The Reckless Moment

 

Director Max Ophüls

Joan Bennett (center) with her father and 3 daughters, 1918

THE RECKLESS MOMENT        A                                                                                         France  (82 mi)  1949  d: Max Ophüls

The highest reaches of the actor’s art begin, I believe, at the point where words cease to play a part.        —Max Ophüls

Among the more forgotten films in cinema history is this hidden gem, the last Hollywood film made by esteemed director Max Ophüls, perhaps his most underrated, which is not only his best American film, but also his shortest and most concise, consolidating the creativity of multiple artistic talents.  An actor, stage director, and producer in Germany and Austria from 1921 to 1930, he worked in more than 200 plays by the time he started his film career, yet spent his life dealing with adversity, including forced eviction from both countries as a Jew working in Nazi Germany, fleeing to Paris only to see the French government fall to the Nazi’s as well, taking his family to seek refuge in Switzerland where he was also expelled in a visa dispute with the Swiss government, eventually exiled to Hollywood in 1941, where the spelling of his last name is altered, as evidenced by this film.  Like other European auteurs at the time, such as Jean Renoir and Fritz Lang, he was treated poorly by the American film industry, unable to find work in America for six years until a recommendation from director Preston Sturges, who also undercut him on his initial working opportunities, taking his place when studio heads were perplexed by the Old World elegance of his sophisticated working style, with its scarcity of star close-ups, eventually leading him to RKO studio head Howard Hughes, making a series of four American films before returning to France, ending his career with a string of some of his most highly regarded films.  Known for his mastery of fluid camera movement, his visual style features distinctive camera movements, complex crane and dolly sweeps, and elegant tracking shots, having a pronounced effect on later directors like Stanley Kubrick and Paul Thomas Anderson.  In an early 1957 interview with Cahiers du Cinéma, Kubrick was quoted “Highest of all I would rate Max Ophüls, who for me possessed every possible quality.  He has an exceptional flair for sniffing out good subjects, and he got the most out of them.  He was also a marvelous director of actors… I particularly admired his fluid camera techniques.”  While his trademark motifs include the use of a complex and detailed dramatic scheme, lavish settings with an ornate décor of chandeliers, staircases, and mirrors, long takes that emphasize the subject, accomplished framing and lighting, and a strong female protagonist, he was one of the first truly international film directors, sensitive to national differences and the human qualities in all his characters, yet he was largely dismissed during his lifetime as a technically flashy auteur, where his thematic concerns were often regarded as trivial in the male-dominated cinematic universe.  However the artistic reputation of Ophüls underwent serious critical reevaluation in the early 1970’s with the advent of feminism, where his baroque style, attention to details, and intense focus on female characters were viewed as not only prophetic but thoroughly contemporary.  Like fellow German émigré Douglas Sirk, the sophisticated camera work and lush décor that were once derided as empty exercises in excess have since been regarded as painstakingly intertwined with the state of mind of the central characters, offering a unique reflection of the postwar landscape.  When examined from a historical lens, the spector of European trauma inhabits Ophüls’ American films, emphasizing the darker side of human nature, where it’s important to acknowledge that a transformation in postwar American culture was largely achieved by the arrival of European émigrés who brought with them haunting personal experiences and Freudian psychoanalytic methods while also introducing Brechtian modernism into America cinema, which can be seen in the melodramas of Sirk and Ophüls.

