Trauma (1962)

The death of a wealthy aunt with a past leads to murder and mental anguish for her surviving heiress, a niece who as an impressionable teen witnessed the slaying. Now marries to an older man who may or may not have nefarious plans, she struggles to reside in the gorgeous country home where the memories are anything but peaceful. This psychological thriller is a common theme in movies ever since "The Cat and the Canary". Lorri Richards isn't really all that memorable as the beleaguered heroine, a role any young actress with vulnerable expressiveness could have played. She's a good screamer, though. Veteran actress Lynn Bari has gone from oomph to cough as the smokey aunt who meets a grizzly end. The best performance is John Conte as the calculating older man who keeps the audience guessing whether he's killer or kisser. Not bad for its kind (especially for being so cheap), but not really scary, either.

To enjoy "Trauma", you have to turn your brain off and just watch the film. After all, so much of the plot really makes no sense. Still, given the limitations in the script and with the budget, it's not a bad little psychological thriller.This film is unusual because the opening titles appear 15 minutes into the film! This is when Emmaline's aunt is murdered...deliberately drowned by someone whose identity is unknown through most of the film. However, and this is a dumb twist, Emmaline might know but she's got complete amnesia of this as well as her life before the murder! It's an overused and difficult to believe concept--and it's not made any easier to accept given the whole hidden mentally challenged and insane brother angle that appears later in the movie!But the folks acting in the film do a nice job, the film has a nice, tense atmosphere and the film is a decent time-passer given that you can just look past everything. Just don't think too much...otherwise it will probably be a bit of a waste of your time.

I don't see any way in which this could be compared to Hitchcock's "Psycho" except that one followed the other closely. "Trauma" is really burdened by its low budget, most of which may have been spent on that brand new Corvette. The production values affect both the script and the performance.Even in the first two or three minutes, when teen-aged Lorrie Richards as Emmaline, is talking with a caring friend, Carla, Renee Mason's acting as Carla is so poor it made me wince. I don't know who you are, reading this. Or WHY you're reading it, for that matter. But if you are some grizzled old wino in an alley, you could be dragged into a studio and give at least as good a performance as Renee Mason. I've seen better acting on the stage of a high school in Tonopah, Nevada. But she's pretty, petite, and has a saucy figure.I don't mean to be too harsh on the poor girl. She doesn't stand out in any particulars. Nobody really delivers the goods. A middle-aged Lynn Bari does her best with the role of Emmaline's rich aunt, but she never did bring much to the party and recites her lines as if in a classroom, but she's a seasoned pro and adds an occasional odd and interesting twist to her delivery of a line. The other chief character, John Conte, has the magnetic appeal of a hard boiled egg.But all of them get some good lines. The writing is better than any other element of the film. When we first see John Conte, he chats with the young Emmaline and mispronounces her name. Even after she corrects him, he smiles genially and mispronounces it again. There's an edgy feel to the scene and the edge is not in the performances but in the dialog.Not to say the twisted plot is in any way original. "Psycho" built up its suspense in ambiguous ways -- Janet Leigh, filled with guilt, yet still smiling with satisfaction as she imagines how her boss will react to her treachery -- until the crashing mid-film crisis that turned the story on its head. There's no danger of anything being gradually built up here. In the first five minutes. Emmaline is put through the cliché of a woman alone in the woods, hearing a strange sound, and then someone leaping into the frame, only to have the leaper turn out to be the family handyman.The plot has been described elsewhere. Briefly, a man marries a woman for her money and when she dies everyone suspects him, possibly because he looks and sounds like a snake. Ah -- but the REAL plot involves forbidden love, an idiot child, hidden rooms, and amnesia.The musical score is by Buddy Colette. He was a talented musician who was part of the West Coast jazz movement, distinguished by its odd arrangements and use of instruments unfamiliar to jazz. Colette played with the Chico Jones group, for instance, that used a jazz cello. The style doesn't belong behind a movie. We hear weird instruments, a bassoon, and I think a harmonium, and, who knows?, sacbuts, virginals, rauschpfeife, and spoons.All in all, I found it dull. The story doesn't really fit a California ranch-style house. It belongs in a ghoul-haunted mansion.

***SPOILERS*** Very well thought out murder/mystery that covers some six years from the time that Emmaline Garrison, Lorri Richards, suffered through.This due to the trauma of seeing her Aunt Hellen, Lynn Bari, murdered by having her forced down under to drown in her swimming pool at the Garrison Estate by an unknown killer. Emmaline also had to identify the body of her friend Lily earlier that evening, who was also murdered, at the Oakmont County Morgue. This caused her to lose her memory of not only what happened to her that terrible night but of her life, fifteen years, up to the time that those events happened. Now six years later Emmaline 21 and married to her Aunt Hellen's former lover Warren Clyner, John Conte, and after extensive treatment for the trauma that she suffered because of that incident is back at the Garrison Estate to start a new life, since she forgot her old one, as young Mrs. Clyner. Despite it's many sub-plots and red herrings "Trauma" does not let it's viewers down and the movies ending more then ties all the loose ends together to make the very complicated story plausible. You even learn a bit about architecture in the film due to one of it's characters Craig Schoonover, David Garner, who's an architect himself. Craig spots an important clue, by comparing an old blueprint of the Garrison Estate to a recent painting of it by Emmaline to what was the reason for the murders there some six years ago. There's also a sub-plot about a major financial swindle by Emmaline's husband Warren and the real reason for him marrying her that in a way runs interference to what the reason is for the murder of Lily and Aunt Hellen. Saying as much as I can without giving away significant plot-lines and clues to the suspenseful and shocking ending to the movie thats well worth the 93 minutes of your time watching this solid suspense thriller.Made two years after the Alfred Hitchcock classic "Psycho" I really think that "Trauma" is a much better movie even though it's almost totally unknown to the movie going public today as well as back in 1962 when it was released. Unlike in "Psycho" the movie didn't have to have at the end a more or less five minute monologue explaining to the audience about the reasons of what was happening in it, "Trauma" did a very good job in the last five minutes of it's story explaining, without the help of an inserted teacher-like commentary, what were the reasons for Lily's and Aunt Hellen's murders as well as what lead up to them.