by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I looked last night for something from my backlog of
recordings from TCM back when I could still make recordings and found an
intriguing item called Whirlpool, a 20th
Century-Fox film gris (my term
for movies that attempt film noir
and don’t quite make it) that reunited director Otto Preminger and star Gene
Tierney from Laura (though most
of Laura was actually directed by
Rouben Mamoulian, whose “touch” shows in that film’s intense visual richness,
characteristic of Mamoulian’s work and uncharacteristic of Preminger’s) in a wild tale which Charles recalled
having read about in books on hypnosis as one of the most flagrantly inaccurate
fictional portrayals of it. The plot casts Tierney as Ann Sutton, wife of
psychiatrist Dr. William Sutton (Richard Conte, outrageously miscast in a role
that cried out for Gregory Peck), who in the opening scene is caught
shoplifting a $300 (in 1949 dollars!) piece of jewelry from a store to which
she and her affluent husband have a charge account. She’s apprehended in the
parking lot by a store security guard and placed under citizen’s arrest, but
she’s bailed out — so to speak — by the mysterious David Korvo (José Ferrer),
an astrologer, psychic and master hypnotist who uses his powers to latch on to
independently wealthy women and suck them dry financially. We later learn that
Ann Sutton is independently wealthy but has never been allowed to live a
rich-and-famous (or even rich-and-not-so-famous) lifestyle, first because when
he was alive her dad wouldn’t allow her to spend any money on luxury items for
herself; then when he died he continued his control over her finances by
locking up his entire fortune in trusts; and when she married Dr. Sutton he
insisted that they live on his
money (he didn’t have any to speak of then, though later he became successful
and they did) and not touch hers. Supposedly she became a kleptomaniac because
as a child the only way she could have anything nice was to steal it, and while
she’d stopped stealing after her dad died Dr. Sutton’s demand that they live
only on his money reawakened her kleptomania. David Korvo uses his “hold” on
Ann to insist that she start dating him — thinking he’s blackmailing her, she
writes him a check for $5,000 but he tears it up — and through his hypnotic
powers he’s able to get her to sleep (something she’s been previously unable to
do) and worms his way into her consciousness until he manages to get her to
enter the house of one of his previous con victims, Theresa Randolph (Barbara
O’Neil, afflicted by hair stylist Marie Walter with a weird grey streak in her
hair that makes her look like the Bride of Frankenstein), whom he’s just
killed, so he can set her up for his crime.
Just then Korvo has a medical
emergency — his gall bladder goes haywire and he needs an operation to have it
removed — and he figures being near death in a hospital bed will give him an
unimpeachable alibi for Randolph’s murder. Only he really intends to hypnotize himself to be able to walk out
of his hospital bed, leave the hospital and go to Randolph’s house, where Dr.
Sutton (ya remember Dr. Sutton?)
has persuaded the police detective in charge of investigating the Randolph
murder, Lt. James Colton (Charles Bickford), to let him take Ann in hopes that
something there will jog her memory and she’ll be able to identify the real
killer. There’s also another MacGuffin: large transcription records Dr. Sutton
made of his therapy sessions with Randolph, who was one of his patients and who
told him all about her run-ins and brief affair with Korvo — only the records
were stolen from his office by Ann under Korvo’s hypnotic control. Korvo beats
the good guys to the Randolph home and plays the records while waiting for
them, and when they arrive he pulls a gun on Ann and tells her he won’t shoot
her if she lets him get away — but eventually his medical injuries catch up
with him and, after picturesquely dropping blood all over the Randolph floor
and letting loose with a wild shot that misses all the other humans in the room
but destroys the Randolph record, he dies. The End. Whirlpool started life as a novel by Guy Endore and got turned
into a film script by Ben Hecht and Andrew Solt — both writers with far better
credits than this one — though because Hecht was not only financially
supporting the Jewish guerrillas in Israel in the late 1940’s who were fighting
not only the Palestinian Arabs but the British who were still in overall
control of Palestine as a protectorate, he was soliciting contributions for
this dubious cause from every other Jew in Hollywood and making public
statements like it gladdened his heart every time a British solder in Palestine
was killed, the British Board of Film Censors refused to let this film be
released in the U.K. unless Hecht’s name was taken off it, so on the British
prints he was billed as “Lester Barstow.”
Whirlpool is the sort of frustrating movie whose basic plot
could have been a weird and compelling thriller if the writers hadn’t piled on
one unbelievable situation on top of another, and if Preminger had been able to
bring any sense of atmosphere to the direction. Instead he and cinematographer
Arthur C. Miller (who’d shown in his credits for more creative directors that
he could do atmospherics) shoot
virtually the whole movie in even grey tonalities; it’s not until the final
reel, starting with Korvo’s escape from the hospital, that Whirlpool even looks like a film noir. About
the only thing it has going for it is José Ferrer’s superbly oily performance
as the villain — in this kind of story the villains are usually more interesting
than the heroes, and that’s true here even more than usual — and even Ferrer
looks flummoxed in the later stages by what the writers are trying to make us
believe his character would do. (The contortions he goes into as he’s trying to
hypnotize himself into being able to walk out of the hospital and drive to the
Randolph house without pain make him look like he’s about to turn into Mr. Hyde
— and arguably Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde might have been a good role for Ferrer.) Whirlpool is another Otto Preminger loser — the script
required visual atmospherics and dramatic subtlety, never directorial tasks
Preminger was good at (his best films, Anatomy of a Murder and Advise and Consent, worked largely because their stories didn’t need visual atmosphere) — and though Gene Tierney was one
of the few actors who actually liked
working for the tyrannical Preminger (they made four films together), the
cruelest irony of Whirlpool was
that it cast Tierney as a mental patient six years before she became one for
real and spent years in therapy, burning through the entire fortune she’d
accumulated as a Hollywood star, from which she was bailed out only by marrying
a Texas oil multimillionaire and never having to work again.
