Below the Sea (1933)

It's 1933 and filmmaker Albert Rogell begins by showing us a German U boat in 1917 loaded with gold bullion. The Germans even speak German, which is an improvement on All Quiet on the Western Front, only three years earlier, and they're believable too. They take out a Norwegian ship but get suckered by an American one and sunk. Down goes the U170 and all its gold with it. There are two survivors, quickly to become one survivor because of the power of gold.

Twelve years later, the captain is back under the pseudonym of Karl Schlemming with a sneaky plan to recover the gold. He's financed by Lily, a harbourfront madam played by Esther Howard, and he relies on the deep diving skills skills of Steve McCreary, played by Ralph Bellamy who isn't just completely unlike his decent but boring heroic character who lost the leading lady in what felt like every film he was in for the next two decades, he also sounds a little like Bogie when he has a pipe stuck in the corner of his mouth. Naturally everyone is completely underhand about everything. Backstabbing is most definitely the name of the game with every end being played against every middle all the way through.

The real star though is Fay Wray, who doesn't appear for quite some time but makes herself known when she does. She was having rather a good roll, having ended 1932 with Doctor X and The Most Dangerous Game and kicked off 1933 with The Vampire Bat, Mystery of the Wax Museum and a little known picture by the name of King Kong. Following up what is really the original and arguably still definitive scream queen performance was never going to be an easy task but she takes a solid stab at it here.

She's Diane Templeton, a wealthy heiress who has got hooked on the undersea world and finances an expedition to see plenty of it. She's after adventure and she gets it, though not quite as she expects with Captain Schlemming and Steve McCreary as her key partners and Lily finding her way on board too. It's very strange seeing Ralph Bellamy playing something other than a Ralph Bellamy role, but he has fun with it and so does Fay Wray. She's interested in human beings, she says, and she wants to take him apart to see how he ticks. She gets a whole slew of great lines to throw at him and she savours them as much as her many sly grins and sideways glances.

She's also an awesome precode heroine. She's completely independent in spirit as well as wealth, free with her affections and without any hesitation in following them. She's willing and even eager to try anything at least once. She doesn't just finance the voyage, she travels on board and even takes a couple of trips underwater in the deep sea gear. She knows how to handle slides and lab gear and she's just as competent in the dark room. She's the sort of female character who isn't interested in sexual equality per se, she doesn't even give the concept of inequality a second thought. She's also delightfully contrary. My favourite line of many must be: 'He hates having his picture taken. Let's take it.' Best of all, she's willing to admit when she's wrong.

The film itself is interesting for more than just Fay Wray and Ralph Bellamy. There's a very effective storm at sea that takes down the Lily financed voyage. There's some underwater photography, including a crab camouflaging himself with rocks, which is all cool for 1933 but rather sparse in its use. The best shots come with an octopus attack which is tacky but fun, with some obvious use of models. It calls for an inevitable rescue mission with Ralph Bellamy and an underwater blowtorch rescuing a glistening Fay Wray, which has to be good, and she had to be the victim at some point, even if she doesn't get to scream! It's a hokey film but it's got plenty of joy if you know Bellamy and Wray.

The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971)

Ralph Gower is a ploughman working in 1670s England when he turns up some sort of fiendish corpse in the ground. It's not human but it's ore than animal. When he fetches the local judge to see it, it has mysteriously vanished with only the local curate in sight, chasing his pet snake. Peter Edmonton is of a higher class than a mere ploughman but he plans to marry a farmer's daughter. He brings her home, but bizarre things are happening in the attic. When she sleeps there she goes insane and when he sleeps there he's attacked by some sort of animal. Meanwhile the youths of the village are being gradually converted over to satanism and witchcraft, led by a young lady named Angel Blake.

This is a pretty effective little historical witchcraft chiller. It doesn't just put everything in a black and white context and the fact that we know many of these actors well from non-horror settings helps to ground what has become a highly fantastic genre and it becomes a strong parallel to how we do many things today. It shows how those who follow Satan can make their cause attractive to everyday people and change the way that they think, feel and act. Linda Hayden as Angel Blake is understandably evil, but Margaret, one of her key followers, is played by Michele Dotrice, best known as Betty from Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em. Seeing her believable in a witchcraft thriller is what makes this work. How she's handled reflects how many cults operate today.

