Almost a decade after he made the original screen adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s Gaslight (1940), Thorold Dickinson was drafted in at the last minute to replace Rodney Ackland at the helm of The Queen of Spades, an adaptation of Alexander Pushkin short story. Beautifully designed and shot (Dickinson and his team manage a convincing St Petersburg in the confines of the far-from-ideal Welwyn Studios in Welwyn garden City where shooting would be interrupted by noise from a nearby railway line and the neighbouring breakfast cereal factory) It’s one of the most atmospheric of ghost films.
Adapted by Ackland and Arthur Boys, it’s a classic Faustian tale of sin, guilt, greed, ambition and poetic justice. Captain Suvorin (Anton Walbrook) a brooding engineer in the Imperial Russian Army is haunted by his lowly status and longs to climb the ladder, rising through the ranks both military and social. Although he refuses to take part in the gambling craze that is sweeping the army, he becomes intrigued when he hears of the aged Countess Ranevskaya (Edith Evans) who as a young woman entered into a pact with the Devil, selling her soul to learn the secret of winning at cards. Suvorin tracks her down and inveigles his way into the affections of her young ward Lizavetta (Yvonne Mitchell), using her to get close to the reclusive Countess. But when he frightens her to death, she returns from the grave to haunt him, driving him mad just as he seems set to achieve everything he ever desired.
The supernatural seeps slowly, insidiously into the film. The first half is a claustrophobic period piece, a study of greed and incipient madness and only in the latter stages, when Suvorin is stalked by the haunting presence of Ranevskaya, does the film fully commit to horror. But when it does, it does it in considerable style – the Countess’ ghost, never seen, first announces itself as the eerie sound of her crinoline dress dragging along the corridor outside Suvorin’s room before bursting in in a cacophony of noise (the sound of a jet aircraft engine running backwards forms the bulk of the unearthly howl) and an inexplicable raging wind. There are moments earlier in the film that hint at the horrors to come – in a flashback, we hear Ranevskaya’s scream as she enters the room of, presumably, the Devil as she sells her soul though, perhaps thankfully, we never see what happened to her.
Dickinson’s use of sound is impressive throughout, from stretches of near silence through a ticking clock that stops as the Countess dies to the unearthly roar that announces her arrival in Suvorin’s room. But it’s the photography of Otto Heller (later to shoot The Ladykillers (1955), Peeping Tom (1960) and The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (1964) among many others) that impresses the most. With its towering shadows and inky pools of darkness, Heller’s work recalls the German expressionist films of the 1920s. Art director William Kellner’s sets are extraordinary too – as noted, Welwyn Studios wasn’t exactly the best equipped of studios – when it opened in 1928 it was state-of-the-art but by the late 40s it was looking a bit long in the tooth and a decade later it closed for good – but Kellner worked small miracles there, not only creating lavish interior sets but also stretches of St Petersburg streets. It all adds up to a marvellous Gothic atmosphere punctured only at the last minute by an entirely unnecessary “uplifting” ending.
The cast is excellent, with Walbrook being particularly impressive as the tortured Suvorin, his descent into madness capably portrayed by both Walbrook and Dickinson who plunges him into a swirl of surreal, expressionist images as the madness takes hold. The mightily bewigged Edith Evans struggles with some not entirely convincing old-age makeup but sells the Countess’ guilt and fear very well, especially in the scene where Suvorin confronts her, demanding she tell him the secret, sagging wearily into her chair, her eyes haunted by memories of what she’s done. Yvonne Mitchell gets her first screen credit and further down the running order are any number of familiar faces, including Ronald Howard, Miles Malleson, Athene Seyler and Michael Medwin.
That Dickinson pulled all this together with only a few days preparation is extraordinary – contemporary directors who sometimes take months, even years, to get a film off the ground could learn a thing or two. Dickinson got the job after Ackland fell out with Walbrook and he recommended Dickinson on the strength of their working relationship on Gaslight. It can’t have escaped the attention of either man that there are similarities in the roles that Walbrook played – men targeting vulnerable young women for financial gain.
Dickinson only made seventeen films (“It’s terribly difficult to direct a film you don’t want to make, ” he once said. “That’s why I’ve made so few”) and was all but forgotten at the time of his death in 1984. But in recent years he’s been rediscovered and his work re-evaluated. Martin Scorsese hailed The Queen of Spades “a masterpiece, one of the very best films of the 40s” and “one of the few true classics of supernatural cinema.” In 2009, after decades of obscurity (it was at one time thought to have been lost altogether) it was restored and re-released to great critical acclaim.
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