I've had a little rare free time recently that has allowed me to catch up with viewing some of my DVD collection. Two movies I watched in the last week offered reminders of DS - and both movies are from 1967, perhaps not surprisingly . . .
The first of these is a movie I never forgot from childhood, and which instilled a childhood fascination with the guillotine (rather a leap from my earlier childhood obsession with hourglasses, a la "The Wizard of Oz"): "Two on a Guillotine." At a climactic revealing moment, a Julia Hoffman-type character (unrequited love and devotion to a mysterious stage magician) blurts out to the deluded magician (and his stunned daughter, played by Connie Stevens), that his wife, who everyone believed had left her husband and young daughter, was in fact dead (I won't say how) and the Julia-type character says "I buried her in the woods behind the house." Now the house in question is an old mansion, and a simple insertion of the word "old" would probably have made this line identical to more than one circumstance occurring on DS.
The second reminder of DS came only last night when I viewed another movie on DVD, a French film with English subtitles, the final film of a famed director (so I have read online) Julien Duvivier called "Diaboliquement vôtre" ("Diaboliquely Yours," the English title). The thriller, starring the handsome/lovely and talented Alain Delon and Senta Berger, is set at a French chateau, where the husband seeks to regain his memory following a car crash but finds that things don't add up, and he begins to doubt he really is who his wife and friend tell him he is ... No, it's not the plot per se that reminded me of DS (although as I think of it now, one can't discount some surface similarity to the storyline where Barnabas holds Maggie Evans prisoner in the Old House trying to convince her she is Josette Collins.
No, it's not the plot that reminded me, but the setting - specifically the chateau, that I mentioned. You will have to view the attached photo to see. The chateau in question where the movie was filmed is Château de Théméricourt in the beautiful Val-d'Oise department just northwest of Paris.
Anyway, I can recommend both movies as entertaining and suspenseful "flicks".