Much of the rest of the cast were key players in Doctor Who, like most English actors. Reverend Fallowfield, who is set up as a paedophile by Angel Blake, is played by Anthony Ainley, the most famous and well regarded actor to play The Master. The assumption of his guilt and the way it is treated is a close parallel to the witch crazes in Scotland in the 1990s and for much of the blind trust we put in children today. Effectively then and now certain things are seen as so abhorrent that we convince ourselves that the conviction of innocent people is a small price to pay to pretend that a particular evil is being vanquished.

Cathy Vespers, a young girl raped and killed by Angel's gang, is played by Wendy Padbury, best known as Zoe, assistant to the second Doctor. Even seeing her in a film like this shocks the senses, let alone being stripped to be raped. Barry Andrews and Simon Williams also had notable recurring roles on Doctor Who.

Sh! The Octopus (1937)

Here's a real guilty pleasure and a personal favourite. Made in 1937 and only 54 minutes long, it has no pretensions to grandeur. It's a hokey B-movie that entertains through sheer energy and satisfaction at being what it is. Everyone in the film knows how hokey it is and they all have fun with their roles and the fact that it's so thoroughly jam packed full of every component part of thirties pulp mystery/horror stories that you don't have time to blink before something else happens.

We're in a lighthouse, one that hasn't been owned for twenty years. It's apparently deserted, abandoned and safe as houses, which is why 'peace loving artist' Paul Morgan buys it. However for a deserted, abandoned and safe as houses lighthouse, it's about as busy as Grand Central Station and there's the prerequisite storm raging outside. There are a couple of caretaker types: Captain Cobb and Captain Hook, and yes, Captain Hook has a hook for a hand and turns homicidal whenever he hears the ticking of a clock. There are hidden panels, hidden passages, hidden everything, out from which eyes gaze, tentacles wave and blood drips.

There are a couple of off duty detectives from Precinct 49, who are driving past when a tyre blows. They're Detectives Kelly and Dempsey and they're reading about the new police commissioner who has declared war on 'the octopus of crime' when the police band tells them about a drifting schooner, a mysterious submarine and a sighting of an octopus. These cops are bumbling cops, played by Hugh Herbert and Allen Jenkins, so they haven't got a clue what any of it all means and so associate the two statements. They think they can make a name for themselves by catching the Octopus, who they think is some master criminal.

Seconds later a girl screams and runs out of the bushes into the storm. She's Vesta Vernoff and she's the daughter of a scientist who has invented a radium ray so powerful that everyone is seeking it so they can take over the world. She's also being chased and tells stories of a murder in the secret basement of the lighthouse. When everyone gets there, they find a murdered man hanging by his feet from the roof. Given that it's a very high roof, being a lighthouse, and there are no stairs, this would seem more than a little mysterious.

Oh, and we're now about ten minutes in. Whew. For a hokey B-movie, that's already more setup to the story than most movies have story, and it doesn't even stop there. Vesta talks of a mysterious plot, mysterious phone calls and mysterious messages. She even gives the cops a mysterious note signed by the Octopus. Then there's terrifying laughs, shipwrecked women, giant spider webs, murder attempts, blackouts, poison gas... I don't think there's anything that isn't in this film! Naturally nobody is who they seem or even who they say they are and everyone is trying to doublecross everyone.

The cast are hardly stars but they have a riot. Hugh Herbert was a popular comedian of the thirties, who jittered, stammered and floundered around exclaiming 'woohoo' at everything. I'e seen him in many films of the era, probably most notably Merry Wives of Reno, which is another screwball riot of a comedy that most people have never heard of. Allen Jenkins was everyone's sidekick: not just to Herbert in 11 films (5 in 1937 alone) but also to James Cagney (5 films together), Humphrey Bogart (7 films together), Edward G Robinson (4 together plus the much later Robin and the 7 Hoods), seemingly anyone who starred in a Warner Brothers film of the era. My favourites are when he teamed up as a double act with Frank McHugh (13 collaborations, including the outrageous Swing Your Lady).

Marcia Ralston has the last of the three lead credits. She was the first wife of Phil Harris, who memorably voiced many characters in Disney films such as Baloo in The Jungle Book, Little John in Robin Hood and O'Malley in The Aristocats. Marcia didn't have as memorable a career but she made a string of movies over a decade and a half. I'll be seeing her again shortly in Men are Such Fools with Humphrey Bogart (and Hugh Herbert).

