A dead person plays the piano
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | A dead person plays the piano |
| Original title | Taste of Fear |
| Country of production | United Kingdom |
| original language | English , German , French |
| Publishing year | 1961 |
| length | 81 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Seth Holt |
| script | Jimmy Sangster |
| production | Jimmy Sangster |
| music | Clifton Parker |
| camera | Douglas Slocombe |
| cut |
James Needs , Eric Boyd Perkins |
| occupation | |
| |
Taste of Fear (original title: Taste of Fear ) is a in black and white twisted, April 4, 1961 in London , first performed British thriller from director Seth Holt .
action
The film begins in Switzerland : the police search a mountain lake and finally recover the body of a young woman.
Young Penny Appleby has been dependent on a wheelchair since a serious riding accident nine years ago in which she fell from her horse and it fell on her. After the death of her best friend, she returns to the house of her widowed and secondly married father, whom she has not seen for ten years, on the Côte d'Azur. When she arrives, her stepmother Jane, who is completely unknown to her, tells Penny that her father is on a business trip. When Penny's father does not return even after days, her questions become more insistent, but she is evaded and Penny is given contradicting reasons for delaying his return home. For the first time, Penny feared that her father might no longer be able to live.
One night the young woman notices a light that she sees in the window of the summer house opposite. Penny rolls over there and discovers his body sitting in an armchair. She gives a piercing scream, flees the summer house in panic and accidentally falls into the swimming pool between the two buildings with her wheelchair. At the last second, Bob, her father's chauffeur, can rescue Penny from the swampy water. As the days go by, Penny begins to doubt her sanity more and more. Her father's corpse appears several times, his car, which he supposedly drove away in, is in the garage and from the locked music room, to which only her father has the key, she listens to music - as if someone were playing the piano.
Penny thinks her stepmother is also acting strangely. She worries about Penny and gets the French doctor Dr. Gerrard into the house. Gerrard, obviously a house friend, claims that her father said that Penny has always had too much imagination (in the original: she was over imaginative ). He certifies that the girl is nervous overexertion and diagnoses incipient paranoia. The other residents of the house don't believe Penny either that she has seen her father dead several times. When Penny asks the employees to check the strange occurrences she has observed, they cannot find anything unusual every time. Penny believes she is at the center of an all-encompassing conspiracy. Only Bob seems to be on their side. Penny gains trust in him and tries with his help to get to the bottom of the mysterious events.
In order for the police to start an investigation, the first thing to do is to find the father's body, both say. So Bob decides to dive into the pool of water. When he sinks into the pool, which is filled with all kinds of rubbish and plants, to examine it more closely, he finally discovers the body of Penny's father floating in the depths. Things are coming to a head, and Penny and Bob now suspect that Jane must be behind what is clearly supposed to drive Penny insane. In this way, both suspect, Penny's stepmother is trying to get the considerable inheritance of her dead husband.
Then things take a dramatic turn. The supposedly trustworthy Bob proves to be the mastermind behind the mysterious processes. Jane Appleby is actually his mistress, and they both plan to kill Penny. They are loaded into the back of their father's car and, with their dead father at Penny's side, they let the car speed down a sloping street without steering so that it falls straight into the sea. Surprisingly, Penny is not nearly as handicapped as everyone previously believed. She can free herself from the car. Bob and Jane believe that both father and daughter are now gone: drowned in a bogus car accident. Nothing stands in the way of the legacy now.
Bob is called to the scene of the accident and is perplexed when the police explain to him that only one body, that of old Appleby, was found in the water. At the opening of the will, Jane, completely surprised, learns from the notary that her stepdaughter has been dead for three weeks. She committed suicide in Switzerland, where she lived. When the notary leaves again, he briefly points out a young lady who is sitting in a wheelchair a few meters away in front of the house. Jane looks at her from a distance, amazed. It's the fake penny believed dead. Jane goes to her. Jane explains that she is Penny's best friend and that her name is Maggie. Penny would have lost all her will to live since her mother's death. After an exchange of letters between Penny and her father, in which he wrote that he could not visit her because strange things were going on here, the girl sitting in a wheelchair committed suicide. Maggie called Penny's father that evening to tell him about it. When a letter arrived at Penny's address two weeks later, in which Penny's father asked his daughter to visit him, Maggie knew something was wrong. She then decided to take Penny's role and travel to the Côte d'Azur. It was clear to her that someone had forged her father's signature and was clearly trying to lure Penny there.
