The Strange Mr. Gregory (Monogram, 1945)

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

After that TCM showed another movie from Monogram directed by Philip Rosen, The Strange Mr. Gregory (1945), for which my husband Charles joined me early on when he returned home from work. I seem to have screened it for him previously in 2007 because I wrote back then that the film – which was then listed on imdb.com only under its alternative title, The Great Mystic, though now it’s listed as The Strange Mr. Gregory – which “for some reason, judging from the TCM synopsis — ‘A magician fakes his own death to catch a murderer’ — I’d assumed it was a whodunit with Edmund Lowe, the on-his-way-down star, playing a magician-turned-detective à la Robert Young’s character in Tod Browning’s last film, Miracles for Sale. No such luck: instead, this film, produced by Louis Berkoff (which sounds like it should be the character name of a villain in the film) and directed by Phil Rosen (who had made two genuinely great films in the early 1930’s, The Phantom Broadcast for the first iteration of Monogram and Dangerous Corner for RKO) from a script by Charles Belden (who would later write House of Wax) based on a story by Myles Connolly (Frank Capra’s mystic-Catholic friend), The Strange Mr. Gregory is on the cusp between suspense thriller and horror film. The opening scene features Mr. Gregory (Edmund Lowe) in a death-like trance from which his servant, Riker (Frank Reicher — and yes, it was interesting to have this actor play a character whose name was pronounced identically to his own), awakens him. Gregory explains to Riker (and to us) that he’s been under for over two days and this is an (East) Indian trick he’s successfully perfected.

“Leaving that big hint in the Screenwriters’ Cliché Bank for whenever he needs to redeem it, Belden then takes us to one of Gregory’s performances (represented by all-too-familiar stock shots of an audience and disembodied hands clapping), whereupon he is greeted backstage by amateur magician John Randall (Don Douglas) and his wife Ellen (Jean Rogers). Gregory is immediately smitten by Ellen big-time — so much so that at first I thought she was going to turn out to be an old flame of Gregory’s who jilted him to marry Randall and he was after revenge, but no-o-o-o-o, we’re supposed to believe that they’ve never met before and it’s love — at least lust — at first sight, on his part anyway (though her Production Code-driven disinclination to have anything to do with him is hard to believe when you realize what a milquetoast actor Monogram cast as her husband). Gregory hatches an elaborate plot which for several reels we can’t make heads or tails of, but which includes teaching John Randall an elaborate rope trick by which you can strangle someone; then inviting Randall to his home for a confrontation, ending up with him apparently strangled with his own rope trick, but not before he’s made a will leaving most of his fortune to his brother, Lane Talbot. Gregory has instructed Riker not to share with the police his suspicions of who committed the murder — even though Riker has found one of John Randall’s cufflinks at the scene of the crime and one would think the whole object of this is for Gregory to frame Randall for his ‘murder’ so he can then re-emerge (after Randall has been safely convicted and executed) and court the grieving widow in some other guise. Instead Lane Talbot duly appears to claim his late brother’s fortune — and it’s impossible not to notice that he, too, is played by Edmund Lowe (leading me to wonder whether the writers were setting it up to reveal Lane as the real murderer, having killed his brother for his fortune and framed Randall for it).

“It turns out, however, that Gregory and Talbot are the same person after all, and Gregory kills Riker (why?) and — with John Randall in prison and awaiting sentence following the guilty verdict in his trial — Gregory in ‘Talbot’ guise courts Ellen’s friend Sheila Edwards (Marjorie Hoshelle), but only to get close to his real love, Ellen — until Ellen catches on to the truth and goes out with John’s defense attorney, Blair (Jonathan Hale), to check out Gregory’s grave. Gregory overhears her phone call making these arrangements and duly returns to ‘his’ grave, suitably putting himself in that East Indian trance thing again so he appears to be there, appropriately dead — only a sharp-eyed and sharper-eared cemetery custodian hears all this back-and-forth motion from the tomb and calls the cops, and when they visit the cemetery Gregory’s coffin is empty. They trace him back to Gregory’s house and he’s shot to death by the police — one form of mortality all his mystic arts couldn’t protect him against, as he outlined to us back in reel one. The Strange Mr. Gregory has many of the faults of Monogram’s movies — a surprisingly unthrilling telling of a potentially engrossing tale, workmanlike but not especially interesting acting (one can’t watch the relatively uncharismatic Edmund Lowe plod his way through his role without wondering what this film would have been like with a real horror star like Boris Karloff or Lionel Atwill in the role; judging from his work in The Mummy, Karloff could have made his character’s unrequited obsession utterly heartbreaking), way too much musical underscoring and stock clips so unremittingly familiar one wants to shake their hands and say hello — but at least it’s a competently made movie, the sets are solid enough one doesn’t fear they’re about to fall on the actors’ heads at any moment, the plot more or less makes sense and Rosen’s direction occasionally grabs some hints at the Gothic.”

I’d just add in 2023 that we’ve seen a much more interesting actor than Lowe, Erich von Stroheim, do this plot in two films for “B” studios made around this time, The Great Flamarion (Republic, 1945) and The Mask of Dijon (PRC, 1946). While The Mask of Dijon is typical “B”-studio sludge, The Great Flamarion is something else again, an unjustly neglected film noir directed by the young Anthony Mann and featuring Mary Beth Hughes in a superb femme fatale performance that deserves, like the whole film, to be better known.