THE QUEEN OF SPADES

In The Queen of Spades Thorold Dickinson brought elements of the then largely forgotten expressionist cinema and even some elements of British classism for a haunting Russian ghost story. It’s a film of great intensity and mood as well as a technical triumph. Otto Heller’s camerawork is mundane when appropriate until it sneaks up on us with shots of utter terror. It’s a distinctly English production in many ways (released by Associated British-Pathe), but for that no less an atmospheric reproduction of St. Petersburg in 1806 when a gambling craze swept the city carrying legends of evil within the cards.

The story comes from Alexander Pushkin and follows Captain Suvorin (Anton Walbrook, whose fading Austrian accent served him right here as a German-born officer) a mild-mannered engineer in the Imperial Army with ambitions of rising up the ranks. He is too proud to engage in gambling but does decide to try his luck when he hears tell of an old countess who long ago traded her soul in exchange for learning the secret of winning at cards. She made a pact never to share this secret and has kept in quiet all these years.

Suvorin discovers where she lives and wins the trust of her timid young ward Lizavetta (Yvonne Mitchell) by means of romance as a means of getting closer to the reclusive old woman. Before he knows it, greed takes over the captain’s soul and he loses more than his savings when he takes to the cards.

Pushkin’s story is a classic Faustian tale about blind ambition and the ruthless pursuit of wealth. The moral, however, is the least interesting part of Dickinson’s screen treatment. Nothing else in it is as simple. What makes The Queen of Spades such a marvelous little film is Dickinson’s use of supernatural horrors, presenting them in such a way so that we cannot reassure ourselves with full certainty that they are merely products of Suvorin’s mental breakdown as he copes with a guilty conscience. 

Hallucinations or not, the representations of a tortured soul are magnificent creations. They begin to appear after the captain threatens the countess with a pistol and she dies of fright. His intention was not to kill her, a deduction made obvious when the pistol is revealed to not have been loaded, but only to scare the secret out of her. But her death is on him and his conscience begins to eat his soul. After a terrifying hallucination he is haunted by disembodied voices, strange sounds coming from empty rooms, and tricks of the eyes. Dickinson hints toward no explanation but makes it certain that poor Suvorin has gotten more than what he bargained for.

            Even when not dabbling in the absurd or fantastical, Heller’s cinematography is stunning and a most unusual fit for British cinema in its heyday. His most striking shots are a juxtaposition of innocence and the creeping darkness such as the close-up of a spider crawling up its web with Lizavetta’s pure lovely face sleeping peacefully in the background. Indeed, this vulnerable young lady is but a fly in the captain’s scheme. The spider, significantly, inhabits Suvorin’s room, where he composes phony love letters for the unsuspecting girl with words he stole from romantic books.

Throughout The Queen of Spades, Dickinson takes familiar elements from classic ghost stories and stylizes them haunting markers of the terror to come. Many of the bizarre characters we see lurking about the snowy streets will be more or less familiar to readers of Poe and fantasy tales. Our recognition of what these sorts of characters usually signal makes their already spooky appearance all the more alluring. A most marvelous stylization is the old decrepit bookseller (Ivor Barnard) with his feathery whiskers and creaking voice. Indeed, Suvorin’s spiral into disaster begins when he first learns about the countess in one of the books he buys at the shop, but the old man’s glare alone seems more ominous than any of the enchantments he warns the captain about.

The true star, however, is Countess Ranevskaya. With a wide and noisy beaded dress and an impossibly high stacked wig which makes her head appear oversized, she looks more like a dream of Lewis Carroll than Fritz Lang. She coasts from grotesquely comical to overbearing and ultimately to tragically comical. Perhaps the blankness of the other leads help, but Edith Evans’s performance as the domineering aristocrat steals the show. Evans had been on stage since 1912 and made her screen debut three years later, but The Queen of Spades was only her fourth film role. She was a star of the stage above all and by 1948 she had over one hundred theater credits to her name. As the countess she commands the screen with diction of the sort seldom seen outside of the theater. While her character is more absurd than threatening, her cantankerous rambles never amounting to much, her presence demands attention, usually that of her long-suffering ward Lizavetta. Despite her ramblings and nodding off to sleep, the old woman knows her days are numbered and seems ready to go after harboring a secret for sixty years. But even in death her presence cannot be ignored, if only because of her chilling gaze.