Then there's the octopus and an effects job that rings so stunningly true I haven't forgotten it from my last viewing two years ago. A nice old lady turns into a witch in a few frames of film and I still haven't worked out how they did it. I did another set of rewinding, frame advancing and trying to fathom it and the only thing I can think is that they touched up the film itself, by playing with the negatives or something similar. But this is a low budget B movie from 1937. Why would they choose to do that? I still don't get it.

Near Dark (1987)

I don't know how anyone could not like a movie in which Lance Henriksen is a confederate vampire. This particular one also has Tim Thomerson and Bill Paxton, and just to add to the good reasons to see it there's a score by Tangerine Dream. The real lead is Adrian Pasdar, playing a young buck from the backwoods of Oklahoma called Caleb Colton, who is unfortunate enough to be attracted to a free spirited vampire called Mae. She's pretty and everyday and different all at once and she's played very nicely indeed by Jenny Wright, who was shaking off the Brat Pack connections with a role this dark.

I'm sure it'll be no surprise to find out that she turns him into something like her. The real catch is that it's nearly dawn and his truck won't move so he gets to walk across the fields while the sun rises and starts to slowly burn him to death. He gets home, after all he's only just been turned, but just as he does, slowly melting, he's grabbed by Mae's memorable pack of vampires in their camper van right in front of his dad and little sister. He gets to start adjusting to his life of night while his dad searches for him.

Memorable is a perfect word for Jesse Hooker's vampires. This is 1987 and vampires were being reinvented in every medium there is. It's far enough back to have been released the same year as The Lost Boys but this plays a lot more seriously. There aren't any Frog brothers here, but there's crazy Bill Paxton as Severen, very 80s looking Jenette Goldstein as Diamondback, Joshua John Miller (half-brother of Jason Patric from The Lost Boys) as a child vampire: big on the inside but small on the outside. And then there's Jesse Hooker himself, played by a wild looking Henriksen who fought for the south.

What makes them special is that they're a solid extrapolation of what vampires would be like. They don't turn into bats, they can't fly, they don't wear capes, they don't sleep in coffins, they don't rise from the dead and keeping out of the sun is a serious problem. They're also far from heroes but that doesn't mean they're the distillation of pure evil. They're people who are different. This approach is one of the key reasons that the film is so successful at what it does: as unearthly as these characters are, they're real right down to the dirt, the lack of makeup on any of them and the matter of fact reactions they have to things that would certainly not be matter of fact to us. The story is courtesy of Eric Red, who also wrote The Hitcher, and director Kathryn Bigelow, who also made Blue Steel and Strange Days. It gets better every time I see it.

Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior (2003)

Somewhere in Thailand is a village called Nong Pradu and every 24 years there's a festival dedicated to Ong-Bak, a statue revered in the village. Part of the festival includes a race up a tree to capture a flag, and it's a particularly brutal race between a whole host of young men coated in mud who aren't held back from throwing each other out of the tree. Winner of the race is Ting, played by Tony Jaa, and when the head of Ong-Bak is severed and stolen a couple of weeks before the key ceremony, it's up to Ting to travel to Bangkok and retrieve it before the village dries up and dies, just like the equivalent village did in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom without their sacred stones.

Tony Jaa is the western name of Panom Yeerum, who became a sensation through worldwide circulation of this film. It doesn't take him long to get into a fight in Bangkok but he denies us a long drawn out battle by taking the opponent down with one very heavy hitting Muay Thai move. It doesn't take long for him to be back in the action again, handling stunts and fights with equal aplomb. He gets to team up with another Nong Pradu villager, Humlae, who is running scams in the capital with a sassy female sidekick called Muay Lek.

Jaa runs like Jackie Chan and especially handles stunts in a similar way. There's one long chase a third of the way in where he shows us what he can do: hurdling cars, leaping between panes of glass, through loops of barbed wire, you name it. Very impressive indeed, and Petchtai Wongkamlao, who plays Humlae, is the Sammo Hung to Jaa's Chan. The instant replay are very Jackie Chan too, but there's more than Jackie in the fighting: Jaa has an economy of movement that reminds a lot more of Bruce Lee but in a very different style. There's some Jean Claude Van Damme, some other western fighters and a lot of what I guess we'll now refer to as Tony Jaa.

