Sometimes one scene is all that’s needed for an actor to show her stuff.  Margaret Lindsay in the 1940 film version of The House of the Seven Gables gets that chance.  As young Hepzibah Pyncheon—whose fiancé Clifford has been accused of and then imprisoned by his own brother for murder—Lindsay’s character learns she is to inherit the title dwelling, the seven-gabled House that, like a genetic disease, has rotted her family from within.

At first, Lindsay doesn’t react.  She stares blankly at greedy brother Jaffrey, who’s been wanting possession of the House for himself.  Then, as the irony strikes her, a smile twists her face.  She will take ownership of the contested domicile; she will thwart the aims of the man who falsely imprisoned her fiancé.  At which she laughs—harsh, full-throated, exultant, so unlike her earlier, girlish peals of merriment.  Facing Jaffrey, she taunts him, reminds him of his crime against his brother, and slams the house door in his face, declaring he will never step foot there again.  As she sags in exhaustion, her face and posture now reflect the loneliness that will isolate her, the anger that will warp her life.  Running through the house, she slams shut every window shutter, blocking out the light, and life itself.

It’s more than Lindsay’s actions here.  It’s how, in a few feet of film, she not only shows but lives through how this character has unutterably changed, from a sweet girl into a woman of rage and fixed will.  You hear it especially in her voice, which goes deep and raspy, all softness filed away, undergoing, as Susan Doll writes at TCM, “an instant transformation that amounts to a complete [alteration] in her personality.”  Lindsay’s shift captures, with the potency of metaphor, a soul’s progress from happiness to grief; it’s like watching a sped-up film of how a flower will bloom, then fade, in a matter of seconds, Time’s ravage wrought with poetic compression.  And if that faded flower could speak…it would sound like Lindsay as the older Hepzibah—dry, flat, whispery, as if voiced by a vanishing ghost.

Outside of TCM devotees, who’s heard of Margaret Lindsay today?  A busy Hollywood actress but never a star, Lindsay was one of those reliable but now-forgotten mid-rank players who, as her Wikipedia profile indicates, “was noted for her supporting work in successful films of the 1930s and 1940s…and her leading roles in lower-budgeted B movie[s].”  As Gary Brumburgh notes at IMDB, “she was either involved in minor pictures that would do nothing to advance her career or was handed oblique secondary roles in ‘A’ pictures wherein she played the star’s best friend, light romantic rival or socialite.”  William J. Mann in Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood wondered if Lindsay’s “offscreen activities,” including a rumored affair with Janet Gaynor, “may help explain why she never progressed to big-budget leads.”  Whatever the cause, by the late 1940s Lindsay’s career had declined, having, Brumburgh writes, “failed to ignite and command the attention of a truer star.”

Maybe B-flick casting and an unconventional lifestyle had something to do with Lindsay’s second-tier status.  Or maybe, with her ingenue looks and ladylike diction (Hollywood journalists first thought she was British), she didn’t stand out from the generic starlet crop.  Then again, maybe those standard roles—of socialite, best friend, romantic rival—were too usual, too conventional, not allowing Lindsay a chance to strut her stuff.  Like another Hollywood near-star, Ann Dvorak, Lindsay had darker, fiercer, more unconventional qualities, which didn’t fit Hollywood typecasting.  You get a taste of such undercurrents in her appearance as Joan Bennett’s cynical roommate in Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street, as a past-first-youth woman who, you sense, lives paycheck to paycheck and is not fooled by the tramp she lives with or the tramp’s pimpish boyfriend.  Scarlet Street is itself a deeply cynical film, and Lindsay’s performance grasps that aspect wholly; she seems to inhabit its story on a meta-level, viewing its louche characters and their sordid deeds with a sharply limned derision.  Though her role is small (two scenes and a blip), Lindsay plays it for keeps, snapping her lines in an acid-dipped voice that takes no prisoners.

Such quirky roles, even brief ones, were, for Lindsay, unfortunately rare.  As with Dvorak, she got stuck in conventional B-fare, such as the 1940s Ellery Queen mystery series, or in supporting bigger female stars, such as Bette Davis winning her two Oscars in Dangerous and Jezebel; in each film Lindsay’s the gal who marries the guy who doesn’t get to marry Davis.  Not the kinds of roles that’ll make you stand out.

