br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night, as soon as my husband Charles got home from work, I ran us a YouTube post of a quite interesting 1953 film noir from Britain called The Fake, centered around the Tate Gallery in London and its exhibit of priceless Old Master paintings borrowed from around the world, including a previously unknown Madonna and Child by Leonardo da Vinci. (“Leonardo” was the artist’s only name; the “da Vinci” was added as a designation of what Italian town he was from. Sometimes the writers and actors of this movie get that right; sometimes they don’t.) The central character is Paul Mitchell (Dennis O’Keefe), an American detective hired by a man named Madison (whom we never see), the American collector who owns the Madonna and Child painting and agreed to loan it to the Tate. Mitchell’s job is to make sure it gets to the gallery and goes on exhibit – and stays there – despite the best efforts of art thieves to steal it. At two previous musea over the last four years,one in Florence and one in New York, Leonardo paintings had disappeared off the walls and been replaced with good-quality but still recognizable copies. Mitchell is understandably convinced that his painting may suffer the same fate when it goes on public exhibition at the Tate.
The opening sequence shows Mitchell’s ship docking in London and a mysterious “Crate 11” being stolen on the dock. He starts a series of fistfights but ultimately lets the thieves get away with the crate because it was a decoy, not the actual Leonardo, which Mitchell finally produces as soon as he gets to the Tate. Mitchell is skeptical of the Tate’s security precautions, saying that the same quick release on the paintings’ locks that makes it easy to remove them in case the gallery burns or has another emergency also makes it easier to steal them. He meets Mary Mason (Coleen Gray, American actress who took the role in this movie mainly because she liked the idea of a free trip to London), a rather tetchy American woman hwo’s suspicious of his attentions, and learns that she’s the daughter of a British painter, Henry Mason (John Laurie). Mary explains to him that her British dad married her American mom, and she was raised by her mother in the U.S. after her parents broke up but she returned to Britain and her father after her mom died.
Henry Mason had a shot at a major career – he got a one-man show at a British gallery in 1939 – but his works were considered too old-fashioned to be salable in the immediate pre-war market and he descended into alcoholism after the war. Among his eccentricities were mixing his paints exactly as was done in the Renaissance, including using real lapis lazuii for his blues instead of the cheaper modern substitutes. Mitchell runs into a British government agent named Smith (Guy Middleton) ahd their paths cross so often, usually in a state of mutual antagonism, at first we start to wonder (as does Mitchell) what side Smith is really on, but we soon realize he’s just a red herring. The Leonardo is indeed stolen from the walls of the Tate and replaced with a copy during the exhibit, and Mitchell sets about trying to recover it. He deduces that Henry Mason actually painted the copy that was substituted for the real Leonardo, and presumes that he made the copies used in the other thefts as well. At one point he commissions Henry to paint him a portrait of his daughter, partly as a favor to him to get h im some money and partly to have a known Henry Mason painting to compare to the fake Leonardo.
Given that the paintings are literally priceless – too well known for the thieves to sell on the open market – Mitchell deduces that the thieves are stealing them for a private collector who wants to hide them in a secret room of his home so only he can look at them. The collector turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Sir Richard Aldingham (Hugh Williams), manager of the Tate Gallery, who masterminded the previous thefts of the Leonardos from New York and Florence and couldn’t resist the temptation to steal the one that’s coming to his gallery as well. He murders Henry Mason because the painter is hoenst enough he’d be likely to tell the authorities where he got the lapis lazuli, which would allow Mitchell to trace the scheme to him. Mitcdhell has the sorry duty to tell Mary that her dad has apparently committed suicide – Mitchell is convinced he was really murdered but no one else thinks that – and Aldingham also kills his partner in crime, Weston (Seymour Green), by feeding him a poisoned drink. In the end Aldingham is caught because of an unfinished picture Henry Mason left behind in his studio – a painting of Aldingham’s study with the three stolen Leonardos in place (Mitchell has seen the room, but only with the automatic panels with which Aldingham covers them so no one else will know the Leonardos are there). Mitchell realizes that Henry painted the picture to let him know where the stolen paintings were, and there’s a climactic scene in which Mitchell brings a vial of acid to throw on the Leonardo Madonna and Child, thereby ruining it. Aldingham’s horrified reaction as Mitchell throws the acid at the paintng gives him away – and Mitchell explains that, once again, he took out the real painting and substituted a fake.
Charles and I had seen The Fake before on Turner Classic Movies (the YouTube post had also been recorded off TCM) but there had been a glitch at their end that chopped off the last few minutes of the film – in which Paul Mitchell and Mary Mason embrace, obviously indicating that they’re bound for a long-term relationship even though he’d have every reason to loathe him because he, albeit inadvertently, led to her father’s death. It was a nice bit of unfinished business to see The Fake complete at long last, and the film itself is quite capable even though it’s hardly a great movie. Thoughm Dennis O’Keefe didn’t transform his image from comedian to tough-guy actor quite as radically as Dick Powell, whose sensational perofrmance as Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet (1944) changed him from Dick Powell 1.0, Boy Crooner, to Dick Powell 2.0, Noir Icon, he did manage a similar transition from the dumb comedies that had been his stock-in-trade in the mid-1940’s to quite convincing noir leads following his success in T-Men (1947), a surprise hit for him and director Anthony Mann and a major boost for the fortunes of its production company, Eagle-Lion, formed when J. Arthur Rank bought the old PRC studio and re-outfitted it as a dedicated U.S. distributor for his British productions, renaming it to symbolize its American (“Eagle”) amd British (“Lion”) interest
