Films: 1960s
(1965) Die! Die! My Darling
Monday, March 05, 2007
Die! Die! My Darling
Director: Silvio Narizzano
Release: 1965
In a twisted reversal of the plot of "Psycho," director Silvio Narizzano's Mrs. Trefoile (Tallulah Bankhead) keeps the spirit of her dead son alive in the basement and captures his would-have-been wife in order to cleanse her soul and make her ready for divine reunion.
Bankhead brings a religious ferocity to her portrayal of Trefoile. Cloistered in a ramshackle farmhouse in rural England, she has quietly imploded in its odd angles and dusty rooms since the death of her son Stephen.
Stephen's final lover, Pat Carroll (Stephanie Powers), is on holiday in England - now engaged to Alan Glentower (Maurice Kaufmann), who works in television. While he closes business with his producer, Pat follows up on the last letter from Mrs. Trefoile - an invitation to meet at last.
Upon Pat's arrival, Trefoile subjects her to immediate inquiry - and then a kind of inquisition. Prayer service, mandatory lodging and dinner-as-punishment are followed by more prayer and the rapid realization that Pat can't leave. With the help of brother Harry (Peter Vaughan) and his physically imposing wife Hannah (Yootha Joyce), 
Trefoile imprisons Pat in an upstairs room.
What follows is a series of escape attempts, and the gradual unfolding of the full and awful flower that is the Trefoile family.
"Die! Die! My Darling" is an awesome example of character writing, a piece that develops, implies and explodes the notions its audience might formulate about its central figures.
While Pat is basically innocent of any crime - she transforms from polite to cruel. While Mrs. Trefoile is deranged, she is also vastly and un-fixably injured by her life. Hannah and Harry are as similar as their names - a double helix of lower-class dependency and self-loathing. On the periphery, Donald Sutherland reminds the viewer of his passionate range as he thoroughly and convincingly executes the part of Trefoile's simple yard-hand Joseph.
Narizzano's film makes powerful use of the Hammer Film Production's trademark purples, oranges, reds and greens - which wash the Trefoile house in lurid and telling colors. Even the sets speak from the inside of Richard Matheson's script - the house's pus-yellow door is a threshold to infection, distended sanity and vile reinvention of the self.
The completeness with which Matheson and Narizzano treat Trefoile's religiosity is magnified by Bankhead's performance. She communicates the facets of her psychological no-win scenario in monologue equally as well as with the gesture of a single raised hand. Powers matches Bankhead nearly scene for scene, her face a marvel of subtle and authentic reactions to an increasingly bizarre situation.
There is much to look at in terms of key influential material in "Die! Die! My Darling." From location, interior sets, basic plot structure and camera choices, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" owes a significant chunk of its core aesthetics and narrative to "Die! Die! My Darling."
As far as content, "Die! Die! My Darling" mines a sexual vein that warps and disfigures the Oedipal complex key to predecessors like "Psycho." The off-screen character of Stephen represents a moral purity that Trefoile denies all others. She scours her household with endless readings from the Bible, and insists that her son and his still-living lover were both meant to marry and virginal until (and following) death.
The son as unsullied father-reincarnate, and the female partner as more perfect mother-returned comprise Trefoile's otherwise aborted sexual universe Trefoile needs to replace whatever psychic scars her own biography must bear. Religion is a stand-in for her pre-trauma existence.
Then there is Harry, a roving sexual opponent of Trefoile's household, a wolf in the fold. Openly adulterous, Harry leaves Hannah and Trefoile behind when the workday is through - off to the local tavern to bed the barmaid. Pat, to Harry, is a new sexual plaything and conveniently accessible and powerless against his advance - except for Trefoile's vengeful attention.
Despite the constant threat of violence, and the psychological brutality perpetrated by Trefoile, the real undoing of the house is knowledge. As Pat gives up hope of physical escape, she turns instead to intellectual dominance of her captors.
She is a fiercely independent character, matching Trefoile's powerful but false freedom-via-religion with a freedom born of truth. In every case she is liberated by telling (or attempting to tell) the Trefoile household what it most wants, or resists, to hear.
She tells Trefoile that she is not a virgin, that she is engaged to a new man, that Stephen killed himself. She tells Harry that he can have her body. She almost tells Hannah that Trefoile killed Harry in the basement. These are the real acts of revelation - that the oppressor only succeeds when the subject is willing to play into the reality created.
"Die! Die! My Darling" is essentially a pair of dominant female characters locked in a tailspin. Trefoile has become the false patriarch in her husband-less household - stripping away all signifiers of femininity to achieve power.
Pat is the feminine incarnate - youthful, sexual and adaptive. Victory comes to Pat when she rattles Trefoile. In her darkest moments, when she suspects that Stephen's death may have been suicide, Trefoile turns to a secret stash of forbidden liquor, lipstick and a looking glass. In her basement, Trefoile keeps a veritable dressing room of theatre costumes, props and posters.
The center cannot hold. Trefoile's return to the female identity introduces a vulnerability she cannot bear - and so she seeks to destroy Pat in a literal sense. She returns, however, to the theatre-set basement to do so, and the action thus rings false.
It is only a show, in the end - a ritual meant to reestablish her motherhood in Stephen's eyes, but Narizzano's camera focuses and refocuses on the portrait of Stephen that Trefoile keeps there, and each time the meaning is made more crystalline. The son has forsaken the mother, the purity he once represented is now scornful departure, and the woman that has replaced her is the undoing of the original, inherently sexual bond.
Trefoile sought to cover that mother-son lust with a lifetime of scripture, but the result is a literal and spiritual knife in the back.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
Die! Die! My Darling, 1965
Powers matches Bankhead nearly scene for scene, her face a marvel of subtle and authentic reactions to an increasingly bizarre situation.
