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what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Edward G. Robinson generally excelled in making interesting roles and particularly border line cases. This is one of the most extreme ones. Together with Judith Anderson, his sister in this film who pities him and has taken care of him all his life, they have brought up an adopted daughter and concealed her true origin from her. The film is bristling with mysteries and secrets from the start. How did he get his wooden leg? Why is he so terrified of his own forest? The question marks keep towering until the first blow is dealt and the first shot is fired, and then the weird but logical consequences of a natural development keep assembling into a constantly more eerie plot of hidden traumas that ultimately must burst out into the open. Robinson's acting is of particular interest here, and the director specializes all the way in catching the silent language of expressions, furtive glances, worried looks, especially in the young girl (Allene Roberts) who looks worried from the start and has reasons to be. There is a secondary plot as well with a loose woman finding herself in the wrong company of an unwilling villain, who is paid to add to the scariness, so the film is replenished indeed with intriguing drama, gradually towering into a very appropriate finale in a passionate burst of confusion.Well, well, the film is a perfect example of how a petty rustic story of farmers and small folk by the cinema can be turned into a towering drama of both tragedy and release. Miklos Rosza with his music completes the stamp of perfection, and a film like this could not have found more suitable music of more spellbinding kind.

On YouTube, I was lucky to come across an excellent, clear, high resolution print of this film. I see that there are several other poor quality, scratched, blurry copies of it on YouTube, which is what happens when a film slips into public domain. It gets shown widely on TV and the prints get old and worn out, and then anyone can transfer a bad copy of it to DVD and legally sell it, with the statement "guaranteed excellent quality recording", but what they don't tell you is that the SOURCE PRINT was bad. I see several other user reviews that complain about the poor quality of a DVD release. For those of you who are very enthusiastic about this film, you'll be happy to find out that a high quality print does exist. Just keep looking for it. I found the film a little too long and slow moving, but it had great atmosphere and the musical score was eerie and effective. Fans of Edward G. Robinson will especially enjoy his fine performance, which carries the film. I did not LOVE this film as some other user reviewers have stated. I "LIKED" it and it was worth watching once.

Dame Judith Anderson is relatively quiet in comparison to her other film and stage triumphs, but when she decides to burn down that haunted cottage, where a murder took place 15 years before, I thought she was coming back as Mrs. Danvers in "Rebecca," 7 years before. Remember what she did to Manderley?Anderson lives with her brother, portrayed by Edward G. Robinson, a questionable character and their adopted daughter. As the film goes on, we slowly find out what had happened years before.Everything begins to erupt when Robinson hires Lon McCalister, a neighborhood boy, to help him around the farm, and the latter, taking a short-cut through the woods to get home, stumbles upon the deep woods, hears voices and screaming throughout. He is soon joined by the adopted daughter who slowly begins to remember this red house.Eerie, but somewhat entertaining. Rory Calhoun stars as the drunken guy hired by Robinson to keep tabs on the surrounding area around the house.

The novel is a classic thriller made several times into a film. In this outing Judith Anderson, Edward G, Robinson, Rory Calhoun and Julie London are familiar today performers of the period who certainly shine in their roles yet the unusual Hollywood morality of the forties colors this project. The thriller scenes have excellent sound, camera work and editing. Much of it the movie Hollywood gold yet the forties mentality of the whole piece seems dated today and therefore in my viewpoint not a keeper. This perhaps ranks with the Hammer films later in time featuring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee more enjoyable to fans of this unusual take on thrillers than to general audiences.