by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The “feature” TCM showed
after Main Street Follies was the 1954 Black Widow, kicking off a night-long salute to actress Gene Tierney that mostly
avoided her best-known films (like Laura and Leave Her to Heaven) in favor of such oddities as this one, The Left Hand of God (a 1955 melodrama starring Humphrey Bogart as a disgraced
U.S. military officer who signs on to the private army of a Chinese warlord,
then runs afoul of him and tries to hide from the warlord’s hit squad by
masquerading as a priest!), Where the Sidewalk Ends (reuniting Tierney, Dana Andrews and director Otto
Preminger from her star-making vehicle, Laura) and other oddities. No relation to the 1987 Black
Widow either plot-wise or in
terms of atmosphere, the 1954 Black Widow is basically a murder mystery grafted onto the plot of All About Eve. Based on a 1952 (i.e., two years after All
About Eve) novel called Fatal
Woman published under the name
“Patrick Quentin” (a floating pseudonym used by four separate writers working
either alone or in pairs — Fatal Woman appears to have been written by Hugh Wheeler and Richard Wilson Webb), Black
Widow revolves around the fatal
attraction (the words are irresistible) between “purpose” girl Nancy Ordway
(Peggy Ann Garner), the Eve Harrington of this tale, and theatrical producer
Peter Denver (Van Heflin). Denver meets Ordway just after his wife, a famous
actress, goes out of town to tour with her latest Broadway hit; in this version
Ordway is an aspiring writer rather than an aspiring actress, but she’s just as
unscrupulous as Eve Harrington, essentially sleeping her way up the ladder of
Broadway success until she attracts Peter at a party hosted by the star of his
latest production, actress Carlotta Marin (Ginger Rogers, top-billed), and her husband Brian Mullen (Reginald Gardiner). The film
begins with Heflin’s character narrating a flashback on how Nancy Ordway moved
up the New York street grid, repeatedly seducing more and more influential
older men until she got to him, and putting on an innocent act that fooled
Denver at first.
He insists throughout the movie that he never actually had an
affair with her, like the good little Production Code-era boy he is, but other
people insist he did — including Ordway’s roommate Claire Amberley (Virginia
Leith) and her brother John (Skip Homeier, older but still as slimy as he was
as the boy Nazi in Tomorrow the World) — apparently their source was Ordway herself, who told them before she
was strangled in Denver’s apartment (where he had given her space to write
during the day — as Charles might joke, “Writing? Is that what they’re calling it now?”). Ordway’s death is ruled a suicide at
first, but when the medical examiner autopsies her it’s revealed that she was
first strangled and then hanged
post-mortem, and the police, headed by detective lieutenant C. A. Bruce (George
Raft), focus their investigation on Denver, his wife, Carlotta and her “kept
husband” Mullen. Ordway’s body was found with a stick-figure drawing of a woman
hanging, captioned with the line, “The power of love is greater than the power
of death” — from Richard Strauss’s Oscar Wilde-derived opera Salomé, a piece Ordway was fond of since she played its
big instrumental section, the “Dance of the Seven Veils,” constantly. Ordway
had drawn a similar stick-figure drawing of herself typing with a word balloon
containing her phone number, which she’d given to Peter so he could call her
and initiate their affair (or non-affair, depending on what you believe about
the story) — only it turns out that Mullen was really her lover, as well as the
father of the unborn fetus she was carrying when she was killed. What’s more,
in yet another reversal from writer-director Nunnally Johnson (like All
About Eve, this is a film in which
the writer and director were the same person), Ordway’s real killer turns out
to be … Carlotta Marin, disgusted with her for seducing and being impregnated
by the husband she’s spent a lot of money, time and energy keeping away from
the work world, at which he freely admits he’s hopeless.
Essentially the 1954 Black
Widow is what All About Eve would have been if Margo Channing had strangled
that ungrateful bitch Eve Harrington just when she realized what the younger
woman was up to, and while Johnson’s writing isn’t quite up to Joseph
Mankiewicz’ for wicked wit the movie is still a lot of fun despite a rather elderly
cast that was probably considered the “over-the-hill gang” even then. It’s also a professionally written and acted
film; Johnson’s writing may be powered by reversals, but at least they make
sense and don’t induce the kind of whiplash that’s become an all too common
reaction to recent thrillers like Tony Gilroy’s Duplicity (which layered on the reversals so thickly that
the plot eventually ceased to make any discernible sense at all). It isn’t cast
anywhere nearly as strongly as Eve was, but Ginger Rogers’ performance as the bitch is quite treasurable;
she pounces on the role as if she were determined once and for all to make us
forget that nice young girl who danced so beautifully with Fred Astaire, and
she plays the big reveal at the end in a surprisingly matter-of-fact fashion,
with a finely honed sense of psychopathology less exciting but more subtle than
the nose-flaring overacting with which Bette Davis would have acted it. I was
also grateful to TCM for showing Black Widow in a letterboxed print reproducing the original
CinemaScope 2.55-1 screen ratio; for years I had described the ridiculous scene
in the pan-and-scan version in which Van Heflin’s glasses had a heated argument
with Gene Tierney’s nose — and I was a bit startled to find that Heflin didn’t
wear glasses at any time during the film, so I’m not sure what I remembered except that the absence of anything
but hairline glimpses of the two leads in what was supposed to be an intensely
dramatic scene between them was disconcerting, to say the least!
