THE MAD ROOM

US, 1969, 93 minutes, Colour.
Shelley Winters, Skip Ward, Stella Stevens, Beverley Garland, Michael Burns.
Directed by Bernard Girard.

The Mad Room is an effective and rather creepy thriller. It is a remake of Ladies in Retirement which was filmed in 1941 with Ida Lupino, Louis Hayward, Evelyn Keyes and Elsa Lanchester. This time Stella Stevens plays the unsteady maid and Shelley Winters plays Mrs Armstrong, the eccentric old lady.

The film builds up its atmosphere, has Stella Stevens going over the top, Shelley Winters also getting a chance to perform in mad style.

The director, Bernard Girard, worked principally in television but made Dead Heat on a Merry- Go- Round for cinemas in the mid-1960s.

1. The significance, the tone of the title? The impact of the horror? Why do horror thrillers appeal to audiences, what conventions did this film use? How well?

2. The style of the credits with their blood and murder, the style of the papers and the information, the flower? How well did this set a tone for the film?

3. The impression of the children? Audience response to them, to them as individuals? The sequence of their training and their coping? Audience awareness of their reputation?

4, How did this contrast with Ellen and her job? How well did the film show Ellen as an ordinary woman doing an ordinary job? Stella Stevens’ style? How eventually true was this? How ironic?

5. Mrs Armstrong as a character? Audience dislike of her? Shelley Winters in this style of role? What qualities of performance made Mrs Armstrong a monster of woman? Did you expect her to be murdered?

6. The job and servants’ work? relationship with Mrs Armstrong? Mrs Armstrong and the memories of her stepson, her charity, society gossips, her friendships? How well were these characters integrated into the plot and to the thriller?

7. The relationship between Helen and her fiance? Conventional romance in the background of a horror thriller? How important was this for the culmination of the film?

8. Helen and her relationship to her brother and sister? The film showing her sense of responsibility for them? Her keeping the information from Mrs Armstrong? How deceptive and ironic was this relationship?

9. The drama of the first meal? The discussion of the need for a mad room, the nature of the mad room?

10. Mrs Armstrong and her discovery of the mad room? The heightening of tension? The explanation?

11. The macabre aspects of Mrs Armstrong's death? the blood and gore, the hand, similarity of the early parents' murder? Audience suspicions?

12. The varying suspicions, the drama of the sequences of getting rid of the body?

13. How convincing was the change in Helen? The blood and the flowers?

14. The dilemma of the brother and sister and their relationship to men? The discovery of Ellen's true motivation?

15. The irony of the dog and the severed hand?

16. The method of the death of the dog and the ending? How appropriate for this kind of film?

17. Was the film too melodramatic or appropriately melodramatic? The use of colour, location and photography? The music, touches of comedy, the minor characters eg, the drunken wife, all combining into effective melodrama?