The story is adapted from The Blank Wall, a 1947 Ladies Home Journal story written by American novelist and short story writer Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, one of the many mystery writers who have undergone repeated cycles of neglect and rediscovery, turned into a what is generally considered her best novel, a subversive and original take on the figure of mother and housewife at odds with traditional views, reconfiguring a maternal protagonist in a patriarchal role, listed by The Guardian in 2011 as one of The 10 best Neglected literary classics - in pictures | Culture, while described by Jake Hinson as The Godmother of Noir: Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, exuding a profound disillusionment with the condition of women in a field dominated by the tough guys of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain.  A pioneer of domestic noir and favorite of crime writer Raymond Chandler, who claimed she was “the top suspense writer of them all,” she began her writing career as a romance novelist, but switched to mysteries during the Depression, where the emphasis was on the perpetrators and the victims rather than on the heroic investigators, accentuating the dark interior lives of her characters, with early strains of German Expressionism, exacerbated by moodiness, despair, guilt, and paranoia, writing 25 novels between 1920 and 1953, with 18 dealing with criminal wrongdoing in one form or another.  As a woman in a distinctly masculine field, she’s less well known than her contemporaries and often overlooked by the reputation of best-selling murder mystery author Patricia Highsmith, a postwar Hitchcock favorite who frequented bars and entertained a mix of New York’s gay and literary worlds, while Holding was educated before WWI at distinguished finishing schools for young ladies and married a British diplomat, living for a while in Bermuda, so by the time the term film noir became widely recognized, she was already in her 60’s.  Celebrated cinematographer Burnett Guffey got his start working as a camera assistant with John Ford in silent features before developing an expertise for his use of lighting when shooting dozens of dark crime movies, becoming associated with film noir pictures, making 20 of them, most notably Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950), while winning Academy Awards for Fred Zinneman’s FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953) and Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967).  The other major collaborator is actress Joan Bennett (produced by Bennett’s husband Walter Wanger), who appeared in many black and white 40’s melodramas about strong women, with a hardboiled, noirish presence of this film.  Married in London at 16, a mother at 17, and divorced in Los Angeles at 18, she went to a women’s finishing school in Versailles and developed a European sensibility, collaborating with directors as eclectic as Fritz Lang, George Cukor, Jean Renoir, and Douglas Sirk, starting out as a sassy, baby-faced blonde in Raoul Walsh pictures before darkening her hair in the late 30’s and working with Lang in a string of four film noir classics, including THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW (1944) and SCARLET STREET (1945), known for playing working girls, femmes fatales, wives, and mothers, she brings a dry wit, subtle intelligence, and a hint of mystery to all her performances.  In this picture she’s elegantly dressed by Jean Louis, who designed all of Rita Hayworth’s outfits, resembling a toned down and darkened version of Myrna Loy, the darling of THE THIN MAN (1934) and its five sequels, known for her wit and sophisticated charm, not to mention female guile, where it’s impossible not to notice Bennett’s chain-smoking, perfect lipstick, and wild, horn-rimmed glasses.

