Nightmare
I dedicate this review to Moon, my great nurse.
This sordid and chilling family drama unfolds in a quiet American town, where a confirmed bachelor lives with his two sisters — one of them rather hysterical, the other jealous, sickly, and possessive.
The quiet, dull life of the trio is upended by the arrival of a young woman with whom the bachelor, George Sanders, falls in love. Sanders is a magnificent actor deployed here in a register diametrically opposed to his usual image as seducer or aristocrat. Here he is a timid provincial bourgeois, dominated by his sisters — and above all by the younger one, Geraldine Fitzgerald, who will do everything in her power to prevent her brother from marrying, which will eventually provoke his revenge.
The theme is, then, the tyrannical dynamic between these two women and their bachelor brother, and it is based on a stage play.
Robert Siodmak constructs this sordid atmosphere with real talent — a bourgeois household in which three unmarried siblings have forged among themselves a strange relationship loaded with frustrations, resentments, obsessions, and repressed desires.
Fitzgerald is magnificent in her portrayal of the pretty, spinsterish sister, whose jealousy toward her brother carries something diseased and incestuous about it: a woman capable of anything to prevent her brother from building his own life with an intruder, the attractive Ella Raines — an actress who, despite her beauty, never managed to break out of supporting roles and retired in the late 1950s.
Don’t miss it. Thank you once more, Ella Raines.
In the first version of the screenplay — and there were several — the film ended with the sister’s execution in the electric chair and the brother’s confinement to a psychiatric hospital. But the famous Hays Code censorship forced Universal to change that caustic and amoral ending. Over Siodmak’s objections, the final version transformed that sordid drama into a nightmare from which George Sanders wakes up at the end of the film.
CARLOS