Evelyn Venable 2/5

Note: This week we are examining some movies with Evelyn Venable. She and her agent somehow got the studio to agree not to assign her bit parts so in 1934 and 1935 so she appeared in substantial roles. In the opening scene in this movie, Venable in a wedding dress is breathtakingly up there with Ann Harding in a wedding dress in Paris Bound.

Double Door
1934 / 1:14
Tagline: “She'll make your flesh creep and your blood run cold”
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This suspense movie opens with a wedding held by one of Manhattan’s old money families. Two spinster sisters are seeing their half-brother Rip married to Ann, a nurse from humble origins. Older sister Victoria, a domestic tyrant, looks down on Ann as an upper servant. The younger sister Caroline, though dominated by Victoria’s demands, welcomes Ann as a breath of life in the gloomy mansion furnished with late Victorian monstrosities.

Mary Morris reprises Victoria whom she played on Broadway for 140 performances. She is a portrait in horror, looking eaten up by hard prejudices and old money. Starting with having The Wedding March cut off in the middle, Victoria is determined to spoil the lives of the newlyweds as thoroughly as she has fouled her own and Carrie’s lives. Victoria’s cruelty to Ann seems especially malicious, as deliberate studied unkindness always is.

It is no surprise that after only a couple of months in the ghastly mansion, Ann is at the edge of her reason. She sees an old boyfriend for comfort and advice. This innocent meeting is exploited by Victoria to drive a wedge between Rip and Ann. She calls a family meeting so that a private detective can report on his surveillance of the movements of blameless Ann. The climax of this short movie is a rocker, with the last fifteen minutes presenting almost unbearable tension.

We movie-goers may wonder why the oppressed have never protested or rebelled against Victoria’s yoke. Raised with Victoria, Caroline has from the time she was a little child been intimidated and coerced by her older sister. Raised by Victoria when his mother died when he was seven, Rip’s spirit was broken a long time ago. He is so demoralized that it is inconceivable for him to crawl out from under his own cowardice and shame at not protecting his own half-sister in the past and his wife in the present. Rip is afraid of gossip and scenes nor can he imagine living any other way, i.e. on his own two feet.

Victoria is nice to the portly poodle but awful to people. New to psychological warfare, Ann makes excuses for the tyrant because Victoria is old and lonely so it’s understandable that she's mean and hateful. Miser Victoria argues that her tyranny is a price family members have to pay for wealth they all live on. With a menacing look on her face, Victoria looks at people the way a king cobra looks at a mongoose, thus imposing her will through sheer stubbornness and killing the victim’s initiative to run or resist.

This Pre-Code movie is based on stage play, but suffers no staid staginess that mars early talkies based on plays like Holiday (1930). Microphones, lighting, and shots from unexpected angles had gone a long way in only four years. This effort definitely looks like a movie. For instance, the lighting and the camera angles on Mary Morris’ face make her look particularly feverish and sinister.  As for Pre-Code themes, I wonder if Rip’s chronicle to Ann of his sleeping in the same room as Victoria as a boy would indicate possible – ugh, it doesn’t bear thinking of, even for those wild Pre-Code days.

Venable’s fine performance brings out Ann’s changing attitude from hope that Victoria will reconcile herself to the marriage to certainty that Victoria’s malevolence will never change. Anne Revere, also reprising Caroline from the stage, overacts here and there but makes us see that Caroline’s warmth has somehow remained indomitable despite Victoria’s incessant browbeating. Carrie’s compassion is a miracle, a tribute to the human spirit. Kent Taylor as Rip conveys that he really loves Ann. His tenderness with her is sweet, but overall like a lot of male actors back then he doesn’t have much going in the pizazz department.

This performance was Mary Morris’ single work for Hollywood. Morris returned to the stage where she felt more at home. She may have felt uneasy with or contemptuous of Hollywood’s plans to typecast her in horror roles. One wonders if she noted Hollywood’s treatment of Maria Ouspenskaya, a genius and teacher of acting.