Crisis (MGM, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, August 16) Turner Classic Movies was doing one of their “Summer Under the Stars” tributes, a full day of films featuring a major star. In this case the star was Cary Grant and the film my husband Charles and I ended up seeing was an unusual one on his résumé: Crisis, a Latin American-set melodrama from 1950 written and directed by Richard Brooks from a story called “The Doubters” by George Tabori (who co-wrote with Paul Anthelme the play Our Two Consciences, on which Alfred Hitchcock based his underrated 1953 film I Confess). In Crisis, Grant stars as super-brain surgeon Dr. Eugene Ferguson, on vacation in an unnamed (and fictitious; an opening disclaimer explains, “The time is now. The scene of the action is fictitious, but the forces at play in this story are not fictitious”) South American country obviously modeled on Juan Perón’s Argentina with his wife Helen (Paula Raymond, cast after Nancy Davis – later Mrs. Ronald Reagan – either turned it down or was rejected). Dr. Ferguson and his wife unfortunately turn up in this unnamed South American country just as the nation’s dictator, Raoul Farrago (José Ferrer, billed second under Grant and the only other actor whose name appears before the title), is suffering from a brain tumor and needs immediate surgery. There’s also a revolution being led by Roland Gonzalez (Gilbert Roland) that’s on the point of overthrowing Farrago, and an American oil company executive named Sam Proctor (Leon Ames) who represents himself as the real authority representing the U.S. The implication is that he’s willing to deal with whoever is in charge no matter how the revolution turns out. Farrago has a forbidding wife named Isabel (Signe Hasso, who was reportedly cast because of her strong resemblance to Evita Perón), a mother who lurks around (Soledad Jiménez) and speaks no English and very little Spanish, and a military adviser named Col. Adragon (Ramon Novarro) who has the Fergusons kidnapped so the world’s greatest brain surgeon can perform the operation needed to save Farrago’s life.

Dr. Ferguson agrees to perform the surgery after first trying to talk the Farragos and Col. Adragon into allowing the dictator to be flown to a state-of-the-art hospital either in the U.S. or in neighboring Chile. Raoul refuses to leave the country for fear that in his absence, the revolutionaries will exploit the power vacuum and take over. Instead he insists that the operation be performed in the presidential palace, and Dr. Ferguson orders Farrago’s aides to recruit two other doctors, two nurses and a general assistant and stock the presidential bedroom with the equipment needed for the surgery. Dr. Ferguson also stages elaborate rehearsals for the operation with a dummy head representing Farrago’s own, and in one of the film’s most chilling moments Farrago watches one of the rehearsals, sees Dr. Ferguson throw away the dummy head, and asks how he did. “The operation was a great success, but you died,” Dr. Ferguson tells him. Raoul Farrago is hardly a model patient; he’s used to giving orders, not taking them. Richard Brooks, making his directorial debut (he’d just written a screenplay for a Clark Gable film, Any Number Can Play, and that had been such a hit he was given the chance to direct his next script), ramps up the tension and fills the soundtrack with Spanish without offering us subtitles (fortunately Charles, who’s tri-lingual in English, Spanish, and Esperanto, understood a good deal of it). I’d seen Crisis before in the mid-1970’s and it seemed silly, mainly because it wasn’t easy to accept Cary Grant as a brain surgeon (before he was cast in the role it was considered for Spencer Tracy, though since Tracy looked older than Grant even though they were contemporaries – Tracy was born April 5, 1900 and Grant January 18, 1904 – his version would have cast Dr. Ferguson as a widower touring South America with his young-adult daughter). I’m also pretty sure Charles and I had seen it together at least once before, but this time around I liked it a lot better than on my previous go-rounds.

