Thie Man in the Iron Mask (Edward Small Productions, United Artists, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Instead Whale followed up Wives Under Suspicion with The Man in the Iron Mask. a moderate-budget swashbuckler based upon Twenty Years After, the third novel in Alexandre Dumas père’s cycle of novels about the Three Musketeers and their involvements in various political conspiracies set in and around the royal court in 17th Century France. The film was produced by Edward Small, who made a specialty of Dumas adaptations starting with the 1934 version of The Count of Monte Cristo, starring British actor Robert Donat in his only U.S.-made film (after that he high-tailed it back home and even when he signed with the U.S. studio MGM it was with a proviso that all his films for them must be made at MGM’s British studio), and his obsession continued with the 1947 Black Magic (based on Dumas’ Memoirs of a Physician and starring Orson Welles as Caglistro – though Gregory Ratoff was credited as director Welles actually ghost-directed the film and probably had a hand in writing it as well).

Twenty Years After had previously been filmed by Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. as a sequel to his own version of The Three Musketeers, and given that it was finished in 1929 and was a silent Fairbanks decided to add a spoken prologue in which he as D’Artagnan would address the audience directly and tell them what they were about to see. (When the film was reissued in the 1950’s the original soundtrack couldn’t be found, so Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. voice-doubled for his late father.) James Curtis reports in his Whale biography that making The Man in the Iron Mask was an unhappy experience for him – even though the film was a commercial success (the last one Whale had) – because Small extensively micromanaged him throughout the shoot. The plot of The Man in the Iron Mask posits that in the early 17th century King Louis XIII of France sires twin sons, and the courtiers immediately decide that they can’t allow two rival claimants to the throne once the boys grow up. They try to get King Louis to kill his younger (by minutes!) son, only he refuses.

Instead he sends D’Artagnan (Warren Willam, in his second film in a row for Whale and a much less challenging characterization than his role in Wives Under Suspicion) home to his native province of Gascony, deeds him a large estate and exempts it from taxation, and bids D’Artagnan to raise the king’s younger son, Philippe, as his own. Then 20 years pass and the brothers grow up: Louis XIV formally assumes the throne at age five (this really happened, by the way) and by the time he reaches adulthood he’s a nasty little nerd who owes more to Caligula or Nero than even the most abusive kings in France’s actual history. He executes people just for the hell of it and invites his mistress, Mademoiselle de la Vallière (Marian Martin), to the royal palace to “service” him any time he wants. He also jacks up the tax rates on the people to pay for his luxurious lifestyle and gets the French peasants so riled up against him it briefly looks like they’re going to start the Revolution over a century early. Louis orders his guards to seize the D'Artagnan household and get them to pay the taxes his dad permanently exempted them from, and eventually Louis learns that there is a young man in his likeness who’s an exact double of him.

Louis Hayward plays both roles, and intriguingly he’s quite a lot better as the evil Louis than the good Philippe; as the bad guy he orders executions and tortures with an off-handed routineness that remains chilling today and no doubt was even more horrifying to audiences in 1939, when Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin were all still alive and at the peaks of their powers. (Quite a few 1939 movies feature historical villains audiences were clearly meant to compare to the real-life dictators of the time.) The bulk of the film consists of the plots the Musketeers, and Louis’ good advisor, Colbert (Walter Kingsford), to abduct and kill Louis and put Philippe on the throne, and the efforts of Louis and his corrupt advisor, Fouquet (Joseph Schildkraut) to keep that from happening. At one point Louis arrests Philippe and forces him to wear a head-covering mask and hood of iron, which he expects will kill him in a few weeks because, unable to shave under it, Philippe will be choked to death by his own beard. Only Colbert and the Musketeers get Louis’ queen, Maria Theresa of Austria and Spain (Joan Bennett), to steal the key to the mask from around Louis’ neck after he gets drunk one night and passes out in the royal bed (it’s clear by then that Maria Therese loves nice-guy Philippe and hates bad-guy Louis). Colbert and the Musketeers are able to rescue Philippe, get the mask off him and put it on Louis, but the king escapes and gives chase in a carriage; eventually the king’s men kill the Musketeers but Louis dies when his carriage overturns and falls down a chasm (an ironic reworking of the death of Kemp in Whale’s The Invisible Man) and Philippe assumes the throne and presumably will reign the remaining 50 years or so of the real Louis XIV’s tenure under Louis’ identity.

Though one of Whale’s favorite themes – imposture – is at the center of this story, The Man in the Iron Mask has few of Whale’s stylistic elements and seems to come alive only in the scenes set in the dungeons of the Bastille. Here, among the flotsam and jetsam of Louis’ political dictatorship and the people incarcerated (or forced to work there as guards, which seems almost as unpleasant), Whale is in his element, humanizing the dehumanized monsters these people have become though their imprisonment. Aside from those genuinely chilling scenes – and the look of the iron mask itself, which resembles some of the early rejected designs for the Frankenstein monster when they were planning to make him look robotic instead of human – The Man in the Iron Mask is a quite entertaining movie but also a rather routine one, though at least the scenes in which Louis Hayward’s characters share the screen are reasonably convincing and the swordfights (choreographed by champion fencer Fred Cavens, who also coached Errol Flynn in his big historical spectacles) are exciting and fun to watch.