The Spiral Staircase

When Screen Director Playhouse adapted the film for radio, they could barely get star Dorothy McGuire to say more than one line by the end of the thirty-minute program. Instead, they worked with the producers to create an almost continuous inner monologue for Helen. As a result, the radio program is less an adaptation of the film than a commentary by the filmmakers on Helen's motivations throughout the story, something rarely seen in films of the era.

PRODUCTION STORY · SOURCED

Close-ups of the killer's eyes and hands.

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The silent film shown in the cinema at the beginning of this film is D. W. Griffith's 1912 The Sands of Dee, starring Mae Marsh and Robert Harron.

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Rhonda Fleming repeatedly and mistakenly claimed that she had received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for the role of Blanche in this film. The film was nominated for an Oscar in the Supporting Actress category, but the person named as the head of the family was Ethel Barrymore, not Fleming.

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This was one of RKO's biggest hits of the 1940s, earning several times its cost ($750,000).

PRODUCTION STORY · SOURCED

The cast includes one Oscar winner, Ethel Barrymore, who was also nominated for this film, and four Oscar nominees: Dorothy McGuire, Elsa Lanchester, Sara Allgood and the uncredited Ellen Corby.

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"Screen Director's Playhouse" broadcast a thirty-minute radio adaptation of the film on November 25, 1949, with Dorothy McGuire reprising her role from the film.

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Second-billed George Brent does not appear for the first twenty-one minutes (the film itself is only eighty-three minutes long).

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Dorothy McGuire, most memorable as Helen, speaks a total of nine words in the film's closing lines.

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It was included in the American Film Institute's 2001 list of 400 nominated films for the 100 Most Heart-Pounding American Films.

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Three years later, Ethel Barrymore would play another cantankerous, bedridden and dying woman in Pinky (1949).

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The villain of this 1946 film has a crazed obsession with ridding the world of flawed people. The previous year, the United States and the Allied Forces had just defeated Nazi Germany, whose goal was the same: to establish a "Master Race" devoid of people with any "imperfections."

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Italian censorship visa #1817 was issued on February 22, 1947.

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