But Lindsay does stand out as Hepzibah.  She takes a standard spinster role and makes it unusual, specific—and strong.  The film’s a loose adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s gothic novel, with some big changes (in the book, Hepzibah and Clifford are siblings, not lovers…).  The film’s story has nasty Jaffrey (nicely played by George Sanders, natch) scheming to find a fortune hidden in the titular House, which his brother Clifford (Vincent Price) wants to sell (though being the House is cursed, it would seem a dicey prospect on the real estate market).  Jaffrey’s plan is for Clifford to languish in prison while he then ransacks the building—only for Hepzibah to gain the property instead.  And thus the focus shifts to Hepzibah, who herself plans and waits, all hope clinging to her constant petitions for Clifford’s release, while the years stretch out and time wraps like a shroud around both the House and her.  Whatever else, Hepzibah is a part.

And what Lindsay does here!  As the young Hepzibah she’s not gushy and guileless, but warm and humorous, looking at people and events with an ironic, slightly askew gaze.  Aging into the 40-year-old solitary woman, Lindsay’s voice, posture, even walk changes—she moves not heavily but lightly, the long, passage of time bestowing on her not gravity but grace.  She’s a phantom floating across floors, each slow sweep registering the weight of years of buried pain.  But Lindsay’s not a conventional, dried-out old maid or clichéd hag.  Instead, her Hepzibah is calm, dignified, meticulously polite, and sparing in her feelings—as if emotion is a precious thing that can no longer be carelessly spent.

It’s that sense of held-back feeling, how all sentiment has been carefully pressed down and stored in the mind’s back room, only to seep out like trapped air, that gives Lindsay’s performance its memorably restrained power.  As Hepzibah gazes sadly at her young cousin Phoebe (Nan Grey), who, coming to live with Hepzibah, brings a renewed sense of life into the cursed House, you sense how the older woman sees, in the girl’s visage, both the image of her lost youth and the child she’s never had.  And when finally reunited with Clifford, Lindsay weeps with the subdued desolation of all their lost years, which brought tears to my own eyes.  The scene’s gently heartbreaking; what joy Hepzibah feels can only, like her life for the past twenty years, be expressed in muted release.

Lindsay’s performance is analogous to what Bette Davis did in a similar role in The Old Maid—the way she pulls back, dimming the vitality of voice and gesture, confining expression to subtle shifts of mood and motion, her gaze sunk into her eyes.  It’s a deeply cinematic performance, relying on the camera to focus on and capture Hepzibah’s inner life, which Lindsay conveys so beautifully.  Aptly, in their book Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films, 1931–46, authors Michael Brunas, John Brunas, and Tom Weaver note that “[h]ad a Bette Davis played Hepzibah, this same performance would be hailed as a classic.”  A subdued irony’s invoked here, Lindsay being compared to her previous co-star, who was celebrated for her unconventionality and fierce grappling with complex characters, while Lindsay was confined to the sort of pallid roles Davis fought not to play.  I can’t help but wonder what Lindsay, had she been seized by the kind of take-no-prisoners ambition that possessed Davis, might have accomplished herself.

Still, one shouldn’t indulge in what-might-have-been speculations, especially concerning actors’ encounters with the unpleasant vagaries of what’s sentimentally dubbed Golden-Age Hollywood.  So much depended on chance, luck, timing, and the whims of money-conscious, leather-souled producers.  Such as what happened with the earlier mentioned, fiercely talented Ann Dvorak, whose career began with vivid performances in such meaty pre-Coders as Scarface and Three on a Match (which also featured a young and mousy Bette Davis).  But Dvorak bucked Hollywood rules (walking out on her studio contract to get married), and her career dwindled into standard B’s, in which she’d play second fiddle to other actresses—such as supporting Margaret Lindsay in such conventional crime flicks as Gentlemen Are Born and ‘G’ Men (though neither film, in which Lindsay’s the hero’s conventionally loyal gal, helped boost her own career).  Dvorak still got chances to show what she was made of—she’s terrific in definitely unconventional parts in Out of the Blue (which I wrote about here) and A Life of Her Own (which I wrote about here)—but, as her biography by Christina Rice titles her, she was a Forgotten Rebel.

Though she may also be forgotten, Lindsay as Hepzibah (which was her favorite part) also got a chance to show her stuff, to display onscreen a new facet of her talent, a previously unheralded depth—for which she should be remembered.  I, at least, am surprised and gratified to have seen it, to see an artist abandon standard grooves and enter new, unexplored territory, with a performance of grit, subtlety, and imagination.  Lindsay really inhabits this woman; she makes Hepzibah unconventional and arresting, as if realizing that here, at last, is a real ROLE.  And she went for it.  Good for her.

Click here to see TCM’s intro/outro to The House of the Seven Gables.

Click here to see a pretty good print of The House of the Seven Gables on YouTube; free with ads, while available.