by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night my husband Charles and I watched two mid-1940’s low-budget movies from Republic Pictures featuring Erich von Stroheim, Scotland Yard Investigator and The Great Flamarion. Scotland Yard Investigator was actually a surprisingly dull movie, especially for a Republic production (however tacky some of Republic’s films, especially their Westerns, were, at least they generally offered much well-staged action). The film was both written and directed by people you’ve probably never heard of before – the writer was Randall Faye and the director was George Blair – and dealt with a plot to steal the Mona Lisa. In the movie, Leonardo’s famous painting was moved from France to Britain during World War II to keep it safe from the Nazis (in real life it stayed in France during the war but was moved from the Louvre to the unoccupied Vichy region in southern France), With the Germans finally driven out of France, the French government wants the painting back, but in order to do that Sir James Collison (C. Aubrey Smith, top-billed) has to retrieve it from storage in an underground mineshaft (which Charles joked was almost certainly a leftover set from one or more of Republic’s Westerns). He hands it over to Jules (Victor Varconi) and Henri (Georges Metaxa),who supposedly represent the French government but are actually in the pay of German art collector Carl Hoffmeyer (Erich von Stroheim in one of his rare film appearances with hair; I wasn’t sure who he was until he opened his mouth and the familiar voice came out).
Hoffmeyer is one of those maniacal super-rich guys whose sole passion in life is stealing the most precious works of art he can acquire and building a secret gallery inside his home where he can gaze on his stolen treasures and take perverse pride in being the only man in the world who can actually see them. There have been other movies about such people, including the 1953 British film The Fake, and apparently they exist in real life as well. In fact, when the Mona Lisa was actually stolen from the Louvre in 1911, at least one account (in Lawrence Jeppson’s book The Fabulous Fakes) is that it was stolen by a ring of art forgers who had offered six private collectors the “real” Mona Lisa. They had an artist copy the original from the Louvre wall (in those days art students were allowed to copy the famous paintings on display there as long as their copies weren’t the same size as the originals) and paint six duplicates on panels of wood they got from dismantling an actual bed of Leonardo’s time.
In Scotland Yard Investigator Collison, who lives with his wheelchair-using wife Mary (Eva Moore, the religious fanatic in The Old Dark House) and his granddaughter Tony (Stephanie Bachelor, who actually turns in an authoritative performance that should have marked her for biggers and betters; maybe she didn’t sleep with the right people), who’s dating the titular Scotland Yard investigator, Bob Cartwright (Richard Fraser, who turned in a brilliant performance as the Quaker stonemason in Val Lewton’s last RKO film, Bedlam, but in all his other roles he lacks the quiet dignity and strength Lewton and director Mark Robson brought out in him in Bedlam and just seems boring), notices right away that the “Mona Lisa” they’ve been storing in the mineshaft is a fake. Apparently the real one is in the hands of corrupt antique dealer Sam Todworthy (Forrester Harvey, father of the dead child Maria in the original Frankenstein) and his wife Emma (Doris Lloyd). Todworthy’s asking 100,000 pounds for the real Mona Lisa (or at least the painting he says is the real one; the two looked the same to me and it’s likely Republic used the same prop painting for both) and Collison, who was up for a knighthood and realizes that if he’s lost the Mona Lisa he could lose the honor, is willing to pay Todworthy’s ransom. Only Todworthy is killed by Hoffmeyer before he and Collison can seal the deal, and the police send a squad over to Todworthy’s antique shop, find his secret hiding place and recover the painting.
Then a French art expert named Renault (Emil Rameau) shows up and demands the painting back on behalf of the French government, and I was expecting a twist in which he would turn out to be an art thief also posing as the legitimate French representative. One thing that bothered both Charles and I about the movie is that Collison never bothers to check the credentials of these alleged French government representatives to see if they really are who they say they are. Charles was sure that if the French authorities had really sent the Mona Lisa to Britain for safekeeping and were now recovering it, the security precautions would have involved armed guards and armored cars instead of Collison just handing the case containing it to Renault, who drives to the airport in an ordinary passenger car with the Mona Lisa in an ordinary painting box. In the end Collison and Cartwright (ya remember Cartwright, the real Scotland Yard investigator?) drive out to the airport and clandestinely exchange the box containingt he fake Mona Lisa for the box containing the real one, only in a tag scene I could have done without writer Faye drops a hint that Collison may h ave kept the real one after all. Scotland Yard Investigator is a surprisingly dull movie, especially given what the participants had shown themselves capable of in other movies (Hoffmeyer’s two henchmen were both in Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies, Varconi in
