Guest In The House (1944)

Guest in the House (1944) is a psychological film noir melodrama in which a young manipulative woman moves in with her fiancé's family and turns a happy household against itself.

Guest in the House — which was later re-released under the salacious, demeaning and slightly orgiastic title of Satan in Skirts — was directed by John Brahm and stars Anne Baxter and Ralph Bellamy, with support from Marie McDonald 

In this sensual and somewhat slow-burning domestic film noir fable, the character of Evelyn Heath (Anne Baxter) arrives in the home of the extended family of her smitten fiancé, Dan Proctor (played by Scott McKay) somewhere on the New England coast, hoping for a recuperative summer.

The scenery is reminiscent of many a woman's picture of the era, with high cliffs and crashing waves, the first being suggestive of suicide, and the later suggestive of emotional turmoil.

It might be hard to class Guest In The House as a variety of home invasion noir, although Anne Baxter does play an insidious enemy who arrives in that most precious of American mid-20th Century institutions — the middle class suburban family home.

Nothing messes with the middle class suburban family home more than film noir. The usual noir sensibility dictates that things are not what they seem, and there is nowhere this works to greater effect than in the happy family home. 

Although many noir features do not appear to be immediately present, this is something of an illusion in itself. Film noir is always set in the city, either a real one or a studio recreation, although this is a rural noir, set entirely within a family home. Film noir was almost shot always in black-and-white, and directors used lighting and shadows to convey the sense of impending doom, and there is a good dose of both in Guest in the House (1944).

Aline MacMahon and Ralph Bellamy

Scott McKay and Anne Baxter

In classic noir style, certain scenes in Guest In The House were shot in confined spaces and used angles where characters are enclosed within the frame, and this is more than possible in the ordered setting of this family home. Despite this the film noir sense of claustrophobia and imprisonment, the effect comes and goes and is not always present in Guest in the House.

Evelyn specifically has eyes on Ralph Bellamy's character who is the brother of her boyfriend, a man she doesn't really love but who helped when she had a nervous breakdown. Evelyn is neurotic and also has a bizarre phobia of birds, and eventually the family sees what's going on and how Evelyn is manipulating everyone, and this leads to a memorable but tragic ending.

Ruth Warrick and Ralph Bellamy in Guest In The House (1944)

At the same time as being set in an ordered family home, Guest in the House (1944) is filmed like a fevered dream with the low ceiling and small corners of this house pulling in on the claustrophobic quality of Evelyn's night mare. In all it is a largely gothic noir, which releases itself from time to time into family melodrama.

Most interesting of all is the dual nature of the functioning of Anne Baxter's character Evelyn who is both villain and victim. As well as being the manipulated product of 1940s visions of female evil, Evelyn is also a woman who suffers greatly and deserves sympathy that she does not get. 

Her striking fear of birds is an indicator as to how poor her health is, although she suffers quietly, she is also aware of what she wants to achieve, which is to pull down the American Dream by breaking this family.

Perhaps the indicator here is that the family dream is a madness of itself and we would be as well to have rooted for Evelyn in this picture. After all she does not kill anyone, but instead uses her manipulated and manipulative mind to break down the environment which maybe only she can fully appreciate is a lie.

Anne Baxter is the Guest In The House (1944)

Certainly Ralph Bellamy's character Douglas does live many kinds of lies, unable to truly love his wife and wistfully drawing ladies as he designs a world for them, based on his received notions of sexuality as typified by his permanent live-in model — played by Marie McDonald — who is in fact a walking mannequin with not much more to her life than that.

Worst of all for the vulnerable Evelyn, he flirts with her, drawing a picture of her and appealing to her childish inner loneliness giving her the attention she craves, but without realising how this is not appropriate.

Marie McDonald, Ralph Bellamy and the gaze — in Guest In The House (1944)

He does this with Evelyn first in a sweet and romantic manner, giving her a feeling of inner confidence and bringing something to life in her. But when he does it for real, as he does in his day job on the large scale, with a full-on super-sexualised woman before him in the form of Marie McDonald, we can see idiocy in him that he cannot, and the harm he can inflict on the vulnerable with his flirting ways.

