Rating: B-
Dir: Rogelio A. González
Star: Wanda Hendrix, Barry Coe, Gisele MacKenzie, Maray Ayres
This is based on a short story of the same name by Edgar Allan Poe. When I say “short,” the whole thing comes in at under 1,300 words. The bulk of its three pages are about a guy staring at a picture, and discovering its history. Specifically, the woman died while sitting for it. Needless to say, the tale needs to down a lot of high-protein shakes to reach feature length, but especially in the final act, I think Edgar would approve. It doesn’t hang about either. Barely has young heiress Lisa Buckingham (Hendrix, once briefly married to Audie Murphy) stepped down from the coach in front of her late uncle’s crumbling home, during a thunderstorm, than she’s seeing a ghostly figure in white.
She and her mother are there for the reading of her uncle’s will, with the rest of the family. Lisa is immediately struck by the titular painting of her cousin Rebecca (Ayres), who is no longer around, due to… reasons. After Lisa tries on some of Rebecca’s clothes, she is accosted by a man (Coe), who clearly mistakes Lisa for her cousin. There’s eventually a lengthy flashback in which we enter full Gothic melodrama. The man, Joseph Hudson, was a fugitive enemy soldier who was hidden in the house by Rebecca, beginning a secret relationship which ends in the re-capture of Joseph during their clandestine wedding. By the time the war ends and he is freed, it’s too late for Rebecca. Or is it?
There are three different movies struggling for dominance here. We begin with a classic haunted house, complete with that Poe staple, a portrait of a dead woman. I will add, it’s refreshingly well-lit too: Lisa doesn’t even need a candelabra for her flitting along the corridors. Then the horror takes a back seat, while we go for a significant period into historical romance, befitting Mills & Boon, complete with a stern, disapproving father. Finally… well, it’s probably a spoiler, but so be it. Joseph goes a bit off the deep end, to put it mildly, and we end up far closer to Nekromantik territory (top) than I expected on the way in, especially in a movie over fifty years old.
It is kinda odd to have a Mexican director, doing a Poe adaptation in English, filmed in Vancouver. But it wasn’t González’s first such, having made One Minute Before Death the previous year. It often gets confused with this, both being based on Poe – “The Premature Burial” there. It looks like they share a number of cast members, to the point I wonder if they were made back-to-back. It likely would have helped had the two leading ladies been closer in age. Hendrix was almost eighteen years older than Ayres, and it shows. That aside, it kept me more interested than I expected, and I really have to respect the ending for going into depths I would not have credited.