In short: Lady in Black (1958)

Original title: Damen I svart

Private detective couple Kajsa (Annalisa Ericson) and John Hillman (Karl-Arne Holmsten) are going on a long-awaited holiday in the country, supposedly to get away from crime. Too bad they’re going to visit Kaja’s friend Inger von Schilden (Anita Björk), who is in a bit of trouble, and not just because she has an affair with the assistant of her husband Christian (Sven Lindberg). Soon enough, a series of murders start, perhaps committed by the area’s local ghost, the titular Lady in Black. Clues, however, and a lot of them too, point towards Inger as a rather more corporeal suspect, if a very clumsy one.

Of course, the Hillmans investigate, alas assisted by their stuttering odious comic relief assistant Freddy (Nis Hallberg), who has followed them to the country.

This is the first of a commercially quite successful series of films about the detective couple directed by Arne Mattsson.Tonally and formally these are close relations to the Italian proto giallos and the German Edgar Wallace krimis that started up at about the same time. Clearly, something good was in the air in Europe at the time.

As far as I’ve read, Swedish critics never did warm to Mattsson, putting him down for his commercial instincts (a problem well known to German genre directors of the time as well), and, absurdly, even mocked his propensity to, you know, move his camera. Which indeed, he does here, too, stylishly and intelligently, emphasising and deepening character relations with it, something he does with some eccentric but effective framing choices in many a scene as well. Mattsson also puts quite some effort into expressionist/noir plays with shadow and light, which pays off particularly well in the scenes involving the Lady.

The script, as is often the case with films like this, isn’t quite as great as Mattsson’s visual realization. The humour really hasn’t aged terribly well (if it ever was funny at all), the sexy bits are not terribly sexy if you’re not from the 50s, and the melodrama and connected characterisation is sometimes a bit stiff. However, the mystery at the film’s core works rather well in the film’s decidedly non-naturalistic world, and the Hillmans make a fun detective couple. It is particularly nice to see in a film from this era how much Kajsa is actually doing on her own account, and how matter of factly the film treats her as her husband’s equal, something this film does much better than any of the Wallace movies from my native Germany ever managed (or even tried).

Lady in Black is really a wonderful film as a whole, aiming to be a crowd pleaser but doing so stylishly.