Die! Die! My Darling. (1965)
Hammer's 1965 horror thriller about a religious fanatic. Tallulah Bankhead, star of Hitchcock's 1944 classic Lifeboat is an excellent choice as the damaged Mrs Trefoile. An aging woman who lives in a secluded Gothic house with her two servants (Yootha Joyce and Peter Vaughan). Clearly insane following the death of her son several years earlier, the madness comes to the fore when her sons former fiance (Stephanie Powers) visits to pay her respects prior to marrying another man.
Italian director Silvio Narizzano moves the film at a fair rate of knots and the story adapted by Richard Matheson kept me glued to the screen as a web of murder, betrayal, rape, repression,abduction and fanaticism unfolds.
It's exploitative for it's era and certainly suspense filled and the film boasts one or two memorable set pieces, but it's the performance of Bankhead (allegedly drunk on set every day) that makes the film for me. The way she spits out the immortal line "Die! Die! My darling" is terrifically venomous and immortalises her along with fellow American Bette Davis in that same years Hammer production, The Nanny, as a queen of British Grand Guignol.
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