CAST A DARK SHADOW is a slice of British noir, centred around a well-to-do household where Dirk Bogarde plays a Bluebeard-type character who's desperate to make himself rich by bumping off a succession of wives. Bogarde takes possibly his darkest role here and he really has a ball with it, particularly in the latter stages when he really cracks up. The rest of the story is quite small scale and it's one of those static pictures that's quite obviously based on a play, with a succession of characters turning up to converse with the leads. Still, the cast is carefully chosen and the film's psychological aspects ring true. Some of the big twists are rather obvious for a modern viewer, but otherwise this is solid stuff.

Cast A Dark Shadow casts Dirk Bogarde as a 50s edition of Bluebeard who marries and murders them. He's got a nice deadly charm to get the women to trust him.

This film has Bogarde involved with three different women. He's met and married Mona Washburne who is a good deal older than he. And a very clever job it was, fooled the coroner completely. But lo and behold she had not changed her will to include him. All he's left with is the house itself, all monies went to Washburne's sister living in Jamaica.

Which leaves him on the prowl to find an additional wealthy woman to provide for him. At a seaside resort he finds the tart tongued Margaret Lockwood who finds his charm irresistible, but she's canny on money matters.and she's not co-mingling the assets in any way.

So he moves on to Kay Walsh an even wealthier woman looking to buy property in the area. All the while getting a little more manic about money.

Bogarde is also quite manic about Robert Flemyng who was Washburne's attorney who has never liked Bogarde, suspects foul play but can't prove anything.

Bogarde is one clever and ruthless killer, but there's a con being worked on him and he doesn't catch on until too late.

There's an additional role of prominence here, that of Kathleen Harrison as Washburne's maid. She's really charming in her own way, an innocent old maid working in all this evil. Lockwood too emerged from her 40s roles when she was cast as a delicate beauty for the most part in costume dramas. She's got quite the tongue and is no one's fool. But she has her hormonal needs.

Cast A Dark Shadow holds up very well for today's audience. It's a timeless tale of greed and corruption.

Dirk Bogarde is an actor most American audiences are unfamiliar with, though this is a shame. He made some excellent films but because most of them were "small" English films, they are only rarely seen in this country. A couple of my favorite films he made are THE SERVANT and CAST A DARK SHADOW and they both have a familiar theme of a sociopathic man who uses and abuses anyone to become rich.

In CAST A DARK SHADOW, Dirk plays a man who is married to a much older woman. He ultimately plans on killer her to get to her fortune, but when she is killed, he unexpectedly finds he ISN'T rich after all. So, he goes about looking for another wealthy woman to marry and then kill! His coldness and self-centered thinking make him an excellent example of an Antisocial Personality (i.e., a "sociopath"). Both the writing and Bogarde's acting make this a must-see film. The only problem, and it is very minor, is that the ending is really exciting but a bit hard to believe.

By the way, I wonder if perhaps those who made this film were trying to imply that Bogarde's character was gay (he was in real life, by the way). At one point, he's reading a men's muscle magazine and showed no sexual interest in women during the film. Expanding this somewhat might have made the film a bit more interesting, but in 1955 this wasn't exactly a topic most film makers were willing to tackle.