The Other (1972), a literate, handsomely crafted, better-than-average horror movie produced and written by Tom Tryon and directed by Robert Mulligan, arose from The Other career - writing - pursued by Tryon after it became apparent that a dark cloud might be hovering over his acting career. After enjoying success mostly on TV series, Tryon thought his breakthrough film would be 1962's Something's Got to Give, when he was cast as the man stranded on a desert island opposite Marilyn Monroe. But in the last year of her life, unable to summon the energy to film it, she was fired, he was, too, and the film was shelved, then remade in 1963 with Doris Day, James Garner and Chuck Connors as Move Over, Darling. By 1963, Tryon thought he was onto something bigger: the title role in Otto Preminger's The Cardinal. But the film flopped, Tryon found Preminger's abusive ways enervating, and he began to rethink his career path.

When Tryon saw Rosemary's Baby (1968), Roman Polanski's horror classic based on Ira Levin's novel, it must have seemed heaven-sent. Yale grad and Connecticut native Tryon attacked his typewriter like a man possessed and produced his own horror novel, The Other. Set in rural Connecticut in 1935, it's centered on nine-year-old twin brothers Niles and Holland Perry, who, beneath their tow-headed friskiness, seem magnets for evil as corpses pile up around them. It was a best-seller and Tryon lost no time in adapting and producing the film version. One of his first hires was Mulligan, who himself having just completed Summer of '42 (1971) and famed for his classic film of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), was the go-to guy when it came to rich evocations of American period locales, of which this is one, avoiding cliched dark corners, drenching most of its evil in bright sunlight from the opening moment.

Niles, the milder of the brothers (Chris Udvarnoky), is seen alone in a weedy, dappled grove of trees, contemplating a ring with the family crest, a falcon (Perry = Peregrine), against a sonic backdrop of voracious insect screeches. Summoned by Holland (Martin Udvarnoky, Chris's real-life twin), he splashes through a stream back to the substantial farmhouse, with its barn and outbuildings, where the multi-generational Perry family lives. The boys have somewhat had the run of the place since the recent death of their father, who died when a heavy trap door fell on his head as he was carrying a loaded bushel basket into the barn basement. Their fragile mother (Diana Muldaur), dressed in white and looking emptied-out, like her own ghost, has drifted into a state of mostly vacant withdrawal since his death. The only one who fully interacts with them is their Russian-born grandmother, Ada, played by the great stage actress Uta Hagen, making her film debut here at age 53 after being in the profession since 1937.

Ada is their link to the supernatural. Not that she's witchy. Far from it, she's loving, sternly moralistic, very much rooted in the here and now. But she's open to folklore and nature and experiences in ways like none of the others. For example, she teaches Niles to imagine himself into the spirit of a crow, and the camera -- potently wielded by the great Robert Surtees - giddily whirls us over the terrain in soaring bird's-eye views and angles, giving us new perspectives on what we see at ground level, doing literally what the film does metaphorically, tightening the screws as a good horror movie should, via ever so subtle dislocations of the ordinary until we know something is off. The motif of differentness is brought to a symbolic boil when the boys sneak backstage into a tentful of traveling carnival freaks. It's this momentary interface with what to them is the genuinely sinister that scares them, unlike the cheesy magician's escape from a seemingly locked box the boys discover has been placed over a trap door.

Parallels from the carnival episode keep resurfacing as magic acts, trap doors and escape hatches figure in an escalating number of deaths - the boys' bratty cousin who threatens to tell on them dies when he jumps from a hayloft onto a concealed pitchfork, a neighbor lady is frightened into a heart attack by a strategically wielded rat, and when we see that in this era of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, a picture of accused kidnapper Bruno Hauptmann is hanging on the boys' bedroom wall, we feel dread, especially after their older sister and her husband bring their new baby to the house. It won't be long, we know, before flivvers filled with armed deputies are rattling up and down dirt roads in a rainstorm as high winds spin the falcon weathervane around like a propeller. Sure enough, Niles, the dreamier and more ethereal looking of the brothers, tells his grandmother he's afraid of Holland, and her face grows heavy with foreboding.

There are times when The Other's taste and restraint may be a bit too prominent, times when scarier and more primal would have been a better choice. The ending, with its crescendo of evil and devastation, could have, for one of the few times in genre history, drawn out the tension more excruciatingly. Tryon's screenplay seems at the end too efficient, even a bit truncated in its impact. Still, as a piece of professional reinvention, it's a success. The Other is never so muted that you fail to appreciate the creepy grip of this or that sinister detail tendrilling its way around a scene. Its hints of terrible things about to happen with worse to come, and its glossy production values make The Other a solid, intriguing outing even if it does come up a bit short on creepiness. Connecticut native Tryon (1926-1991) said, after several more novels and movie versions of them, that writing brought him more satisfaction, and certainly more money, than acting ever did.

Producer: Robert Mulligan
Director: Robert Mulligan
Screenplay: Thomas Tryon (screenplay and novel)
Cinematography: Robert L. Surtees
Music: Jerry Goldsmith
Film Editing: Folmar Blangsted, O. Nicholas Brown
Cast: Uta Hagen (Ada), Diana Muldaur (Alexandra), Chris Udvarnoky (Niles Perry), Martin Udvarnoky (Holland Perry), Norma Connolly (Aunt Vee), Victor French (Angelini), Loretta Leversee (Winnie), Lou Frizzell (Uncle George), Portia Nelson (Mrs. Rowe), Jenny Sullivan (Torrie).
C-108m.

by Jay Carr