Even while working under tight studio-dictated time and budget constraints, this rare instance of Ophüls dealing with a contemporary setting is a blend of a women’s picture melodrama and film noir, set on Balboa Island just outside Los Angeles, a vacation spot with very few year-round residents, starring Joan Bennett as Lucia Harper, a suburban housewife whose husband Tom is away on business in Europe helping to rebuild Berlin in the aftermath of the war, living with his elderly father (Henry O’Neill) and two teenaged children, Bea (Geraldine Brooks) and David (David Bair), along with black housekeeper Sybil (Frances Elizabeth Williams, a black activist who spent two years in Moscow studying with famed theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold).  In this film there’s an opening narration that quickly disappears, with suggestions of a literary work unfolding before our eyes.  Slipping away from her kids one day she drives to a sleazy hotel in Los Angeles to see a man named Ted Darby (Shepperd Strudwick) about staying away from her underage daughter.  Clearly driven by unsavory intentions, he’s a squalid character twice her age who turns into a shakedown artist, where she’s clearly out of her element, yet the sweeping movements of the camera with its meticulous eye for detail make this a compelling sequence fraught with tension, Reckless Moment, The -- (Movie Clip) She's Only A Child YouTube (3:27).  When she returns home, we discover Bea is a spoiled, rebellious type languishing away at art school, where her self-centered arrogance echoes the model set in the classic Michael Curtiz melodrama, Mildred Pierce (1945), the first film noir told from a female perspective.  The film takes a dark turn when Darby’s dead body is found lying on the beach the next morning, with Lucia immediately suspecting her daughter is involved, so she disposes of the body by dumping it in a distant lagoon, where protecting her family from scandal is her primary concern.  It’s a long, tense scene which is done in complete silence except the lapping of the waves, accentuating the breeze blowing her hair and scarf as she drives her motorboat with the body covered under a tarp, as she continually looks around, exploring her options, heightening the tension of her point of view with an impending sense of danger.  Very much a character-driven story, where shadows are evident in the hallways of the household, and objects are constantly seen in the foreground, like a labyrinth she has to navigate, yet things only get worse with the arrival of a strange man named Martin Donnelly, played by a moody and overly restrained James Mason with an Irish accent, a symbol of moral decay who went on to star in George Cukor’s A Star Is Born (1954) and Stanley Kubrick’s LOLITA (1962), who turns out to be a low-life blackmailer, wanting cash for a package of love letters written by Bea to Darby, implicating her in the murder, as otherwise he’ll turn them over to the police.  This really sets the gears in motion, elevating the intrigue in this brooding, psychological thriller, with Ophüls brilliantly staging this scene as a centerpiece showstopper, emphasizing the lack of privacy as the characters are under constant threat of being overheard, where constant interruptions challenge Lucia’s desire for middle class order and neatness, where nothing can appear out of place, making it seem like he’s a friend of the family, as he ingratiates himself into her life with strange and curious results, The Moves #3: The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls, 1949) on ... YouTube (6:58).  Desperately trying to hold her life together against a rising undercurrent of ever-increasing threats to stability, she goes into what filmmaker Todd Haynes describes as “maternal overdrive” to try to protect her domestic life, a place where everyone depends on her, continually bombarding her with requests, never having a moment of peace, as Lucia still must run her family, raise her children, and care for her elderly father-in-law without arousing suspicions, while at the same time negotiate with a shady blackmailer to avoid being implicated in a murder investigation.  Ruthless in her determination to prevail, the film dramatizes the crushing weight on the shoulders of women, trapped by family life, discouraged from pursuing careers and denied independent lives, faced with limitations men never have to experience, yet obligated to provide for those around them while also being a nurturing presence, where there is literally no escape from this indefatigable maternal role, a reference to Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, becoming a radical critique of the pitfalls of domesticity and the patriarchal family, a daring move in the conservative era of 1950’s America.      