There is a story in here but it's pretty routine. Once we're established, it's on with the stunts, then the fights, then the fights that include stunts, and the stunts that include fights, because after all that's what the film is about. The story really doesn't matter. Jaa and his cohorts hit hard and we really feel the blows connect. Ouch! And I really mean OUCH! It's been a while since I've seen a martial arts film where I've reacted to the blows the way I did here. Respect to the new man.

Man Bites Dog (1992)

Directors: Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel and Benoît Poelvoorde
Star: Benoît Poelvoorde

Here's a completely unique film that I haven't seen in far too long. It arrived at the same time as other films exploring the modern culture of violence like Bad Lieutenant and Natural Born Killers. However those were American films made by directors and starring actors we've actually heard of, so were promptly either banned outright in England or handed a long delay before eventual release. Man Bites Dog is a Belgian film made by a bunch of film students, shot in black and white and in French, so naturally it was released uncut with an 18 rating and nobody noticed except some very obscure film fans like me.

It begins as it means to go on, with a brutal garrotting on a train. The killer is Benoît Poelvoorde, one of the writers/directors of the film, who like most of the characters in the film has the same name as the actor. He's the subject of a documentary, being made by the directors of our film, again using their real names. He's a cheerful and sociable chap, who just happens to be a serial killer. He happily explains the details of his business to the camera, while he's going about it. He explains his formulae for weighing down different types of bodies in preparation for dumping them. He explains how and why he picks his targets and his techniques and tools of the trade. In between murders, he waxes lyrical about life and love and everything else from race to architecture to poetry. He doesn't tend to hide much, for a serial killer, visiting the crew back to meet his family, to watch him accompany a musician friend on piano or even to the home of a prostitute he visits.

The point of course is to explore, in the structure of a dark comedy, modern culture's obsession with an glorification of violence and killing along with an important question: how far can journalists go in reporting something without becoming part of what they're reporting on? In this case not very far. For the first killing we see, the camera crew merely shoot the action. For the second, they help to light the scene. Soon they're financing their film from money stolen from the homes of elderly victims. It doesn't take too long before the production crew's sound man gets to be accidentally added to the death toll.

It all highlights the doublethink very well indeed. Rémy eulogises Patrick the sound man, obviously broken up by his death and deeply concerned for Patrick's pregnant girlfriend. He explains how it's hard to talk about the death of his friend, seemingly completely oblivious of the fact that he's been making a film in which his subject has been happily killing people. Eventually of course the crew assist in the killing itself, thus becoming literally part of the crimes. It's a stunning film, not just during the film and during the silent end credits where you get to reflect on what has gone before, but later as time goes by and it starts to come to mind while watching other TV shows, documentaries or news footage. And other, more obviously fictional films too...

Manhunter (1986)

With the plan of watching The Silence of the Lambs tomorrow night and reviewing it for my book on the IMDb Top 250, it seemed like an appropriate thing to watch Manhunter tonight. I love everything about this film, have seen it a number of times and have introduced it to many people. I also firmly believe that not only is the film better than The Silence of the Lambs, which I also enjoy and admire, but Brian Cox's performance as Hannibal Lecktor is better than the Oscar winning turn of Sir Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter. The only thing I haven't done is watch them back to back to be sure. After all both are true classics.

We start with Dennis Farina trying to coax William Petersen back into working for the FBI in order to catch a serial killer that already has two families to his credit. He's working on a lunar cycle and they're running out of time before the expected next victim. Petersen is the best but he's also retired, after serious mental trauma incurred catching Hannibal Lecktor. Farina and Petersen are hardly minor names in the business, though this dates back to 1986, well before Petersen would become Grissom in CSI. Naturally he takes the bait and becomes far more entangled in the search for the Tooth Fairy than he ever intended to be.

Petersen is simply awesome here. Every time I see the movie I see new facets of both his performance and those of other members of the cast and crew and find myself grinning in admiration all over again. He's very matter of fact, very capable, very professional, but also very different from anyone else investigating the case. They're cops, they're investigators, but Will Graham is there because he has an understanding of why insane people do what they do, what makes them tick, but he can't go too far down that path without feeling some of what they feel. That's why he needed psychiatric treatment after Lecktor.

