Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

focuses on the explicitly Freudian analysis of pair’s behaviour, that the twins respectively
represent the good and evil sides of human beings. The film also deploys mirrors (it
actually opens and ends depicting a disordered room with a broken mirror) to indicate that
the two female characters share divided loyalties and ambivalent emotions (fig. 84). Ruth
plays the loving sister, the one that psychiatrist Scott Elliott (Lew Ayres) falls in love with
when he is called upon to investigate the murderous femme fatale Terry (the sisters’ shared
boyfriend had been murdered in cold blood and witnesses identify one of them as the
culprit but are not able to tell them apart).
In contrast, The Spiral Staircase reflects a different type of vice, that of
compensatory psychotic violence, with a protagonist who has committed a string of
murders (all of the victims sufferers of a certain physical affliction or some kind of
physical imperfection). The killer’s identity has eluded the police. The Constable’s (James
Bell) words are clear though concerning the killer: “Somebody in this town. Somebody we
all know. Someone we see everyday. Might be me. Might be you.” The police may not
know who the murderer is, but they suspect that the next victim may be Helen, who was
struck dumb after a childhood trauma involving a fire. This is the contrived postulate of the
drama.
The film is therefore heavily over-determined as a suspenseful psychological
drama, in which the characters move about in an old house, full of dark corners, flickering
candles, and which has its own in-house killer. It manages to penetrate the minds of the
characters, most especially that of Professor Albert who, we are told in the second part,
was the one to look after Steven’s mother, while his brother has never cared much for
anyone but himself and travelled around the world. But at least the latter seems less
inhibited as a person in his own way. Unusually for a whodunit, the identity of the
murderer is narrowed down to the two bitter rival stepbrothers. It is also revealed that their
dead hunter father had always called them weaklings because they never knew how to use
a gun. The film is openly (even absurdly) Freudian, uncovering developmental family
problems, so the spectator can easily understand how deranged the guilty son is. He is a
voyeur, entrapped in his own childhood past.
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