Like a handful of Grant’s other films, including None But the Lonely Heart (1944) and his previous foray into South American intrigue, Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), Crisis certainly stretches him considerably more than the romantic comedies he usually made. It’s still a bit hard to accept him as a brain surgeon (despite the coaching he got from a real-life brain surgeon, Dr. Tracy Putnam), but he’s quite good as the man in the middle, caught between Farrago’s will and the revolutionaries’ determination to overthrow him. At one point the Fergusons go out to a nightclub with Sam Proctor that turns out to be a hotbed for the revolutionaries. They meet guitarist Cariago (Vicente Gómez, whose solo guitar is heard through much of the soundtrack in a gimmick director Brooks admitted he borrowed from Anton Karas’s famous zither scoring in Carol Reed’s The Third Man), who as a matter of principle refuses to play in his native country while Farrago is still its ruler. Reluctantly he agrees to play for the Americans, and then suddenly a detachment of Farrago’s secret police storms into the club, holds everyone at gunpoint, and threatens to start arresting people. Ferguson says if they arrest anybody else they’ll have to arrest him, too, since he was doing whatever everyone else in the club was doing. Knowing that Farrago is depending on Ferguson’s medical skills to save his life, they give up. Ultimately the operation takes place and it’s a success, sort of, but Farrago insists on violating doctor’s orders and taking personal charge of the last-ditch resistance at the presidential palace. The military switches sides and joins the revolution, Farrago dies as a result of his exertions in his weakened state, the revolutionaries invade the palace and shoot down Farrago’s wife, and then the revolutionary leader Gonzalez announces that he’s going to rule the way Farrago did.

Gonzalez is shot in the back by a disillusioned revolutionary and pleads with Dr. Ferguson to help him, which he refuses because he’s just seen the cycle play out and doesn’t want to be part of it anymore. Instead he and his wife, who was kidnapped earlier by the revolutionaries who held her hostage and sent a note to Dr. Ferguson that she would be killed if Farrago survived the operation (Mrs. Farrago intercepted the letter and burned it so Dr. Ferguson wouldn’t see it and would go through the operation as planned), are reunited and successfully flee the country. Crisis seems all too relevant today, especially now that the U.S., hailed in the script as a worldwide beacon of freedom, is ruled by a Farrago-style megalomaniac with his own private police forces, ostensibly to deal with immigration (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE; and Customs and Border Protection, or CBP) but really to arrest and sometimes kill anyone who crosses their path and says or does something Dear Leader doesn’t like. Crisis was made in the middle of the so-called McCarthy era and it’s amazing how much liberal political content Brooks got into the film, not only in terms of its depiction of life under an authoritarian crazy but the anti-capitalist strain in the portrayal of Sam Proctor, who’s willing to deal with any central government as long as it protects his company’s precious investment in extracting its oil. Brooks said later he encountered a lot of resistance on the set from more experienced behind-the-camera personnel, including cinematographer Ray June and art department head Cedric Gibbons, and he suspected it was deliberate when a camera crane ran over Brooks’s foot. Brooks refused to leave the set to seek medical attention for fear MGM would use that as an excuse to replace him, but Grant protected his job by announcing to Brooks and all within earshot, “You’re my director on this film, and that’s that!” Though it was a box-office flop on its initial release, partly because audiences had a hard time accepting Cary Grant as the world’s greatest brain surgeon and partly because Mexico and most other Latin American countries banned it, Crisis actually holds up well today and is an intriguing outlier in Grant’s career.

Contempt (Le Mépris) (Rome Paris Films, Les Films Concordia, Compagnia Cinematografica Champion, Inter, Interfilm, Marceau-Cocinor, 1963)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, August 9) my husband Charles and I ran a Blu-Ray disc of a truly odd movie from 1963: Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris, which both the English-language distributors of this movie and Google Translate render as Contempt. I first heard of this movie in Fritz Lang’s interview with Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg in their book The Celluloid Muse. The stars are Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, and Jack Palance, and the story deals with a U.S. producer who comes to the Cinecittá studio in Rome to film an adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey with Fritz Lang, playing himself, as the director. Godard also cast himself as Lang’s assistant and the film’s real-life cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, as the director of photography for the film-within-the-film. Early on in the movie, Charles said, “You didn’t like Inception and you wanted to watch this?” Contempt was based on a novel by Italian author Alberto Moravia called Il Disprezzo, which also means Contempt (though other sources have given the name of Moravia’s book as A Ghost at Noon, the title of the first English-language edition), and the basic plot is that boorish American producer Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance) has come to Italy to bankroll and supervise Lang’s film of The Odyssey (which once again begs the question of why in the early 1950’s Lang, who’d proven his spectacle cred with Die Nibelungen and other epics in the early 1920’s in Germany, was given cheap little noir thrillers like The Blue Gardenia and The Big Heat while fellow German expat Henry Koster, a quite good director for romance and comedy but hopelessly out of his depth in mega-movies, pulled big spectacle assignments like The Robe, Désirée, and The Virgin Queen). Lang’s recollection of Godard’s working methods was quite different from what he’d been used to in both Germany and the U.S.; he said, “I will never forget a four-page letter to the producer which he’d interpolated in the script [which Godard wrote] in place of a scene in which Brigitte Bardot is supposed to take a bath. ‘Dear Mr. Producer,’ it said in effect, ‘I cannot tell you how this scene will play, what the characters will say, or even what chairs they’ll be sitting in … .” I could hardly believe my eyes, accustomed as I was to the American method of strict adherence to a given shooting script.”

