by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film Charles and I watched was The Fake, a 1953 British production whose producers, Ambrose
Grayson and Steven Pallos, borrowed two American stars, Dennis O’Keefe and
Coleen Gray, for the leads but cast the rest of the parts with the great
British character actors abundantly available to the London studios when they
weren’t doing stage work. Directed by Godfrey Grayson (presumably Ambrose’s
brother) from a script by James Daplyn (“original” story) and Patrick Kirwan
(screenplay), The Fake is a
pretty familiar story that seems to have been based at least in part on some of
the legendary real-life art frauds documented in Lawrence Jeppson’s book The
Fabulous Fakes and other sources, notably
the theft of the Mona Lisa from
the Louvre in 1911 (it was recovered three years later, but in the meantime six
fake versions had been sold to private collectors, each of whom were told they
were getting the stolen original, and there are people who believe to this day
that the original Mona Lisa is
still in the hands of a private owner and the one hanging in the Louvre today
is one of the fakes — and that doesn’t even get into the earlier version of Mona
Lisa Leonardo da Vinci painted himself and
which is in a private collection
in London) and the recurring stories of naïve artists who paint or sculpt new
works in the style of the Old Masters (and deliberately use antiquated
techniques), who intend to sell their works as what they are — new pieces made
in the old styles — but instead their pieces are bought by unscrupulous dealers
or crooks who pass them off as originals from the period.
Dennis O’Keefe plays
American private detective Paul Mitchell, charged with bringing over a Leonardo
called Madonna and Child from New
York to the Tate Gallery in London. When the crate carrying it is stolen off
the London dock Mitchell produces the real painting, which he’s carried himself
— only is it the real painting?
Previously there were thefts of Leonardos from musea in New York and Florence,
and in each case the stolen painting was replaced with a nearly exact copy.
Mitchell starts hanging out at the Tate (which gets a screen credit; the
producers acknowledged the assistance of the real gallery) and meets librarian
Mary Mason (Coleen Gray), daughter of painter Henry Mason (John Laurie), who had
enough of a reputation that in 1939 he had a one-man show, but by 1953 is
considered hopelessly out-of-date because he’s so convinced that art history
has gone steadily downhill since the Renaissance that he’s adopted the
techniques used then, including making his own blue paint from lapis lazuli
pigment and clove-oil and beeswax medium (which means that, at least in 1953,
people couldn’t have told one of his works from a genuine Renaissance piece
just by chemically analyzing the paint — more recent techniques have been
discovered that can document when
paint was applied to a canvas, thereby exposing forgers that used period canvas
as well as period-style paints, but those didn’t exist when this film was
made).
Of course Mitchell falls in love with Mary, and she resists him, then
accepts him, then rejects him again when she figures he’s only courting her to
get evidence against her dad, who it turns out painted copies of Leonardo’s
works that were used by an art-theft ring to substitute for the originals when
they stole them. Mitchell wonders why anyone would steal such valuable works
that were so famous they couldn’t be sold or fenced — it’s obvious to us that there’s a private collector somewhere who wants
them, plans to display them secretly in a space only he can access, and is
willing not only to pay through the nose for them but will countenance any crime, including murder, to make sure he gets the
paintings and they can’t be traced back to him. By the end of the movie it’s
revealed that the private collector is Sir Richard Aldingham (Hugh Williams),
and though we missed the ending because TCM’s equipment glitched out, it’s
pretty obvious that Aldingham was either captured or killed and Mitchell and
Mary Mason kissed and made up following the death of her father (her dad’s
death provided the clue Mitchell needed — he painted a picture of Aldingham’s
sitting room with the Leonardos plainly visible instead of hidden behind the
sliding panels in his wall that usually concealed them from ordinary visitors,
and somehow his killer missed it) and his exoneration when he noticed the
“Leonardo” on display at the Tate was actually the copy he had painted himself.
The Fake is well made, though its
debt to the climax of Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail (set in the British Museum) is pretty obvious,
especially in the vertiginous chase sequences in the Tate in which Mitchell
futilely pursues one of Aldingham’s minions as he steals the real Leonardo and
substitutes Henry Mason’s copy. I’d love to see the ending of this sometime,
but even in truncated form Charles and I enjoyed The Fake even though it did seem awfully familiar through much of its running
time!
