“Anton Walbrook is captivating in his unbridled performance style and his total espousal of an old-school, self-destructive and tragic protagonist. But there is something more, too. Walbrook was one of those great film actors who made full and courageous use in his work of his essential otherness (he was an Austrian Jewish homosexual working in a foreign country and language). Although a classically trained actor, in nearly all his memorable English-language performances—but most notably Gaslight (1940)—he drew explicitly on his alien heritage (most obviously represented by his Germanic baritone voice and clipped diction) while in The Queen of Spades he appears to invite the audience to side against him for subconscious reasons other than what he says and what he does.”
Anton Walbrook and Edith Evans are magnificent in this lavish, hallucinatory film. You can read my treatment of it as part of Reverse Shot’s annual Halloween round-up, the Great Pumpkins - here
