Plot

1952. Drama. Directed by Michael McCarthy. Starring Natasha Parry & Donald Houston. In a spooky mansion, one of three sinister spinsters tries to poison her nephew's wife to steal a large inheritance.

A story of a newly-wed wife of a young doctor who goes to live with him in an oppressive old house where various mysterious attempts are made on her life.—Graeme Huggan <hia95gh@sheffield.ac.uk>

The film opens with Robert and Ann in a passionate embrace. Robert leaves and Ann rushes in to her flat to see her flatmate Cass, to tell her that Robert has asked her to marry him. Cass is surprised as the couple have known one another for less than the week; and even more surprised when Ann tells her that the wedding will be in a few days' time. Robert has three aunts and they never come up to London, so could Ann and Robert have their reception in the flat? A few days later the wedding has taken place, and Robert explains that they will live at Crow Hollow, his family home. Robert is a country doctor. Robert and Ann have to go to meet an elderly lady, an old friend of the family who is not expected to live long. The old lady is in hospital and sees Ann alone, and approves of her but refers to "poor" Robert: he has been so much alone, and he is an orphan. Ann says that she too is an orphan. The old lady says that Robert has been alone ever since he was a child; the three aunts who now live with him are evidently not a positive influence. She tells Ann not to let Robert take her to Crow Hollow, saying it's no good to either of them. However the old lady is too ill to continue and Ann has to leave before she can explain. Robert and Ann drive to Crow Hollow, which Ann has never seen. She thinks the house is lovely, and indeed it looks like an old manor house. As they pull up, Aunt Judith is pottering about outside and Robert calls her over. She is friendly towards Ann, and explains that she is a naturalist, and has just received an unusual spider from Australia as a zoological specimen. Robert and Ann go indoors and Aunt Opal is introduced; she too is friendly and compliments Ann on her looks, albeit rather intrusively. Aunt Hester is out at present. Aunt Opal takes them to the main bedroom, but she seems to have a habit of making gloomy remarks; this leads to her impress on Ann that "It's where our dear Mother died." Opal tells Robert that a patient needs a home visit, and Ann realises that his medical duty takes precedence. Is he more conscientious as a doctor than as a conscientious husband, she asks. She goes down to the sitting room and the third aunt, Hester, has returned. Hester too makes a personal remark about Ann's slimness, and the ladies as well as Robert himself have a marked tendency to say "Nonsense" when Ann makes any observation herself. It now emerges that Willow is in the house, and Robert has brought a present for her. Ann asks who Willow is, but Robert dodges answering the question. Ann and Robert will now sleep in the main bedroom, but Opal shows Ann the bedroom where Robert had slept hitherto. Ann says she prefers the room; couldn't they move in there? When that idea is turned down, they look at a painted portrait of Robert's Mother; Ann likes it and asks if they could have it in the bedroom they are using, but that request too is brushed aside. Now Opal takes Ann to another room; she hopes Ann will like it. Ann says it is lovely, but it now emerges it is Willow's room. Who is Willow? Well, she is a sort of companion, but "we always treat her as one of the family". Later Ann is trying to be dutifully happy; Robert is strangely melancholy, but doesn't properly explain why. Ann is in bed and someone is knocking at the door. Instead of answering it she reads a note on her pillow; Robert has had to go out on a call. The knocking is persistent, so Ann asks the knocker to come in; it turns out to be Willow, who is dressed as a housemaid; she is a strikingly good-looking young woman. She has brought Ann breakfast. Willow is very direct in her manner, although she calls Ann "Miss". Willow is wearing a necklace Robert has bought her, and she now takes an interest in Ann's clothes that are being unpacked. Nevertheless, she makes a disparaging remark about Ann's wedding outfit. Ann makes a tart reply, but Willow seems unabashed. Alone the next day, Ann goes to see the place in the outhouses where Judith keeps her zoological specimens. Again Judith is friendly enough and she pointedly asks Ann whether she likes the household. Ann evades answering, and Judith says that before Ann came, they had a discussion whether she would be better looking than Willow. Judith shows Ann the newly arrived live spider; it is very large and it looks like a bird-eating spider, but Ann doesn't really like spiders. Ann now goes to see Mr Dexter, the gardener; he is very friendly, and he warns Ann not to let the aunts bully her. Hester bustles in with a bottle of strychnine, which she says she uses to protect the carrots in the garden from rabbits. Dexter tells Hester she should be careful with the strychnine. Robert is out making calls, so Hester invites Ann to join her in the village, where she is going to distribute her soup. Evidently she considers it to have health-giving powers to local people. Ann goes to