This certainly has the feel of a short story to it. It takes it's time getting there, but the denouement is surprisingly effective. It all centres on the increasingly obsessive captain of engineers "Herman" (Anton Walbrook) who spends most of his cold and snowy St. Petersburg evenings with his aristocratic friends as they play faro. He never joins in, but that is because he has learned that the grandmother of one of his friends supposedly sold her soul to the devil in return for a secret that made her invincible at the card table. Determined to discover this secret, he befriends her confident "Lizaveta" (a competent Yvonne Mitchell) in the hope that he can gain an interview with the Countess (Dame Edith Evans) - a cantankerous woman who has lived to a ripe old age. A chance encounter ends in tragedy - but for whom? Walbrook is on good form, and is supported by a cast of familiar faces amongst his ennobled friends - Ronald Howard and Anthony Dawson probably being the most recognisable. Thorold Dickinson does, perhaps, string this out for fifteen minutes or so more that it can comfortably sustain, but this story of greed, love and fear is well told with Dame Edith and her squeaking frock and huge wigs delivering a wonderful sense of a woman who is thriving yet struggling with despair. The last twenty minutes are well edited with some clever use of visual and audio effects and the ending - well that's not quite what I was expecting. Well worth a watch, this.