It's a shady variety of one of film noir's finer tropes — the portrait of the woman. By creating the portrait, Douglas (Ralph Bellamy) creates something magical inside of Evelyn (Anne Baxter) than is only ever going to disappoint her and be realised in violence, when she sees how false it is

Spying on the spying in Guest In The House (1944)

Other than being a masterpiece of fevered derangement, Guest In The House (1944) does manage to in its way demolish the American family home, but only briefly, and only if viewers can find sympathy for Anne Baxter's character. This is a big ask perhaps, in a world that wishes only to categorise such an individual woman as a danger, as opposed to a prophetic and powerful force. 

Margaret Hamilton and Ruth Warrick in Guest In The House (1944)

In the end, when Evelyn triumphs, or believes she is about to, such notions depart  and  crashing waves, the expressive lighting and heavy emotions take over as the poor woman's madness brings her to her own painful end — leaving the American family happy to breakfast another day.

Lewis Milestone began directing the film in April 1944, but was stricken with appendicitis in May 1944 and collapsed on the set. John Brahm then stepped in to direct

Although Kenneth Anger's book Hollywood Babylon remains largely discredited as a licentious and untrue collection of exaggerations, gossip and outright lies, it does however point to a more vague virus of moral illness which afflicted golden age Hollywood and probably still does today.

There were certainly unusual pressures which arose from the Dream Factory, and whether it was the crash diet, surgery and amphetamines that may have killed Laird Cregar at the age of 31, or the alcoholism that drove so many to hurt so many others — there was certainly something about the combining of celebrity, dreams and the cultural power of the cinema that drove the immoral excesses and unhappiness of so many of its stars.

It could easily be said that women suffered more in this manner than men, and the remains a deal of tragedy behind the scenes that is even now, not much seen.

The case in point relating to the movie Guest In The House (1944) might well be the life and career of Marie McDonald. It seems clear looking back on golden age Hollywood, that many of the women were treated as as prizes by the powerful men, who saw them as a certain aspect of their successes.

How the women felt about this is hard to see, but alcoholism and drug abuse may be a decent measure for starters. 

McDonald's seven marriages and other romances kept her in the media spotlight throughout her career. Her first marriage was to sportswriter Richard Allord in 1940. The marriage was annulled after three weeks.

Mild mannered madness from Anne Baxter in Guest In The House (1944)

In January 1943, she married her agent Victor Orsatti in Reno, Nevada. They divorced in May 1947 and while awaiting the divorce from, McDonald had an affair with mobster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, with  Siegel reportedly finishing it because of her chronic lateness.

McDonald's third and fourth marriages were to millionaire shoe manufacturer Harry Karl. They married in September 1947 and were separated in August 1954 and were divorced that November and remarried in Arizona in June 1955. They separated in March 1956 and, in May, Karl filed for divorce claiming that McDonald had beat him, causing him "grievous mental suffering".

At the time of their separation, McDonald was pregnant and Karl dropped the divorce suit in June. During their separation, McDonald dated Michael Wilding and they divorced for good on April 16, 1958, with Karl later marrying actress Debbie Reynolds.

During her final separation from Karl, McDonald dated George Capri, one of the owners of the Flamingo Las Vegas. On June 12, 1958, Capri accompanied McDonald to the hospital after she accidentally overdosed on sleeping pills while the two were staying in Las Vegas. They broke up in September 1958.

Ruth Warrick in Guest in the House (1944)

On May 23, 1959, McDonald married television executive Louis Bass in Las Vegas and Marie filed for divorce after ten months. On August 6, 1961, she married banker and attorney Edward Callahan in Las Vegas and on September 17, 1962, Callahan filed suit in Los Angeles asking for a divorce from McDonald for mental cruelty or that the marriage be annulled due to fraud. 

McDonald married for the seventh time in 1963 to her sixth and final husband, Donald Taylor. They met while she was appearing in Promises, Promises, the final film which Taylor produced. They remained married until McDonald's death

One of the more wild tales about Marie McDonald concerns her kidnapping — and the fact that the police did not believe that she was kidnapped.

Police doubted Marie McDonald's story, which changed several times. Those doubts deepened when police found suspicious evidence at her home, including newspapers used in the construction of the note in her fireplace. Additionally, a novel called The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown was discovered, mirroring the kidnapping story of a movie star who is kidnapped by two men. 

