You’d have to say that Vincent Price’s film work was hit and miss until the middle 1940s, when his career took off at Fox under Zanuck, Preminger and Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Were it not for this gothic melodrama born of ‘women’s fiction’ he might have remained solely a versatile supporting actor instead rising to specialized leading man status. Price was certainly perfect for a genre concerned with trembling maidens, brooding bridegrooms and the ubiquitous haunted portrait over the fireplace mantle.
Writer and producer Mankiewicz became director Mankiewicz on Dragonwyck, a finely crafted, highly entertaining romantic mystery a year that Hollywood was still enjoying revenues at a Golden Age level. The show could also be taken as a vehicle for Fox’s top draw Gene Tierney, the gorgeous Queen of the Overbite who became a star two years before in Otto Preminger’s Laura. The formidable Walter Huston gets second billing for a strong supporting part, but the film’s central character is actually the third-billed Vincent Price. It’s a standout role for Price, and the one that most resembles his future persona in high-class horror films. All that’s missing is the Price sense of humor.
The story plays out like classic gothic Americana. Connecticut farm girl Miranda Wells (Gene Tierney) receives an invite from her relative Nicholas Van Ryn (Vincent Price) to come to upstate New York to serve as a houseguest and governess. Miranda follows the teachings of her god-fearing father Ephraim (Walter Huston) but also dreams of romance and luxury; her loving mother Abigail (Anne Revere) thinks she should follow her dream. The Van Ryn estate is in a politically divided district where landed Dutch patroons lord it over tenant farmers. Miranda finds Nicholas distant but also polite and thoughtful. His mostly bedridden wife Johanna (Vivienne Osborne of Two Seconds) is a neurotic who eats too much. Daughter Katrine (Connie Marshall) is a joyless child. All three of the Van Ryns are haunted by a strange portrait and a suicide in the family’s past. The morbid connection seems to please Magda, the housekeeper (Spring Byington).
Through the local doctor Jeff Turner (Glenn Langan) Miranda discovers that Nicholas is unpopular with the locals, who impatiently await new state regulations to outlaw the feudal-like patroon system. At a patroon picnic, Dr. Turner must restrain angry tenant farmer Klaas Beecker (Harry ‘Henry’ Morgan) from attacking Nicholas. Dr. Turner is immediately attracted to Miranda. Her situation becomes more difficult at a party when she bridles at the class snobbery. It’s also clear that Nicholas is attracted to Miranda. He shocks his his fellow patroons by dancing with her, while his wife Johanna watches.
How many supermarket bodice-ripping novels have we seen with titles like ‘Dragonwyck?’ Backed by some of the best artists in the business, including un-billed producer Ernst Lubitsch, Mankiewicz transforms a page-turner into an exceptionally good movie experience. The sets and costumes never overpower the performers, who stay stage center at all times.
Vincent Price blooms under some of the best direction of his career. Nicholas Van Ryn is more delicately shaded than the usual Byronic brooder in film, even Fox’s recent Rochester performed by Orson Welles. In no way a standard villain, Van Ryn’s dark side doesn’t express itself for quite a while. Initially well mannered to a fault, he soon reveals his essential bigotry and sense of noble entitlement — that Americans were supposed to leave behind in the Old World. Yet Nicholas remains a charmer Miranda’s attraction to him seems more reasonable than that of the heroines of Jane Eyre or Rebecca.
Non-star Glenn Langan is solid as the doctor who we suspect will be waiting patiently for Miranda, like Gabriel Oak in Far from the Madding Crowd. We might know Langan from Forever Amber but he ended up being immortalized by monster fans as The Amazing Colossal Man. The rest of the cast could not be improved. Walter Huston raises the theme of Bible morality, which has an important role to play in the film’s strongest character reveal. As the unwanted wife, Vivienne Osborne projects a constant insecurity. Spring Byington’s creepy maid Magda is sort of an anti-Mrs. Danvers character — instead of outright menace, Magda offers unwanted opinions and advice with a conspiratorial smile.
Ms. Tierney comes off as intelligent and focused. Most ‘worried wives’ in these things cower and simper, but the uncommonly strong Miranda withstands all of the negative influences around her. She even prevails in her choice of maids. Peggy O’Malley (Jessica Tandy) has a bad leg, and Miranda gets her way even though the prejudiced Nicholas despises deformities.
The only aspect of Dragonwyck that writer-director Mankiewicz doesn’t resolve well is the haunting angle. The movie insists that both little Katrine and Nicholas hear haunted music and voices. We hear them too, but as Miranda does not, I interpret the mystery sounds as psychological in origin: various occupants have succumbed to the group superstition and gone slightly loony. Yet critics keep insisting that a real supernatural component is present. Perhaps Mankiewicz did the right thing making it ambiguous.
Although it doesn’t bother us now, the way Dragonwyck fails to resolve the unhappy Katrine character was odd for a 1946 studio picture. It’s equally unusual for a movie of the time to leave the welfare of a child hanging, especially with the supernatural involved. I doubt that Miranda is going to abandon Katrine, but we still wonder what the future holds. Will the girl escape from her boarding school and make her way to Connecticut for familial revenge? She is Vincent Price’s daughter, after all.
The censors would be appeased, because the overt message is that Miranda’s Christian devotion makes her immune from ghostly nonsense. Mankiewicz handles this theme very cleverly, to tie in with the darkening of Nicholas’ character. He’s haughty, domineering and arrogant, but when he openly asserts that he has no use for God, we know he’s not likely to be redeemed. It’s unfortunate that so much of the criticism I’ve read on Dragonwyck condemns Nicholas for being an atheist. He doesn’t deny God, he defies him, and therefore acknowledges God’s existence.
Some critics of the day didn’t like the film’s description of the patroon system with its land renters. To me it gives the story a backbone, anchoring Nicholas’ crazy aristocratic hauteur in historical fact. I’d be curious to know what the difference is between the Dutch system that New Yorkers were eager to dissolve, and ordinary sharecropping that, for all I know, is still the norm elsewhere in the country.
The interesting casting of Price is what makes the movie work. Audiences of 1946 wouldn’t necessarily expect him to be playing a villain. Nicholas Van Ryn now seems a more refined precursor of Roderick Usher and other demented Price horror characters. One slight flick of an eyebrow, and we know this Dutchman is up to no good.
Part of the pleasure of watching Dragonwyck is its near-perfect production design. All we see of New York is the interior of a hotel, but the traffic going by outside suggests that an entire city is present. Miranda’s trip up the Hudson river uses an excellent miniature of a packet boat — and all the rear-projected images of the shoreline are large-scale studio miniatures as well.
