Title: The Red House
Year: 1947
Director: Delmer Daves
Writer: Delmer Daves, from the novel by George Agnew Chamberlain
Stars: Edward G. Robinson, Lon McCallister, Judith Anderson (Citizen Kane), Rory Calhoun, Arlene Roberts, Julie London

The Story: A subsistence farmer lusts after his foster daughter, who loves an upstanding farmhand, who dates a teen seductress, who runs around with a randy gamekeeper, who protects the sinister secrets of… the red house!

Why It’s Great: Daves made some great movies, but he’s better remembered today by fans of high camp who love the overheated melodramas that made him very rich at the end of his career, movies like A Summer Place and Parrish. It’s impossible to take those Troy Donahue movies seriously, so I was shocked to discover how powerful and disturbing this movie is. The plot isn’t even all that different –they’re all cautionary tales about budding teen sexuality, but this one still works. Those later movies are famous for their bombastic dialogue. Here Daves is smart enough to give most of his lyrical flourishes to tough-as-granite Robinson, who works them into a powerful portrait of bottomless madness. He can really sell a line like “We humans weren’t made that way, we were born helpless…”