Three Faces East (Warner Bros., 1930)

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

Last night (Wednesday, August 2) I ran my husband Charles and I a DVD I just got of the 1930 Warner Bros. film Three Faces East, the second of at least three movie versions of this rather odd play by Anthony Paul Kelly about espionage during World War I. The play premiered in August 1918, while World War I was still going on, and the movie rights were initially purchased by Producers’ Distributing Corporation (PDC), Cecil B. DeMille’s attempt to start his own studio during the 1920’s. PDC made a silent version in 1926 starring Jetta Goudal and Robert Ames, directed by Rupert Julian and written by Monte Katterjohn (best known today as the screenwriter for Rudolph Valentino’s iconic 1921 film The Sheik) and C. Gardner Sullivan. Then sometime in the late 1920’s Warner Bros. bought the rights and made this early talkie version, with Constance Bennett and Erich (spelled “Eric” on the initial ads) von Stroheim, along with Anthony Bushell and various other actors, including a middle-aged character actor named William Holden whose name turns up on a lot of cast lists and confuses people who think the later William Holden wasn’t old enough to have been an adult actor in 1930. (The first William Holden was born William Chester Holt; the second one – the one we know from Sunset Boulevard, Network and many other major films – was originally William Beedle.) The 1930 Three Faces East was directed by Roy Del Ruth from a script by Arthur Caesar and Oliver H. P. Garrett, and it was remade a decade later as British Intelligence, directed by Terry Morse from a script by Lee Katz.

Three Faces East is a confusing story because its whole premise is that people’s loyalties are not what they seem and the espionage universe is full of double agents, people pretending to be loyal to (and spying on the side of) one country while actually in the pay of another, usually one of their bitter enemies. In the opening scene we see Valdar (Erich von Stroheim) personally receiving the Croix Militaire from the King of Belgium – and 1930 audiences probably wondered the same thing we do, which is why and how someone so unmistakably German (though Stroheim was really Austrian) would be getting a decoration from one of Germany’s enemies in the war. The next scene shows German agent Z-1 (Constance Bennett) meeting with her handlers and being given her new assignment: she’s to show up unannounced at the home of British Sea Lord Sir Winston Chamberlain (William Holden) and his wife, Lady Catherine Chamberlain (Charlotte Walker; whose acutely stage-bound performance is easily the worst acting in the film), and tell them she was the fiancée of their late son William, who died in a German prisoner-of-war camp in which she was also (supposedly) detained. William Chamberlain is really dead, though the Germans have carefully concealed that fact from virtually everybody, and to document her story Z-1 is supposed to present the Chamberlains their son’s personal effects. She’s also supposed to tell them her name is “Frances Hawtree” and she was a British army nurse who tended their son when he was wounded and on his deathbed. Z-1’s current mission is to find out when and where the American troops currently sailing across the Atlantic to join the war will be disembarking so German U-boats can sink their transports. Thus the American reinforcements the British and French are counting on will never arrive and Germany will be able at last to win the war. (I found it amusing that the character name “Winston Chamberlain” turns out unwittingly to be a mashup of two names that figured prominently in the run-up to World War II: Neville Chamberlain, who was Prime Minister when World War II started and did the disastrous “appeasement” policy that helped bring on the war; and Winston Churchill, who took over in 1940 and led Britain aggressively to ultimate victory. And to add to the ironies, during World War I Winston Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty, essentially the same occupation as the fictitious “Winston Chamberlain” in the film.)

