A Lady Without Passport (MGM, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Unfortunately, the next film Turner Classic Movies showed, A Lady Without Passport, was pretty dreary and boring. It was shown as part of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” even though it’s not really thematically or visually noir. It was also an MGM production, and this time the producer, Samuel Marx (MGM’s former story editor during Irving Thalberg’s lifetime and not a relative of the Marx Brothers, though the Marx Brothers’ father was also named Samuel), hired Joseph H. Lewis as director on the strength of his immediately previous film, the 1949 film noir masterpiece Gun Crazy. Marx also hired MGM’s former contract star, Hedy Lamarr, to return to the studio following the success of her most recent film, Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949). He had to pay her $150,000, a whopping increase over what she’d been making until 1945, when MGM fired her. Lamarr was born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna, Austria on November 9, 1914 and as a teenager she appeared in several German films, most notoriously in Ecstasy (1933), directed by Gustav Machaty. (Since Machaty was Czech, this is routinely referred to as a Czech film even though it wasn’t; it was made in Munich and, though there is virtually no dialogue, what there is of it is definitely in German.) Machaty tricked young Hedy into appearing nude in various scenes, pointing out that the camera would be far away from her and telling her she’d only be seen dimly in the background. His trick was to use a telephoto lens, a piece of equipment Hedy had never heard of, and she didn’t realize what he’d done until she took her parents to see the film – and there her naked body was in vivid closeup splashed bigger than life across the screen.

Hedy later married German munitions maker Fritz Mandl, who regularly took her to big Nazi functions in hopes that her sheer beauty would encourage Nazi officials to place large orders with his firm. When Hedy got tired of being Mrs. Fritz Mandl and getting dragged to these parties, she divorced him in 1937, just as MGM head Louis B. Mayer was touring Europe looking for beautiful young women he could sign to film contracts. Though he was more than a little anxious about Hedy’s past, particularly her infamous nude scenes in Ecstasy, Mayer signed her anyway and renamed her “Hedy Lamarr” after Barbara La Marr, an actress he’d worked with in silent days. Alas, when Lamarr showed up to Hollywood Mayer didn’t have a movie in mind for her – he wanted her to make I Take This Woman with Spencer Tracy as a doctor torn between his desire to help the poor and the demands of his rich, spoiled wife, but the script wasn’t ready and ultimately the movie took three years to make and cycled through four directors. Instead Mayer loaned her to United Artists producer Walter Wanger, who put her in Algiers, his remake of the French film Pépé le Moko. She became an instant sensation because audiences were so struck by her beauty they either didn’t notice or didn’t care that as an actress she sucked. Lamarr turned down a number of great films, including Casablanca and Gaslight (both of which went to Ingrid Bergman, who was just as beautiful as Lamarr and could act) as well as Laura (though Lamarr defended her decision on the last one, saying years later that it was a terrible movie redeemed only by David Raksin’s great song; she said, “If only they’d sent me the sheet music with the script!”).

Instead she made a ponderous Gaslight knockoff called Experiment Perilous with George Brent at RKO, and after MGM let her go she made equally dreary movies like The Strange Woman, Dishonored Lady and Let’s Love a Little. Getting cast as Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille’s Biblical epic Samson and Delilah seemed like a major boost to her career (though it had its detractors; referencing her and Victor Mature, who played Samson, Groucho Marx joked, “I never go see movies in which the man’s tits are bigger than the woman’s”), but A Lady Without Passport was a commercial flop and another dreary movie that allowed Lamarr to coast on her looks and didn’t require any acting skills. It’s essentially Casablanca lite; male lead Peter Carzcag (John Hodiak) is a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service agent sent to Cuba to bust a human trafficking ring led by nightclub owner Palinov (George Macready, who out-acts just about everybody else in the film). Palinov has a private plane with which he smuggles undocumented immigrants from Cuba to the U.S., landing them on a secret airstrip in Florida. Peter poses as Hungarian refugee “Josef Gombush” in order to get inside Palinov’s operation, and what follows is about 80 minutes of ponderous “intrigue” in which Peter falls in love with Marianne Lorress (Hedy Lamarr), a woman of mystery – the Wikipedia page on the film says she was fleeing a concentration camp but I don’t remember that being at all clear in the film itself – who’s desperate to make it to the U.S. because her father (whom we never see) has already established himself here, though later she admits that he’s undocumented, too. Palinov is willing to help Marianne even though she has no money, because there’s another way she can pay him … and Peter has a jealous hissy-fit that she’s willing to have sex with him for the chance to emigrate.

It ends with a series of surprisingly dull chase sequences, in one of which Palinov’s plane is chased by an INS plane and forced to crash-land, followed by another chase through the Everglades. According to Wikipedia, this scene was originally supposed to take place in a hotel, but since the film was shot almost entirely on location in Florida and Cuba, that would have required finding a disused one. They couldn’t, so producer Marx ordered that the final confrontation be moved to the Everglades in a scene strikingly reminiscent of the ending of Lewis’s immediately previous film, Gun Crazy. Alas, the comparison only makes A Lady Without Passport seem even worse! There’s also something of Key Largo in the climax, as Peter is stuck on a boat with Palinov and Marianne and deliberately sabotages Palinov’s escape plans by switching the boat’s fuel tanks from one that’s full to one that’s empty, then when Palinov demands that Peter throw his gun in the water, Peter throws in the lever controlling the fuel tanks (which he’s previously removed) instead. Ultimately Palinov makes his escape, or tries to, though we don’t see him get either captured or killed. We just hear Peter tell Marianne that he won’t get far, a disappointing ending to a disappointing movie. In his “Noir Alley” outro, Eddie Muller praised Joseph H. Lewis’s direction and Paul Vogel’s cinematography, saying that Lewis almost invariably placed the camera where it should have been and cut effectively, but this is the Joseph H. Lewis who’d become known as “Wagon-Wheel Joe” because he had a whole collection of wagon wheels he’d put in the foreground when he shot “B” Westerns and wanted to add some visual flair to enliven otherwise dull dialogue scenes.

Here the dull script by Lawrence Taylor (story), Cyril Hume (“adaptation”) and Howard Dimsdale (script) sorely taxed Lewis’s visual skills and gave us a boring movie with only a few bits of actual film noir occasionally livening things up. If the writing committee had made Marianne an outright femme fatale assigned by Palinov to lure Peter into the plot and ultimately either compromise or actually kill him, A Lady Without Passport would have been a considerably better and certainly more entertaining film than it is. One wonders why Hedy Lamarr wasn’t able to apply her intelligence to becoming a good actor, since she was hardly your stereotypical “dumb” sexy female movie star. In 1942 she and French émigré composer George Antheil teamed up in Hollywood to invent something called “frequency hopping spread spectrum,” defined on the TechTarget Web site (https://www.techtarget.com/searchnetworking/definition/frequency-hopping-spread-spectrum) as “the repeated switching of the carrier frequency during radio transmission to reduce interference and avoid interception.” Their idea was to make it impossible for enemy ships to jam the guidance systems of Allied torpedoes. The U.S. Navy decided during the war that the system was too complicated to bother with, but after World War II they adopted it but had their engineers “tweak” the system enough to avoid infringing on the Lamarr/Antheil patent. Though frequency hopping became the basis of cell-phone technology, Lamarr didn’t get credit for her role in inventing it until 1997 – three years before her death – when the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) finally gave her an award for it. She never made a penny from an invention whose current estimated value is $30 billion, and her reaction to the EFF award was, “It’s about time.”