Donnelly, it turns out, is not your typical extortionist, as he deeply sympathizes with the plight of Lucia, who can’t raise the money without the signature of her husband, who is completely inaccessible, yet the monetary demand is immediate nonetheless.  Donnelly actually becomes infatuated as he hauls her groceries, offers grandfather tips on the horse races, and gives her son advice on how to fix an old engine, yet Lucia is casually dismissive, remaining guarded and emotionally impenetrable, stuck in this absurd no man’s land where nothing makes sense, literally torn from her world of suburban domesticity into a lurid criminal underworld where both feel morally bankrupt, while Donnelly finds himself in a similar position with his mobster crime boss Nagel (Roy Roberts) who impatiently demands the money now, with no further delays.  Lucia is seen in ever-restricted spaces, on the ferry with Donnelly, never leaving the confined space of the car where she is a helpless passenger discussing the terms of blackmail, in a crowded bus station, or in a public phone booth, always feeling exposed, afraid of being seen, where the compressed space is emblematic of her diminishing freedom, undergoing a series of “reckless moments” where the consequences become the primary focus of the film.  Exasperated at one point, with her family constantly watching her every move, Lucia confesses to her blackmailer, “You don’t know how a family can surround you sometimes.”  Viewing her as a victim, Donnelly aptly points out, “You have your family, I have my Nagel.”  What’s uniquely compelling is the way Donnelly fills the void by becoming a willing shadow husband, in some ways developing a deeper personal connection than she has with her family, so when he accompanies her on a trip to a local drugstore he blends in just like part of the family.  The postwar scenes of Lucia in downtown Los Angeles are particularly vivid, as she makes her rounds through the streets of Los Angeles visiting the bank, a loan office, and a pawnshop trying to raise the necessary funds with little success, where the traffic is terrifying, the sidewalks are cluttered, while strange men are lurking in the doorways, providing a disoriented feeling that matches her internal despair, resembling the documentary-style footage of postwar Tokyo in Kurosawa’s STRAY DOG (1949), another noir film made about the same time.  Lucia Harper is not your typical femme fatale drawn into a fatalistic criminal underworld, yet she is drawn in nonetheless specifically because of the absence of her husband, forcing her to assume his patriarchal duties.  With women having no access to economic power, they find themselves in a subservient position in society.  What Lucia fails to realize is that Sybil should be a close friend and confidante, an ally in her unsettling adventure down a dark path and an omnipresent moral center, though conveniently out of focus, placed in the background, or left out of the frame altogether, yet Lucia rejects her repeated offers of help and sees her only as a black servant, unable to recognize her equally repressive predicament working for the Harper family, both reduced to servitude, though Sybil does assume the position behind the wheel of a car late in the film, which may be the first time a black woman drives a car in a Hollywood film, yet she remains uncredited.  Their common plight foreshadows the emergence of both the Civil Rights Movement and feminism.  Lucia’s strength lies in her responsibility as a mother, as a head of a household, and a respectable member of the community, which is a stark difference from other noir women in similar predicaments, like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (1944), Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), or Jane Greer in Out of the Past (1947), who generate their power and strength from the way they manipulate men through their sexual allure.  There’s none of that here, yet we do get a very distinct cinematic image of her femininity in the way she neurotically chain-smokes cigarettes, or wears reading glasses to perform domestic activities, where she’s often seen behind a desk in a business-like manner writing letters or making a shopping list, where her restraint only makes the final scenes that much more rewarding, setting the stage for a dramatic emotional release.  Built into the film are bookended long-distance phone calls, with the camera fixed on Lucia as she takes the call by the stairs with family members parading back and forth behind her eager to get their chance to talk, calmly implying everything is in order even when it’s not, sparing her husband the dramatic details, instead conveying a picture of the same world he left behind, a portrait of domestic tranquility, while the “happy ending” of the finale has a subversive context, conveying the ultimate irony, and while she speaks cheerfully, she also weeps uncontrollably, a lingering expression of grief from the traumatic ordeal she has undergone.       

Note

Two years after the film was made, Bennett became the subject of her own scandal.  Having been represented by her agent Jennings Lang for twelve years, she met with him one afternoon to discuss an upcoming TV show, which upset her irate husband, producer Walter Wanger, who noticed her car was missing in the backlot of the television studio, having driven off in Lang’s car.  When they returned together, dropping her off to her car, Wanger, who was waiting, shot him twice where he stood, wounding him severely, but he survived.  Jealously believing Lang was trying to break up his marriage, Wanger pleaded temporary insanity and served a 4-month prison sentence, however the couple remained married.  Bennett’s career suffered afterwards, as the studios refused to work with her, having made 65 pictures in the 23 years beforehand, and only 5 in the decade that followed, with Bennett quoted as saying “I might as well have pulled the trigger myself.”

Maternal Overdrive  Todd Haynes on Max Ophuls’ The Reckless Moment on Vimeo (21:59) 

Eddie Muller introduces "The Reckless Moment"; Noir City 2016, SIFF Egyptian (7/27/2016) YouTube (7:19)

Moviedrome - The Reckless Moment (Mark Cousins)  Mark Cousins intro to the film, YouTube (3:00)

The Reckless Moment (1949) - Crime, Drama, Film Noir  entire film may be seen here on YouTube (1:22:02)