The film is gorgeously constructed and gorgeously shot. Michael Mann is very inconsistent with his films, but when he gets it right he's a genius. He got it right in Heat and he got it incredibly right here. He may well have got it right in The Insider too, but I haven't caught that one yet. On the hand he certainly didn't get it right in The Keep. Here I'm seeing a lot of obvious skill, in composition and choice of architecture but a lot of subtle work too. It's in the way the camera moves; when it pans and when it jumps and when it switches back and forth from person to person; how the scenes transition. It's in the speed things move, not just the camera but the conversations.

There's so much subtlety throughout the whole first conversation between Graham and Lecktor that there should be cinematic textbooks written about it. There are subtle signals to show who has the upper hand at every step, how and when it switches, when control is gained and lost. It's genius acting, writing and directing and it's about as perfect a scene as I think I've ever been privileged to witness. Petersen is amazing here but so is Brian Cox as Dr Lecktor. Hopkins was great but Cox to me will always be Lecktor. Hopkins gave an awesome performance but Cox went beyond that in my mind, from playing a part to being Lecktor. For him not to be recognised as a genius for this performance is truly outrageous. He is hardly in this film but he's amazingly memorable.

There are four genius performance here on screen, not that anyone in the entire film lets the side down. The third is Stephen Lang who plays Freddy Lounds, a tabloid journalist for The Tattler, and he's a totally sleazy yet very believable piece of work. I've seen him elsewhere and couldn't even recognise him. That's a really good sign of a really good actor. The fourth is Tom Noonan, playing the Tooth Fairy, Francis Dollarhyde. We don't even see him until over half the way through the movie and when we first see him, we only see the bottom half of his legs, and we're still impacted. When we finally see his face and Noonan says 'Here I am' and puts a gap between the second and third word, we're sold. Further scenes just amaze, including a very strange love scene. Ralph Fiennes in the dire remake Red Dragon doesn't even come close.

At one point Francis Dollarhyde tells Freddy Lounds that he owes him awe. That's what I feel when watching this movie, even though I've seen it many times before. I'm awed at the achievement.

Spring Fever (1927)

Before Our Dancing Daughters Joan Crawford was still working in supporting roles. Here she is with the second credit but not a lot to do. Fourth on the bill George K Arthur is far more important. He's Mr Waters, who runs some shipping line or other and who far prefers the game of golf. The catch is that dreaming of holes in one doesn't make him a good golfer in the slightest and he has a job hitting the hole on the putting green that takes up most of his office. Luckily for him, his shipping clerk Jack Kelly is a superb player, which he discovers when firing someone.

Instead of getting fired himself by chipping something through a glass window, Kelly finds himself teaching the boss how not to slice, right down an aisle full of vases. His reward is two weeks as a guest at the Oakmont Country Club, far better than the Maple Leaf Municipal Golf Links where he has a hard job getting a round in before work starts. Kelly is played by William Haines, which means that this is a formula story that is far more fun than it ought to be.

Haines tended to play characters way too big for their boots, who promptly alienate everyone else in the story, get their comeuppance two thirds of the way through the movie before finally redeeming themselves in the end. Surprisingly here he's far more likeable than he usually is to start out, but soon he's up to par on the obnoxious front with unwanted advice and more than a dollop of laughing at other people's misfortune. His comedown is a little more subtle here than usual but it's there all the same.

Joan Crawford is the love interest, naturally, by the name of Allie Monte. Kelly discovers her at the club when registering, and falls for her hard. It's always fun watching Billy Haines, one of the most openly gay men in the Hollywood of the 20s, pursue the ladies, especially when other ladies are pursuing him. Someone in the scriptwriting department must have had a sense of humour because there are a few jokes in there that take advantage of what the audiences already knew. One minute he's almost tapping another man on the back end, the next he's 'straightening' someone out.

Haines was always fun to watch and he played the talented jerk very well, even when it's plainly obvious that he isn't a great golfer. At least it's more believable than in the few movies where he's supposed to be a great American football player or a tough Marine. One example of that came next for both Crawford, Haines and director Edward Sedgwick: 1928's West Point. This is more believable and at least as much fun. My only problem with it is that it seems to be quite a bit longer than IMDb or TCM say it is, so my recording missed the ending.

