The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing
It’s a shame that Evelyn Nesbit (Joan Collins) has been largely forgotten by the Collective Conscious as her colourful life is full of material for miniseries or films. Richard Fleischer’s 1955 CinemaScope film covers the most eventful part of her life. She was briefly the teenaged mistress of the architect Stanford White (Ray Milland) before attracting the attention of the millionaire Harry K. Thaw (Farley Granger) who married her. Thaw then shot White in public in Madison Square Garden, leading to a ‘trial of the century’ – a bit premature as the century was only six years old – and Thaw’s consignment to an insane asylum. There is a lot going on here still very relevant for today.
As I will say in all my comments to his films, Fleischer is a director whom I don’t know quite what to make of. Is he or is he not an auteur? Sometimes I don’t think he is, but his films do have a visual quality that persists across them whether they are a New Testament epic like BARABBAS or a sci-fi thriller like SOYLENT GREEN. I find his framing highly attractive, and his blocking sometimes feds into that in interesting ways. There is also a recurring theme of misanthropy, whether embedded in the context of the story being told or directed towards the characters themselves. Last time I thought about this, I decided that maybe Fleischer wasn’t an auteur after all. Now I’ve swung back in the other direction.
In THE GIRL IN THE RED VELVET SWING, Fleischer has two obsessed men to play with, and toys with a misanthropy directed towards the upper classes and maybe even the race of men. (His women are more sympathetic, even such a character as ambiguous as Nesbit.) What’s interesting from the perspective of 2026, where all this might seem ancient history of a piece with the trial of Joan of Arc, this story occurred within living memory at the time of production. (An equivalent event for a film today would have occurred in the mid 1970s, when I was a teenager.) Yet its setting was also, even as far back as 1955, another world. The great scars of one Great Depression and the two world wars transformed society and individual outlooks. The voice of radio and the growing spread of television was transforming newspaper journalism just as much as the internet has toppled television from its summit. To watch this film today is to watch a film about an alien world in its own time, let alone ours.
But this is also a very closed world. It becomes accessible to Nesbit owing to her modelling and theatrical careers, but had she remained a seamstress like her mother she would have been excluded. There’s a bit of dialogue about twenty minutes into the film where White mentions Sarah Bernhardt, Buffalo Bill, the Greek goddess Diana, Watteau (although I think Fragonard is meant) and Shakespeare. It’s impossible to imagine such an exchange being written into a mass-market film today without a massive quantity of clumsy exposition being required. I’m not convinced the cinema-going Americans of the 1950s caught all of that either, but at least the makers had the graciousness to assume that they would. But I am sure that Stanford White, Robert Collier and, thanks to her longer association with such circles, Gwen Arden (Gale Robbins) used references like that all the time.
That graciousness towards the audience further extended to concealing the sordid details of the story. The Production Code would not have tolerated taking the audience down into the depths of White’s Epstein-like enthusiasm for teenagers. Nesbit herself served as an advisor to the film’s production, so we can be sure her role in all this is somewhat whitewashed. There is even a tight rein kept on Thaw, who is childishly temperamental but not particularly threatening – an odd reservation considering he kills a man in public.
Fleischer guides Collins into an ambiguous performance. Most critics have observed there is uncertainty between her Nesbit being innocent and being all too knowing about what she is getting herself into. I prefer to think this is wholly intentional on their part. Fleischer’s and Collins’ Nesbit knows what she wants, but she is, at least with White, inexperienced in knowing how to get it. Critics of the time and since have also been none too happy with Milland or Granger, either. Milland’s White is a more stoical character than the real man, by all accounts. It transforms him from a lecherous old goat into a more sympathetic character and the real tragic character of the film. If I was to slight any performance, it would be that of Granger. I fear, though, that he had a difficult task. Thaw has to be menacing enough to make shooting White plausible, while at the same time capable of convincing a jury of his temporary insanity while posing as Nesbit’s avenging white knight in the cause of her abuse at the hands of White.
The second part of the film, following Nesbit’s marriage to Thaw, and covering the murder of White and the trial of the century, seems a bit less well structured. Here Fleischer implies a weirdness in the Thaw family, but the exact nature of this is not clear. It does revolve not around Thaw, but his mother. It’s clear she dominates the household, but just how much does Mrs Thaw (Cornelia Otis Skinner) love her Harry? Maybe too much, and Evelyn’s young, tainted sexuality is about as welcome in the maternal house as she was to Mrs Stanford White (Frances Fuller). In 1955 discretion was still valued, and I think Fleischer might be exploiting the restrictions of the Production Code to hint at a hypocritical society that hid all manner of filth and depravity behind secret entrances.
Even with the final shot of the film, Fleischer both simultaneously displays and conceals. As the swing tracks its final arcs in the film, we are offered a superb evocation of the male’s animal lust. It’s as if Fleischer is telling us that we should be aware of what really is afoot in the world, and perhaps it is wise to keep it hidden.
The film itself was not much loved in its own time or even today. I think there are two reasons for its failure in the 1950s. The first is that, as my interpretation of the last shot suggests, it surprisingly does make an assault on the Patriarchy. This was not (and still is not) an acceptable target in a country that had spent the previous decade pushing women back into the home. The second is that the film is very much about America’s wealthy, and Americans don’t really like to be reminded that their populist society is a protective façade for an hereditary oligarchy without titles.
