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Apparently she prefers to talk
If there's such a thing as a typical ventriloquist's dummy story, "And So Died Riabouchinska" (1956) isn't it. Closely adapted by Mel Dinelli from the 1953 Ray Bradbury short story of the same name and directed by Robert Stevenson for the first season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–62), it's as much star-crossed romance as it is weird tale, the sting of its ending not a twist after all but something desolately familiar. When the tell-tale roll of a silver dollar reveals a body in the basement of a variety theater, the detective on the case finds the ventriloquist and his dummy telling different stories. So far, so Cavalcanti, but not for quite the same reasons.
I read the original story for the first time last year in Killer, Come Back to Me (2020), the invaluable centenary collection of Bradbury's crime fiction of which it is one of the standouts, and I don't think it's an insult to this production to acknowledge that any filmed version of fiction written so subjectively and poetically has to work uphill. Without spoilers, the story gathers much of its force from the ambivalence of the supernatural, the plausibility that rather than manifesting the pseudo-DID of so many ventriloquists overtaken by their dummies, John Fabian, however selfishly or accidentally, really has invested his beloved Riabouchinska with a mind and a will of her own. Bradbury can communicate this effect with the shifting lenses of his prose, describing the dummy in rapturously inorganic terms and then insisting not merely on its lifelikeness, but her life:
The face was white and it was cut from marble or from the whitest wood he had ever seen. It might have been cut from snow. And the neck that held the head which was as dainty as a porcelain cup with the sun shining through the thinness of it, the neck was also white. And the hands could have been ivory and they were thin small things with tiny fingernails and whorls on the pads of the fingers, little delicate spirals and lines.
She was all white stone, with light pouring through the stone and light coming out of the dark eyes with blue tones beneath like fresh mulberries. He was reminded of milk glass and of cream poured into a crystal tumbler. The brows were arched and black and thin and the cheeks were hollowed and there was a faint pink vein in each temple and a faint blue vein barely visible above the slender bridge of the nose, between the shining dark eyes.
Her lips were half parted and it looked as if they might be slightly damp, and the nostrils were arched and modeled perfectly, as were the ears. The hair was black and it was parted in the middle and drawn back of the ears and it was real—he could see every single strand of hair. Her gown was as black as her hair and draped in such a fashion as to show her shoulders, which were carved wood as white as a stone that has lain a long time in the sun. She was very beautiful. Krovitch felt his throat move and then he stopped and did not say anything.
God help the prop designer who has to render that in three dimensions, all right? The Riabouchinska of the TV episode is a delicately modeled and exquisitely costumed puppet with a regal profile and a voice of spellbinding velvet—it belongs to Virginia Gregg and it isn't spun sugar or snowflakes, it's deep-chested and authoritative, stronger than the apologetic gallantries of the silver-haired man who holds her in the curve of his arm and lies—but not once are we in the story's danger of forgetting her inanimate nature when we can see the solid hinge of her mouth, her stiff fingers and her flat painted eyes. We have to believe in her independence as we believe in practical effects, convinced less by the details of the dummy than the reactions of the human actors to her. At first, guided by the hard-nosed skepticism of Charles Bronson's Detective Lieutenant Krovitch, we may see her as nothing more than a treasured object, her interruptions and contradictions an elaborate and not especially amusing effort at obfuscation on the part of a man who should be giving straight answers: "I didn't come here to see you do your dummy act, Fabian! Next thing you know, you'll be asking me to put my ear to that block of wood and hear a heartbeat!" Then we may notice not just the resentful loathing with which Claire Carleton's Alyce Fabian speaks of her husband's dummy, but how even alone with Krovitch she never once refers to Riabouchinska as "it." Above all, we watch Fabian himself, played tenderly and slipperily by Claude Rains in a performance that makes almost as conspicuous use of his own voice as his calling card of The Invisible Man (1933), and when Riabouchinska is so incontestably real to him who remembers carving and painting and dressing her, who are we to argue? Every now and then the teleplay cheats a little, as when Fabian is still laughing at the admission of his own cuckoldry when Riabouchinska's voice cuts reprovingly across his, but most of the time it plays fair with the division of voices, letting the interlocked work of Gregg and Rains support the audience's disbelief. The script isn't really a two-hander with Krovitch and the rest of the theater and always the music of the night's acts and the chatter of the hallways bleeding in through the cheap walls of the dressing room, but for the two of them, it might as well be.