Basically Contempt is a romantic quadrilateral in which Brigitte Bardot plays Camille Javal, wife of Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli), a moderately successful writer of crime fiction who gets hired by Jeremy Prokosch to rewrite the script of his mega-production of The Odyssey (an unexpectedly au courant plot point given that at the moment Christopher Nolan’s film of The Odyssey is one of the two top-grossing movies in the world – and the other, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, also stars Tom Holland, who plays Odysseus’s son Telemachus in The Odyssey and Spider-man, a.k.a. Peter Parker, in Brand New Day). Along the way he has to deal with Prokosch’s lousy ideas for changing the story, mainly by having Odysseus and his wife Penelope (who in Homer’s original was a model of faithfulness, angrily turning down the suitors who asked her to marry them on the ground that Odysseus was obviously dead after having been away that long) on the outs with each other. In fact, Prokosch suggests to Paul that Odysseus fought in the Trojan War in the first place only because he wanted out of his marriage, and that was the reason he was taking his own sweet time getting home to Ithaca, too. Paul also has to deal with Prokosch’s not terribly secret interest in Camille, who for no particular reason except that she’s a woman in a Jean-Luc Godard movie changes from faithful wife at the beginning to nagging harridan who makes it clear that her attitude towards her husband has changed to, you guessed it, contempt. I don’t know, not having read Moravia’s novel (not that I’m in any hurry to), whether the fault is his or Godard’s for making the reasons for Camille’s sudden change in attitude towards her husband so maddeningly unclear. A recurring problem with Godard’s work is his rather diffident notions of human nature; in his first film, Breathless (A Bout de Souffle) (1960), which I described in a previous moviemagg blog post from 2022 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/07/breathless-lies-films-imperia-les.html) as “a thoroughly unpleasant and annoying story about two small-time losers who talk a lot about having sex – both with each other and with other people – but never actually do so, at least as far as we can see on screen,” the characters seem more than a bit “off,” never coming across as actual, believable people.

I remember seeing a few Godard movies in the early 1970’s I actually liked, including One Plus One (1968), in which he did a documentary-style film about The Rolling Stones recording their masterpiece, “Sympathy for the Devil,” interspersed with scenes involving a preposterous character named “Eve Democracy” (Godard’s then-wife Anne Wiazemsky) in vignettes illustrating the political and cultural conflicts of the 1960’s; and Vladimir and Rosa (1971), which effectively dramatized the Chicago 8 conspiracy trial and tweaked the story so two of the defendants were also verité filmmakers making a movie about the trial even as they were in it. (This was produced by a short-lived company formed by Godard called the Dziga Vertov Group, after the pioneering Russian documentarian of the 1920’s, and while Godard denounced Vladimir and Rosa as a fatally compromised film, a fiction film forced on him by his financial backers and an interference with the “purity” he wanted that the Vertov Group would only make documentaries, I remember it as vividly entertaining and politically provocative.) Alas, I’ve been singularly unimpressed by the Godard films I’ve seen since then, including this one. Godard is quoted as saying on this film’s imdb.com page that Contempt was his one compromise with the studio system and the world of big budgets and major stars, and he later said he’d hated making it. (An article in the August 14, 1963 Variety about the making of the film suggests shy; though the total production budget was reported as $1 million, half of that went to Bardot as her salary; another $200,000 went for the movie rights and to pay the rest of the cast, and $100,000 went for insurance, leaving just $200,000 for actual production costs, including Godard’s own compensation.) At the same time imdb.com’s “Trivia” page on this film said Godard’s original casting idea for this film was Frank Sinatra (in which role, Piccoli’s or Palance’s?) and Kim Novak, but they turned it down. Later one of Godard’s producers, Carlo Ponti, offered him Sophia Loren (Mrs. Carlo Ponti) and Marcello Mastroianni, but Godard turned them down. Apparently Godard tried to link the plot of Contempt with that of The Odyssey by saying the film was “the story of castaways of the Western world... who one day reach a mysterious island [Capri, one of the locations for the film-within-the-film], whose mystery is the inexorable lack of mystery.” If that was supposed to be the link holding the film together, I missed it completely; the parallel I thought we were supposed to get was between the inane changes Prokosch wanted to make in the plot of The Odyssey and the otherwise inexplicable collapse of Paul’s and Camille’s marriage.

