Dragonwyck (1946)

Dragonwyck is a gothic romance from 20th Century Fox about an 18 year old Connecticut farm girl (Gene Tierney) who in 1844 travels to New York's Hudson Valley to stay with distant relatives in their massive estate known as Dragonwyck.  There are definite shades of Hitchcock's Rebecca to the story, and a little known history lesson about New York's Dutch aristocracy. I hadn't seen a lavish old school Hollywood movie like this in a while and I really enjoyed it. Based on a 1944 novel of the same name Dragonwyck feels really condensed,  enough so that I'm kind of curious about the book to see what they left out. A major character just disappears from the second half of the movie without explanation, at least one set up is never paid off, and Vincent Price's late in picture announcement about his drug addiction is so sudden and out of nowhere that I actually laughed out loud. "Your a drug addict? Since when?" But I loved the mode of the piece, it was well mounted and for the most part well acted. In my estimation a minor find. ***1/2