clanciai Joe Mankiewicz's first film as a director is like all his subsequent ones a paragon of clarity and thoroughness, attaching much attention to every detail, while at the same time the actors are generously given free room to reign. Consequently in all his films, all actors appear outstanding, especially in his early ones. His next film was even darker than this one, maybe his deepest dive into the noir genre, "Somewhere in the Night" about the mystery of a lost identity and even more intriguing than this one - here Vincent Price completely dominates the drama by you in suspense as you never can know or even guess what he is up to. He appears as the perfect gentleman, and yet you must suspect that he has terrible secrets to hide, which don't become evident until the very end, as he masks them so well. Gene Tierney is equally good, and they match each other perfectly - just previously they had been together in Otto Preminger's priceless "Laura".The other actors are good as well, especially Walter Huston as the terrible but honest father, while you must observe the young Jessica Tandy entering the scene after Gene Tierney has been married. You can't recognize her, but her performance as a cripple is quite remarkable.Alfred Newman's music is equally perfect, never too intrusive but properly enhancing the Gothic atmosphere whenever it is stressed. Only Glenn Langan as the doctor is a bit simplistic, while the tenants are impressive in every scene. A special tribute to the always admirable Anne Revere as Gene Tierney's wise and hardy mother.

Dalbert Pringle Set in the year 1844, Dragonwyck, from my point of view, was nothing but a silly piece of overwrought, melodramatic fluff.Regardless of it having an expensively polished look to it, Dragonwyck (from 1946) was worthless trash that was obviously being backed by big, Hollywood bucks. Pairing the frigid beauty, Gene Tierney, with the effeminate, Vincent Price, as a pair of hot, on-screen lovers, was a gross miscalculation that clearly reduced Dragonwyck's romantic angle to the level of being downright laughable and ludicrous.These two marginally talented actors couldn't have been more mismatched and unconvincing as a couple of passion-starved sweethearts had they both deliberately gone out of their way to persuade me that they secretly loathed each other with the burning fire of vehemence.Dragonwyck's disappointingly trite and predictable, little story tells the tale of the common, pretty, god-fearing, farm girl, Miranda Wells from Greenwich, Connecticut, who, one day (right out of the blue) is suddenly invited to come to the luxuriously vast estate of her distant cousin, the rich, pompous and pretentious dandy, Nicholas Van Ryn, in order to be a companion to his somewhat strange and melancholy, 8 year-old daughter, Katrine, whom he and his sickly, ever-complaining wife, Johanna, have absolutely no time, nor any love, for.Once Miranda arrives at Van Ryn's vast and ominous mansion known as "Dragonwyck" (this name is never explained), in order to fulfill her duties, that's when this film (regardless of its visual sumptuousness) quickly loses large quantities of steam and fails to even come close to living up to its intended potential and its dramatic clout. Filmed in b&w, Dragonwyck's 100-minute running time seemed more to me like 100 hours.This film did not contain one, single, likable character. And Gene Tierney, though pretty, was clearly too old to be passed off as being a believable 18 year-old.

James Hitchcock The romantic-historical novelist Anya Seton can be seen as an American equivalent of her British contemporary Daphne du Maurier, and Seton's novel "Dragonwyck" has a lot in common with du Maurier's "Rebecca", including the fact that both books are clearly influenced by Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre". All three novels have at their centre a young woman from a relatively humble background who marries a wealthy and charismatic older landowner belonging to the gentry or aristocracy. In each case the older man has been married before and is hiding a guilty secret connected with his first wife. "Dragonwyck", like "Jane Eyre" but unlike "Rebecca" which has a twentieth-century setting, is set in the first half of the nineteenth century. The story takes place in upstate New York during the 1840s, a period when the Hudson River valley was still dominated by the Patroons, the descendants of wealthy seventeenth-century Dutch settlers who owned large tracts of land which they controlled in a similar manner to European feudal aristocrats. By the 1840s, however, the autocratic power of the Patroons was being challenged by their tenant farmers, who resented paying what they saw as exorbitant rents and tithes, in what have become known as the "Anti-Rent Wars". The heroine, Miranda Wells, is the daughter of a poor Connecticut farmer. She is invited by Nicholas Van Ryn, a Patroon and a distant cousin of her mother, to come and live at his country house Dragonwyck Manor as a companion to his daughter. Dragonwyck, as one might expect in a melodrama of this nature, is an immense, gloomy Gothic mansion, even though we learn that it dates back to the seventeenth century when Gothic architecture was out of fashion. (Any Gothic building in 1840s America would probably have been of very recent construction). On the surface Nicholas seems charming and sophisticated, but he soon reveals a darker side to his character. He ignores his wife Johanna and his daughter Katrine, and treats his tenants with an arrogant condescension. Something else which shocks Miranda, who has grown up in a deeply religious family, is that in private Nicholas makes no secret of his atheistic opinions, although in public he tries to keep up the image of a devout churchgoer. The servants hint darkly that both the house and the Van Ryn family are cursed. And yet, despite all this, Miranda falls deeply in love with her cousin and, after Johanna dies of a sudden illness, marries him despite the vehement opposition of her parents and despite the fact that she has another admirer in the handsome, politically radical young doctor Jeff Turner. The plot then develops as one might expect, with Nicholas turning out to have a sinister past and the marriage proving to be far from happy. The ending of the film, however, is not that of the novel, probably because the producers felt that Seton's denouement, which involved a steamboat race on the Hudson River, would be too costly to reproduce on screen. The film is not the sort of "heritage cinema" costume drama with which we are familiar today. Ever since late fifties, and certainly since the sixties, it has been customary for films set in the 1800s to be made in colour, often sumptuous colour, with an emphasis on a detailed recreation of the costumes and furnishings of the era. "Dragonwyck" would doubtless have been more visually attractive had it been made in this way, but in 1946 the economics of film-making meant that colour was still the exception rather than the rule and it was still common for period dramas to be made in black-and-white, despite the precedent of "Gone with the Wind" from several years earlier. (Gene Tierney, who stars as Miranda here, was to act in another example, "The Ghost and Mrs Muir", the following year). Vincent Price succeeds well in conveying both sides of Nicholas's personality, the charming and the sinister. This was one of his early roles, but one that looks forward to the sort of parts in melodramas and horror movies he played later in his career, such as the Poe/Corman cycle of the sixties. (There are certainly similarities between Nicholas and Roderick in "The Fall of the House of Usher" or Verden Fell in "The Tomb of Ligeia"). Gregory Peck was, apparently, the first choice for Van Ryn, but in this period of his career he was not an actor normally associated with villains- his Mengele in "The Boys from Brazil" came much later- and I cannot help feeling that he would not have been nearly as convincing as Price. Tierney- as she generally did- makes an adorable heroine, and there are also good contributions from Walter Huston as Miranda's strait-laced old father, nearly as autocratic as van Ryn, and from Spring Byington as the old maidservant Magda. This was the first film to be directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who took over when Ernst Lubitsch dropped out because of ill-health; he was also to direct Tierney in "The Ghost and Mrs Muir". It is not, by any means, one of Mankiewicz's greatest films, certainly not when compared to something like "All about Eve", but it is still a very decent one, a dark and haunting Gothic melodrama. 7/10