Wild Girl

WILD GIRL        B+              

USA  (78 mi)  1932  d:  Raoul Walsh

This is actually a remake of several earlier Silent film versions, all based on the 1898 Bret Harte novella Salomy Jane’s Kiss, from William Nigh and Lucius Henderson’s SALOMY JANE (1914) starring Beatriz Michelena, and George Melford’s SALOMY JANE (1923) starring Jacquelyn Logan, to this early 1932 Pre-Code Raoul Walsh version starring Joan Bennett, where all three versions are adapted from Paul Armstrong’s 1907 four-act stage version called Salomy Jane.  Set out West after the Civil War during the mid 19th century, it takes place entirely in the redwood forests of California’s Sequoia National Park, a supremely beautiful location that only adds a unique element to this film.  Walsh grew up in New York City as childhood friends with John Barrymore, becoming an actor for the stage and screen before being hired by D.W. Griffith, working as his assistant director while also playing John Wilkes Booth in Griffith’s racially controversial but also highly influential epic film THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915), the first film to ever be shown in the White House under Woodrow Wilson.  Walsh lost an eye in a car accident while making the film IN OLD ARIZONA (1928), where actor Warner Baxter went on to win the Best Supporting actor in the part Walsh intended to play, effectively ending Walsh’s acting career, but he wore an eye patch for the rest of his life while still directing well over 100 feature-length films.  Walsh discovered Marion Morrison, an unknown prop boy at the time working on THE BIG TRAIL (1930), turning him into the star of his film while also changing his name to John Wayne, after Revolutionary War General Mad Anthony Wayne, who happened to be the subject of a book the director was reading.  Walsh became known as one of the most competent craftsmen during the heyday of the studio system, specializing in adventure stories, a director who knew how to utilize outdoor locations and drive the action through pace, composition, and editing sequences, becoming a classical Hollywood filmmaker. 

This early talking film shows how effortlessly Walsh made the transition from Silent to talking pictures, using the opening credit sequence with photograph album photos introducing the cast, but the characters come to life on camera humorously introducing some little tidbit about their character, “I'm Salomy Jane, and I like trees better than men, because trees are straight,” a clever and charmingly amusing aural and visual cue that not only introduces sound, but enhances the audience’s appreciation for the cast even before the movie begins.  Another clever device is an optical page-turning effect, where each transitional dissolve into the next scene is a rarely used technique reinforcing the storybook aspect of the movie.  And the opening of this film is a true delight, somewhat dated with a black Mammy character, but there’s never the least inference of bias or mistreatment, as she becomes the mother figure, best friend, and playmate of Salomy Jane, Joan Bennett as a feisty young frontier woman who is something of a tomboy in perfect harmony with the natural world around her, at home among the trees, the creatures in the woods, and playing with little children.  When she sees the stagecoach arriving, she waves to the driver before running home through the woods, grabbing Louise Beavers as Mammy, where the two have to fend off a half a dozen or more live bears en route, which is a dazzlingly filmed sequence as they are all in the same frame together, no computer graphics, making this a most impressive opening.  Eugene Pallette as stagecoach driver Yuba Bill is another revelation, as he’s a hearty old soul who loves to tell stories, something of a Shakespearean Falstaff character with his rotund girth, his gift for gab, his embellishments of stories making him the true hero, and of course, his ultimate cowardliness.  Again, when making the transition to talking pictures, it helps to have such a natural born raconteur and scene stealer who is as thoroughly entertaining as Pallette, who eventually became too physically large for screen roles, building a secondary career just doing voice effects.  His best scene here is when he describes a conversation between horses, using hysterical voice inflections to describe the different animal’s sound as well as their intentions.  If that’s not inventive enough, Bennett, alone in her element, even goes skinny-dipping in the river showing her bare backside where of course she’s discovered by someone she knows only as Man, continually calling him that until the final frame of the film, turning out to be Billy, aka the Stranger (Charles Farrell), who in the opening credit sequence indicates he fought with Robert E. Lee.   