I do not normally approve of making stories more obvious, but Dinelli draws out an element that goes by almost as read in Bradbury's "And So Died Riabouchinska" and sets it heartbreakingly at the climax of the episode. Like Krovitch with his tough cop's weakness for rational explanations, the audience is feinted this way and that with motives for the murder of Luke Ockham, the one-time vaudeville juggler on whose corpse that unlucky silver dollar landed shining like a tip for Charon. Was he blackmailing Alyce with the knowledge of her affair with her husband's press agent? Was he blackmailing Fabian over something grimmer, such as the cold case of one Ilyana Riamonova whose glossy headshot dug up from the archives bears an uncanny, unsurprising resemblance to the doll of her diminutive name, who worked as Fabian's assistant in the days when his act was much less successful and his dummy was named Sweet William and who disappeared without a trace in 1934? And yet from the first scene it's there in plain sight, the old stage manager cheerfully joking as the stocky, dapper man passes with his long suitcase, "Mr. Fabian, you're the first ventriloquist I've ever known who took his dummy home every night." Spitting out her jealousy of her beautiful wooden rival, Alyce entreats the detective to understand, "Do you know he spent hundreds of dollars on her wardrobe when I had nothing to wear? Why, Lieutenant, do you know that he even—" before the door opens with her lover and then her husband behind it and she chokes herself off. Krovitch returns to the theater to hear the ventriloquist and his doll talking quietly in their dressing room with no one to hear them: "There were nights in my life when I dreamed of the unobtainable, and you were what I dreamed." We may get to the truth before our lens character does, but it's still devastating when it arrives, all pretenses stripped off like the tuxedo of Fabian's stage act to the shirtsleeves of an cornered, aging man. Riabouchinska herself tells the story of their blackmailer's murder—the wooden figure unflinching, the human man beside her as inert as a dummy himself, all except for the faintest tremble of his throat in time with her words—but the motive is left for Fabian to relate, for once in his life to be the one to tell the truth:
"He threatened to tell the world about us. About Riabouchinska and me. He wanted to hold our love up to ridicule, but I couldn't let him do that, could I? How could we have been happy that way? People would have laughed. People would have turned away. Horrible, they'd have said, ugly. Look at them on that stage! He's in love with a piece of wood! Who do they think they are—Romeo and Juliet? Tristan and Isolde? Look at those hideous, revolting freaks! So you see, I had to kill him."
Dramatically, of course, that's a much better secret than the crime of passion that we like Krovitch have been encouraged to expect. Riabouchinska firmly exonerates Fabian of the murder of Ilyana Riomonova—we have no reason to believe that she's even dead, just that she never returned to her possessive, volatile lover—and we know by now that Riabouchinska never lies. More importantly, for all the queer vibes of Michael Redgrave's Maxwell Frere and Hugo in Dead of Night (1945), I cannot remember explicitly encountering this take on the ventriloquist/dummy relationship before. We heard her profess her love as they took their bows, but wasn't that just a wink to the audience, the puppet complimenting the puppeteer's skills? Getting away with a love affair in the guise of daily shows and twice on Sundays makes the act itself as much of a beard as Alyce, each performance precious and perverse. It's the kind of confession one can imagine another actor playing more creepily or pathetically, but Rains delivers it with the pain and sincerity of a true lover, so desperate not to have "the only beautiful thing that was left in my life" found out that an audience would have to be very sure of the pure vanilla of their private lives not to feel for him. Tragically, he has proven himself no better a lover to Riabouchinska than he was to the black-haired, blue-eyed, living girl in whose image he created her: in trying to preserve their life together, he has cut it short. "When you killed him, I realized that we could not go on, because while I've lived with your lies, I cannot live with something that kills." Ilyana Riomonova could take herself away in person. Riabouchinska can only take herself away in spirit. If a doll come to life is the uncanny valley, how much worse is a doll that has died? But the title told us she would: her eyes roll closed, her mouth clicks shut, she's a tree without a dryad and Fabian all of a sudden is an old and bewildered man, hollow with long-echoing grief: "She's gone. I can't find her. She's run away. I can't live without her. Help me to find her, please. Help me to find her, please, please . . ." I don't think I know a bitterer ending to Pygmalion and Galatea. Rains makes us believe in the loss of Riabouchinska, but Gregg makes us believe it was her choice.
Unlike the later iteration of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962–65), episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents ran 25 minutes each: short films of short stories, at their best compressed, reverberant, and weird. In all honesty I have read more of the source stories than I have seen the adaptations, but I would rate "And So Died Riabouchinska" highly even if Bradbury weren't one of my formative writers and Rains an actor I would and have watched in just about anything. The bookending diegetic music is nicely, wryly done; so is the photography by Reggie Lanning, which strikes a low-light balance between noir and naturalism and at one point employs a mirror to separate two pairs of characters within the same shot. I don't have much to say about the character of the press agent, but he's played by Lowell Gilmore and I never had seen the actor as anyone but Basil Hallward. I thought I had never seen Virginia Gregg—or heard her—but after all I have seen Psycho (1960). I hope it wasn't typecasting. "You see, Fabian's such a liar and I have to watch him." This preference brought to you by my truthful backers at Patreon.
