Movies have taught me the best reaction to some questions or statements is to turn and run. Consider “What are you doing here?” If you even have to ask that question, you should already have turned heel and booked it instead of saying anything. Worse still is if somebody asks for confirmation that nobody knows where you are.
That’s what Tod Slaughter’s 19th century squire asks of young Sophie Stewart when she comes to his house as the title character in the 1935 UK thriller Maria Marten, or the Murder in the Red Barn. She was supposed to be at choir practice. Instead, she popped in and, in what is surprisingly suggestive for the time, he pops into her. If only she had fled when he devilishly asked her to confirm nobody knew where she was. Also, didn’t anybody have the imagination to engage in any other form of sexual gratification back then besides inserting flap A into slot B? Was the handjob a 20th century invention? Also, when you knock boots with a blueblood, is the euphemism “knocking bloots”?
Needless to say, she gets knocked up, which seemingly happened in every first-time sexual encounter of that time. I was reminded of the sketch around the “Every Sperm Is Sacred” number in Monty Python and The Meaning of Life where a prim housewife played by Eric Idle muses, “We have two children, and we’ve had sex twice”.
Stewart just happens to be in the kitchen of the family home when she cries to her mother that she has a bun in the oven. Her father (D.J. Williams) disowns her and tosses her into the street.
Pressuring him into marrying her, Slaughter instead gets the idea of slaughtering her, so I guess his name is predestination. Continuing her questionable judgment, she agrees to meet him at an isolated spot in the dead of night under the pretense they are going to run away together. Instead, he takes her to the titular (sub-titular?) structure, where he kills her and buries her in the earthen floor.
Also in the mix is Eric Portman as a gypsy who tried to convince Stewart to marry him. Look, I know “gypsy” is a pejorative, and long out of favor, but all the characters use that word here, and I can’t think of another way to describe the character. His costume is so stereotypical of such a character that it might as well have been purchased from a Halloween Express. And that Fleetwood Mac song “Gypsy” is still very popular, so cut me some slack. All this aside, there is a convenient ethnic person for the town to pin her disappearance upon.
That song reference reminds me of how that title (well, again, subtitle), had me thinking about the same-named Tom Waits track. I don’t know if Waits was influenced by this film, but this is an old story which was told several times over and in many forms. It is actually based on a true story, the 1827 murder of the title character by one William Corder.
Everything about this film harkens back to that time, such as that unwieldly title. The film even opens with the cast being introduced as if this is a play being performed in that period. The performances in the film proper might even be along the lines of that one would have seen on most 19th century stages. I at least know they were similar to those in the silent film era, which had really only ended five years earlier.
This kind of role and film is where Slaughter really shines. He is a hammy actor but that style is appropriate for this film. As much as I love Vincent Price, he was often far over-the-top as well. What I found curious about Slaughter, in the first time I have seen him in a picture, is I detected a genuine nastiness under the buffoonery, as if his character here was superficially too ridiculous to be taken seriously, while harboring a deep cruelty within.
The biggest surprise for me in watching such an early film as Maria Marten is how adult it is. Made in the UK, it makes no bones about the leads boning. There is genuine menace in Slaughter’s performance, as well as some gallows humor (even literally, as gallows will be involved near the end). At the time this was released, US film studios started buckling to the severe restrictions of the Production Code that would have hobbled a film like this.
Dir: Milton Rosmer
Starring Tod Slaughter, Sophie Stewart, D.J. Williams
Watched as part of Powerhouse/Indicator’s blu-ray boxed set The Criminal Acts of Tod Slaughter: Eight Blood-and-Thunder Entertainments, 1935-1940