Sir Hitchcock used to say : the more successful the villain ,the more successful the film .
And "Uncle Silas " got three memorable villains for the price of one.
Katina Paxinou appears first as a French teacher ,but her lessons are so terrifying ( you 've got to pronounce "u " properly !say it again " uuuu"!) that her pupil gets nightmares at night ;she sings bizarre songs in French and she takes the ingenue for a promenade .....in the cemetery ...
.......where she meets the second villain(Manning Whiley ) who is none other than her first cousin ,son of sweet uncle Silas ....
.......who is the third baddie (Derrick De Marnay) and lives in a gloomy dark castle , par excellence the Gothic place ,with a roof which can give you the jitters ;uncle Silas is suave ,sly and ,little by little,reveals his true colors :he's the ogre of the fairy tales flash on the bone;
The three actors overplay ,in an outrageous way (mainly Paxinou), turns this Gothic tale into enjoyable grand guignol and combine their efforts to bump off pitiful Jean Simmons and to latch onto her valuable inheritance (hence the alternate title).Jean Simmons ,then at the beginning of a brilliant career ,and who had already a masterpiece under her belt ("black narcissus")