A stranger in the midst is enough to arouse people’s suspicions, as it matches the unusual occurrence of the stage getting robbed, so the sheriff rounds up a group of men folk to hang by a tree whoever the culprit is before the night is done.  That’s quick and efficient justice in this outland Western frontier.  And if that’s not enough trouble, Jane is constantly pursued by an assemblage of men competing for her affections, including card shark Jack Marbury (Ralph Bellamy), the man in black always seen curling his waxed moustache, or a contemptible swine Rufe Waters (Irving Pichel) who believes he has an early claim on her, or an overly pious man running for Mayor who secretly molests women, Phineas Baldwin (Morgan Wallace), none of whom really catch her interest.  But when she hears the handsome Stranger tracked down Baldwin and shoots him on the spot, settling an old score, apparently from Kentucky, where the two are seen running over rooftops, she develops a sudden attraction for the man.  So the sheriff adds another noose for his double lynching of a stage robber (the poorest man in town) and a murderer (a stranger), which sends Jane into a swooning depression, only to later find a renewed sense of optimism.  Walsh evidently witnessed an actual lynching as a child, adding some degree of authenticity to this sequence, beautifully shot with quick edits and offscreen sound, with the shadow of the hanged man all that’s seen on the ground, a chillingly effective moment in what is otherwise a rather humorous tale, told with a tongue-in-cheek style from the outset, using plenty of exaggeration and understatement mixed together, almost as if the audience is being told a bedtime story, as in subsequent tellings other aspects might be emphasized.  It’s all blended together with a deft hand and a unique mystique, where the simplest of stories is the least of our interest, but the embellishment of the redwoods, the calm and collected Stranger, a man with few words, the joyous energy of Jane, who is the picture of innocence, yet strong-willed and independent enough to stand up to any man, and the mystifyingly beautiful natural setting is an authentic natural treasure.  The enchanting tone gives this an upbeat feel throughout, even when real human issues are addressed like starving, poverty, vengeance as justice, or crime and punishment are ultimately addressed, giving this a mythical feel of living in Divine Eden, a perfect, picturesque world, where early signs of civilization are the purest forms of human expression, where sin is seen as violating the laws of nature, not God or the laws of man, making this something of a Pantheist western.

Suspiria

SUSPIRIA                   A-                   

Italy  (98 mi)  1977  ‘Scope  d:  Dario Argento 

The Only Thing More Terrifying Than The Last 12 Minutes Of This Film Are The First 92.    —poster tagline    

One of the Granddaddy’s of horror films, largely due to the spectacular effects, where this is one of the most outstanding uses of color of any film ever made, using the three-strip Technicolor process (already obsolete at the time of shooting), where every single shot is literally bathed in the sensuous beauty of Technicolor, always accentuating the eye-popping visual design of the film, shot by cinematographer Luciano Tovoli.  Using something of a barebones story, the film is instead prone to extreme exaggeration, featuring spectacular murder sequences, where much of the film plays out like a visit to a mad funhouse, where behind each door is another frightful experience designed to produce shocking horrors, each one more astonishing than the last.  Using a repeating musical theme composed by Argento along with the band “Goblin,” this has a familiarity with John Carpenter’s creepy and hypnotic electronic score in HALLOWEEN (1978) released the following year, where you get a pervasive sense of foreboding dread just from the opening sequence, Suspiria (1977) Very scary first 15 minutes!!! YouTube in HD (15:12), which is a breathtaking lead-in to this nightmarish world drenched in brilliant colors, a master class of filmmaking technique taking place on fabulous sets, including the initial murder sequence starting at about the 9:30 mark.  The spookiness of the taxi cab ride may as well be an arrival to Transylvania, instead it’s Jessica Harper as Susy arriving in Germany to study at a prestigious dance academy, featuring an extraordinary sound design throughout, but also horribly amateurish dubbing and hysterical overacting.  In a sudden shift of narrative, a frightened woman, Eva Axén, flees the school in a panic, finding safe refuge in the apartment of a friend, only to be murdered by an unseen force in the middle of the night, two white eyes staring from out of the dark, where some may confuse this character with Susy, as both are soaked by the rain.  Argento, in something out of the Werner Herzog handbook for making movies, supposedly played the musical soundtrack at full blast on the set to force the actors into an unnatural sense of powerlessness to circumstances beyond their control, perhaps best expressed in this weirdly ominous sequence of Susy simply walking down the corridor of the new dance academy, MOVIE : SUSPIRIA [1977] - YouTube (1:18).    