After this confession, Maggie gets up and leaves. Jane is stunned. She sits down in the wheelchair and collapses. She now knows that her plan has failed. In the meantime the notary has also informed Bob about the girl sitting in a wheelchair. Bob is flabbergasted, he runs back to the house. When he sees a person from a distance who is sitting in a wheelchair high above the sea cliffs with his back to him, he runs there and kicks the wheelchair into the abyss with all his might. He sees Jane plunge into the depths. Then the police arrive and arrest him. Without a word he goes to Maggie and the recently arrived Dr. Gerrard, who had obviously been privy to Maggie's plan, passed by. Maggie and Dr. Gerrard look down the steep slope into the sea. You see Jane's body floating in the water.
Production notes
A dead man plays the piano was one of the few awesome films in the wedding of this company specializing in horror fabrics, which got by without a classic cinema monster (Dracula, Frankenstein, mummy, werewolf etc.).
Was shot Taste of Fear from 24 October 1960 to 7 December 1960 in Black Park, Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire , England, and on location in the South of France , including the airport in Nice . The film was awarded by Columbia Pictures . The German premiere took place on January 12, 1962. The FSK released the film from the age of 16. In the United States , the film was called Scream of Fear .
The advertising campaign for the film abstained from describing the content to attract audiences to the cinemas. So there was only one billboard photo showing the screaming Susan Strasberg.
criticism
The film 's large lexicon of people praises Holt's “feeling for an atmosphere that creates tension”.
The House of Horror writes that the film is “a brilliant example of how one can win exciting moments from a clichéd story” and praises Holt's effective directing alongside the script and camera.
Halliwell's Film Guide sees a "clever rip-off from Hitchcock " with borrowings from Die Teuflischen .
Geoff Andrew from the Time Out Film Guide criticized the story as the devilish plagiarism, but found words of praise for the implementation: "Thanks to Douglas Slocombe's camera and a tight, shock-like editing technique, Holt succeeds in a tour de force in a dark, uncomfortable atmosphere."
The lexicon of international films writes: "Over-the-top tear with a crime and horror story in which Susan Strasberg plays the wheelchair-bound daughter of a 'corpse'."
Web links
- Taste of Fear in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Scream of Fear on rottentomatoes.com
Individual evidence
- ^ Peter Osterried: “The Hammer Chronicles”, p. 219, MPW Filmbibliothek, Hille 2006; ISBN 978-3-931608-74-3
- ^ A dead person plays the piano in the dictionary of international films .
- ^ Ronald M. Hahn, Volker Jansen: Lexicon of the horror film. Munich 1989, p. 122/123
- ↑ Kay Less : The film's great personal dictionary . The actors, directors, cameramen, producers, composers, screenwriters, film architects, outfitters, costume designers, editors, sound engineers, make-up artists and special effects designers of the 20th century. Volume 4: H - L. Botho Höfer - Richard Lester. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89602-340-3 , p. 40.
- ^ "Taste of Fear (Scream of Fear) was a splendid exercise in squeezing thrills out of a cliché story (plot to drive young girl insane), well scripted by Jimmy Sangster, superbly photographed by Douglas Slocombe, and directed with dazzling skill for the precisely right effect by Seth Holt. “- Allen Eyles, Robert Adkinson and Nicholas Fry (eds.): The House of Horror, Lorrimer Publishing Ltd., London 1973, p. 69 f.
- ↑ "Smartly tricked-out sub-Hitchcock screamer with sudden shocks among the Riviera settings and plot Which Hammer borrowed from Les Diaboliques." - Leslie Halliwell : Halliwell's Film Guide , Seventh Edition, New York 1989, p 994th
- ↑ "Brazenly plagiarising Clouzot's Les Diaboliques [...] The plotting is very contrived indeed, but thanks partly to Douglas Slocombe's camerawork and to taut, shock-cut editing, Holt manages a tour de force of brooding, genuinely unsettling atmosphere." - Review ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in the Time Out Film Guide, accessed November 6, 2012.
- ↑ Klaus Brüne (Ed.): Lexikon des Internationale Films , Volume 8, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1987, p. 3869.
