A Reflection of Fear - 1972 film review

A while back, Scott Herbertson drew my attention to the books of Forbes Rydell, a pen-name for two women, DeLoris Stanton Forbes and Helen B. Rydell. I'm hoping to read and review at least one of their books before long. Forbes (1923-2013) also wrote books under other names - Tobias Wells, DeLoris S. Forbes, and Stanton Forbes. One of the Stanton Forbes novels was Go to Thy Deathbed, which was filmed just over half a century ago as A Reflection of Fear. So when this popped up on Talking Pictures recently, I decided to watch it.

The film has a strong cast, led by Robert Shaw, who plays a writer called Michael. At the start of the film, he has long been estranged from Katherine, who is the mother of his child, Marguerite. Katherine is played by Mary Ure, a very beautiful woman who was married to Shaw but who suffered from alcoholism and died in tragic circumstances in 1975 at the age of just 42. This is, sadly, the last film she made. Marguerite is played by Sondra Locke, whose own life was somewhat troubled, and who in this role plays a character aged 15, even though she was in her late twenties at the time.

It's clear from the start that Marguerite is strange and perhaps disturbed. She lives with Katherine and her grandmother (Signe Hasso) in a remote mansion and spends much of her time talking to her dolls and even amoeba collected from a pond. She has grown up apart from her father but seems to have developed an obsession with him and longs to see him again. When Michael turns up, with his girlfriend (Sally Kellerman) in tow, bad things begin to happen...

This is a strange, unsettling film. The final twist is extraordinary, but not foreshadowed (unlike the majority of the plot developments, which are fairly predictable) and it is introduced in a bizarrely off-hand way, via a telephone message. Apparently the film was severely mangled in the editing process, resulting in various oddities which detract from one's viewing enjoyment. So it's a curiosity rather than a masterpiece. Even so, there's something hypnotic about some of the photography (the director, William A. Fraker, was noted as a cinetographer) which makes it worth a look. And I'd be interested to read the source novel - which presumably follows a much more logical path.