What Z-1 hasn’t counted on is that William had a brother, Austin Chamberlain (Anthony Bushell), who was wounded in the shoulder in a land battle and given an invalid’s leave to recover at his family’s country estate. Z-1’s mission is to open the safe in which Winston the Sea Lord keeps the vital information about the Americans’ arrival plans, steal and memorize the information, and give it to her contact Schiller, who’s working as the Chamberlains’ butler under the identity “Valdar.” There’s a delightful scene, almost certainly interpolated by von Stroheim, in which he carefully and lovingly fondles Z-1’s undergarments as he puts them away in her room – fondling women’s underwear was a long-time Stroheim fetish he put into movies including Queen Kelly, and he tried to get it into Sunset Boulevard (he suggested a scene in which he would be shown washing and pressing Gloria Swanson’s panties, but director Billy Wilder wouldn’t let him). There’s at least one other character with apparently divided loyalties, Yates (William Courtenay), who overhears Z-1 opening Winston Chamberlain’s safe but doesn’t say anything about it because she manages to convince him it was all innocent; she was just in the library looking for a book to read. One of the plot issues is that Z-1 is in awe of the legendary German master spy Blecher, whom she tells Schiller she wants to meet; Schiller angrily tells her Blecher is too important and his time too valuable to waste any of it on her, and thus Schiller will be her only contact. Z-1 was given a password to use to recognize her contact – the password was “three faces east” and the response was “backwards and forwards” – and she uses them on Valdar, but for some reason Valdar is coy about giving the proper response. Is he suspicious about her true loyalties? Also love starts rearing its head in the plot as Z-1 starts falling in love with Austin Chamberlain while Schiller a.k.a. Valdar expresses interest in her. At one point Schiller tells Z-1 that as soon as the U-boats sink the American troop transports they will flee to Stockholm, Sweden (Sweden was neutral during World War I, as they would be during World War II), get married and then have a honeymoon in Switzerland (also neutral).

Later, when Z-1 learns of a change in the plans for the American troop ships – they will land, not in Liverpool, but at the French port of St. Croix – she catches Schiller as he’s about to send a radio message to the German Admiralty. She pulls a gun on him and announces that if he tries to send that message, she will shoot him – thereby revealing that all along she was a double agent for British intelligence. As Schiller a.k.a. Valdar dies, he reveals that he was the mysterious German agent Blecher who’d been doing such a good job stealing Britain’s naval secrets, and he’d spent time nominally working for the Belgian army so he could establish a cover identity that would fool the British into thinking he was on their side. In the end, Valdar a.k.a. Schiller a.k.a. Blecher dies, Z-1 as Frances Hawtree and Austin Chamberlain pair up, Britain, France and the U.S. win the war, and the world is safe for niceness for at least another 21 years. Charles questioned the whole basis of the plot – why, if Blecher is already ensconced as a completely trusted servant in the household of the British Sea Lord, do his bosses at German intelligence feel a need to send in another spy to infiltrate the Chamberlain house? He also wondered about the scene in which Valdar in his butler duties is shown using an electric stand-up vacuum cleaner – to him, at least, that seemed anachronistic for 1918 – and he noted that in a British home, especially one in the countryside and therefore remote from any power station, the only thing they would have done with an electrical connection in 1918 was to run lights. Charles particularly wondered how Blecher powered his radio transmitter; I had assumed he’d have batteries, presumably large ones that could generate the required voltage to send a radio signal to Germany. And he also wondered how Stroheim’s big speech about how the American entry into the war would end Germany’s chances of victory went over to 1930 audiences; people, especially Americans, who saw the play in 1918 were probably roused to the patriotic excitement Anthony Paul Kelly clearly meant the scene to induce, but 12 years later a lot of Americans were isolationists and many were convinced we had been talked into involvement in World War I by British propaganda.

According to Stroheim biographer Thomas Quinn Curtiss, Roy Del Ruth gave him a hard time throughout the shoot, apparently envious of Stroheim’s own reputation as a director, including forcing him to put on a full-dress military uniform in his car rather than giving him a dressing room. British Intelligence, a 1940 remake of the same story which Jack Warner obviously green-lighted with the thought that the outbreak of World War II had made this clunky old World War I intelligence story newly relevant, had a few improvements – in that one the heroine’s true name is Helene von Lorbeer and her cover identity is as “Frances Hautry,” a French refugee – but in general is even messier than this one. The part of Valdar/Schiller/whoever (in the later version the identity of the German master spy is “Franz Strendler”) was taken over by Boris Karloff, the first of two times he’d remake a role originally played by Stroheim. (The second time was in Douglas Sirk’s 1947 film Lured, an underrated thriller in which Lucille Ball gave one of her greatest dramatic performances as a woman who’s recruited as a decoy to answer personal ads in order to catch a serial killer who finds his victims that way. It was a remake of the 1939 French film Pièges, meaning “lures” or “snares,” directed by Robert Siodmak.) At least the director who remade Roy Del Ruth’s 1931 film of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon a decade later vastly improved on it. He was John Huston, making his directorial debut, and not only did he get a superlative cast featuring Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, he lengthened the running time by 30 minutes to allow him to include more of Hammett’s novel in the film. Alas, Terry Morse was no John Huston and the leads in British Intelligence, Margaret Lindsay and Bruce Lester, were weaker than Constance Bennett and Anthony Bushell.