I read the original story for the first time last year in Killer, Come Back to Me (2020), the invaluable centenary collection of Bradbury's crime fiction of which it is one of the standouts, and I don't think it's an insult to this production to acknowledge that any filmed version of fiction written so subjectively and poetically has to work uphill. Without spoilers, the story gathers much of its force from the ambivalence of the supernatural, the plausibility that rather than manifesting the pseudo-DID of so many ventriloquists overtaken by their dummies, John Fabian, however selfishly or accidentally, really has invested his beloved Riabouchinska with a mind and a will of her own. Bradbury can communicate this effect with the shifting lenses of his prose, describing the dummy in rapturously inorganic terms and then insisting not merely on its lifelikeness, but her life:
The face was white and it was cut from marble or from the whitest wood he had ever seen. It might have been cut from snow. And the neck that held the head which was as dainty as a porcelain cup with the sun shining through the thinness of it, the neck was also white. And the hands could have been ivory and they were thin small things with tiny fingernails and whorls on the pads of the fingers, little delicate spirals and lines.
She was all white stone, with light pouring through the stone and light coming out of the dark eyes with blue tones beneath like fresh mulberries. He was reminded of milk glass and of cream poured into a crystal tumbler. The brows were arched and black and thin and the cheeks were hollowed and there was a faint pink vein in each temple and a faint blue vein barely visible above the slender bridge of the nose, between the shining dark eyes.
Her lips were half parted and it looked as if they might be slightly damp, and the nostrils were arched and modeled perfectly, as were the ears. The hair was black and it was parted in the middle and drawn back of the ears and it was real—he could see every single strand of hair. Her gown was as black as her hair and draped in such a fashion as to show her shoulders, which were carved wood as white as a stone that has lain a long time in the sun. She was very beautiful. Krovitch felt his throat move and then he stopped and did not say anything.
God help the prop designer who has to render that in three dimensions, all right? The Riabouchinska of the TV episode is a delicately modeled and exquisitely costumed puppet with a regal profile and a voice of spellbinding velvet—it belongs to Virginia Gregg and it isn't spun sugar or snowflakes, it's deep-chested and authoritative, stronger than the apologetic gallantries of the silver-haired man who holds her in the curve of his arm and lies—but not once are we in the story's danger of forgetting her inanimate nature when we can see the solid hinge of her mouth, her stiff fingers and her flat painted eyes. We have to believe in her independence as we believe in practical effects, convinced less by the details of the dummy than the reactions of the human actors to her. At first, guided by the hard-nosed skepticism of Charles Bronson's Detective Lieutenant Krovitch, we may see her as nothing more than a treasured object, her interruptions and contradictions an elaborate and not especially amusing effort at obfuscation on the part of a man who should be giving straight answers: "I didn't come here to see you do your dummy act, Fabian! Next thing you know, you'll be asking me to put my ear to that block of wood and hear a heartbeat!" Then we may notice not just the resentful loathing with which Claire Carleton's Alyce Fabian speaks of her husband's dummy, but how even alone with Krovitch she never once refers to Riabouchinska as "it." Above all, we watch Fabian himself, played tenderly and slipperily by Claude Rains in a performance that makes almost as conspicuous use of his own voice as his calling card of The Invisible Man (1933), and when Riabouchinska is so incontestably real to him who remembers carving and painting and dressing her, who are we to argue? Every now and then the teleplay cheats a little, as when Fabian is still laughing at the admission of his own cuckoldry when Riabouchinska's voice cuts reprovingly across his, but most of the time it plays fair with the division of voices, letting the interlocked work of Gregg and Rains support the audience's disbelief. The script isn't really a two-hander with Krovitch and the rest of the theater and always the music of the night's acts and the chatter of the hallways bleeding in through the cheap walls of the dressing room, but for the two of them, it might as well be.
