A young woman in a foreign country is subjected to psychological manipulations by the locals in 1950's So Long at the Fair. Jean Simmons plays Vicky, an Englishwoman who wakes up one morning in her Parisian hotel to find not only has her brother disappeared but his hotel room has vanished with him. The story that follows, based loosely on an urban legend, is an effective entry in the gaslight genre.
Of course, the hotel staff insist they have no memory of her brother or of room 19 ever being anything other than a washroom. I thought it unlikely that any explanation the film provided could satisfactorily make sense of this. I thought it would be like Dangerous Crossing, another movie with a similar premise in which the explanation ended up making very little sense. But actually So Long at the Fair's explanation, while unlikely, does make sense, so long as one remembers that real people, even communities, occasionally do very strange and unwise things.
There's a nice contrast between the normal, sensible world Vicky goes to sleep in and the nightmare she wakes up in, in which everyone behaves as though all her memories of her brother are her delusions. Matters are made more difficult by the fact that Vicky's command of French is weak. It's rare for a movie of this period to make language differences an important aspect of the story and I certainly appreciated it here.
Inevitably, there are flaws in the elaborate deception, the most significant being a young man named George Hathaway (Dirk Bogarde), an artist from England. He assumes an heroic role but the film maintains its tension. He enlists the aid of a doctor played by none other than Andre Morell. It's always nice when he turns up.
So Long at the Fair is available on The Criterion Channel.
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