest with much in line with the Val Lewton horrors of the era. It's a low-key, atmospheric production about a woman who arrives at a small town in Massachusetts and is the only survivor of a bus crash (shades of UNBREAKABLE). Once she settles down in the town, the superstitious locals begin to suspect that she's possessed by the spirit of a vengeful witch.It's fair to say that not much really happens in this movie, and nor does it need to. THE WOMAN WHO CAME BACK is a short, thinly-plotted story that's more about building a sense of mood and place than anything else. It's quite expressionistic in style, with lots of shadowy scenes and spooky, half-explained moments. The cast are certainly adroit and the only thing that really lets it down is the ending, but until that point? Lewton himself would be proud.

In the little-seen 1945 chiller "Woman Who Came Back" (not, strangely and irritatingly enough, "THE Woman Who Came Back"), we meet a very disturbed young lady, Lorna Webster (played by Nancy Kelly, perhaps known to most viewers for her role in 1956's "The Bad Seed," and here looking very much like Joan Crawford in "Mildred Pierce"). Returning to her hometown of Eben Rock, MA (a stand-in for Salem) for the first time in years, she meets an evil-looking old crone on the bus, who claims to be Jezebel Trister, a supposed witch who had been burnt at the stake by Lorna's ancestor 300 years before. Following a series of increasingly suspicious incidents involving a bus crash, some dead flowers, rat poison, a burning book, a canine "familiar" and a sickened young girl, Lorna comes to believe that she has been possessed by the old witch...and so does the rest of the town. But has she really? This short film (it all transpires in only 68 minutes) has been directed by Walter Colmes (I know...who?) in a pleasing, atmospheric manner. It is occasionally creepy and brooding, but sadly dissipates a terrific setup with a forced and mundane explanation for all the frissons that had come before. Still, the picture serves as a nice object lesson on the perils of superstition and paranoia. Had it been made just five years later, it would have been read as a biting commentary on McCarthyism, and the modern-day witch hunt that the Wisconsin senator would then be initiating. As it is, the film comes off like an ominous predictor of America's future. Kudos to the wonderful character actor Otto Kruger, here playing a levelheaded reverend, as well as to John Loder, in his role as Lorna's increasingly frustrated doctor fiancé. In all, this is a pleasing little film that will certainly disappoint many, but one that still offers up an important message. And it appears just fine, too, on this crisp-looking Image DVD.

THE WOMAN WHO CAME BACK (1945)Kind of a seldom-seen movie. I saw it a long time ago and forgot how boring it was. An old hag of a witch who was burned at the stake 300 years earlier returns to take over the body of a young woman. The catch is, her great-something grandpa was actually the judge who condemned the witch!Too bad the movie crawls along at a snail's pace, because it's got a good premise and a strong opening. But unfortunately, this thing just gets hopelessly tedious as it trots along.* out of ****

THE WOMAN WHO CAME BACK stars Nancy Kelly (THE BAD SEED) as Lorna Webster, direct descendent of the 17th Century magistrate responsible for "sending eighteen women to their fiery deaths," in the infamous Massachusetts town of Eben Rock. Coming back by bus, Lorna shares her seat with a black-veiled hag (THE OLD DARK HOUSE's Elspeth Dudgeon) who claims to be Jezebel Trister, Judge Elijah Webster's most famous victim. When the bus plunges into Shadow Lake, Lorna is the sole survivor - with the body of the strange woman nowhere to be found. So begins a series of strange encounters that threaten to plunge modern Eben Rock back into the dark ages.THE WOMAN WHO CAME BACK is a neat little Lewtonian drama about Old Country superstitions festering in the New World. Eben Rock is a town unable to rest comfortably on its own foundations (the Webster family tree hangs heavy with the kind of scoundrels that found nations), making less a story about the supernatural than of how superstition drives the sensitive and marginal away from reason and true faith (embodied here by the friendship between John Loder's town doctor and Otto Kruger's sage minister).Although THE WOMAN WHO CAME BACK seems influenced by the psychological horror films being produced by Val Lewton at RKO around the same time, the film also anticipates a key bit of business in the later CARNIVAL OF SOULS (the survivor of an aquatic auto accident later coming to doubt her sanity). Highly recommended.