The Lineup (1958)

A porter throws Philip Dressler's suitcase into a cab down at the docks and the cabbie sets off at high speed before Dressler can get in. A quick couple of collisions and one dead cop later, the cabbie dies too and Lt Ben Guthrie and Insp Fred Asher have an investigation on their hands. The Lineup was a film version of a TV series that run from 1954 to 1960, with Warner Anderson and Marshall Reed reprising their roles. The villains, Dancer and Julian, don't appear in the series, and are played by Eli Wallach, Ugly from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and Robert Keith, father of Brian Keith and boyfriend of Peg Entwistle, a failed actress who committed suicide by jumping off the H in the Hollywood sign.

We're in California in 1958, therefore this is a TCM showing courtesy of guest presenter James Ellroy and the whole thing revolves around heroin, the only difference from usual being that this is San Francisco not Los Angeles. Dressler was just one of many tourists fingered as carriers without their knowing it, the bad guys inserting the drugs into merchandise they bought in eastern countries and collecting it from them at a later date, after they'd carried them unknowing through customs.

The story plays very well indeed, very believably alternating between how the bad guys operate and how the cops investigate. I was really impressed with the matter of fact nature of Anderson and Reed, but then they'd been playing these characters for five years and 150 or so half hour episodes. It also plays tough, definitely for keeps and we're left in doubt as to how far people will go to get what they want. There are some brutally hard hits too, for 1958. While you can see more blood and tissue on any random primetime TV show nowadays, this one carried a punch.

Then again it's an early Don Siegel movie, he who went on to such lily livered wimp out movies as Dirty Harry, so maybe that isn't too surprising. I was really impressed about this film version of a TV series that I'd never heard of and really ought to seek out the series.

The Bad Seed (1956)

My better half knows Patty McCormack from a whole host of TV shows and I think I only know her from last year's Psycho Hillbilly Cabin Massacre!, a fun little film that I saw as part of a horror shorts collection at the International Horror & Scifi Festival here in Arizona. My lass also knows this film, as a childhood favourite, but she hasn't seen it in years. It leapt out of the aisle at Fry's at her so we get the rare opportunity of watching an old black and white movie on DVD for a change.

At 11 years of age, McCormack debuted here as eight year old Rhoda Penmark, though she had made a couple of appearances at the age of six. Rhoda is the angelic child of the Penmark household, blonde haired and blue eyed and all sweetness and light. She's the pride of Col Kenneth and Christine Penmark, but mom still worries a little. She's not sure that Rhoda should be quite so grown up at eight and there are some powerful tantrums. Then Claude Daigle, the boy who wins the school penmanship contest over Rhoda, turns up dead by drowning at the school picnic and with every additional snippet of information that comes to light, Christine Penmark can't help but suspect her own angelic daughter.

Films like this seem to me to be very American, because my wife knows all the actors from their respective cultural contributions, just as I do in similar ways with many English films. There's Jesse White, who's just another actor to me but to my wife he's the original Maytag repairman. There's William Hopper as the father of the household but she knows him as Paul Drake to Raymond Burr's Perry Mason. There's Paul Fix, who I know now from Night of the Lepus but my wife knows as the sheriff from The Rifleman. There's Frank Cady, who I've seen in a few films but not enough for him to stick, who my wife knows as Sam Drucker from Green Acres.

The only name I know really well is that of the director, Mervyn LeRoy. He was one of the key filmmakers at Warner Brothers, with his classic perhaps I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. This is my fifteenth of his films and by far the most recent, the closest being Any Number Can Play from 1949. The earliest I've seen date back to 1931 including such luminaries as Five Star Final and Little Caesar, which started the whole gangster genre of the early thirties, but his career ran from 1927 to 1968 and was notable in every way except that he never won an Oscar.

Eileen Heckart won an Oscar, in 1972 for her supporting work in Butterflies are Free, but it wouldn't have been out of place here either. She's the mother of Claude Daigle, deceased, and she gets a couple of long scenes of drunken honesty that ring very true, true enough to win her a Golden Globe. She did get a Oscar nomination too, as did Patty McCormack and Nancy Kelly as Christine Penmark. A fourth Oscar nod went to Harold Rosson for Best Cinematography, but the film didn't win anything. As it's really a psychological horror movie, that may not be surprising. After all, only four years later, Psycho got four nominations and lost in all of them too.