In writing the above I called Contempt a “romantic quadrilateral” rather than a “romantic triangle” because of the fourth character, Francesca Vanini (Giorgia Moll), who it’s variously hinted is Prokosch’s secretary, his assistant, his continuity person (what was then called a “script girl”), and his interpreter, since of course he knows only the most rudimentary French and doesn’t know any German, Frltz Lang’s native language. Francesca is really the only sympathetic character in the movie, and there are hints of romantic interest between her and Paul – though if you think that’s the reason Camille is losing interest in Paul, that’s way too normal a motivation for a film like this. Eventually Camille walks out on her husband and accepts Prokosch’s offer of a ride from Capri back to Rome, but along the way [spoiler alert!] there’s a car crash ex machina in which they both die. Paul quits the production to write a play since he’s already told both Camille and us that live theatre is his first love, and the final scene shows Fritz Lang directing Odysseus’s homecoming, with the still seas off Capri standing in for those off Ithaca. Frankly, I was wondering how they were paying for this with the money man dead. Along the way we’ve got a gorgeous CinemaScope and Technicolor tour of the wilds of Capri, including Prokosch’s preposterous house, complete with an outside flight of stairs with no banisters (something I notice in these mobility-impaired days of mine!) that forms part of its roof. (The house was actually built in 1937 and the architect was Adalberto Libera; the person he designed it for was Italian writer, filmmaker, diplomat, and war correspondent Curzio Malaparte.) Also along the way Fritz Lang gets to make his famous comment that the CinemaScope wide-screen process (actually, Contempt was shot in a similar wide-screen anamorphic process called Franscope, ironic since CinemaScope’s original inventor was a Frenchman, Henri Chrétien) is suitable only for “snakes and funerals.”

It was a joy to see Fritz Lang in a movie – I’ve long regarded him as the greatest director of all time, even though in his 1997 biography Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast, Patrick McGilligan painted such a negative picture of Lang the person that, thinking of Christina Crawford’s infamous portrait of her adoptive mother Joan Crawford, I joked it could have been called Director Dearest – but he’s just sort of there. Apparently Godard really admired Lang, even though the two had almost nothing in common as filmmakers. Contempt was a real disappointment at least partly because, like quite a few more recent films, it has nobody in the dramatis personae (except for Francesca) we really like. Ironically, it might actually have been better if Godard had injected more of his Left-wing politics into it and made the Jack Palance character an avaricious Trump-like capitalist monster who believed he could buy literally anything and the Bardot character a femme fatale who wantonly and for rational, if evil, reasons dumps her milquetoast husband (who was apparently even more milquetoast in Moravia’s novel) in favor of the boorish American moneybags producer. If Bardot hoped that the prestige of working in a Godard movie would help her establish her reputation as an actress and not just an animate sex doll, she had another think coming, though she walked away from it with half a million dollars in salary after having delivered an O.K. performance in a virtually impossible role.

