Cinema: Tallu'sTurn | TIME

TIME

April 2, 1965 12:00 AM GMT-5

Die! Die! My Darling! The crazed seers who plot film trends have exhausted the first wave of mature movie queens willing to trade their glamour for Grand Guignol; now this second-string British thriller offers Tallulah Bankhead as its reigning menace.

As in most such exercises, the camera excavates Tallulah’s once-fabled beauty with indecent pleasure, as though she were a ruined abbey or an old Roman wall. She bangs about as an unhinged religious fanatic who rules a desolate manor in the English countryside with several subnormal servants. She is mourning her dead son, and when his former fiancee (Stefanie Powers) comes to pay a courtesy call, Tallulah promptly locks her up. Her intention, of course, is to purify the girl’s spirit and send her to the late lamented Stephen in a ritual death. Stefanie escapes that fate, but before Tallu and her ghastly crew have done with the girl, she has been stabbed, damned, beaten and shot at. She also falls through the glass roof of the greenhouse, narrowly escapes drowning and rape.

Darling makes no sense at all. But diehard dread addicts will appreciate that its settings look eerily authentic, its gore is in shivery color, and Tallulah spreads terror with explosive authority. Her chosen weapons are a knife, a gun, and a voice box so volcanic that the entire household becomes paralyzed every time she summons her maid Anna (“An-aaAGGHH!”), pronouncing the name like a death rattle. In Darling’s sickest, saddest moment, Stefanie discovers Tallu leafing through yellowed scrapbooks stuffed with clippings and old photographs and asks bluntly: “Were you an actress?” Rather pointed question for a girl who doesn’t want to have her throat cut.

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