by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched an
odd movie Turner Classic Movies had shown as part of this month’s “Star of the
Month” tribute to Paul Henried: Joan of Paris, a 1942 wartime melodrama from RKO featuring people
who would become two of the biggest male stars of the 1940’s — but not at RKO:
Paul Henried and Alan Ladd. Both went straight on from Joan of Paris to their star-making films at other studios —
Henried with Now, Voyager at Warner Bros. and Ladd with This Gun for Hire at Paramount — indicating that the “suits” at RKO
had a good eye for talent but a lot of trouble keeping it. (The biggest and longest-lasting stars RKO
ever “broke” — Katharine Hepburn, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers — were signed
during the one-year tenure of David O. Selznick as studio head.) Written by
Charles Bennett and Ellis St. Joseph from a story by Jacques Théry and Georges
Kessel, Joan of Paris deals
with a group of five Royal Air Force bomber pilots who are shot down over
occupied France shortly after the German takeover. The squadron leader is Paul
Lavallier (Paul Henried), who’s the product of a French father and a British
mother. The other four, including “Baby” (Alan Ladd in the last of his
galley-years films), are 100 percent Brits, and “Baby” was seriously wounded
when German fighters shot down his plane. As a result, the other four are
forced to hide in a sewer and Paul, the only one who speaks French (though of
course, this being a U.S. movie, all the dialogue is in English!), is sent out to contact the Resistance and
get help for the men. While fleeing he enters the apartment of Joan (Michèle
Morgan, the one card-carrying French person in the cast), and though she’s
initially perturbed (to say the least!) at the appearance of a strange man in
her bedroom, eventually she agrees to help him, not only because she’s a decent
person but also because she’d adopted Joan of Arc as her personal saint
(remember that when this movie was made Joan of Arc had only been canonized for
two decades!) and she’s impressed when the Free French medallion Paul wears
contains the Cross of Lorraine (with two horizontal bars — the top shorter than
the bottom — instead of the usual one).
A good percentage of the action (such
as it is) in Joan of Paris takes place in a large French cathedral, billed in the “trivia” section
of imdb.com’s page for the film as “the studio’s largest single set since The
Hunchback of Notre-Dame” (the
1938 version with William Dieterle directing and Charles Laughton as star —
which I rather heretically think is the best film of that story, superior to
the quite good 1923 silent with Lon Chaney, Sr.), but I suspect it was the same set as the one built for Hunchback. The centrality of the church to the story is
explained not only by the fact that Joan’s character is depicted as an
intensely religious woman who’s adopted Joan of Arc as a role model but also
because the priest, Father Antoine (a bit of intriguing anti-type casting for
Thomas Mitchell — judging from the good-hearted drunks he usually played, one
worries how they can keep Father Antoine from over-indulging in the sacramental
wine), is a key contact for the Resistance. Most of the film is a chase scene
through Paris, as Paul attempts to elude the Gestapo in general and two Gestapo
agents in particular: local commandant Herr Funk (a rather oddly miscast Laird
Cregar — he was great as a rogue cop in I Wake Up Screaming and the psychos he played in The Lodger and Hangover Square, but he’s too queeny to be believable as a Nazi
and one can’t imagine a weirdo like Cregar comfortable as a cog in a machine of
institutionalized evil) and his unnamed
agent (Alexander Granach) who’s given the principal responsibility for keeping
Paul under surveillance in hopes he’ll lead Funk to the other four British
flyers.
I’d first seen Joan of Paris in the 1970’s, during my early days cultivating an interest in classic
Hollywood — back in the pre-VCR, pre-DVD, pre-cable movie channel days in which
satisfying your curiosity about a legendarily good (or legendarily bad) movie
often meant staying up past 3 a.m. to watch it “live” as it aired on some
obscure UHF channel — and I’d been disappointed in it. Now it seems like an
oddly uneven movie, one that at times because of the World War II subject
matter, Henried’s presence in the cast and the appearance of an exotic European
beauty as the female lead to be a virtual prequel to Casablanca. At other times it seems just dull and one wishes
it could have been directed by Charles Bennett’s former collaborator, Alfred
Hitchcock — they made six movies together, five in England and one (Foreign
Correspondent) in the U.S., and Bennett
was essentially to Hitchcock what Dudley Nichols was to John Ford or Robert
Riskin to Frank Capra: the writer who did more than any other to shape the
identifiable style of a superstar director — instead of the other major director to emerge from Britain’s film
industry in the 1930’s and make a career in the U.S., Robert Stevenson. Much of
Stevenson’s work here is genuinely imaginative — the first sequence is, of all
things, a clip of the “Don’t Let It Bother You” number (and its preceding montage of Parisian night life) from the second Fred
Astaire-Ginger Rogers film, The Gay Divorcée, which is suddenly cut off when all the lights in
the club set go out and we hear a radio advisement that the five British flyers
are on the loose — and the screen remains pitch-black until a later scene when
one of the flyers, in hiding, strikes a match and we finally get a look at them. There are also plenty of dark,
shadowy atmospheric compositions in the style later known as film noir — the cinematographer was Russell Metty, who had
shot some of the early tests for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and would later work with Welles on Touch of
Evil — and a quite good chase
scene in which our sights of the actors are reduced to little more than their
feet and most of the story is told with sound effects alone, Val Lewton-style.
(Was Lewton already influencing his RKO confrères even though he was just making his first movie as
producer, Cat People, around
the same time? Or were both Stevenson and Lewton drawing on the lessons in the
creative use of sound RKO’s people had learned from former radio master Orson
Welles?)
Joan of Paris is a
maddening movie, quite good in spots, quite banal in others, suffering mainly
from the naïveté of Michèle Morgan’s
character — though within the limits of the script she acts it quite well — and
also from the stuffed-shirt nature of Henried’s: here as in Casablanca he’s unable to bring much more than a sort of
generalized idealism to his role as an anti-Nazi freedom fighter (even though
Henried was German and an anti-Nazi refugee himself!). At the same time there
are some great scenes, including one in which an already condemned British
captive who’s refused to give the secret address of the underground leader to
the Nazis under torture is visited by Father Antoine, who needs that
information to help Our Heroes, and naturally he thinks the “priest” is a
phony, an actor hired by the Nazis to trick him out of the secret they’d
previously tried to torture out of him. At the end Michèle Morgan’s character
gets captured and shot by the Nazis — thereby sacrificing her life for her
country’s liberation, just like her namesake and role model — but she’s bought
enough time for all the flyers, including Henried’s character (who was willing
to give up his own life for the others to get away, but in the end didn’t have
to), to make their seaplane connection back to Britain.
