Director: Lance Comfort
Writer: Max Catto
Stars: Anne Crawford, Maxwell Reed, Siobhán McKenna
Synopsis: Emily, a pretty young Irish girl, gets a job on an English farm where the men take to her while women object to her flirtatious nature. When a man from her past shows up and accuses her of attempted murder, suspicions are aroused as to who Emily really is.
English film director Lance Comfort spent most of his twenty-five-year career on the fringes of the filmmaking industry, never reaching the success his filmography might suggest he’d attain. He created many pictures, most of which were of B-level quality, that drew the audience’s attention, yet he never received recognition for his work. But Comfort is not the only director of that post-war era in British cinema that was sidelined or forgotten. Many were on those same cinematic outskirts, later to be rediscovered through the immortality of film. I didn’t hear about Comfort until two years ago, while researching B-movies from before the 1960s, as that is where the sleaze and Grindhouse pictures gained prominence.
One of the films that emerged during my research was Daughter of Darkness, Comfort’s 1948 picture, which ultimately relegated him to this type of film in the 50s and 60s due to its lack of commercial success, given its low budget. While dismissed in its original release, the film has been reassessed; its horror and gothic elements are now deemed exemplary and a notable addition to the 1940s catalogue of British genre pictures. This is why the committee at this year’s Locarno Film Festival is celebrating the film, as well as many other British pictures, in this year’s retrospective section of the festival programme, titled ‘Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema, 1945-1960’.
Daughter of Darkness is set in Ballyconnen, a small village in an unspecified area in Ireland, where a beautiful but disturbed woman by the name of Emily Beaudine (a magnetic Siobhán McKenna) is forced to leave her job as the apprentice of a local priest because of the townsfolk’s foreboding and uneasiness. The people, particularly the women in the small town, believe that a particular evil has possessed her. After a young boxer tries to seduce and take advantage of her at the fair, and she slashes his face with her sharp fingernails, immediate actions are taken to send her away. The priest helps her relocate to a friend’s house in Yorkshire to work at their family farm. But the townsfolk’s jealousy will travel alongside her, bringing some dire occurrences her way.
Emily is not an angel; there is some sort of justification for the hatred she’s given. The young woman has been taking advantage of other men to get “revenge” on those whom she believes have wronged her. It is a tale of two sides of the same coin, hatred being the worth of such and serving as an indictment on the restrained conventional norms plaguing Ireland and Britain at the time–and, in some places, it is still plagued by such. In said farm, Emily finds comfort and tranquility at first, playing her role by doing hard work. The distant locale has her far from the crazed mentality in Ballyconnen, and at the mercy of a life with new beginnings.
The strange feelings she had before are suppressed amidst the changes. Fascination, repulsion, and ecstasy upon the presence of the opposite sex have dissipated; Emily is finally able to control the once uncontrollable. However, the past comes to haunt her; the carnival has left Ireland and is on route to Britain. And you can feel the poisonous feeling it has growing stronger and more pungent as they get closer to Emily. It is almost as if the carnival, possessed by a spirit of wrath, knows where she’s hiding and waits for the right moment to strike her down–the moment before full recovery. The scarred boxer is right close. Emily and he are going to see each other, and there is no chance of escaping the encounter.
Daughter of Darkness was an anomaly at the time of its release, as the gothic elements weren’t yet prevalent in 40s mainstream media, and its anti-heroine, Emily, was depicted in a manner far different from similar characters who contained an equal amount of monstrosity and sincerity. There were Gothic melodramas that followed female characters in distressing scenarios. But Comfort was one of the few filmmakers bold enough to transition from that heightened nature to a more genre-focused one. Of course, at the same time, it was not celebrated, and this departure from tropes and conventions was more so ignored. However, across the years, film historians and critics have found their way towards the film and managed to appreciate what Comfort and company did back in 1948.
Comfort may not have been given the biggest opportunities in his lengthy career, yet his contributions have aptly made some waves. What makes Daughter of Darkness so effective is the focus on atmosphere, whether through its visual composition and play with shadows or the direction of the performances and biting score. Visually, it is a stunning picture, where Comfort and cinematographer Stanley Pavey compose with a looming damnation covering each square inch of the scenery. The way the two implement shadows into the frame gives the implication of an uncanny valley — the strong feeling that something wicked is coming the characters’ way. The setting becomes embalmed in dread and takes on a character of its own, embodying a society that fears and rejects a woman outside the conventional confines of society.
It becomes a dangerous place. And while Emily is adapting to it, this place changes with her. That is where McKenna’s performance gets its strength, in the construction and deconstruction of her monstrosity, where love and pain intertwine to express her inner sorrows and are expelled through violence. Comfort never abandons her character, even when it is revealed that she, in fact, has a malevolent presence that guides her. She is a monster, yet because of how she was treated and set aside without guidance, she remains a troubled, lonely soul who doesn’t know how to head towards her path to healing and devotion. McKenna has a way of reflecting that through simple glances and looks. It makes the picture more tragic and disturbing, with every horror element adding a disquieting sensibility to an already damning tale of a young woman who can’t be seen as a person, and is destined to calamity by society’s own ruling.
Daughter of Darkness has a few foibles with its character work outside of Emily. None of them is memorable enough to stick with you because they are mostly the same. However, what it lacks in character development, the film makes up for in enriching the atmosphere and psychological dissections of its main character. In this regard, Comfort crafted a work that, while imperfect, stands out in its singular vision and feels ahead of its time. That singularity is precisely why its rediscovery (and why reassessments and retrospectives of films overall) matters. It restores to the spotlight a filmmaker who was long denied the recognition his artistry deserved. Daughter of Darkness is a fascinating artifact of postwar British cinema and a haunting reminder of the shadows history can cast on those who fall between its margins.
