The Woman Who Came Back (1945)

Walter Colmes' The Woman Who Came Back goes well beyond 'Lewtonesque': it's an outright Val Lewton pastiche, yet still my favourite fantasy film of 1945.

It begins in the present day, with former runaway bride Nancy Kelly returning by bus to her family's ancestral home of Eben Rock in Massachusetts. An old woman leading a German Shepherd dog on a leash stops the bus and attempts to pay her fare with an ancient pound note, then sits next to our heroine and calls her by name before claiming to having been personally acquainted with her ancestor, a witch burning judge who died over 300 years ago. Shortly thereafter the bus goes off the road, over the cliff, and into the town lake, killing everyone except Kelly, who stumbles into the local pub and the waiting arms of local doctor John Loder, whom she had previously jilted at the altar. Ultimately all the bodies are recovered from the lake except that of the creepy old hag, and the neurotic Kelly begins to think she may have been earmarked as the reincarnation of a witch who, along with her dog 'familiar' was burned at the stake. Apparently always something of a square peg, a condition not ameliorated by her having thrown over that nice Doc Loder, her neighbours begin to share her delusion, particularly when the daughter of the doctor's a-little-too-loving sister becomes ill...

After a wonderfully promising opening the film settles down to a number of nicely foreboding but restrained set-pieces, the elements of which can all be tracked back to Val Lewton: the male protagonist worried by the apparent psychological fragility of his fiancee, and the anxious walk taken by his sister who is pursued by the sound of a jangling dog collar, are both lifted wholesale from Cat People; the suggestion of a neurotic woman as danger to a small child derives from Curse of the Cat People; and the menacing figure of the old woman's roaming dog echoes the jungle cats freed from their cages in the zoo in both The Leopard Man and Cat People. It is clear that whoever devised these scenes (story author John H. Kafka or screenwriter Dennis J. Cooper) had studied the Lewton playbook very closely and made a list. And it's an extremely pleasing simulacra, even if Colmes' careful direction is sometimes let down by a small budget and attendant inability to obtain adequate coverage. This is evidenced by the infrequent appearance of soft and ill-proportioned cutaways that are obvious optical zooms untidily cropped out of the carefully composed two person master shots that make up the bulk of the picture, to substitute for alternate angles the editor simply didn't have and therefore had to invent. Colmes also fails to rein in the performances of his cast as carefully as Lewton was wont to do, hardly surprising in a film whose budget apparently usually did not allow for more than one camera set-up per shot, but it's particularly problematic in the case of his heroine, whose hysteria is unrestrained and obvious a bit too early on, somewhat out of step with the more leisurely and subtle build of the plot. But if the limitations of a small budget sometimes proved too much for its second time director, the benefits of a great deal of meticulous planning prior to shooting are writ large on the screen, and easily outweigh any criticism -- and one criticism in particular.

Most reviews of the film admit to feeling let down by the explanation offered by Otto Kruger's rational priest at the conclusion. The final scene does feel tacked on and lazy, and the film would have been better served by its having been omitted (in which case it would have faded out on a perfectly good shot of the wind-dappled surface of the mysterious lake). Without it, The Woman Who Came Back might enjoy a greater reputation today. But the reviewers appear to take it for granted that the explanation offered for the film's biggest mystery (the disappearance of the witch from the drowned bus) neatly ties off all the loose ends. It really doesn't.

Yes, the supposed witch's confession is discovered to have been forced for political reasons, but just because she wasn't a witch doesn't mean there wasn't a ghostly presence in the film, does it? For instance, a book on the evils of superstition is shown with its pages being riffled by a breeze, but there's no way it could have blown from the table on which it lay to burn in the fireplace: it's simply too big, and the fireplace too far away. There's also a scene involving a heavy trap door, left lying open flat on the floor, that is shown to close but couldn't possibly have fallen shut (seeing as it would have had to fall up in order to do so), it could only have been lifted. And even if the old lady was an ex mental patient, where'd she come by that museum piece currency she tried to use on the bus? Bad props, I hear you say: bad writing, or bad directorial choices. I don't think so. A great deal of obvious care went into this production, and intended or not those details, if recalled them, leave lingering doubts in the mind of the viewer as to the veracity of the pat solution we are offered.

Besides, whatever its very minor faults, The Woman Who Came Back is remarkable in that, coming from Republic Studios, it manages a creditable Val Lewton with even less money and far fewer resources than Val Lewton had access to, which makes this just the kind of modest, industrious, effective and very endearing little gem we here at Biased Observer are digging for.