Robert Wise's take on Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House came at around mid point in his seven decade career. He edited Citizen Kane for Orson Welles, made several of Val Lewton's celebrated grown-up horrors, made a credible sci-fi entry with The Day the Earth Stood Still, thrilled audiences with West Side Story and still had The Sound of Music to come. That (and more) is all before 1970. Less taught by experts than came from on the job training by visionaries, Wise was one who not only sprang free of small movie apprenticeship, he became a giant of the mainstream. But this was minus the auteurism that put the likes of Hitchcock into the common parlance. Wise just did the work as effectively as he could.
If that smacks of faint praise, take a look at this film. The rich black and white interiors, shiny polished panelling here, spotty old mirrors there, strangely angled close ups of marble cherubs that look like demons, and more deep focus process shots than you could shake a Kane at. Wise went into his cinematic workshop and chose the Welles file to fashion a setting at once gothic and traditional but constantly modern. When Markway's lines about psychic phenomena stretching from the prehistoric to daily police reports the mise en scene backs him up. The weirdness of the nocturnal exteriors of the house is mostly due to shooting them with infrared film, giving them a simultaneous dark and detailed appearance. Some adventurous audio design and physical effects like the sitting room door that starts to breathe and you have the kind of cinema of trickery that William Castle was still using to thrill and (phsycially) shock his audiences. If it were only that, The Haunting would be known to us for its ghost train gags.
It isn't only that. Wise's strenuous work on his setting brings us deeply into the world the better to let us focus on the story of Nell. Nelson Gidding's screenplay honoured the source novel by concentrating on its narrator. The film begins with a brief change to this as Markway tells the story of the house over the scenes of death and violence. This segues into his interview with the owners. This works for the adaptation as it allows a lot of background (the arresting visuals prevent it from feeling like an information dump). Then from Nell's first scene we hear her interior monologue for the rest of the film. This is necessary. It might strike today's audiences as creaky or perhaps soap operatic but it is saved by performance.
Julie Harris is magnetic. She contains a rage so consuming it is like a separate personality, pushing through the most timid of her lines. As we see her growing comfort and assurance that she belongs in the diseased house we witness a kind of relief from a lifelong resentment. In a timelapse sequence in the prologue we see Abagail Crain age from girlhood to her death in her sickbed and it presages Nell's need to escape her mother and the possibility that she will become her. Theo's bullying taunts and the disappointment that Dr Markway proves a romantic cul de sac are worn by her as a kind of hazard gear on her way to consummation with the house. Harris' embodiment of all this puts the rest of the cast well behind. By the time of her final lines of narration she is as much possessor as possessed which is the stone that hangs off its finale.
(Aside: I'm sure David Lynch used Julie Harris appearance and performance for the character of Mary in Eraserhead. Google the titles and choose images. Seeing is believing.)
For their parts, though, the central cast do step up. Richard Johnson does what he can with his dialogue which can be a series of smug claims about his expertise. His concern for Nell warms him up, though, and he emerges more rounded than his posh nerd start. West Side Story alumnus Russ Tamblyn stretches his sharp frat boy bopper into something more relatable when he is forced to show fear. None too subtle, this nevertheless enriches the film's atmosphere.
And then there's Claire Bloom, ethereally beautiful but soured here by arch cattiness as part of her defence equipment. Her ubermodern look is supplied by fashion leader Mary Quant which allows her jaguar-like performance to remain visible. Theo's lesbianism is not just hinted at, it provides her with one of the film's funniest lines ("you're the doctor" you need to see it get it) and Nell with a barb that at the time would have shocked. Bloom neither butches up nor nancies down for Theo. Her urbane dialogue would be equally at home at a Manhattan cocktail party which is largely how she delivers it. Her sexuality is offered here as something unremarkable in her chosen milieu but queered by proximity to the straight world. A scene in which she threw her partner out of their apartment was cut but I think that was less because it was risque than the dilution it might add to Nell's story.
Joan Fontaine remembered Robert Wise as a mechanical film maker, directing scenes with a stop watch. That was from experience not too much earlier than this production but, rather than cast doubt on Fontaine's slur, the notion of attending to the machine first does come through in The Haunting. Once that's set, though, the warmth rises and helps us through the craft of nurturing the cast. Wise might have had better conversations with his editors or electricians but his casts move and talk through their scenes as though they are really in them. One of my comfort movie resorts if I am alone (after guests or without them, so as not to use this as torture) is to watch the sequence from when Nell enters Hill House with Mrs Dudley through to all four central characters meeting and having dinner. I want to be physically in the scene whenever I see it.
Also, I've known folk to chuckle at Mrs Dudley's lines about the isolation of the house, that no one will come "in the dark ... in the night". This is not delivered like a campy ominous warning, it's light and spare, like a musical motif or a moment from Samuel Beckett's icy two hander Footfalls. It's not given as scary but eerie. And that goes for the film as a whole. There are some pioneering set ups and effects but if you let them happen while witnessing Nell's self discovery causing her to unravel and race to the genuine tragedy of the finale, you will feel the eeriness without need of any pointers. I watch this film in full at least once a year. I've seen it once at a cinema. I've suggested it is a kind of comforter but the more I think of it the more I wonder why that is. And then that becomes eerie.
Viewing notes: I watched my imported Blu-Ray which offers a very good transfer marred at points by white burn out but is generally very deep and clear for a film with as much detail as this. The audio needs a little cranking but it's pretty much the best presentation to date outside of a screening on 35 mm at a cinema. There was once a local dvd release but that would be long deleted. You can, however, hire it from Prime or Google Play in HD for about $5.
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