The Story of Temple Drake

A Southern gothic melodrama shot like a horror movie, this adaptation of Faulkner’s notorious Sanctuary is also a thornily ambiguous study in sex and morality. Miriam Hopkins, in an extraordinary performance, finds the high-strung, neurotic brittleness within the stereotype of a spoiled Southern belle. The racy opening establishes Temple as a tease who enjoys bringing college boys to the boiling point and then leaving them flat. But is she heartless, or is she frightened? And does she deserve to be punished with rape? When her date takes her slumming at a dilapidated plantation mansion-cum-speakeasy and passes out cold, her vulnerability is painful. Her blonde curls, bare shoulders and shimmering silk gown suddenly mark her not as a princess but as helpless prey, surrounded by slavering, animalistic men.

The one who finally attacks her (in a barn where sunlight sifts through the bars of a corn-crib) is a sleek, trigger-happy gangster played by Jack La Rue. Tall and dark, with impassive heavy-lidded eyes, La Rue, the eternal henchman of thirties gangland, exudes oily menace from every pore. Temple’s apparent acceptance of her rape raises the suspicion—both within the film and in readings of it—that she somehow enjoyed it. But Hopkins plays these scenes in a traumatized, almost catatonic stupor that suggests instead that she responds to shame and abuse by mentally shutting down. The film retains to the end an ambivalent but compassionate view of Temple, and the swampy atmosphere created by Karl Struss’s gauzy, expressionist camerawork conveys the oppressive mental haze through which she must grope for clarity.

By Imogen Sara Smith