2001 / 101 mins / color
Dir. Scott McGehee and David Siegel / Sc. Scott McGehee and David Siegel / Cine. Giles Nuttgens / Prod. Scott McGehee and David Siegel
Cast: Tilda Swinton, Jonathan Tucker, Goran Višnjić
Based on the novel The Blank Wall (1947) by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
Streaming access courtesy of Swank

Crime novelist Elisabeth Sanxay Holding was, in the opinion of Raymond Chandler, the “top suspense writer of them all.” Yet, of her voluminous fiction, only one of her crime stories has received feature-length adaptation: The Blank Wall (1947), which has been filmed twice, first as the Max Ophuls-directed The Reckless Moment (1949) and, a half-century later, as The Deep End (2001), written and directed by David Siegel and Columbia graduate Scott McGehee. This neglect is all the more startling, however, inasmuch as Holding’s output was perfectly suited to the studio-era genre of the “woman’s picture.” Along with her contemporary Charlotte Armstrong, Holding was one of the most skilled exponents of what literary critic Sarah Weinman has since dubbed “domestic suspense” - a hybrid of crime story and melodrama in which mystery and intrigue is woven around familial obligations.

The Blank Wall is Holding’s masterpiece in this respect, a novel about an everywoman housewife and mother, Lucia Holley, who is trying to keep things together while her husband is away at war. When a dead body shows up, Holley has to stay on top of her domestic responsibilities while simultaneously trying to dispose of a corpse and negotiate with blackmailers and the police. As Holding writes of her protagonist: “She had the resourcefulness of the mother, the domestic woman, accustomed to emergencies. Again and again she had to deal with accidents, sudden illnesses, breakdowns. For years she had been the person who was responsible in an emergency.”

In Holding’s tale, as in the Ophuls adaptation, the corpse is that of the sleazy older boyfriend of Lucia’s teenage daughter. The Deep End updates this by turning the daughter into a son, and making his relationship a queer one. Despite the mother’s support of her son’s sexuality, the film’s engagement with queer themes is somewhat dated by its menacing depiction of a gay underworld. Most paradoxical of all is Tilda Swinton’s place in all of this, in her role as the mother. For years the muse of queer British filmmaker Derek Jarman (her debut was in his 1986 Caravaggio), Swinton finally achieved cross-over success in The Deep End playing a character who fights against the threat of her son’s public outing.

Those interested in the earlier adaptation, featuring Joan Bennett as the mother and James Mason as her blackmailer, can easily find it on YouTube.

– Rob King