Dead Reckoning (Columbia, 1946, released 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Turner Classic Movies was doing one of their “Summer Under the Stars” all-day tributes to a particular star, in this case Humphrey Bogart, so at 9 p.m. my husband and I watched a not particularly distinguished film vehicle for him, Dead Reckoning (1946). It was made at Columbia Pictures and TCM host Ben Mankiewicz said it was a loan-out deal from his home studio, Warner Bros. It wasn’t; in 1946 Bogart had renegotiated his Warners contract to be non-exclusive, and having already made a loan-out film for Columbia, the war movie Sahara (1943), he signed directly with them to make this. Later he and Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn would cut a deal under which Bogart’s own production company, Santana Pictures (named after his yacht), would make its films at Columbia with the studio as distributor and co-financier. The big problem with Dead Reckoning is it seems to have been assembled, Frankenstein monster-style, from Bogart’s previous films. No fewer than five writers are credited – Gerald Drayson Adams and Sidney Biddell for the story, Allen Rivkin for “adaptation,” and Oliver H. P. Garrett for the actual script – and it’s a film that definitely supports my general field theory of cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers. The film was directed by John Cromwell, who was on the “outs” with the studios just then because of his Left-wing politics, but Bogart insisted on him because Cromwell had given him his first role in a Broadway play, Drifting, in 1922.

Bogart plays Warren “Rip” Murdock, a veteran who’s just returned home from World War II (a bit of a stretch since he was 46 when this film was made, and looked it), where he was commander of a paratroop unit and his star private was Johnny Drake (William Prince). The film opens with Murdock running through the rain-drenched streets of Gulf City, a small beach town in Florida, and seeking refuge in a church (reminding viewers of the 1939 film The Roaring Twenties, in which Bogart and James Cagney had a gun duel to the death in front of a church), where he starts narrating a flashback to Father Logan (James Bell), who like Murdock had served in World War II and is still wearing his service uniform rather than clerical garb. The flashback features Murdock and Drake being summoned to Washington, D.C. on a secret mission, Murdock is understandably pissed off that the war is over but he’s still being ordered around on secret missions, and eventually he learns from rifling through the papers of the superior officer who’s in charge of the operation that Drake has been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and Murdock is getting the Distinguished Service Cross. Only Drake has a horror of being photographed and given any sort of publicity, so as soon as he realizes what’s happening to him he literally jumps off the train. Murdock follows him but loses him as Drake hops another train. Murdock learns from various clues, including a Yale University senior pin that Drake had on him but was in a different name, that Drake was actually from Gulf Coast, Florida and enlisted in the Army just weeks after he was caught up in a major scandal involving sex and murder.

The murder victim was a rich man named Sidney Chandler and Drake was accused of killing him for the love of his wife Coral (Lizabeth Scott, on loan-out from her mentor, Hal Wallis, at Paramount, in a part Harry Cohn intended for Rita Hayworth, who was having a feud with him at the time and turned it down). Coral Chandler is a classic film noir femme fatale who was involved with a gangster named Martinelli (Morris Carnovsky, billed third), who runs a fancy nightclub in Gulf City where Coral had once sung. In a scene strikingly reminiscent of Casablanca (you see how many other Bogart movies this one references?), Murdock demands that Coral sing Drake’s favorite song and she initially refuses, but after Martinelli also orders her to, she does. It doesn’t help that the song, a ditty called “Either It’s Love or It Isn’t” by Columbia house songwriters Allan Roberts and Doris Fisher, is hardly as good as “As Time Goes By.” It also doesn’t help that Lizabeth Scott obviously has a voice double, Trudy Stevens. Murdock learns that one of the key witnesses against Drake for Chandler’s murder is a man named Louis Ord (George Chandler), who then worked as a waiter at Martinelli’s club but has since been promoted to bartender. Ord tells Murdock that Drake had written a letter for Murdock, though it was in a code Murdock and Drake had used with each other while in the service. Unfortunately, Martinelli grabbed the letter and tried, unsuccessfully, to break the code. Murdock drifts into an ambiguous relationship with Coral, including a sequence in which she deliberately loses $16,000 at Martinelli’s roulette table (shades of The Big Sleep!) because Martinelli is blackmailing her by holding onto the gun with which Chandler was killed, which has Coral’s fingerprints on it.