the room to get a coat, and discovers Willow there; she is dressed in Ann's clothes. Ann had only said she could look at them, and was offended that Willow had taken the liberty. Declining to apologise, Willow now asks Ann if she was telling the truth when she previously said that the clothes were fashionable: they seem kind of plain, she says. In town with Hester, Ann goes to see Robert at his surgery. She persuades him to go to lunch with her, and she complains that the aunts are rather oppressive. Robert says this is utter nonsense. She explains that she is unhappy, and says why, but he brushes her concerns aside. She asks if they could move to another house, but he evades answering and flatly contradicts her feeling of unhappiness. There is to be a dance later in the week and they will go; in the sitting room Ann's favourite dress is brought out, and Judith lays down a box containing the spider next to some flowers. Upstairs in her room Willow is setting Ann's hair, and suggests she could wear the flowers in her hair, and Ann agrees. Ann fishes for Willow to explain whether she has a romantic interest locally, but Willow ignores the enquiry and starts to put the flowers in Ann's hair. A spider falls out and lodges on Ann's bare shoulder. She screams, and Willow runs to get Robert; the spider is dislodged and Robert kills it. Judith insists that the spider was in a box with a lid and could not have simply escaped on its own. There is a fruitless discussion about how the spider could have got there, and Robert eventually asks the other women to leave. Willow was holding the dress that Ann was to wear, and throws it down contemptuously on the bed. Robert is superficially sympathetic, but is entirely dismissive of Ann's concern that someone means her ill. They go to the dance, and Ann is introduced to Diana Wilson; it was her mother who warned Ann about Crow Hollow just before she died in hospital. Ann asks Diana if she knows what her Mother's warning against Crow Hollow meant. Diana doesn't really know, but mentions that the aunts at Crow Hill had more or less stolen the old lady's maid: Willow. Diana says that Willow was bribed by the Aunts to go there. She was adopted; the two women agree that Willow is possibly devious, and Diana hints that Robert might have become romantically involved with her. Later Robert and Ann have a discussion about Crow Hollow; Ann is desperately unhappy at the situation, and as before Robert is dismissive and evades even addressing Ann's wishes. However Robert discloses that he promised his grandfather that he would live at Crow Hollow and allow the three aunts to live there, and for that reason he can't simply go to live elsewhere. In the sitting room later the Aunts are discussing Marguerite, Robert's Mother, when Anne walks in. The discussion turns sour, implying petty hostilities. Willow comes in and asks Opal if she can have the day off tomorrow, and Opal agrees without consulting Ann, further emphasising that Ann is not mistress of the house. As Ann leaves the room, the gardener Dexter comes in and shows Anne a deadly poisonous toadstool he has found, and which he proposes to give to Judith. They go in to the kitchen, and Dexter puts the toadstool down. Dexter tells Anne that the Aunts were displeased when Robert's parents got married. His mother died in the house of a mysterious fever. Anne later looks at her gravestone in the churchyard and sees that she died at the age of 26. It is raining hard in the churchyard, and Anne gets wet through. When Robert comes home she asks him what his Mother died of, and asks if she was very unhappy at Crow Hollow. He sidesteps both questions, and is concerned that Ann may have got a chill. He insists, against her wishes, that she goes to bed. She falls asleep and wakes much later; Opal comes and says that Robert has gone out to attend to a medical case; and she adds that Ann must be hungry; she will see if Hester has got some soup ready. In fact Hester arrives at once with some soup. Ann starts to eat it, but finds it bitter. Hester says that is nonsense; it's a very bland soup. She leaves, but Ann almost immediately suffers a severe vomiting attack. Later Robert and the aunts are round Ann's bed; Ann mentions the toadstool, and that "they" want to kill her. Robert injects her with something, and she sleeps, but has a nightmare recollecting everything that has happened. Eventually she revives, and Robert says she is better. But she will be very weak for a few days. She protests that the soup was harmful, but Robert refuses to discuss it. In the kitchen Judith is looking for the poisonous toadstool she left there, with Willow's help, but she can't find it. But she does find something belonging to Hester; it's not obvious (to the viewer) what it is, but Willow comments that it's a dangerous thing to leave lying about; you never know what it might get into. Much later Ann wakens; a nurse has been employed to sit with her, and the crows are noisy outside. Ann asks the nurse if anything was discovered about the soup, but she says that none was left over so no test was possible; but Ann's immediate vomiting response prevented any permanent ill effect. Robert arrives, and the nurse leaves the room. Ann raises the matter of the soup