THE RED HOUSE (1947)

Cast

Plot

There's something in them thar woods... A young woman is warned off venturing too far from the homestead by her parents, but the lure of that old red house is just too much to resist. Edward G Robinson gives a whompingly overblown performance as the man of the house with a dark secret scratching to get out. A dark tale of sexual awakening and repressed family memories: melodramatic almost to the point of failure, but a mesmersing fairy tale of the Grimm school nonetheless. Delmer Daves may have looked to Freud for inspiration, but David Lynch, Todd Solondz and Tim Burton certainly benefited from his strange film. The transfer to DVD is a woeful affair, but worth persevering with.