Dir: Robert Mulligan | US Fantasy drama
Fifteen years after Tom Tryon had played the title monster in I Married a Monster from Outer Space, although the ordeal it depicted must have paled by comparison with the subsequent experience of working for Otto Preminger. He returned to films in style as executive producer on his own adaptation of his best-selling novel.
Having just created a splash with ‘Summer of ’42’ director Robert Mulligan returns to the summer of 1935 – a date driven home by an appearance of the National Review Association logo and when John Ritter is seen reading a newspaper headlining the trial of the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby – for this Hitchcockian exercise in psychological horror shot in brilliant colour by veteran cameraman Robert Surtees (there’s an eye-watering scene depicting a kid falling on to a pitchfork) which imbues Connecticut with the same inscrutable beauty as Grant Wood and Andrew Wyeth.
Just as Mulligan’s earlier study of childhood during the thirties in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ had enlisted the services as narrator of Kim Stanley (a stage actress rarely seen in films), so ‘The Other’ provides an extremely rare screen record of legendary Broadway star and acting coach Uta Hagen. @RichardChatten