Murdock wins back Coral’s losses at the craps table, but shortly thereafter both Murdock and Coral are given drugged drinks by Martinelli and his sadistic assistant Krause (the marvelous Marvin Miller). Martinelli and Krause kill Ord and plant his body in Murdock’s room to frame him, though Murdock manages to get rid of the body by hiding it in a giant laundry cart. (Ord’s body, as depicted in the film, is ridiculously light and easy to carry.) Later, when Murdock breaks into Martinelli’s office to grab Drake’s letter, he’s knocked unconscious after he smells jasmine, Coral’s favorite perfume. Murdock, who had previously enlisted a former safecracker he knew named McGee (Wallace Ford) for help cracking Martinelli’s safe, took some old hand grenades from him as World War II souvenirs and uses them to set Martinelli’s office on fire, killing Krause. Murdock marches Martinelli out of the front door of his office, whereupon he’s killed by a mysterious assailant (once again, shades of The Big Sleep!). The killer turns out to be Coral, who it turns out also murdered Johnny Drake two days earlier. Murdock confronts Coral while they’re supposedly running off together in a car in lines so close to those at the ending of The Maltese Falcon it’s a wonder Dashiell Hammett didn’t sue for plagiarism: “When a man’s pal dies, he’s supposed to do something about it.” She responds by shooting Murdock as he's trying to drive, only the car crashes, Murdock survives his injuries, but Coral is hurt fatally, though not before a long closing sequence in which she confesses all to a convenient priest. Murdock is flown to D.C. to accept the Congressional Medal of Honor (ya remember the Congressional Medal of Honor?) for Drake, though he announces to the Army brass that the medal will have to be awarded posthumously. The End.

I’d seen Dead Reckoning once before on commercial TV in the 1970’s, and the ripoff of The Maltese Falcon at the ending particularly irked me then and still does. It’s an O.K. movie but Bogart did better ones both before (including all the ones the writing committee at Columbia ripped off for it) and after. There was concern around Columbia that Lizabeth Scott might not get along with Bogart because Hal Wallis at Paramount was pushing her as a threat to Bogart’s own (fourth) wife, Lauren Bacall. Scott was even nicknamed “The Threat” as a reference to Bacall’s nickname, “The Look.” As things turned out, Bogart laughed off the attempt to build jealousy between Scott and Bacall by saying that Scott actually looked more like Bogart’s previous wife, Mayo Methot, though that didn’t stop Columbia’s publicists from advertising the film as, “Bogart is out with a new woman!,” after his successful films with Bacall, To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep (based on a novel by Raymond Chandler, which makes me wonder if the writers deliberately picked the name “Chandler” for both the femme fatale and the husband – alleged husband, since along the way Martinelli tells Murdock that Coral was really married to him the whole time she was with Chandler – she conveniently offed!).

Letty Lynton (MGM, 1932)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, August 1) my husband Charles and I watched a movie I’d just got on a Warner Archive Blu-Ray release: Joan Crawford’s 1932 vehicle Letty Lynton. This film was held back from reissue for a truly bizarre reason involving a couple of copyright trolls named Edward Sheldon and Margaret Ayer Barnes, who sued MGM for plagiarism and persuaded a U.S. court to award them one-fifth of MGM’s income from the film. Both sides appealed the judgment, with MGM demanding it be thrown out completely and Sheldon and Barnes demanding all MGM’s income from the film. The play Sheldon and Barnes claimed MGM had ripped off to make Letty Lynton was a work from 1930 called Dishonored Lady, and based on my only source – a 1947 film version produced by Hunt Stromberg (also the producer of record for Letty Lynton) for United Artists which so aroused the ire of the Production Code Administration that its screenwriter, Edmund H. North (who four years later got a far more congenial assignment, The Day the Earth Stood Still), had to keep rewrting it to meet the Production Code Administration’s demands – all Letty Lynton and Dishonored Lady have in common is they both feature female leads who are accused of murdering their paramours and manage to work the legal system to avoid prosecution. I’d first heard of Letty Lynton in the mid-1970’s when I bought a paperback edited and compiled by Leonard Maltin based on a magazine he and David Chierichetti had co-edited called Film Fan Monthly. The book featured an article mentioning four Joan Crawford films, two of which were still unavailable from MGM while two had been recently rediscovered. Letty Lynton was one of the two which were still unavailable, and either Maltin or Chierichetti described a long scene in which Crawford quietly leaves the apartment of a man she’s just murdered and compared it to the ending of the second act of Puccini’s opera Tosca. That had led me to assume that the legal difficulties that had led to Letty Lynton’s suppression had come from Puccini’s publisher, Ricordi, a firm so notorious for defending its intellectual property that they once sued Al Jolson, Billy Rose, and David Dreyer because they’d borrowed the instrumental introduction to the aria “É lucevan le stelle,” also from Tosca, for their song “Avalon.” (Like the court in the Letty Lynton/Dishonored Lady case, the court in that case ruled that Puccini and Ricordi should get a percentage of the royalties from “Avalon.”)