Literally nothing can prepare the viewer for the assault on the senses that Argento throws at you, feeling as if you’re stuck in the hypnotic intrigue of a nightmare you can’t escape, captivated by a relentlessly horrifying, fear-inducing experience where you’re continually drawn deeper and deeper into this cavernous abyss, where you find yourself alone in a dark and hallucinogenic fever dream with an evil force on the loose.  Even before her entrance to the academy, all is not right, as things are strangely out of whack, where Susy is seen as a young, wide-eyed innocent lured into the mysterious lair of dark and hidden forces which have their own peculiar designs.  The school is run by Joan Bennett (her final screen appearance), a former film noir femme fatale in Fritz Lang’s SCARLET STREET (1945), as the seemingly sophisticated and ultra polite Madame Blanc, while the harsh taskmasker and disciplinarian is Miss Tanner, none other than Alida Valli from THE THIRD MAN (1949), both familiar faces that add character and and a kind of camp personality to the overall rich décor of what appears to be a witch’s coven, something along the lines of ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968), where we get a clue when the doctor treats the young ballet dancer’s blood instead of any illness, recommending a glass of red wine every night, which has the effect of inducing sleepiness, leaving her helplessly drugged each night.  Her roommate is Sara, Stefania Casini, best friends with the girl killed earlier, who suspects foul play but has little to go on.  When a shower of maggots falls from the ceiling, not to mention a bat attack, and the mysterious death of a blind pianist, mauled by his seeing-eye dog, you’d think this ought to provide sufficient warning to one and all, but no one leaves or turns to the police.  As dark fates continue to befall several more individuals, Susy stupefyingly remains on the premises, remaining drugged and clueless to the source of evil.  There’s even a Susy and Sara swimming pool sequence with the eerie tone of DIABOLIQUE (1955), where in the calmness of the still water, the atmospheric presence of a disturbing force is everpresent, which eventually leads to her roomate’s gruesome demise, another spooky sequence of slasher horror Suspiria's best scene - YouTube in HD (3:35) that is quickly covered up by the next morning.    

When Sara supposedly disappears, according to school officials, packing and leaving without a word early the next morning, Susy contacts one of her friends, a young, cherubic faced Udo Kier who plays Sara’s former psychiatrist.  They discuss the possibility of witchcraft, as if this is the message Sara was trying to send her from the grave, but Udo offers the standard psychobabble mantra, “Bad luck isn’t brought by broken mirrors, but by broken minds.”  However one of his colleagues offers keen insight by suggesting witches have an insurmountable desire to accumulate power, where all the minions of the coven collectively offer their knowledge to a single leader who rules over them all, amassing supernatural powers that can literally alter reality.  Most of this narrative information is for the audience’s behalf to help them find their way through this dizzying weirdness, as the director only accelerates the relentless slasher assault with terrifyingly creepy, wall to wall music that continually sounds like glass shattering.  Argento really is a master of the tracking shot, as this is his chosen method to take us slowly on a dreamlike journey into a strange new world, becoming something of a haunted house movie, where characters are forever exploring the remote interiors of the building at their own peril, including Susy who finally throws out the wine and thinks she’s on to something.  The slow pan of the camera through the hallways literally becomes her hesitant, but curiously fearful perspective as she attempts to trace the source of evil, following her down corridors that are suddenly saturated in a torrent of red, continuing through hidden doors into strange, mysterious rooms, all with a strikingly beautiful decorative design, accompanied by the sound of whispered shrieks on the soundtrack, past two Russian fat ladies who menacingly stand guard to their eerie, secret world, seen in the kitchen giggling hilariously while they chop meat.  As Susy climbs deeper into the unknown, with the mind-altering music weighing upon every anticipated thought, the suspense by itself is hair-raising, but she continues to wander into the mysterious lair of a Hellish underground, a place where the living and the dead coincide, where we’ve already seen what can happen to her helpless friend Sara.  Argento’s slowly building sense of dread is met with simply extraordinary Art Deco splendor, using lush visual effects to create an unsurpassed boldness that literally redefines the genre through such a brilliantly extravagant, heavily stylized art design, where the frightening onslaught of terror onscreen becomes a uniquely individualized film experience.