The Queen of Spades

Thorold Dickinson was a British director who made 9 feature films.  His luck was bad and he is now mostly forgotten.  Dickinson's most celebrated picture was Gaslight (1940) -- this psychological thriller was enormously successful in the United Kingdom and, then, became a victim of its own fame.  MGM bought the rights to the film, remade the picture in a version that won Ingrid Bergman an Academy Award, and, then, demanded that all evidence of the British source be eliminated -- all negatives and prints of Dickinson's film were destroyed.  (He secretly kept one print and it is from this source that the film is now known.)  Dickinson worked with low budgets and was frequently summoned to productions to salvage pictures that were already vexed in some way -- he was called onto the Queen of Spades se only five days before beginning photography and had to re-write the script to the picture each night after the shoot.  Further, Dickinson was hampered in that he had never read the famous Pushkin short story upon which the film is closely based.  Despite, or, perhaps, because of these circumstances, Queen of Spades is a feverish, expressionistic masterpiece of its genre.

In St. Petersburg, Russia, the officer corps are obsessed with faro, a card game that seems to be entirely based on chance -- there's no skill involved, the player merely chooses a card and, then, the opponent draws cards until there is a match.  Unlike poker or other games of that sort, there seems to be no bluffing involved in the game, no strategy, and no mathematical calculus.  In this respect, the game has an uncanny aspect -- apparently, men risked huge sums on a draw of the card.  The film shows that the game was played by very drunken men with gypsy girls wailing weird songs and dancing in the flamelit shadows of the barrack's casino.  One officer, a German named Herma, refuses to play -- this is because he is poor and can't risk his wages on the game.  Because he refuses to play with his brother officers, Herman is mocked and humiliated.  One snowy day, Herman, who is like the Byronic hero of Stendhal's The Red and the Black -- he fancies himself an uebermensch and has a large portrait of his hero, Napoleon on the wall.--goes to a spooky bookstore to buy a volume about Napoleon's campaigns.  A book falls to the ground, a kind of miscellany containing stories about people who sold their souls to the Devil.  Without any questions asked, Herman buys the book from the sinister Jewish proprietor of the store.  In the book, he reads that a beautiful Russian countess sold her soul for success at cards -- this is shown by interpolated flashback.  The woman was promiscuous and one of her lovers had stolen money from her husband and, so, she ransomed her soul to the Queen of Spades, the embodiment of evil destiny, and was given the secret for success at cards.  Using this secret, she made a vast fortune.  Herman discovers that the bewitched countess, although now in 80's is still alive.  He also learns that the malignant old woman has a beautiful young ward, Lizavetta.  Herman has seen the young woman through the window of the Gothic and decaying palace where the old countess lives.  He sends her love letters and, gradually, earns the young woman's confidence.  On the basis of his relationship, Herman insinuates himself into the household and, finally, tries to coerce the old woman into telling him the secret of the cards.  The old woman dies of fear and Herman seems to have been thwarted.   But, then, he attends the countess' funeral and, while stooping over the bier, the corpse opens its eyes -- we have previously seen the dead woman glaring with glassy hate-filled eyes at Herman.  Later, a strange gust of wind blows into the hero's apartment, knocking over furniture and scattering his papers, and the hero hears the sound that the old woman's heavily brocaded dress made on the floor as she limped along.  The old woman's voice whispers the secret of the cards to Herman and he goes to the gambling hall immediately to try his luck.  He wins a great fortune, but the cards are fickle and, at last, he loses everything.  Herman goes mad and, as he is dragged to an asylum, we hear him muttering the secret of the cards.

Dickinson gives this story a full Gothic treatment -- there are icy snowstorms, sinister  black sleighs whisking through the streets of the snow-bound city, secret passageways, and strange apparitions.  The gypsies sing in a wild, keening timbre and the officers are always staggering around, hurling vodka glasses to the floor to break them.  Dame Edith Evans plays the role of the old Countess and she is a sight to behold -- there seems something deformed about her body, always tightly wrapped in a cocoon of silk and satin.  Her arms seem too short and her torso is like that of a monstrous caterpillar. Her make-up seems derived from that used with Karloff in The Mummy by Karl Freund (1932) -- her face is grooved and lined with age and she seems older than old, ancient, mummified, with bright eyes that stare out of her ruined face and that seem to not miss anything around her.  She is cruel to her ward and aspects of the film have a fairy-tale quality -- the poor tormented girl is always being ordered around by the vicious old woman and she yearns for a kind lover to rescue her from this nightmare.  Dickinson makes the motives of Herman, brilliantly played by Anton Walbrook, as obscure as possible.  If you don't know the story, you will not know how to "read" Herman's actions -- does he really love Lizavetta or is he merely attempting to seduce her to discover the old woman's secret?  This is left unclear and the film is daunting in the sense that we can't locate the hero --  in fact, it seems that the movie has no hero at all, something that surprises us when we consider the date that the film was made and its genre.  The shots are crammed with all sorts of baroque detail and lit expressionistically with jagged shadows playing across walls and flickering flame light in the hearths.  Some of the exotic door ways and corridors seem to have migrated to the film from Sternberg's even more febrile The Scarlet Empress (1934) -- there are hideous carytids, skulls serving at keystones in corbel arches, and Orthodox cathedrals full of eerie icons and massive painted columns (the church looks like some kind of grotto).  The camera is always in motion, lurching here and there in the crowded and claustrophobic sets.  Walbrook's Herman first seems righteous and reasonable, but he becomes more and more unhinged as the film progresses and, at the end, he is ranting in heavily accented English that makes him sound like Bela Lugosi.  Everything is dark and cold, and the narrow streets are always foaming with snow blowing off the rooftops.  The scene in which the ghost of the old woman appears (audibly but not visibly) to Herman in his apartment is an astonishing tour de- force -- a wild gale of billowing curtains, glasses and bottles blown to the floor, furniture toppling and paper flying all around followed by dead, numb silence in which we can hear the countess' grotesque ballroom gown scraping across the floor as her ghost approaches.  In one earlier scene, we see the old woman slumped and shapeless in her chair.  Beside her there is a stand on which her ballroom gown, like some kind of insect's carapace, has been hung -- it maintains its form, a sinister bell shape that visually rhymes with the many bells that we hear tolling in this film.