Tangier (Universal, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

When my husband Charles came home from work last night two hours early I ran us both a 1946 movie called Tangier, a terrible movie ripping off some great ones (notably Casablanca) with Maria Montez in a fusion of the Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henried roles: she’s Rita, a fugitive from Madrid, Spain (so at least this time she, a real-life native of the Dominican Republic, was playing a Hispanic instead of an Arab, a Polynesian or a Gypsy) whose father and two brothers were tortured and murdered during the Spanish Civil War. She dances at a nightclub called the Ritz (I couldn’t help but joke, “Everybody comes to Ritz”), only she tries to hunt down the man who tortured her father and brothers so she can kill him. So she frequently asks her maidservant Dolores (the marvelous Louise Allbritton, whose magnificent performance in the 1943 film Son of Dracula – in which director Robert Siodmak and his brother Carl, who wrote the script, anticipated Anne Rice’s vampire tales by casting Allbritton as a normal human who wants to become a vampire so she can be immortal despite the considerable down side of having to attack and kill people for their blood – should have made her a star: instead she got relegated to comedy parts and her career ended in 1964) to go on in her place.

The Humphrey Bogart character is Paul Kenyon (Robert Paige), a discredited former war correspondent who’s trying to rehabilitate his reputation, who falls in love with Rita even though he’s warned she only dates guys with big bankrolls they can lavish on her. Among the other men in her life are her dance partner, Ramón (Kent Taylor) and Col, José Artiego (Preston Foster, heavier-set than we remember him from his career peak – to the extent he had one – in the early 1930’s). It doesn’t help that it seems all the men in Rita’s life have little thin moustaches and, aside from Preston Foster looking about a decade older than Rpbert Paige or Kent Taylor, they pretty much resemble each other. They’re also among the most boring people ever created by movie writers – in this case Alice Duer Miller, who wrote the “original” story (and for some reason Miller’s imdb.com page omits the most important film ever made based on a story she wrote: the 1935 musical Roberta with Irene Dunne, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, based on a 1933 musical script by Otto Harbach based in turn on a Miller novel called Gowns by Roberta) and M. M. Musselman and Monty F. Collins, who wrote the screenplay – and one of the most irritating aspects of this movie is the desperation with which the writers went to get World War II intrigues into the story even though the war itself had ended the year before.

The good guys and the bad guys are both chasing after a large diamond (we see the “diamond” and it’s one of the most obvious fakes ever produced for a film) in Rita’s possession – though, realizing that holding it puts her life in danger, Rita later palms it off on Dolores – and Alec Rocco (J. Edward Bromberg), who skulks around the action to the side for most of the film and is thought by Rita to be the torturer from Franco’s Spain she’s sworn to kill, turns out to be an agent of the wartime Allies there to recover looted property the bad guys still have in their possession after the war. Needless to say, Col. Artiego is the real torturer and Nazi villain – as if we couldn’t tell from the medals on his chest, which make him look like Conrad Veidt’s character in the original Casablanca – and the writers can’t figure out a better exit for him than having him and Allbritton’s character get trapped in the hotel’s defective elevator, which crashes and kills both of them. (At least Louise Allbritton got to take out the principal villain, albeit at the cost of her own life.) There’s even an equivalent to the Dooley Wilson character in Sabu, who plays “Pepe,” a street minstrel who walks between the tables at the Ritz nightclub singing bad versions of American folk songs like “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain” and “Polly Wolly Doodle,” which in one of the film’s few genuinely funny lines he introduces as “Number One on the American Hit Procession.”

The wretched misuse of Sabu in this and virtually all his other Universal films speaks volumes about the mistreatment of actors of color; even Universal, who cast Turhan Bey so creatively (in The Mad Ghoul he’s actually the hero and bland white actor David Bruce is the titular monster),didn’t know what to do with Sabu. He suffered the same fate that Sue Lyon did a quarter-century later: just as Lyon’s career began at the top (playing the title character of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita with Nabokov himself doing the screenplay and Stanley Kubrick directing) and therefore had nowhere to go bot down, so Sabu also started at the top (under Robert Flaherty’s direction in the film Elephant Boy) and therefore also had nowhere to go but down. He made a few genuinely good films after that, including Drums and The Thief of Baghdad (a considerably better movie than the deadly-dull 1923 Douglas Fairbanks silent), but then he got stuck at Universal in one dead-end character role after another, usually opposite Maria Montez. But then again there were a lot of bizarre attempts to knock off Casablanca both during and after the war, including Warners’ own To the Victor (1948), and none of them matched the perfect balance of wartime intrigue, suspense and romance of the original – though Tangier failed so dismally the gap between it and Casablanca looms larger than the actual distance between the two Moroccan cities that give the films their titles.