Review of The Queen of Spades (1949) by Mike M — 18 Dec 2009

A film with an acute sense of the pleasures of storytelling, made manifest in the soldiers' barrackroom anecdotes, and the dusty book Walbrook's Suvonin finds in an antiquities shop, offering up its own tales of the unexpected.

.. Mitchell now seems a rather insipid romantic lead, and Dickinson lays the caged-bird imagery around her on somewhat thick, but it's a worthwhile reissue, bringing back to our attentions one of the few British filmmakers who appeared unembarrassed by opulence and melodrama, in a way that pushes him closer to Max Ophuls than any of his homegrown contemporaries, Powell and Pressburger notwithstanding.