The nominal basis for Letty Lynton was a novel of the same title by Marie Belloc Lowndes, sister of French writer Hilaire Belloc and author of 40 novels as well as at least three nonfiction works, one a biography of Edward VII when he was still the Prince of Wales before he became King, and two memoirs. Her best-known work was The Lodger (1913), inspired by a friend who told her she thought she had had Jack the Ripper as one of her neighbors. The Lodger has been filmed five times, most notably in 1926 directed by a young up-and-coming Britisher named Alfred Hitchcock and starring Ivor Novello, who also appeared in a 1933 sound remake directed by Maurice Elvey. In Lowndes’s original book the mystery lodger is indeed Jack the Ripper, while in Hitchcock’s film because producer Michael Balcon didn’t want Ivor Novello, a glamorous male star, to play a murderer he forced Hitchcock and his writer, Eliot Stannard, to change the story and make Novello’s character a man out for revenge against the Ripper for killing his sister. (Hitchcock would have that same problem again 15 years later with his film Suspicion, which in its original form cast Cary Grant as a murderer who poisoned his wife with a spiked glass of milk. The “suits” at RKO demanded it be changed to let Grant be innocent, which Hitchcock responded to with one of the worst-directed scenes in his entire career.)

Letty Lynton begins in Montevideo, Uruguay, with spoiled American heiress Letty Lynton (Joan Crawford) living as the mistress of Continental ne’er-do-well Emile Renaul (Nils Asther). She is determined to leave him and take the next ship to New York in the company of her middle-aged white maid, Miranda (Louise Closser Hale). He is equally determined to keep her, pointing out that she’s tried to leave him several times before and she’s always come back. Nonetheless, she successfully makes it to New York – only to find, to her shock, that Emile is at the dock ready to meet her and take up with her again. Emile beat the ship by flying to New York and even buzzing the ship with his plane. Meanwhile, on board ship Letty has met and fallen genuinely in love with Jerry Darrow (Robert Montgomery), another scion of a rich family whose parents (Walter Walker and Emma Dunn) literally own their own lake as part of an estate in upstate New York. (This is one of many MGM movies that deals with the Depression basically by ignoring it.) Naturally Letty’s biggest concern is keeping the two men in her life from meeting each other, though there’s a telling moment in which Letty is caught by U.S. customs and charged taxes on items imported from South America – and Emile covers the bill. Emile also has a packet of love letters Letty wrote him during their extended on-again off-again affair, and threatens to use them as a weapon against anyone else she might be interested in. Letty’s relationship with Jack lasts long enough for her to be invited to his parents’ upstate estate and view the locals skating on the surface of the family lake. Unfortunately, just before taking the trip with Jerry and his folks, Letty agreed to meet Emile at 8 p.m. one evening in his hotel room. She brought along a bottle of poison (it’s amazing how many movie bathrooms in the classic era had bottles clearly marked “poison”) actually intending to use it to kill herself if Emile wouldn’t let her go. He refuses, and she spikes a glass of wine with the poison, which he drinks.

