“I ask for the last time, are you going to tell me the secret of the cards? Or are you not?”

If you like to gamble, I tell you I’m your man. You win some, lose some, it’s all the same to me. Sadly, the same can’t be said of Captain Herman Suvorin (Anton Walbrook), a non-gambling soldier stationed in a snow dusted fairy tale village where the only pastime available is to play the new sensation that’s sweeping the nation, a children’s card game similar to “snap”.

Those soldiers just can’t get enough of it, I’m telling you. God knows why, as it’s obviously a simple game of chance (one player picks three cards, the other player turns over two packs one card at a time until the cards are revealed – if they’re on the dealer’s side, he wins, if they’re… oh, you get the idea). Level-headed Suvorin knows this, and squirrels his savings away whilst his slightly less Germanic-sounding colleagues blow their pay on the gambling and associated schnapps, chuckles and young ladies on offer.

But then Suvorin hears a story about a countess who apparently sold her soul for the secret of the cards – the three choices that will win every time. Rightly or wrongly, he ascribes this tale to an elderly countess who happens to live nearby, and vows to get the secret out of her, one way or another.

Of course, this being a cautionary tale of horror and madness, his plans fail to go one way, and head very much in another. The buffoon manages to scare the countess (Edith Evans) to death and somehow also manages to make her young mistreated ward (Yvonne Mitchell) fall madly in love with him (women, eh? They see you hanging around in the street outside their window night after night, and immediately put two and two together). As you can well imagine, this can’t bode well, and it doesn’t. Especially when (in the film’s pivotal and genuinely unsettling scene) he appears to be visited by the ghost of the countess, who gives him the names of the cards he was so keen on getting…

If I was to say to you “crumbly old black and white film from the 1940s”, you might well shrug your shoulders and make that noise teenagers make and inexplicably write in their TikTok posts. But what if I was to say “Dead Of Night”? That piqued your interest, didn’t it?

Now, I’m not saying that Queen Of Spades is in the same league as its venerable cousin, but it has a similar look and feel. And as I’ve already said, it has a couple of properly unsettling moments, a great cast, and a lovely, fairy tale story (based on a short story by Alexander Pushkin). Plus, it’s got the ever dependable Walbrook in it, who’s always worth watching.