The Secret Fury (Loring Theatre Corporation, RKO, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, September 2) Turner Classic Movies blessedly resumed Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” series with an intriguing movie my husband Charles and I had both seen before, albeit not since 2004 (and my previous journal entry is now inaccessible because it won’t open with the current version of Microsoft Word). It was called The Secret Fury, and was made by something called Loring Theatre Corporation in association with RKO, which distributed. The Secret Fury starred Claudette Colbert and Robert Ryan, and though the producer of record was Jack Skirball (who had produced Alfred Hitchcock’s first two films for Universal, Saboteur in 1942 and the awesome Shadow of a Doubt in 1943), Colbert was apparently involved in the business end as well. It was written by Lionel Houser based on an “original” story by Jack Leonard and James O’Hanlon, and directed – at Colbert’s insistence – by her friend Mel Ferrer (no relation to José, though José Ferrer is in this movie in an uncredited minor bit). This was during a period in which Colbert, like George Raft, was having diva hissy-fits and turning down parts in great movies like Frank Capra’s State of the Union (which she signed to do but walked out on when he wouldn’t guarantee her a 5 p.m. quitting time; she was superbly replaced by Katharine Hepburn) and Joseph Mankiewicz’ All About Eve (in which she was replaced – again, superbly – by Bette Davis). Muller’s introduction to The Secret Fury mentioned the wide variety of films she’d been in during her glory days in the 1930’s and early 1940’s, from historical spectacles like Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross (1932) and Cleopatra (1934) to screwball comedy classics like Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) and Preston Sturges’ The Palm Beach Story (1940).

But by the time she made The Secret Fury age and her insufferable pickiness were tumbling her down from her formidable perch, and instead of State of the Union she made a Gaslight knock-off called Sleep, My Love for Mary Pickford’s Triangle company, released through United Artists. I haven’t seen Sleep, My Love in decades but I remember it as a ponderous bore, redeemed only occasionally by Douglas Sirk’s direction, and my initial reaction to The Secret Fury was, “She walked out of All About Eve to make this?” This time around I liked it considerably better, though it still has a ridiculous ending that even Eddie Muller made fun of in his outro. Like Sleep, My Love, The Secret Fury is a Gaslight knock-off, though it begins with a scene that could have come from one of Colbert’s screwball comedies in the 1930’s. A man shows up at the elaborate home of well-to-do concert pianist Ellen Ewing (Claudette Colbert) carrying a box containing a rented tuxedo from a clothing store called McGonigle’s (also W. C. Fields’ character name in 1934’s The Old-Fashioned Way). He tries and fails to get in – they’re having a wedding party and it’s invitation-only – until he sneaks in via a back window and only then it turns out that he’s Ellen’s bridegroom, David McLean (Robert Ryan). Alas, the wedding is interrupted by an interloper who says Ellen can’t marry David because she’s already been married two months previously to a man named Lucian Randall (Dave Barbour, jazz guitarist who was then married to singer Peggy Lee). Ellen can’t recall what she was doing that day but she’s quite sure that getting married wasn’t part of her to-do list, especially not to a man she’s never heard of before.

But the bishop who was supposed to officiate says he can’t as long as there’s a chance he’d be suborning bigamy, so David and Ellen drive up to Fairview, California where the alleged marriage took place. They meet the justice of the peace (Percy Helton) who performed the ceremony, and he remembers Ellen as the bride – as does his mother, who served as the witness. David and Ellen end up staying at a hotel for the night – in separate rooms, this being an era of strict Production Code enforcement – and Ellen encounters a maid, Leah (Vivian Vance, in her first film appearance one year before she’d move on to TV legend status as Ethel Mertz on I Love Lucy), who’s wearing a pin that belonged to Ellen’s mother and which Ellen supposedly gave her while on her honeymoon with Lucian Randall. Ellen tracks down Randall to a hotel room where he and his musician buddies are having a jam session, featuring a laid-back modern version of Tom Delaney’s Dixieland classic “Jazz Me Blues” and a slow blues original. Ellen confronts Randall and someone shoots him dead with a gun stolen from Ellen’s formidable Aunt Clara (veteran stage actress Jane Cowl). Ellen is accused of the murder and both the prosecutor and the defense attorney have direct connections to her: the D.A. is Ellen’s former boyfriend Eric Lowell (Paul Kelly, in an odd makeup that resembles Lurch from The Addams Family) and her attorney is Gregory Kent (Philip Ober), a former friend of Ellen’s late father who, in the absence of her dead dad, was going to give her away at the wedding. Midway through the trial Ellen freaks out and is incarcerated in a mental institution run by the formidable Dr. R. W. Roberts (veteran character actress Elizabeth Risdon), only she escapes.

Meanwhile, David has become convinced that someone is plotting to drive Ellen permanently insane, and Leah approaches him and offers him information about who put the plot together and why – only she’s garrotted with piano wire just before David is scheduled to meet her. Later the same assailant tries to kill David by hiding in his car with the piano wire and waiting for the right moment (one wonders if the killer’s choice of a murder weapon had anything to do with Ellen’s career as a concert pianist), only David successfully fights him off. David gives him a D.I.Y. waterboarding at a convenient outdoor faucet and extracts the information from him about the plot, but after David ties him up and announces he’s going to turn his assailant over to the police, the assailant tries once more to shut David up for good and ends up falling to his own death out of David’s car. We know from the man who issued Ellen’s and Randall’s marriage license that the bride had a scar on her hand – which Ellen doesn’t and Leah, the maid, did – and eventually David pieces the plot together but still doesn’t know who’s the mastermind behind it. Ellen realizes it when she flees the asylum, hides out in her own home, and we see Gregory Kent bend book matches in a peculiar way that’s the same as was found at one of the murder scenes. Gregory challenges Ellen to shoot and kill him, with the idea that as soon as she dies so she’ll be incarcerated in the mental institution for the rest of her life. His motive is that previously her father testified against him in a sanity hearing, so he served four years’ time in an institution that he didn’t deserve, and he was determined to put Ellen through the same fate as his revenge. Only David comes on the scene and rescues Ellen; though at first he still thinks Gregory is a good guy, Ellen quickly convinces David he’s the villain and Gregory meets his exit when a huge framed mirror in the house’s attic, crudely held up by a beam, falls forward and crushes him to death. We’d already seen the mirror and it was being set up to figure prominently in the plot like Chekhov and his pistol, but I’d assumed it would break and the superstitious Ellen would be convinced it was causing her all her bad luck.

Despite the sheer preposterousness of the ending, The Secret Fury is actually a pretty good movie, well acted by Colbert, Ryan and Ober (who was Vivian Vance’s husband for real at the time; it’s their only film together, though they don’t get any screen time together), effectively directed by Ferrer and given the right film noir sheen from cinematographer Leo Tover. It’s also nicely made in its gradual transitions from the screwball-comedy opening to romantic melodrama to crime movie and finally film noir, and thanks to the fact that it was an independent production and RKO was only the distributor it was spared the idiotic tweaks Howard Hughes, RKO’s eccentric (to say the least) owner at the time, put a lot of the studio’s films through just then.