The Great Flamarion (Republic, 1945)

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

After the relative dullness of Scotland Yard Investigator, The Great Flamarion looked even more like a masterpiece than usual! I first saw it in 1985 as part of an Erich von Stroheim retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in a brand-new restoration from UCLA (which alas has never been issued on home video or DVD), and while I’ve seen it a few times since in public-domain prints that fail to do justice to this remarkable film, it’s still a real gem in the film noir cycle. The film was directed by the young, up-and-coming Anthony Mann, from a script by Anne Wigton, Heinz Herald and Richard Weil, though the source story was a tale by Grand Hotel author Vicki Baum called “Big Shot,” first published in Collier’s magazine on September 19, 1936. It begins in Mexico City in 1936, in a cheap vaudeville theatre in which gunshots are heard. A woman is found dead, and at first everybody assumes she was shot until a post-mortem reveals that she was actually strangled. A mysterious figure climbs up the theatre’s catwalks, only he loses control and falls to the floor, and as he expires a clown on the bill recognizes him as former star Flamarion. With his dying breaths Flamarion (Erich von Stroheim, top-billed and this time with his head shaved as usual; there’s even a sequence that shows a barber with a straight razor shaving his scalp) narrates the story in classic film noir fashion.

The story basically turns out to be The Blue Angel meets Double Indemnity, as Flamarion is a major star in theatres with an act involving shooting guns on stage with live ammunition. His act involves a playlet in which a young man and woman play an illicit couple who are surprised by her husband, Flamarion, who literally comes in shooting and blows off the top of a champagne bottle as well as other objects. For the finale he’s supposed to shoot at the man in the skit and just barely miss hitting him. His stooges in the act are the husband-and-wife dance team of Al and Connie Wallace (Dan Duryea and Mary Beth Hughes), only Connie has among the biggest pairs of roving eyes of any woman in a 1940’s movie and Al’s understandable jealousy has literally driven him to drink. Flamarion has had no time for women since he lost his wife 15 years earlier in a scandal that also precipitated his dismissal from the military in his home country (a clear echo of the real Stroheim’s dismissal from the Austrian military due to a gambling debt, which forced him to emigrate to the U.S. in 1900). He threatens to fire both Al and Connie because Al’s drunkenness makes it impossible for him to do the act safely – he worries that Al would be in the wrong place at the wrong time and the bullets from Flamarion’s gun will really kill him – but Connie turns on her femme fatale charms and seduces Flamarion into letting them stay on.

Only Connie’s roving eyes have landed on a bicyclist on the same bill, and she conceives a plan to use Flamarion to kill her husband on stage in a supposed “accident” so she can dump both of them and run off with her bicyclist until her attentions are diverted by the next hot man who comes along. The murder duly occurs, though the coroner’s jury in San Francisco (where it takes place) rules it an accident, but Connie warns Flamarion that they can’t be seen together for three months until the heat dies down. She promises to meet him in Chicago on October 14, but of course we know (even though Flamarion has no idea) that she’s not going to be there because she’s going to be in South America with her bike-riding boyfriend. In a scene that reminded me of the Flower Duet from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, albeit with the genders reversed, Flamarion blows most of the money he had saved up to have the room decorated with flowers to celebrate her return to him. When she doesn’t show, he follows her across the U.S. and blows what’s left of his money on private detectives and tipsters who just rip him off. He’s reduced to selling all but one of his guns to keep himself alive – a weirdly symbolic castration, especially since we’ve seen him earlier fondling the gun barrel as an obvious phallic symbol, and when Connie first seduced him she compared the experience of having his bullets whizz by her when they did their act to caresses.

Ultimately Flamarion gets a tip from Cleo (Esther Howard), a middle-aged music-hall singer who was on the same bill with them in San Francisco, that Connie and her biker boyfriend are performing in Mexico City. He follows them there and we learn, not at all to our surprise, that though she and the bike-rider are married she’s still cruising other guys and he’s getting fed up with her. Ultimately Flamarion catches Connie and the two have a confrontation in which she wrestles for the gun and actually shoots him, whereupon he strangles her (which explains the earlier confusion about her cause of death) and then expires as soon as he’s finished telling the story to the clown. The Great Flamarion is a woefully neglected and underrated movie; it was not only not included in The Film Noir Encyclopedia but that book’s entry on Anthony Mann’s Desperate, made at RKO two years later, lists it as Mann’s first film noir. I was looking for a copy of Vicki Baum’s story “Big Shot” online and didn’t find one, but I came across this rather bizarre post on both the story and the movie on the Workers’ Bush Telegraph Web site, https://workersbushtelegraph.com.au/cinema-del-popolo/the-great-flamarion-by-sue-wighton/, which offered the information that Baum’s short story was quite different from the film.

In the story the unnamed “big shot” is actually married to the heroine, Ria, but she’s unhappy in the marriage and wants to get away from him both to advance her career and because she’s in love with someone else (a version of the tale Stroheim had already played in his 1929 film The Great Gabbo and would redo a year later at an even cheaper studio, PRC, for The Mask of Dijon). The hyper-Leftist critics at this site, Bernie Dowling and Ian Carr, denounced the film as “misogynist” – which it is only in the sense that the whole concept of a femme fatale is misogynist – and argued that Baum’s story was more progressive because the woman was trying to liberate herself. I don’t agree: I think The Great Flamarion is marvelous as it stands, and Mary Beth Hughes’ performance is one of the three great femmes fatales of the original noir cycle, along with Barbara Stanwyck’s in Double Indemnity and Ann Savage’s in Detour. Connie Wallace is less immoral than amoral, and though she gets what she wants in horribly anti-social ways she is an independent woman who, as François Truffaut said of his femme fatale, Catherine, in Jules and Jim, “a woman who wants to live like a man because that is her nature.”