Though we don’t see him actually consume the poisoned wine, we get a marvelous scene in which he suddenly complains that the room is getting dark even though it isn’t. He turns on the light switch, but still complains the room is getting darker. Then he collapses to the floor and dies, and Letty carefully removes all her possessions from his body in a long, silent scene that represents Joan Crawford’s finest acting in the film and was what probably evoked Film Fan Monthly’s authors to compare this to Tosca. Unfortunately, Letty’s and Jerry’s idyll at Jerry’s parents’ palatial mansion in upstate New York is interrupted abruptly by Hennessey (William Pawley), a New York City police detective who shows up and insists that Letty must accompany him immediately to be interrogated over Emile’s suspicious death. Jerry insists on coming with her to support her psychologically, and he, Letty, and Letty’s mother (May Robson, who frankly turns in the most authoritative and believable performance in the film) face district attorney Haney (Lewis Stone, presumably on the last rung of his legal career before he gets appointed as a judge in the Hardy Family series, also at MGM). Haney presents the evidence that seems to implicate Letty in Emile’s murder, including the bill for the customs duties he paid for her; the packet of love letters which she inexplicably didn’t take with her when she killed Emile; and a shoe she left behind. (One would think a woman who so meticulously removed her handbag from the dead man’s grasp would notice that she’d lost one of her shoes. The film would have made more sense if the writers, Wanda Tuchock and John Meehan, had reversed the items so she’d left with both shoes but left the handbag behind.) Jerry decides to get Letty off the hook for Emile’s murder by insisting, in a plot twist no major-studio writer would have dared dream up after enforcement of the Production Code tightened in 1934, that while Emile was killed he and Letty were at his place having sex. Mrs. Lynton backs up the story, and Letty is set free for a murder she almost certainly committed – though a savvier director than Clarence Brown might have made it ambiguous by inserting a shot in which Letty tries to dissuade Emile from drinking the poisoned wine but Emile drinks it anyway.

Letty Lynton was kept out of circulation by MGM for 95 years because rather than obey the court dictate that they give Edward Shelton and Margaret Ayer Barnes one-fifth of the film’s income, they just shelved it, though at least sometime in the 1950’s someone in MGM’s vault staff transferred it from nitrate to safety stock, so it was preserved instead of rotting away in the vaults. In 2025 the play Dishonored Lady, from which the plot of Letty Lynton had allegedly been plagiarized, entered the public domain; and rather than risk having Letty Lynton itself enter the public domain in 2027 George Feltenstein of Warner Home Video and Casey LaLonde, Joan Crawford’s grandson, worked to have the film restored, re-copyrighted, and issued on home video at last. After all the wait it would be nice to be able to report that Letty Lynton is a rediscovered masterpiece, but it isn’t. It’s an uneven film with moments of greatness. There are a surprising number of overhead shots and unusual camera angles for a film directed by someone as ordinarily vanilla as Clarence Brown, but also some appallingly obvious process shots, especially in the shipboard scenes. One particularly creative aspect I liked is the use of then-popular songs for the underscoring, including “Home (When Shadows Fall),” heard as Letty and Jerry discover their love for each other after a comic-relief scene in which their attempts to find a spot on board the ship to canoodle are continually interrupted by crew members swabbing one deck after another. (And people thought 1969’s Easy Rider was so innovative for using then-popular songs to set the mood of the story.) One thing I found weak about the film was Robert Montgomery’s performance; the role cried out for Cary Grant – who was then just starting on the path to stardom at another studio, Paramount – or, if not him, then Clark Gable, who was under MGM contract and had already been established as a frequent co-star of Crawford’s. Reviewers at the time faulted the sheer unlikelihood of the story; Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times wrote, “Clarence Brown, the director, pays too much attention to his photographic effects and not enough to the necessary psychology of the characters or the plausibility of the incidents. Both the comedy and the drama are forced.”

On balance Letty Lynton is a fascinating curio from Joan Crawford’s career as well as more evidence of how much the movie world lost when the studios were forced by a pressure campaign from the Roman Catholic Church and its front group, the Legion of Decency (that name says it all!) to get serious about enforcing the Production Code in 1934. In its casual treatment of sexual relationships as well as the way Letty Lynton literally gets away with murder, this was a story that would have given major traumas to anyone trying to film it under post-Code auspices – as indeed producer Hunt Stromberg, director Robert Stevenson, and especially screenwriter Edmund H. North went through the tortures of the damned whey they filmed the original Sheldon/Barnes play Dishonored Lady in 1947 and North had to rewrite the script over and over to satisfy the Code enforcers’ demands!