Passport to Destiny (RKO, 1944)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The second item on TCM’s July 20 marathon of “B” movies was a truly odd film from RKO in 1944 called Passport to Destiny, which despite its awe-inducing title was actually a low comedy starring Elsa Lanchester as Ella Muggins, a cleaning woman still in mourning for the loss of her late husband, Army sergeant Albert Muggins. We never see him as a live character but he’s represented by a framed photo of (guess who?) Elsa Lanchester’s real-life husband, Charles Laughton (who was actually Gay; in Lanchester’s autobiography she says he sprang that piece of information on her on their wedding night, which surprised her, though for whatever reasons they stayed married from 1929 until the end of Laughton’s life in 1962). Lanchester was well aware that she was not conventionally attractive, and she did her best to turn that into an asset: she said, “I was content because I was fully aware that I did not like straight acting but preferred performing direct to an audience. You might call what I do vaudeville. Making a joke, especially impromptu, and getting a big laugh is just plain heaven.” Her best-known film was The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), in which at the insistence of James Whale, her old friend from the London theatre (and also a Gay man!), she played both Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in the prologue showing how the novel Frankenstein came to be written and the Bride of Frankenstein herself. For the latter role she had to wear a large cage-like structure on top of her head into which makeup genius Jack P. Pierce teased her own hair, and (like Lon Chaney, Sr. in The Phantom of the Opera) she also had to wear uncomfortable frameworks in her eyes so she would not blink. Only the grey streaks on either side of her head were not her own hair. (I remember mentioning that to Charles, who said, “You didn’t think the grey streaks were hers?,” and I said, “Actually, I was surprised in the other direction. I’d always thought the whole thing was a wig!”)

Passport to Destiny casts Lanchester as a free-spirited character proud and unembarrassed by her job, and convinced that a magic amulet her late husband gave her will protect her from all harm. When the attic of the house she has to clean has to be emptied because of the Blitz she takes it as a personal insult and decides to travel to Germany to get this Hitler guy a piece of her mind. Amazingly (by fiat of screenwriters Muriel Roy Bolton and Val Burton) she makes it into Berlin and rescues Captain Franz von Weber (Gordon Oliver); the two steal a German bomber and use it to fly to safety in Britain, though realizing that the RAF will likely try to shoot down the plane they bail out of it and float to earth by parachute. It’s not that good a movie, but it was cute and a decent showcase for Lanchester, whose sense of humor is better displayed as an eccentric artist in one of her husband’s vehicles, The Big Clock (1948), a Paramount film noir based on a novel by Kenneth Fearing about a maniacal publisher (Charles Laughton) who murdered his mistress and a crusading editor for one of his publications (Ray Milland) who’s suspected of the crime. The director was Ray McCarey, Leo McCarey’s brother, of whom I once joked regarding a Ray McCarey movie in which the star was Bing Crosby’s brother Bob, that both star and director had far more prestigious and better paid brothers in the same business!