We have commenter Fibber McGee to thank for this week's movie. Also, I have a new boyfriend, and his name is Tod Slaughter! (Both of those are real names! Oh, OK… Tod's real first name was Norman…)
I read Wilkie Collins' "The Woman in White" many years ago on a long train trip, and remember it as being the slow-burn variety of Victorian novel, with very careful pacing and many long descriptive passages that don't pay off until hundreds of pages later… it's wonderful, but requires many hours of devoted attention. Well, that simply won't do for director George King and his team (the credited writers are Edward Dryhurst, Frederick Hayward and H.F. Maltby), who boil the entire complicated story down to 69 minutes of melodrama. We open with Mr. Slaughter hammering a tent stake through someone's head, and the action only ratchets up from there!
The nice thing for King et al. about Collins' novel is that, while it may be long and complicated, it's not particularly subtle — the hero is named Hartwright, for one thing. So it actually translates fairly smoothly to the melodrama treatment. Slaughter's victim in the first scene is a wealthy baronet named Sir Percival Glyde; Slaughter's unnamed character simply steals Glyde's identity and comes home to England, where he swiftly marries beautiful heiress Laura (Sylvia Marriott) and menaces everyone else in sight, including the mysterious woman who claims to be Glyde's first wife (also Sylvia Marriott). When clever Dr. Fosco (Hay Petrie) threatens to expose the impersonation, Slaughter snarls, "I'll feed your entrails to the pigs!"
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