McDonald agreed to a re-enactment, which was filmed by police. Her estranged husband Harry Karl also doubted the story and claimed McDonald was "not a well woman". McDonald accused Karl of orchestrating the abduction for publicity purposes, but later admitted that she fabricated his alleged involvement.

After investigating the alleged kidnapping, police admitted that they could find no conclusive evidence that the event took place due to "perplexing discrepancies". Finally, a grand jury convened to investigate the kidnapping and Marie McDonald testified that her story changed frequently because she was in shock when she gave her initial statement and had been taking sedatives when she gave other statements.

Marie McDonald

After weighing the evidence, the grand jury could not come up with any conclusive evidence to bring charges against anyone.

On October 21, 1965, McDonald's husband, Donald F. Taylor, found her slumped over her dressing table in their home in Hidden Hills, California. On October 30, the coroner announced that McDonald's death was caused by "active drug intoxication due to multiple drugs" and was determined to be an accident or a suicide. 

The case was referred to a suicide team of psychologists and psychiatrists which determined the final mode of her death. Three months after McDonald's death, on January 3, 1966, her widower Donald F. Taylor died of an intentional overdose of Seconal.

These are some of the facts swiped from the Wikipedia page about Marie McDonald — and bare and incomplete as they may seem they point to a troubled life, made infinitely more troubled by the privilege of her status and the unhealthy courting rituals of Hollywood and Vegas life, at its highest. It speaks of sadness, and is one of many sad stories from the golden age.

Marie McDonald re-enacts scene from her story of kidnapping at home in Encino, California

There is little wonder that film noir often focused on the advertised image of domestic bliss because if there is one thing that was forever true of it — it was that it didn't exist.

Happy marriage was as much an ideal as the unblemished domestic home. This is not to say that these did not exist, but as a post-war paradigm these were ideals which we learn about in film noir, more from their destruction than their presentation.

There was no harm as such in their presentation — which largely took place in the fast growing sphere of advertising. It's just that we are all of us human — all too human — and such prone to fault and failure. Nothing wrong with that either, especially when it makes such good film noir.

Lightning flashes in film noir — Guest In The House (1944)

The true death of film noir arose in the glowing light of the television screen, especially when films began to be made with television audiences in mind. No more sitting in the dark. What's more the consumer society did rely on its people being somewhat impotent, sitting and home and watching rather than participating. This is where the emphasis of the home began to truly flourish in the culture.

The characters of Guest in the House operate blissfully unaware of World War II which is presumably occurring out there somewhere. Neither of the leading men seemed to have been called to fight and indeed Ralph Bellamy's character works in the perfectly vain business of dress design and advertising, this being an era in which men did everything, including the design of women's clothes. There is plenty that could be said about that.

Aline MacMahon in Guest In The House (1944)

In a proto-typical film noir, there is a fear and mistrust of young women. In Guest in the Houkse (1944) the fear is justified, even though in all aspects Satan in skirts herself, Eveyln heath (Anne Baxter) presents throughout as demure and conservative.

Anne Baxter in Guest In The House (1944)

She may be no temptresses but she is a manipulator and she can use sex if she needs to, attempting the downfall of the household. She is a dangerous noir character because despite being blushing and decorous she is unattached, independent, powerful, and after money and material gain. 

Film noir did not just create these tropes for the sake of things however. Evelyn still represents a  collective anxiety related to the social context of wartime America, because while men went off to war the U.S. government aggressively recruited women into the workforce. The Rosie The Riveter poster is still in regular use today, always presenting a kind of feminism that was absent when it was first created  — although it articulates much with the overall wearing women rolling up her sleeve and forming a fist with her hand.

When after the war, women were asked to leave their jobs and go back to being housewives a certain fear and instability about gender grabbed the nation, and was instantly fed into the film noir cycle. It was not so much that there was a fear of powerful, independent women but more an equalising of reality. Some view film noir as expressive of the fact that women who are independent and not in their place — although there is more to the film noir world view than that.

The fact that Ralph Bellamy's character Douglas Proctor seems to be a rather unaware but super-affable clothes designer seems to point far away into the 1950s — his attitude in fact will lead to the triumph of objectification, appearances and images, and all the vanity and glamour that Marie McDonald's character Miriam represents.

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