Christopher Plummer was honored back in August as part of TCM's Summer Under the Stars, which gave me the chance to record quite a few of his movies that I hadn't seen before. Among them was a 1975 version of The Spiral Staircase. According to the TCM schedule, it's appearing on TCM again in the early hours of the morning tomorrow (Jan. 18) at 4:30 AM. (It's theoretically possible the TCM schedule has an error and this could be the more famous 1946 version, but considering the following film stars Jacqueline Bisset as does the 1975 The Spiral Staircase, I'm presuming this is no mistake.)
The movie starts with neither Bisset nor Plummer; instead we get a blind woman walking someplace with her guide dog. It's the sort of urban landscape that involves going on a pedestrian walkway that goes under a roadway. This is as always the perfect sort of place for something untoward to happen, since the place is perpetually in shadow. And, sure enough, something does happen, which is the the poor woman gets shot to death with her poor guide dog standing watch over her until the police and coroners can come.
Cut to a shot of our heroine, Helen Mallory (Jacqueline Bisset). She's seeing a doctor whom you could be forgiven for thinking is also her husband. But she's really seeing him because she's lost her ability to speak for psychological reasons that are continually hinted at later in the film through vision-like flashbacks: she survived a house fire in which a little girl, presumably her daughter, died, with Mom unable to help her. But the big reason this and the opening scene murder fit together is that the murder is the latest in a series of murders that all have one thing in common. The murder victims all suffered from one disability or another. Being a mute (although not a deaf-mute; Helen can still hear just fine) is a disability too, so perhaps Helen should get out of the city for a while.
Thankfully, Helen's grandmother, Mrs. Sherman (Mildred Dunnock), lives out in a suitable big house in the middle of nowhere that's theoretically a wonderfully safe place to be but in a movie like this is bound to be a bigger danger to Helen than staying in the city would have been. Grandma Sherman uses a wheelchair as she's got diabetes, and lives in the house with some servants as well as her son, the respected psychologist Dr. Joseph Sherman (Christopher Sherman). Also in the house is another son, Steven (John Phillip Law), who seemingly just got out of the military and, now back with his family, is carrying on an affair with his brother's secretary Blanche.
Helen gets to the house just before a big rainstorm is about to hit, which is a big plot point because the house is isolated enough that power outages are not infrequent. Indeed, they happen often enough that the house has a generator, but just rarely enough that the generator doesn't get used enough to be checked as frequently as it should be. The manor also has a couple of outbuildings, and a strange man who may or may not be the unseen murderer from the opening scene is found in one of them. However, we learn quickly enough that he wasn't the murderer, as he himself gets bumped off. And, as you might guess, this spells danger for Helen as it's not going to be the last killing in the story.
It's been quite a few years since I've seen the 1940s version of The Spiral Staircase, so I can't quite come up with a good list of the ways in which the plots of the two movies differ. This 1970s version feels a bit convoluted, which I'm guessing is based on the fact that it had a fairly small budget without being part of the studio era where lower budgets could be covered by regular studio overhead. As a result, this remake is always a bit of a mess. It tries hard, but at times comes across as though it's trying too hard. You can see why the cast would want to make a newer version of The Spiral Staircase, but ultimately it feels like less than the sum of its parts.
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