I’m more in company with Cleveland Amory, a largely forgotten journalist turned pop social historian and early television commentator, who thought it was one of the better ‘society’ films ever made. Given his place amongst Boston Brahmins, he should know.
© 2026 Paul Brewer
As I will say in all my comments to his films, Fleischer is a director whom I don’t know quite what to make of. Is he or is he not an auteur? Sometimes I don’t think he is, but his films do have a visual quality that persists across them whether they are a New Testament epic like BARABBAS or a sci-fi thriller like SOYLENT GREEN. I find his framing highly attractive, and his blocking sometimes feds into that in interesting ways. There is also a recurring theme of misanthropy, whether embedded in the context of the story being told or directed towards the characters themselves. Last time I thought about this, I decided that maybe Fleischer wasn’t an auteur after all. Now I’ve swung back in the other direction.
In THE GIRL IN THE RED VELVET SWING, Fleischer has two obsessed men to play with, and toys with a misanthropy directed towards the upper classes and maybe even the race of men. (His women are more sympathetic, even such a character as ambiguous as Nesbit.) What’s interesting from the perspective of 2026, where all this might seem ancient history of a piece with the trial of Joan of Arc, this story occurred within living memory at the time of production. (An equivalent event for a film today would have occurred in the mid 1970s, when I was a teenager.) Yet its setting was also, even as far back as 1955, another world. The great scars of one Great Depression and the two world wars transformed society and individual outlooks. The voice of radio and the growing spread of television was transforming newspaper journalism just as much as the internet has toppled television from its summit. To watch this film today is to watch a film about an alien world in its own time, let alone ours.
But this is also a very closed world. It becomes accessible to Nesbit owing to her modelling and theatrical careers, but had she remained a seamstress like her mother she would have been excluded. There’s a bit of dialogue about twenty minutes into the film where White mentions Sarah Bernhardt, Buffalo Bill, the Greek goddess Diana, Watteau (although I think Fragonard is meant) and Shakespeare. It’s impossible to imagine such an exchange being written into a mass-market film today without a massive quantity of clumsy exposition being required. I’m not convinced the cinema-going Americans of the 1950s caught all of that either, but at least the makers had the graciousness to assume that they would. But I am sure that Stanford White, Robert Collier and, thanks to her longer association with such circles, Gwen Arden (Gale Robbins) used references like that all the time.
That graciousness towards the audience further extended to concealing the sordid details of the story. The Production Code would not have tolerated taking the audience down into the depths of White’s Epstein-like enthusiasm for teenagers. Nesbit herself served as an advisor to the film’s production, so we can be sure her role in all this is somewhat whitewashed. There is even a tight rein kept on Thaw, who is childishly temperamental but not particularly threatening – an odd reservation considering he kills a man in public.
Fleischer guides Collins into an ambiguous performance. Most critics have observed there is uncertainty between her Nesbit being innocent and being all too knowing about what she is getting herself into. I prefer to think this is wholly intentional on their part. Fleischer’s and Collins’ Nesbit knows what she wants, but she is, at least with White, inexperienced in knowing how to get it. Critics of the time and since have also been none too happy with Milland or Granger, either. Milland’s White is a more stoical character than the real man, by all accounts. It transforms him from a lecherous old goat into a more sympathetic character and the real tragic character of the film. If I was to slight any performance, it would be that of Granger. I fear, though, that he had a difficult task. Thaw has to be menacing enough to make shooting White plausible, while at the same time capable of convincing a jury of his temporary insanity while posing as Nesbit’s avenging white knight in the cause of her abuse at the hands of White.
The second part of the film, following Nesbit’s marriage to Thaw, and covering the murder of White and the trial of the century, seems a bit less well structured. Here Fleischer implies a weirdness in the Thaw family, but the exact nature of this is not clear. It does revolve not around Thaw, but his mother. It’s clear she dominates the household, but just how much does Mrs Thaw (Cornelia Otis Skinner) love her Harry? Maybe too much, and Evelyn’s young, tainted sexuality is about as welcome in the maternal house as she was to Mrs Stanford White (Frances Fuller). In 1955 discretion was still valued, and I think Fleischer might be exploiting the restrictions of the Production Code to hint at a hypocritical society that hid all manner of filth and depravity behind secret entrances.
Even with the final shot of the film, Fleischer both simultaneously displays and conceals. As the swing tracks its final arcs in the film, we are offered a superb evocation of the male’s animal lust. It’s as if Fleischer is telling us that we should be aware of what really is afoot in the world, and perhaps it is wise to keep it hidden.
The film itself was not much loved in its own time or even today. I think there are two reasons for its failure in the 1950s. The first is that, as my interpretation of the last shot suggests, it surprisingly does make an assault on the Patriarchy. This was not (and still is not) an acceptable target in a country that had spent the previous decade pushing women back into the home. The second is that the film is very much about America’s wealthy, and Americans don’t really like to be reminded that their populist society is a protective façade for an hereditary oligarchy without titles.
I’m more in company with Cleveland Amory, a largely forgotten journalist turned pop social historian and early television commentator, who thought it was one of the better ‘society’ films ever made. Given his place amongst Boston Brahmins, he should know.
© 2026 Paul Brewer
Mini Review: Visually, this is a treat. Not many people like this, but I think it is worth a look. Fleischer's interest in the demimonde intersects with high society here.