by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Ghost
Camera, a 1933 British production
that I was inclined to think of as one of the earliest examples of Alfred Hitchcock’s
influence — until I looked it up on imdb.com and found it was made in 1933, two
years before The 39 Steps and four years before Young and Innocent. Both its writer and its star had Hitchcock
connections in their pasts, though: Harry Kendall, who played the rather prissy
male lead John Gray, had played the suburban husband Fred in Hitchcock’s 1931
masterpiece Rich and Strange (when the film was a financial flop Hitchcock blamed Kendall, who was
not only Gay but a bit of a queen in real life), and the film was based on a
story by J. Jefferson Farjeon, one of whose plays had provided the basis for
Hitchcock’s 1932 film Number Seventeen. It was a production of Twickenham Studios (the company dissolved in the
late 1930’s but the studios remained in use — the first third of the Beatles’ Let
It Be was shot there in 1969), a
company I’d known before only as producers of four of the five Sherlock Holmes
movies with Arthur Wontner as Holmes (which hadn’t particularly impressed me:
they were hamstrung by stage-bound stories and low budgets and the Wontner
Holmes movie Twickenham didn’t make, The Sign of Four, was his best in the role).
The Ghost Camera was based on a Farjeon story called A Mystery
Narrative — when I saw that in the
opening credits I thought that was simply a genre indication, but it was the actual title of the
source story, reflecting how John Gray, an innocent man drawn into
investigating a murder, compares his own story to those of the heroes of
detective fiction. He’s also the sort of person who tries to impress people
with his learning (his “erudition,” as he’d say) through never using a
one-syllable word when a four- or five-syllable word will do. The script is by
H. Fowler Mear and is quite witty, the sort of thing that uses the typical mystery
clichés but also ridicules itself for doing so, though Gray’s comic-relief
sidekick, Albert Sims (S. Victor Stanley), gets pretty oppressive after a
while. (It must have been really challenging for this film’s casting director to come up with someone even
queenier than Harry Kendall!) The gimmick is that Gray is driving through the
countryside in a convertible when someone throws a camera away and it lands in
the (otherwise empty) back seat of his car. He finds it and decides to develop
the film inside — he’s got a fully equipped processing lab in his basement,
which is explained by the fact that he and Sims are proprietors of a drugstore
(a “chemist’s,” as they call them in England) and presumably use the lab to
develop film for their customers. There are five photographic plates in the
camera’s clip, and the first one Gray develops is a photo of one man stabbing
another — only when he hangs the negative and print to dry, a heavy-set man
breaks into the shop and steals them as well as the camera itself. Gray still
has the other four plates, and three of them turn out to be scenes in the
countryside — including an old ruined castle and a shot of a train — while one
is a photo of a woman.
Using the pictures to trace the girl, Gray finds out she
is Mary Elton (Ida Lupino, in her first film), and the camera belonged to her
brother Ernest (John Mills), who took it out to the country one day to shoot
some pictures for a contest and hasn’t been seen since. Ernest worked at a
jewelry store and joined a plot led by some crooks to steal a valuable diamond,
then thought better of it and stole the diamond back, intending to return it —
but his two confederates each thought the other had made off with the gem, so
they had a fight and one of them stabbed the other while Ernest shot the scene
with his camera hidden. The killer disguises himself as a Scotland Yard officer
and tries to retrieve the other plates and keep from being discovered, and as
they travel together Gray and Mary begin to fall in love even though she realizes
that the likely outcome of his investigation will be the apprehension and trial
of her brother for murder, especially when they trace the locations in the
photographs and find the cave where the killing took place — with the victim’s
body still inside. Ernest is found and indeed arrested, and he’s put on trial
before a coroner’s jury headed by an officious coroner (Felix Aylmer) who’s
obviously gone into the proceeding already convinced Ernest is guilty. It’s
only at the very end, when Gray is confronted by that “Scotland Yard officer”
and he realizes at long last he isn’t a Scotland Yard officer, and is in fact the real killer, that it ends
happily, with him and Mary paired up and kissing just at the right moment to
spoil Sims’ attempt to photograph them.
The Ghost Camera is a finely honed light mystery, beautifully
balanced between thriller and comedy elements in the way Hitchcock would become
famous for later, and while director Bernard Vorhaus doesn’t quite have Hitchcock’s skill at suspense and pace, he
keeps the action flowing and shoots much of the film from oblique angles. One
wonders where he was when Twickenham was handing out the directorial
assignments for all those dull Holmes movies with Wontner! This film is filled
with people who became far more important later, not only in front of the
camera (Lupino, Mills, Aylmer) but behind it as well: the editor was a young
man on the make named David Lean. Lupino is billed first on the title card —
perhaps a later addition to boost her billing to take advantage of her
subsequent success in Hollywood — but only eighth in the opening credits, but
it does seem to have been an
“introducing” sort of credit because in terms of screen time and overall
importance she truly has a leading role, and it’s fascinating not only to watch
the young blonde Lupino but to hear her voice before she went to the U.S. and
eradicated her British accent so successfully that on at least one occasion she
was passed over for the part of a Brit because the director didn’t think she
could learn to talk like one again! The Ghost Camera is quite a good movie, a surprise especially given
its auspices — and one wonders why Bernard Vorhaus didn’t have more of a career
as a director: this was his first film and he eventually made it to the U.S.
but got stuck at Republic making things like The Affairs of Jimmy Valentine and the 1950 So Young, So Bad instead of the Hitchcock-style scripts he clearly
deserved!
