SHADOWS ON THE STAIRS
US, 1941, 64 minutes, Black and white.
Frieda Inescort, Paul Cavanagh, Heather Angel, Bruce Lester, Miles Mander, Lumsden Hare, Turhan Bey, Charles Irwin, Phyllis Barry, Mary Field.
Directed by D. Ross Lederman.
Shadows on the Stairs is based on a popular play of the late 1920s. Is a very suitable basis for this kind of film, action happening in the interiors of a London house. The setting is London, 1937, a boarding house with several lodgers – quite a mixture, some shady dealings, some intense relationships, then some murders and disappearances.
Frieda Inescort, often very haughty in the roles she played, is the landlady but much more down-to-earth although getting near hysterical after the murders. Veteran director and actor, Miles Mander, plays her rather absent-minded husband whose main attention is given to chess. Heather Angel is the daughter, Bruce Lester the playwright who lives in the house and is attracted to the daughter. Mary Field commands all the scenes she is in as a rather older what is referred to in the film as “maiden lady�, rather romantic and highly strung in her reading of poetry and caught in a crisis where she is missing her dentures and cannot reply to the police. Paul Cavanagh, who often looks suspicious, is a businessman connected with character actor, Turhan Bey, who is involved in political smuggling. There is also the maid, Phyllis Barry, who is the object of intense dislike by the landlady but who seems to be carrying on with the businessman. At one stage, a man dressed as an Indian, turban and all, climbs in window and is stabbed.
It is all very British and the cast consists of many of the British actors in Hollywood the time – and it is surprising to see that this is a Warner Brothers film.
There is plenty of dialogue, drama and melodrama, the relationship between the landlady and the businessman, his contacts with the Indian, the mysterious stabbing, the firing of the maid for dropping all the crockery, her being seen by the young couple at midnight going downstairs. There is also information where the audience knows that the playwright is actually a celebrated author living quietly to get background for his writing.
Just when it is getting very complicated about who did what, where did the disappearing people go to, what is the nature of the relationships and why is the landlady becoming so hysterical, there is one of those surprise endings where it seems that this is all the work of the playwright, and he is recounting the plot, involving them all fictitiously, as they sit forming an audience. A copout? Or a tongue in cheek ending?
