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 hear through you and I speak the truth through you. )
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 hear through you and I speak the truth through you. )
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.
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