Storm Over Lisbon (Republic, 1944)

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

I hadn’t seen Storm Over Lisbon since the late 1980’s, when my then-partner John Gabrish and I watched it together as I recorded it on videotape over the air. It struck me then as it strikes me now, as an oddball knock-off of Casablanca – partly a remake and partly a sequel, as if this set of writers (Elizabeth Meehan, story; Dane Lussier and Doris Gilbert, script) were tapping the scribes of Casablanca (Julius and Philip Epstein, Howard Koch and an uncredited Casey Robinson) and saying, “You thought your characters were home free once they got to Lisbon” Think again.” Storm Over Lisbon casts Erich von Strohem as Deresco, owner of a snazzy nightclub and attached hotel in Lisbon (I couldn’t help but joke, “Everybody comes to Deresco’s”) which is really a front for his espionage ring. In an early scene Deresco gets ticked off by a German agent who was out to buy from him a stolen Allied secret and orders his bodyguard/hit person to kill him, Then, just as we’re beginning to think Stroheim’s character is actually going to be a good guy this time around, he makes the same deal to sell the same secret to an Anglo man representing the Japanese government. The real good guys are U.S. war correspondent John Craig (Richard Arlen), who’s trying to get out of Lisbon on the Pan American Clipper plane and return to the U.S.; and its pilot, Bill Flanagan (Robert Livingston, an original member of Republic’s “Three Mesquiteers” Western series characters until he was replaced by John Wayne, then returned to the series after Wayne’s sensational success on loan to Walter Wanger for John Ford’s Stagecoach made him too valuable a property for Republic to waste in “B” movies).

Craig is a sort of combination of the Humphrey Bogart and Paul Henried characters in Casablanca, and Deresco is a combination of Sydney Greenstreet’s and Conrad Veidt’s characters in that film. The Ingrid Bergman character is a dancer named Maritza (Vera Hruba Ralston), who takes a job at Deresco’s but says she wants to go to the U.S. on the Clipper to continue her dance career in a country that isn’t a battlefield in the war. We get to see her in two big dance numbers at Daresco’s club, in the first of which she dances to the “Polovestian Dances” from Alexander Borodin’s opera Prince Igor nine years before one of them became the basis for the mega-hit song “Stranger in Paradise” by Roibert Wright and George Forrest from the 1953 musical Kismet (though in 1940, four years before this film was made, Artie Shaw had taken that same melody and used it for a song of his own called “My Fantasy”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFrskrQz5Ec) while Deresco stays in his office and watches her on a closed-circuit TV monitor. (This device had already been used in several Bela Lugosi films at Monogram and would later appear in the 1946 film noir classic Gilda.)

The MacGuffin turns out to be a film of U.S. military forces training in China – we never really learn what’s so important about it, but as Alfred Hitchcick continually explained, we don’t really need to either. Deresco holds Craig prisoner in his lavish club/hotel and Craig makes a half-hearted attempt to escape before he’s foiled by Dresco’s agents. Then the French secret police come in and rescue everybody, and we learn that Maritza – true name Maria Mazarek – is not only a Czech refugee but also an agent of the Surété. In a final scene that’s supposed to evoke the unforgettable parting of Bogart and Bergman from Casablanca but falls far short of its model, Craig is about to leave on the Clipper and asks Maritza to join him, but she refuses for reasons the writers never quite make clear. Storm Over Lisbon is the sort of mediocre film that begins with great promise and fritters it away, and it doesn’t help that Richard Arlen and Ropbert Livingston so closely resemble each other it’s hard to keep track of which overacted cornball American we’re watching. It’s an O.K. movie and Vera Hruba Ralston had noticeably improved as an actress since The Lady and the Monster – her dance steps are fun to watch, especially a set of pirouettes that end her first big number and are the sorts of moves she was used to doing on skates – but she was still learning her English dialogue phonetically and she still has zero personality as a “type.” (Bela Lugosi also never learned more than the simplest English and learned his lines phonetically, but he had personality to burn.) Of course Storm Over Lisbon would have been considerably better with Bogart and Bergman in the Arlen and Ralston roles, but this was Republic and you did pretty much the best they could with the talent they had.