again, and as always Robert curtly dismisses the question. Ann asks again what it was that killed his mother, but again he evades the matter. She repeats her discomfort at living at the house and begs him to consider leaving, but he simply turns his back on her and doesn't answer. The next day Ann is packing a case, and she tells Willow she is going away; she asks Willow to secretly arrange a car to take her to the railway station; she isn't going to tell the household about her intention to leave. As Ann is packing, Willow pointedly mentions Ann's evening gown, and Ann says she can have it. Willow asks for a cocktail hat too. Willow mentions that "funny things happen in this house" and says that Ann is wise to leave. Willow makes the phone call for the car, and later tells Ann that the coast is clear for her to leave without being seen. She is at the railway station and her train comes in; Ann seems to be having doubts about leaving now, and Diana (whom she met at the dance) gets off and talks to her. When Ann says she needs to catch the train, Cass says that is "nonsense", and insists that she comes back to her place for a rest. When they get there Diana tells Ann that she thinks that the aunts hoped Robert would marry Willow. It was possible that one of the aunts was Willow's mother. Ann finds Diana's sympathetic manner reassuring, and she agrees to let Diana drive her back to Crow Hollow. Ann goes to her room to put back the clothes she had taken for her trip, and discovers Willow slumped over the dressing table. She is wearing Ann's evening dress, but with a large knife in her back, plainly dead. Ann screams and finds Robert. They don't phone the police or ambulance, but Hester and Opal appear, and Robert calmly tells them that Willow is dead. Later the police come, and Ann is interrogated by a police detective; he asks if there was anything between Robert and Willow, and Ann insists that she herself was the intended victim. The policeman dismisses the idea out of hand because Willow's hair was fair and Ann's is dark; the policeman is sarcastic and hostile to Ann. The policeman has taken a necklace from Willow's body and asks Ann if it is strange that Robert gave her presents. Ann doesn't think so, and the conversation turns to Willow's parents. A local policeman volunteers that there used to be a rumour that her father was a gardener at Crow Hollow in the past; his name was Jed Dawson. But the man doesn't know who the mother was. "That was kept very dark." Ann believes that the police think that she herself was the killer, perhaps because of jealousy over Willow The policeman has finished questioning Ann and there is a family conference in another room. Diana has come over to see if she can help, and Ann says that she is the police's principal suspect. As usual Robert uses his favourite response, "Nonsense", but the police won't even let Ann leave the house to stay at Diana's. Hester and Diana are interested in the revelation that Dawson was Willow's father, and Hester comments that that was where Willow got her good looks: he was a handsome devil. But Dawson was sacked and left to work for Diana's Mother. Ann is convinced that she was the target of the murder, and that Willow was mistaken for he because she was sitting at her dressing table and wearing her evening dress, as she had said she could. Willow's fair hair, and Ann's dark hair, seem to disable the theory of mistaken identity until Ann realises that she also said Willow could have a cocktail hat: if she had that on, it would have concealed her hair. A brief reconstruction by Ann and Diana is arranged for the sceptical police. Robert urges the theory on the police, and that Ann is in danger of a further attempt. Diana agrees to stay at the house in Willow's room in support of Ann. In the night Hester knocks on Robert and Ann's bedroom door: there has been a phone call that a woman patient is ill and he is needed. Ann begs him not to go but as usual he disregards her feelings; she is to go to Willow's room and sit with Diana. Ann suddenly realises that she didn't hear the telephone ring even though she and Diana had slept lightly. Ann runs to tell Robert, and Opal is seeing him off with a cup of coffee; she says that she got the message about the unwell woman from Judith, but meantime she presses the coffee on Robert, Ann begs Robert not to drink it as it must be poisoned. The mood suddenly changes instantly; Robert now seems to believe Ann, and confronts Opal: why should she want to kill him? In an equally sudden change, Opal says, "Why shouldn't I? Why should either of you live now that Willow is dead? I always intended you [Robert] to marry Willow, so that she should be mistress of Crow Hollow, not her [Ann]! Yes, I tried to kill her too, so that you should be free again, free to marry Willow. But Instead I killed my own daughter,. My daughter WIllow". Robert says he will have to call the police and Opal goes to the kitchen, and drinks her poisoned coffee and is dead. On another day Robert and Ann are happier; Robert is writing an application for a post at the Middlesex Hospital in London; he thinks Ann would be glad to get away. But Ann takes the application letter and tears it up: now at last she is content to live at Crow Hollow.