The Book of the Erinyes

My friend Michael Kemp just poin­ted me at an inter­pret­a­tion of the Fur­ies that I hadn’t seen before — Slavko Vorkapić’s excel­lent mont­age sequence for the 1934 film Crime Without Pas­sion (writ­ten and dir­ec­ted by Charles MacAr­thur & Ben Hecht).

Slavko Vork­apić (1894–1976) was a Serbian-American film dir­ector and editor, but per­haps bet­ter known as a Spe­cial Effects Technician.

Filmreference.com has an entry for him which men­tions this fant­astic sequence:

When work­ing with film­makers of an adven­tur­ous frame of mind, Vork­apich seized the oppor­tun­ity to intro­duce expres­sion­ist ele­ments into his work, and some of his most ima­gin­at­ive effects occur in the mont­ages he devised, work­ing closely with cine­ma­to­grapher Lee Garmes, for Hecht and MacArthur’s Crime without Pas­sion.

The open­ing cred­its show three winged Fur­ies dart­ing through the canyons of New York to seize at ran­dom upon their vic­tims; when crooked law­yer Claude Rains shoots the dan­cer who is black­mail­ing him, the Fur­ies emerge from a drop of her blood as it falls in slow-motion and wheel venge­fully out into the night, feast­ing their eyes on the viol­ence of the city.

I just love the way the Fur­ies are visu­al­ised in this mont­age.  Spectacular!

Just for the record, the Fur­ies were played by Dorothy Brad­shaw, Fraye Gil­bert, and Betty Sund­mark.