The Spider (20th Century-Fox, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I looked for a relatively brief movie my husband Charles and I could watch on YouTube before Stephen Colbert’s program and found it in The Spider, a 1945 vest-pocket film noir (or at least film gris) from 20th Century-Fox whose duration is listed as 63 minutes on imdb.com and the post further shortened it to just 59 minutes on YouTube. Directed by Robert Webb from a script by Jo Eisinger and Scott Darling (the latter an excruciatingly frustrating writer who worked on most of the Mr. Wong series of films from the late 1930’s with Boris Karloff playing a Chinese detective) based on a play by Fulton Oursler and Lowell Brentano (which according to an entry on Brentano in the Playbill Web site, https://www.playbill.com/person/lowell-brentano-vault-0000006801, opened on both March 22, 1927 and February 27, 1928: the date confusion is because it was produced twice in quick succession in New York, earlier at Chanin’s 46th Street Theatre and later at the Music Box, while the 1928 production took place at the Century Theatre). Webb, Eisinger, Darling and the other uncredited writers who worked on it (including Anthony Coldewey, Irving Cummings, Jr. and Ben Simkhovitch) threw the entire armamentarium of film noir clichés as they existed as (relatlvely) early as 1945 and ran with them, producing a movie that comes off, at least to me, like an odd mixture of The Maltese Falcon and The 39 Steps.

The film begins with heroine Delilah “Lila” Nielsen (Faye Marlowe – with a name like that she seens to have been destined for film noir stardom!) walking the mean but also partying streets of New Orleans looking for her missing sister. She hires private investigator Chris Conlon (Richard Conte, the top-billed male lead) to find her sister and give her back an envelope Delilah wants to give back to her sister… if she’s still alive. Conlon’s hard-edged partner, Florence Cain (the marvelous Ann Savage from Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1946 Detour, though like Jerome Cowan in the 1941 Maltese Falcon she doesn’t make it out of the first reel, more’s the pity; amazingly, this was her first movie after Detour, in which her acid-edged performance should have made her a star), wants nothing to do with Lila, who’s using the name “Judith Smith.” She contacts Conlon at the Creole Club, where we hear an unseen nightclub pianist playing songs from previous 20th Century-Fox musicals like Glenn Miller’s hit “Serenade in Blue,” and asks him to deliver an envelope to Cain on behalf of the fictitious “Judith Smith” and give her a broach. He insists on a $50 retainer in advance, in cash, and he also understandably wants to know just what’s in the envelope. “Judith” admits she can’t tell him what’s in the envelope because she doesn’t know herself.

Conlon also insists that the exchange take place at his apartment, not Florence’s, only literally while his back is turned and he is out of the room someone sneaks in and strangles Florence with gloved hands. There follows a bizarre scene between Conlon and his Black manservant, Henry (Mantan Moreland, who soars above everyone else in the movie talent-wise), in which Conlon is determined to relocate Florence’s body from his apartment back to hers. It’s unclear whether the scene was intended to be comic – especially when, as they’re taking the corpse down the elevator to Conlon’s car (where we see the intriguing spectacle of a white man driving and a Black man riding in the back seat, the exact opposite of a usual Moreland film), they block the entry of another building tenant, Mrs. Gillespie (Ruth Clifford), and she immediately calls the superintendent (George Beranger) to complain. Director Webb stages the scene with a bizarre ignorance of just how hard it is to carry a corpse – they don’t call it “dead weight” for nothing – and the whole idea is to get the body out of Conlon’s apartment before the usual dumb movie cops find it there.

The next scene takes place in Conlon’s home office and features a heavily accented man named Mihail Barak (Martin Kosleck, who like Savage was a far more talented actor than you’d think from his work here: his best performances were as the crazy artist Marcel Delange in the 1946 Universal “B” House of Horrors and as Joseph Goebbels in two films about the Nazis, The Hitler Gang from 1944 and Hitler from 1962, as well as a TV show from 1954, an episode of the Motorola Television Theatre called “The Last Days of Hitler”) who crashes Conlon’s office with a gun and tries ineptly to hold him up. The scene is so reminiscent of the early confrontation between Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre in the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon I was startled at the sheer audacity of the makers of this movie to rip it off so closely only four years later (though since the play it was based on premiered in 1927 there’s an outside possibility that this came first and Dashiell Hammett’s novel from 1929 came later). After that we cut abruptly to a scene in a theatre in which a phony psychic called “The Great Geronne” (Kurt Kreuger) is passing off his female assistant as a mind-reader using a secret code between them – only when Geronne signals her to read the name (“Judith Smith”) and address (Hotel Royale) on Lila’s letter, she freaks out and bails in the middle of the act.

Eventually it turns out that Lila and her sister used to be the assistants of the real Geronne, literally growing up with him as part of his act, only the current Geronne, whose real name is Ernest, killed Lila’s sister, killed the real Geronne and impersonated him. He also kills a hotel manager, Henri Dutrelle (Jean Del Val), after Conlon traces him and it turns out he can identify the killer – and this is the one bit of real pathos in the film because Dutrelle has recently married his long-time partner Colette (Odette Vigne) and they were clearly looking forward to a long life together when he’s dispatched well ahead of schedule. The contents of the mysterious envelope were a bunch of old newspaper clippings that definitively establish the fake “Geronne” as the murderer of Lila’s sister. The Spider – not, as I’d suspected it would be, an adaptation of one of the pulp stories put out by a rival publisher as a competitor (or knockoff) of The Shadow – is actually a professionally produced movie even though its sheer brevity and the unwitting silliness of a lot of it doesn’t help much. At least the cinematographer was the genuinely talented Glen MacWillliams (an American, despite his Scottish name and great success in British films), who had achieved renown as Jessie Matthews’ cameraman in her British musicals and to whom she gave credit for a lot of her success. MacWilliams manages to create a convincing film noir atmosphere even though it’s not that good a movie plot-wise: Charles was worried it was running too long for us to watch Stephen Colbert’s show afterwards, only then the filmmakers whipped the movie into an early ending and left key plot points resolved eitner in fragmentary form or not at all.