I do not normally approve of making stories more obvious, but Dinelli draws out an element that goes by almost as read in Bradbury's "And So Died Riabouchinska" and sets it heartbreakingly at the climax of the episode. Like Krovitch with his tough cop's weakness for rational explanations, the audience is feinted this way and that with motives for the murder of Luke Ockham, the one-time vaudeville juggler on whose corpse that unlucky silver dollar landed shining like a tip for Charon. Was he blackmailing Alyce with the knowledge of her affair with her husband's press agent? Was he blackmailing Fabian over something grimmer, such as the cold case of one Ilyana Riamonova whose glossy headshot dug up from the archives bears an uncanny, unsurprising resemblance to the doll of her diminutive name, who worked as Fabian's assistant in the days when his act was much less successful and his dummy was named Sweet William and who disappeared without a trace in 1934? And yet from the first scene it's there in plain sight, the old stage manager cheerfully joking as the stocky, dapper man passes with his long suitcase, "Mr. Fabian, you're the first ventriloquist I've ever known who took his dummy home every night." Spitting out her jealousy of her beautiful wooden rival, Alyce entreats the detective to understand, "Do you know he spent hundreds of dollars on her wardrobe when I had nothing to wear? Why, Lieutenant, do you know that he even—" before the door opens with her lover and then her husband behind it and she chokes herself off. Krovitch returns to the theater to hear the ventriloquist and his doll talking quietly in their dressing room with no one to hear them: "There were nights in my life when I dreamed of the unobtainable, and you were what I dreamed." We may get to the truth before our lens character does, but it's still devastating when it arrives, all pretenses stripped off like the tuxedo of Fabian's stage act to the shirtsleeves of an cornered, aging man. Riabouchinska herself tells the story of their blackmailer's murder—the wooden figure unflinching, the human man beside her as inert as a dummy himself, all except for the faintest tremble of his throat in time with her words—but the motive is left for Fabian to relate, for once in his life to be the one to tell the truth:
"He threatened to tell the world about us. About Riabouchinska and me. He wanted to hold our love up to ridicule, but I couldn't let him do that, could I? How could we have been happy that way? People would have laughed. People would have turned away. Horrible, they'd have said, ugly. Look at them on that stage! He's in love with a piece of wood! Who do they think they are—Romeo and Juliet? Tristan and Isolde? Look at those hideous, revolting freaks! So you see, I had to kill him."
Dramatically, of course, that's a much better secret than the crime of passion that we like Krovitch have been encouraged to expect. Riabouchinska firmly exonerates Fabian of the murder of Ilyana Riomonova—we have no reason to believe that she's even dead, just that she never returned to her possessive, volatile lover—and we know by now that Riabouchinska never lies. More importantly, for all the queer vibes of Michael Redgrave's Maxwell Frere and Hugo in Dead of Night (1945), I cannot remember explicitly encountering this take on the ventriloquist/dummy relationship before. We heard her profess her love as they took their bows, but wasn't that just a wink to the audience, the puppet complimenting the puppeteer's skills? Getting away with a love affair in the guise of daily shows and twice on Sundays makes the act itself as much of a beard as Alyce, each performance precious and perverse. It's the kind of confession one can imagine another actor playing more creepily or pathetically, but Rains delivers it with the pain and sincerity of a true lover, so desperate not to have "the only beautiful thing that was left in my life" found out that an audience would have to be very sure of the pure vanilla of their private lives not to feel for him. Tragically, he has proven himself no better a lover to Riabouchinska than he was to the black-haired, blue-eyed, living girl in whose image he created her: in trying to preserve their life together, he has cut it short. "When you killed him, I realized that we could not go on, because while I've lived with your lies, I cannot live with something that kills." Ilyana Riomonova could take herself away in person. Riabouchinska can only take herself away in spirit. If a doll come to life is the uncanny valley, how much worse is a doll that has died? But the title told us she would: her eyes roll closed, her mouth clicks shut, she's a tree without a dryad and Fabian all of a sudden is an old and bewildered man, hollow with long-echoing grief: "She's gone. I can't find her. She's run away. I can't live without her. Help me to find her, please. Help me to find her, please, please . . ." I don't think I know a bitterer ending to Pygmalion and Galatea. Rains makes us believe in the loss of Riabouchinska, but Gregg makes us believe it was her choice.
Unlike the later iteration of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962–65), episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents ran 25 minutes each: short films of short stories, at their best compressed, reverberant, and weird. In all honesty I have read more of the source stories than I have seen the adaptations, but I would rate "And So Died Riabouchinska" highly even if Bradbury weren't one of my formative writers and Rains an actor I would and have watched in just about anything. The bookending diegetic music is nicely, wryly done; so is the photography by Reggie Lanning, which strikes a low-light balance between noir and naturalism and at one point employs a mirror to separate two pairs of characters within the same shot. I don't have much to say about the character of the press agent, but he's played by Lowell Gilmore and I never had seen the actor as anyone but Basil Hallward. I thought I had never seen Virginia Gregg—or heard her—but after all I have seen Psycho (1960). I hope it wasn't typecasting. "You see, Fabian's such a liar and I have to watch him." This preference brought to you by my truthful backers at Patreon.