Dickinson treats her sympathetically (though humorously) but not without criticism. The flighty affairs of her youth are what got her in trouble in the first place. When her husband’s money is stolen by one of her thieving lovers she visits the isolated palace of the mysterious St. Germain. He gives her the secret of winning at cards in exchange for her soul, beginning her sixty year trauma, even after she replaces the stolen money. It’s the price she pays for infidelity, but the movie does offer a voice of sympathy through her elderly servant who pities the old lady who is nearing the grave and has still not found peace.

The Queen of Spades is an unusually balanced film, believing in poetic justice but also with a lot of empathy for desperate people. This is most evident in Dickinson’s treatment of Suvorin. His superior, Prince Andrei (Ronald Howard), fights him for Lizavetta’s love and ultimately brings him to ruin. Dickinson seems to harbor mixed feelings for Suvorin but never railroads the response of the audience.

It’s hard not to feel sorry for him. He dreams big while passively taking scorn from his superiors. When he sees a chance he goes for it and loses sight of the consequences. His dream is too close at hand for him to back off, even if it means bringing down the countess and Lizavetta.

 From the start there seems to be something brewing inside Suvorin; perhaps resentment toward his commanding officers. But even after his crime and descent to lunacy we are still confused about how to respond to him. His story is all too familiar.

In their own way, Suvorin, the countess, and Lizavetta are all trapped in their own curse. Countess Ranevskaya has had the burden of not only keeping a coveted secret for much of her life, but also the painful memory of how she got it. Lizavetta remains in her service as a sign of gratitude for the countess taking her under her care years earlier. Suvorin is at first a prisoner of his own greed and then of his insanity. Lizavetta finds freedom in the arms of Andrei, but Countess Ranevskaya and Suvorin sealed their sad fates long ago.

Much of the movie is distinctly British in tone. Suvorin’s spooky encounter with what he takes to be the countess’s ghost in his room (the best scene in the film thanks to Dickinson’s expert use of sound) is constructed very much like Scrooge’s encounter with Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol. In both instances, a soul inflicted with avarice is about to be pushed into repentance by a spirit. Nonetheless, Dickinson retains Pushkin’s Eastern European fundamentals; fear induced by old superstitions, Faustian morality, and mysterious old women.

All of these classical elements are presented here in stylized form. Dickinson combines them with his technical tricks, often to great effect. Few filmmakers work so well with sound, for instance. Early in the film, a woman’s scream bridges into the gallop of a frightened horse, elevating the fear in an already intense shot.

But what he masters best is silence, which here marks both the start of something bad and death itself (as in the clock that stops ticking when the old woman dies). It get’s a little more when the silence accompanies Suvorin as he secretly enters the countess’s dimly light house to set his final plan in motion. Of course, this sets into motion the tragic events to come, but because it is Suvorin (not the countess or Lizavetta) who we see walking in silence (and darkness) we come to see him as equally vulnerable to the dangers to come. Dickinson is playing with the audience in a very clever way, refusing to give us a clear protagonist to follow as the plan unfolds.

Dickinson handles this complicated fantasy with grace and cinematic mastery, but he wasn’t the first director signed on. Production began with Rodney Ackland, co-writer of the screenplay, on helm. Ackland, however, clashed with Walbrook and producer Anatole de Grunwald and backed down. Walbrook had fond memories of working with Dickinson in Gaslight and suggested he take over. He did and masterfully captured the dark depths of human desire in all of its passion, horror, ambition, and greed. The Queen of Spades is a triumph both as an exercise in expressionism as well as an exploration of blind ambition.