Left Field Cinema

The opening credits for the Queen of Spades are shown on a torn and crumpled theatre poster, a sadly prescient image of how the film has been treated over the years. To watch this forgotten masterpiece is to find a screwed up piece of paper, flatten it out and discover a beautiful love letter. The Queen of Spades is a neglected gem of British cinema, released in 1949, the same year as The Third Man, Kind Hearts & Coronets, and Whiskey Galore; it is certainly an equal bedfellow to these classics. Why it has been largely ignored for so long is a mystery, maybe a more high profile cast list would have helped, or a connection with Ealing or The Archers. It’s a worthy contender for the BFI’s top 100 British films list but as it is, it doesn’t even get a mention on the Wikipedia list of British films released in 1949.

The Queen of Spades is a short story written by the Russian poet Pushkin, Tchaikovsky made an opera from it and it has also been adapted for screen many times before and since this version. Set in St Petersburg in the early 19th century, Capt. Herman Suvorin, is an officer of the engineers, upset, at his lowly status amongst the wealthier, more aristocratic Cavalry Officers who spend their time gambling and womanising. He is desperate to find the secret to winning a card game called Faro that the other officers use to gamble with. He believes the elderly countess Ranevskaya sold her soul for the secret when she was much younger. The officer plans to seduce her niece Lizaveta, in order to gain entry to her household so he can extract the valuable information from the ancient countess. Secret passages, murder and ghostly apparitions follow as fate deals Herman a bad hand.

Thorold Dickinson took over directing duties at three days notice after Rodney Ackland the intended director left, due to a falling out with both the producer and the lead actor. A small budget and a lack of preparation seem to have forced a highly inventive, expressionistic zeal into the direction. Dickinson is quoted as saying that early on he decided to “throw caution to the wind and in every scene aim for conscious and colourful contrast.” and to this aim he surely succeeded. It has the heady supernatural air of a Powell & Pressburger film. Dickinson jettisoned the favoured British tradition of realism and instead seasoned this supernatural story with a strange and wonderful sense of fantasy.

The legendry stage actress Edith Evans gives an unforgettable performance as the terrifying Countess Ranevskaya, her head contorted into a strange twisted drooping position as the weight of her gigantic beehive fights her attempts to cock her increasingly deaf ear up at the world. Anton Walbrook is wonderful as the greedy, Napoleon obsessed Captain Herman, he brings a hypnotic, serpent like charm to the role, utterly convincing as an intense impassioned admirer, the object of his bogus affection is more than forgiven for falling for his sleight of the heart.

A spider’s web is superimposed over a shot of the innocent niece, as she lies in bed suggestively fingering her secret stash of love letters from the Captain. In another scene, at a funeral, the eyes of the countess’s corpse flick open to stare shockingly at Herman, who is stricken with guilt and terror. The film is peppered with these thrilling moments; almost every scene holds something that startles the eyes.

Mirrors feature frequently in the film; Herman’s plagiarized love letter, repeating itself on loop in Lizaveta’s mind “your dark eyes have driven away my rest and peace, oh if you could but love me” she stares into her mirror, into her dark eyes, falling in love with this romantic vision of herself. Elsewhere the countess sits in her bedroom, her decaying reflection caught in an ornate oval mirror draped in lace, above hangs a round ornately framed painting of her in her youth, in-between stands her niece, trapped once again like a fly. The greatest scene though could well be the eventual meeting of Captain Herman and the countess. As the countess prays to an icon of the Virgin Mary reflected in her bedroom mirror, Herman slides into view, black suited, the Virgin Mary blocked, a final test for the countess. Ranevskaya silenced by fear can only stare at him as he implores her through desperate whispers to divulge her ‘secret of the cards’. A clock ticks loudly and as Herman becomes more desperate, more aggressive, pulling a pistol on the countess, she drops dead with fright. The clock stops. Herman’s mouth hangs open in shock at what he has done. The scene is brilliantly played, beginning with the quiet desperate pleadings of the countess’s prayers to the mirror “Holy Virgin have mercy on me” and then echoed in Herman’s equally desperate pleas to her “I beg! I beseech you!” The camera captures the scene perfectly, the four elements, Herman, the countess, the mirrors and the icon, strung tightly together.

The struggle to make this strange and beautiful gothic masterpiece, at a time when Britain was still in tatters from the war, cannot be underestimated. Snow drifting through the streets looks the part but was in-fact made from grinding down the Perspex windows of crashed German planes, as Thorold Dickinson puts it; “It scratched, but it looked very good on the screen so we suffered in silence.”

Olly Paterson