by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
When Charles and I got home, however, we watched a movie that was even more surprisingly good, since we hadn’t had much of an expectation for it: it was just another archive.org download of the film Love From a Stranger, the 1937 version of a story called “Philomel Cottage” by Agatha Christie (a real surprise since it’s a psychological thriller rather than a whodunit, and is one of the few times in her writing career that Christie actually gave a damn about character development and real emotion instead of just creating stick-figure people and having them enact a murder mystery) and the play Frank Vosper adapted from it, though in the U.S. it was released as A Night of Terror (which rather gives the ending away!).
It was
produced by a British company called Trafalgar, though several Americans were
involved: super-agent Harry Edgington (who had represented both John Gilbert
and Greta Garbo in the silent era and anticipated Lew Wasserman and Charles
Feldman in using his stable of stars to move from agentry to production) was
the producer, Rowland V. Lee was the director, Frances Marion the screenwriter
and Ann Harding starred as Carol Howard, a woman in London with a boring job
(at a foundation of some sort); a boring fiancé, Ronald Bruce (Bruce Seton); a
small flat and only two amusements: buying lottery tickets and hanging out with
her roommate, Kate Meadows (Binnie Hale), whom she genuinely likes even though
a third woman, Kate’s crotchety Aunt Lou (Jean Cadell) is part of the deal.
Things change for her when one of her lottery tickets actually wins her a prize
of several thousand pounds, and when she advertises a sublet on her flat the ad
attracts a fascinating young man named Gerald Lovell (Basil Rathbone, a South
African-born British-trained actor but one who already had a following among
U.S. film audiences), who claims to be a World War I veteran and a South
American oil tycoon and says he wants to rent her little flat because he used to
live in the neighborhood before he struck it rich and wants to relive those
days. Instead of moving in, though, he follows Carol onto the ship that’s
taking her to Paris (it was a French lottery so she has to go there to claim
the prize) and eventually woos her and marries her.
They live high off the hog
and eventually, once they return to the U.K., Gerald announces that she’s
buying them a house in Kent but he needs money to complete the deal — and
Carol, totally trusting her husband, signs two large legal documents that give
him control over her entire fortune. Once they move there, Carol’s life becomes
slowly discombobulated as she sees Gerald go into irrational rages and tell
both her and the servants, gardener Hobson (Donald Calthrop) and his daughter, maid
Emmy (Joan Hickson, who according to imdb.com returned to Christie’s work
decades later as Miss Marple on a BBC-TV series), that under no circumstances
are they to go into the cellar because he has his darkroom there (he’s an
amateur photographer) and he also does scientific experiments (he’s claimed to
make his living as a chemical engineer). It’s not that clear what he really does in the cellar, but eventually it turns out that
both he and the local doctor, Gribble (Bryan Powley), own a book about famous
murderers — only Gerald’s copy is missing the photo of one of the most famous
ones of all, Fleming, who made it his habit of meeting and wooing women who’d
suddenly come into money, marrying them, getting them to sign their fortunes
over to him and then killing them.
Dr. Gribble brings over his copy of the
book, but before Carol can see it Gerald rips out the photo of Fleming from
that copy, too, and needless to say it turns out that Gerald is Fleming and Carol is his next would-be victim —
though the other characters learn what’s going on in time that Carol’s life is
saved, Fleming is arrested and Carol ends up back in London with her boring job
and her boring boyfriend. Love With a Stranger wasn’t exactly fresh drama then any more than it is
now, and Rathbone had played a similar part two years earlier in the 1935 MGM
film Kind Lady (with Aline
MacMahon as his “mark”), only in that case he wasn’t romancing her (just taking
advantage of her kind heart and interest in helping out the downtrodden) and he
was a suave but sane swindler whose interest in Ms. MacMahon was in the 10
valuable paintings she had on the walls of her home. In Love With a
Stranger Rathbone’s character is
certifiably crazy, and his descent from Continental charmer to out-and-out
madman is a chilling and vividly thought-out piece of acting. But what’s most
interesting about Love With a Stranger is not the movies that inspired it but the ones with similar plotlines
that came later, including Gaslight and Notorious.
One advantage of those later films was that the damsel in distress was
played by Ingrid Bergman, a far more subtle and sensitive actress than Ann
Harding, who usually walked through her parts so impassively she sometimes
comes across as an unfunny Buster Keaton in drag. In this movie at least
Rowland V. Lee gets her to smile a couple of times in the opening reel, and as
if to make up for her relative impassivity in the rest of the movie she goes
into a spasm of flaring, scenery-chewing overacting in the scene in which she
finally has to deal with the revelation that her husband is a serial killer.
But despite Harding’s limitations, Love With a Stranger is a fine film, and it benefits from a quite
advanced musical score by the young Benjamin Britten — much more dissonant than
the norm for an American film at the time, though it suffers from the relative
reticence of British studios in using music (the scored scenes are mostly
dialogue-less montages and there’s surprisingly little underscoring of dialogue
for 1937); with someone as skilled as Britten (even that early) composing the
score, we’d certainly want to hear more of it!
