Chase a Crooked Shadow (1958)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

A Disappointing Continuation

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Chase a Crooked Shadow (1958) This dives quickly in-an heiress has come to Barcelona and a man who is apprently after her fortune shows up, at night, with cocky assurance. It's evil and it's odd. The woman is played with stern conviction by Anne Baxter, and she holds the whole movie together. The filming is vivid, and dark and shadowy from the get go, in moderately wide screen black and white. When it goes to daylight, the crips, tonal perfection of the image is quite noticeable. That might be an odd reason to like the movie, but it's quite visually beautiful. I suppose the East Coast of Spain gets some credit. Unfortunately, the plot at first comes off as improbable, with a couple of twists at the beginning that left me incredulous. But the acting is so earnest you can put up with it for awhile. When it becomes a kind of mind game between the two leads, it has some reasonable thread (some) and it is only the steely determination of Baxter's acting that keeps it interesting. The plot against this woman is elaborate, and therefore scary, held in check by the upper class politeness of all the characters. I'm sure people would compare this to Hitchcock for its personal suspense, its stylish attempts at mind games, or for echoes of "Gaslight" and "Rebecca." It's a British movie, released by Warner Bros., and it might suffer from a sense of imitating Hollywood rather than making its own mark (as Carol Reed might have a few years earlier). The British director here is Michael Anderson, who left no real imprint on film history, and the leading actor is also British, Richard Todd, and he's more handsome than compelling. So why see the film? The palette of grey tones of the deep focus photography? The torturous plot with too much talking? Anne Baxter, alone, rising above? Maybe, almost. There is enough in these elements to almost work, actually. Convolutions. And Julian Bream's wonderful guitar.

CHASE A CROOKED SHADOW is a low budget British crime thriller with a simple plot well brought to the screen. Anne Baxter plays a lonely woman living in a big villa who is visited by a stranger who claims to be her brother, previously thought dead. The man assimilates himself into her life, gradually sending her over the edge, while friends and associates refuse to believe that he's not who he claims to be. This very much plays out as a psycho-thriller like the many such films that Hammer Films made during the 1960s (A TASTE OF FEAR, for example). The writing is clever and literate, successfully building to a twist climax that you won't see coming despite all the guesswork you'll be putting in. Richard Todd and Herbert Lom make up the excellent little cast.

The idea behind "Cast a Crooked Shadow" is really neat....it's what they did with it that really, really disappointed me and left me irritated. After all, with such a great idea, surely they could have dealt with it better than this mess of a film!When the film begins, Kimberly Prescott (Anne Baxter) is taking control of her family's estate in Spain. It seems that her father killed himself and she's the surviving heir. However, soon her brother arrives and this is a SERIOUS problem since he is dead!! No, he's NOT a zombie but a man who is claiming to be her brother. She KNOWS he's a phony, as she saw her brother's dead body. But the man has all the documentation to prove he IS her brother! And, soon he brings folks into the home and soon Kimberly is a virtual prisoner due to these strangers! How is she to resolve all this, as they probably are going to kill her and the police think she's nuts!So why did I eventually feel cheated? Well, how all this was resolved....it was terrible. And, I have no idea why they chose to run away from the menacing fake brother angle and where the film eventually chose to go. It didn't work and the big confession scene at the end was ridiculous. A BIG misfire.

I have to admit, I am a sucker for a plot with a good twist. The problem is they don't grow on trees. Think of the films of recent years and I can only come up with two, "The Usual Suspects" and "The Sixth Sense". Both come into the category of being worth a second look to see how they work and both pass the credibility test with flying colours. There was that detective novelist of yesteryear, Agatha Christie. I lapped up practically every one of her tales as a teenager and a young man. She must have tried out every permutation of the twist imaginable, always giving the satisfaction that, even if you did not guess it, the person who "dun" it was psychologically the only possible candidate. After "Aggie" the detective novel was never quite the same again. By trying to write "real" novels of supposedly literary quality, most writers in this field seemed more interested in realism than clever twists with the result that I rather lost interest in the genre. Again there are very few good twist movies from the time I grew up with cinema. "Les Diaboliques" and "So Long at the Fair" remain excellent examples that give pleasure on repeated showings even with the element of surprise missing. Worth mentioning that, although not quite on their level, I actually discovered a good little twist movie the other day from the same period, "Chase a Crooked Shadow" starring Anne Baxter and Richard Todd. Anne Baxter is in much the same sort of predicament as Jean Simmons in "So Long at the Fair". Instead of her brother disappearing, Anne's supposedly dead brother turns up as someone she does not recognise. She spends much of the film trying to convince friends and police that Richard Todd is not her brother but of course no-one believes her. I suppose that ultimately "Chase a Crooked Shadow" lacks the sense of style of the others I have mentioned. Michael Anderson's direction is rather pedestrian although he does manage a couple of sudden character appearances that made me jump. I don't suppose I shall watch it again as I rather think it has given up all it has to offer but I would certainly recommend it to lovers of Grand Guignol as an hour and a half of mildly pleasurably viewing.