Quick Cuts

By J.C.

THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE owes more than a passing debt to Shirley Jackson's fine novel The Haunting of Hill House, and to the clammy film Robert Wise adapted from it in 1963. Both the plot and shocks here are similar, if not so forceful: a small, antagonistic group of researchers shut themselves up in an ominous old house to divine its dark secrets. The house preys on the various psychological weaknesses of the investigators, enlarging their hidden personal frailties into flaws that are often fatal.

The Hell House researchers are a supercilious physical scientist (Clive Revill), his sexually repressed wife (Gayle Hunnicutt), an eager mental medium (Pamela Franklin) and a wary, fearful physical medium (Roddy McDowall).

There is none of Shirley Jackson's psychological subtlety to be found here, only a couple of rude -- and occasionally effective -- shocks, plus a good, serious performance by Pamela Franklin.

INTERVAL is a kind of vanity production produced by and starring Merle Oberon, 62. She has had finer moments (Wuthering Heights, The Scarlet Pimpernel). Miss Oberon is always being consulted on such questions as "How do you feel about love?" "Have you ever made love without love?" -- and is in turn forever dispensing bits of Mary Worth wisdom like "We're all caught in the same interval between being born and dying." A feckless young artist (Robert Wolders) is unaccountably smitten by her, and they begin one of those romances that require them to wander around a lot of picturesque locations -- Yucatan, in this case. The antique splendors of Chichen Itza make the passions of Interval seem petty indeed, but so would a brisk round of Parcheesi.

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