Lady in White (1962)

Original title: Vita frun

With his last will, a rich arsehole industrialist (as if they were any other kind) manages to snub rather a lot of people, starting with his nurse and certainly not ending with composer of pompously melodramatic piano tunes Eva (Gio Petré) and colonialist Roger von Schöffer (Jan Malmsjö), the children of his first wife. The only winners in the bequest lottery are his second wife Helen (Anita Björk) and her daughter (Elisabeth Odén, I believe) – whom he had adopted, unlike the children of his first wife. These two get everything, even the mansion that once belonged to Eva’s and Roger’s family. Helen graciously allows Eva to keep living in the mansion, but in the most hurtful manner she could come up with.

A bit later, Eva drowns herself in the nearest swamp. Afterwards, Roger returns from his stint in Brazil, and curious things start happening that surely won’t have anything to do with the typical crime-causing passages all wills in mystery movies contain.

In any case, a mysterious Lady in White – who may or may not be a ghost – portends evil, apparently ghostly hands play Eva’s horrible music on a harpsichord, and there’s fun with a life-sized doll, too.

Eventually, Helen calls in private detective John Hillman (Karl-Arne Holmsten). He’s not bringing his rather more interesting wife, alas. However, comic relief assistant Freddy (Nils Hallberg), now having left the Hillmans trying to get his own detective agency going, has been hanging around since the beginning of the movie to pump his aunts for some starting capital. Which is great for people who like comic relief characters, I suppose.

This is the final Hillman mystery by Arne Mattson, and despite what the title’s closeness to the first one in the series might make one belief, this is not a re-tread of that one, but has a plot all of its own; apart from the inclusion of a potentially ghostly lady, of course, but I’m certainly not going to complain about that sort of thing.

Hillman only arrives at the halfway mark through the film. Before that, Mattsson and his audience spend quite some time with a cast of characters right out of the nastier arm of the manor house mystery that would bear its most beautifully poisoned fruits a couple of years later in its own corner of the giallo. Everybody here has dirty secrets, is unpleasant, a liar, a drug addict, a cheat, a money-grubber or of the bizarre belief that being titled is anything but a reason for shame for the oppression one’s ancestors grew fat on. In other words, it’s a fun time to be had with these pretty stains on humanity that gets even better with everybody’s love for hand-wringing melodrama. Though I’m not terribly sure the film finds its characters quite as reprehensible as I do.

Mattsson’s handling all of the talk needed for the sort of film this is rather excellently, posing everybody in the most effective way for maximum hand-wringing, using reflections and shots made from knee-height to make things visually more interesting (and weirder, too), really going as all-out visually as I’ve by now begun to expect of the man’s often pretty astonishing looking films. Mattsson is particularly great at the spooky bits, so much so I’m rather disappointed he apparently never made a straight-up piece of supernatural horror (though this comes pretty damn close for spoiler-y reasons). Particular highlights in that regard are Eva’s suicide in the swamps by night, the final appearance of the Lady, and a climactic séance that ends with a proper mad scene – all shot in ways that would have fit perfectly in an Italian Gothic (which is the highest possible compliment for this sort of thing), all drenched in shadow.