Robert J. Maxwell Stunning Gene Tierney, daughter of a down-to-earth Connecticut farmer who is a God-fearing son of the soil, is invited to stay for an extended visit with a terribly rich distant relative whom no one in the family has never met. He turns out to be Vincent Price, practicing for his later Edgar Allan Poe movies, his features emblazoned with "marks of weariness, marks of woe". He's a patroon in the Catskills and has a hundred sharecroppers working his vast estate. He's married to a mindless wife who soon dies mysteriously. This makes him available as a husband and, his being filthy rich and having a dozen servants and chilled out-of-season canolli and whatnot, Tierney falls in love with him. They marry. It develops -- well, all sorts of things develop -- and Price expires and Tierney goes back to the humble farm she's always called home.I found it all pretty dull going. The chief problem is not with the acting or the direction. That's professional enough for most of the cast. Price is tall, sinister, with a ramrod for a spine and the face of a horse. And the magnificent cinematography is by Arthur Miller who, along with Joe August, Gregg Toland, and one or two others, was an absolute genius with black and white.No, the problem is that Anya Seaton, who wrote the original novel, seems to have gorged herself on every other novel ever written about a young woman from a stern background who finds herself living in an old, dark mansion that guards some sort of secret. It's almost a pastiche, a shotgun approach. There are especially strong hints of "Rebecca" and "Jane Eyre" although none of them lead anywhere. There is, just for instance, a dark tower in which Price spends much of his time alone. No one is allowed in the chamber. And when Tierney finally discovers the secret, it's not an insane wife but something far more ordinary and tawdry, and it has no place in the narrative. The writers missed one cliché though. Tierney rides off alone in her carriage, leaving Dragonwyck and a mooning young doctor behind. The mansion is intact, whereas it should have been nothing more than a charred ruin.It's clumsily written too. Characters come and go, and events take place, with no explanation. When Tierney first arrives at Dragonwyck, the only person who seems entirely candid with her is Spring Byington as the somewhat dotty old maid. She disappears like King Lear's fool half-way through. Jessica Tandy, in an early role as an Irish maid, is "a loathsome cripple" who plays an important part in the story and yet is not there for her friend Tierney's departure. Somewhere along the line the resentful sharecroppers are given some kind of lease to buy by the governor of New York, but any important consequence was lost in the editing. Price and Dragonwyck may be poorer for the collapse of the patroon system but neither of them show it. A few cobwebs would have helped, or a rotting cake and dusty drapes. Where is Miss Haversham when you need her?The young doctor is Glen Langan, who has the mellifluous voice of an announcer on an FM radio station that plays nothing but Debussy, and the features of a mannequin in an upscale department store window. Doctors tend to be of two types in movies like this. They are either young, poor, modest country doctors, or they're mad scientists. Langan occupies the first set, except that, contrary to expectations, he may fall for Tierney (who wouldn't?) but she has no interest in him as a lover.Others might enjoy it more than I did. I liked "Rebecca" and the various versions of "Jane Eyre" but this was a long, slow slog. Good luck.