Interference (Paramount, 1928)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, September 17) my husband Charles returned home from work relatively early, at 9:30 p.m., and I took advantage of that fact to run us an old movie I’d stumbled across on one of my YouTube feeds: Interference, a 1928 film that was Paramount’s first all-talkie. Interference began life as a 1927 play on London’s West End, written by Roland Pertwee and Harold Dearden. Paramount bought the rights and filmed it as a silent movie in 1928 directed by Lothar Mendes, with Julian Johnson writing the intertitles and Henry W. Gerrard as cinematographer. They recruited an all-star cast featuring Evelyn Brent as Deborah Kane; Clive Brook as Dr. John Marlay, London’s leading heart specialist; William Powell as Philip Voane, mistakenly reported as dead in combat in World War I but in fact alive and living under the name “Julian Ackroyd”; and Doris Kenyon (by far the weakest among the four principals) as Faith Marlay, the doctor’s wife. The story starts at a Remembrance Day memorial service honoring the fallen in the Great War (which was what World War I was usually called before there was a World War II) at which among the names of the honored dead read aloud as part of the ceremony is Philip Voane’s. Only Philip is actually there, essentially watching his own funeral. Before the war he dated Dorothy until leaving her for Faith and marrying her. With her husband officially declared dead, Faith remarried to Dr. Marlay, who’s making a good amount of money but has tied it up in investments and is therefore cash-poor. Knowing that the scandal of being in a bigamous marriage could wreck Dr. Marlay’s career, Dorothy, who stole Faith’s love letters to Philip from Philip’s apartment while he was away at war, is using them to blackmail Faith. Faith makes a payment of 500 pounds but can’t afford any more. Among Dorothy’s threats to Faith are a series of blank postcards Dorothy is mailing to the Marlays. Dorothy tells Faith that once the blackmail payments stop, she’ll start writing messages on the postcards dealing with and exposing Faith’s secret.

Meanwhile, by coincidence (or authorial fiat), Philip has noticed that he has a heart condition, and his own doctor refers him to the great Dr. John Marlay for consultation. Alas, Dr. Marlay tells Philip that he has an aneurysm and he’s not long for this world, though he can stretch out the time he has left by avoiding alcohol, sex, and other forms of exertion. It’s the sort of story that relies on a whole lot of exposition and also quite a lot of coincidence-mongering to work at all. Philip catches Faith Marlay in the doctor’s live-work space grabbing a bottle of potassium cyanide and threatening to take it herself. Philip grabs the bottle from her and gives her a few bromides about suicide not being an easy way out at all. Ultimately, Philip returns to Dorothy and offers to become her lover again, but it’s a ruse: he really means to kill her with the cyanide and fake it to look like suicide. Only Dr. Marlay, who was there on his own fruitless attempt to get his wife’s incriminating letters back, goes through with the frame, apparently on his own initiative, but he makes a mistake. He puts the bottle of cyanide in Dorothy’s right hand, whereas everyone who knew Dorothy knew she was so strongly left-handed her right had was virtually useless. The police hear that from one of Dorothy’s friends (for someone who needed 500 pounds in blackmail money she sure seemed to have a lot of money to throw around, including paying a manservant and a maid; the only scenes that reveals Interference’s origins as a silent film are two shots of the manservant bounding up Dorothy’s apartment stairs unnaturally fast, courtesy of the fact that silent cameras shot at a lower frame rate than sound ones). Just then a reporter comes to her apartment to interview her, which in itself casts doubt on the idea that she committed suicide. The cops naturally conclude that either Dr. Marlay, his wife, or both killed Dorothy and faked it to look like she killed herself, but a deus ex machina shows up in the form of Philip Voaze, who shows up at the Marlays’ apartment and confesses to the cops that he killed Dorothy and, since he’s under a medical death sentence anyway, he’s convinced he won’t live long enough to stand trial.

Interference is actually a quite good story idea, though it’s burdened by the usual crudities of early talkies. First of all, Interference was originally shot using the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system, and as usual, when the studio transferred the soundtrack to sound-on-film, rather than center or letterbox the image they just sliced off the left-hand ninth of the screen to make room for the film soundtrack. So compositions J. Roy Hunt, who shot the sound version, intended to be centered are annoyingly off-center. (Hunt would later settle at RKO and shoot, among other things, Val Lewton’s and Jacques Tourneur’s anti-racist masterpiece, I Walked with a Zombie.) Second, the acting is generally pretty stiff, with that annoying early-talkie habit of the actors patiently waiting between the end of their cue line and their delivery of their own – though we’ve seen other early sound films that were considerably worse than this one in that regard (can you say Behind That Curtain?). The director was Roy J. Pomeroy, who’d begun at Paramount’s special-effects department (back when they were still dismissively called “trick shots”) where he worked on Cecil B. DeMille’s silent The Ten Commandments (1923) and figured out a way to have Moses’s sister Miriam (Estelle Taylor, later Mrs. Jack Dempsey) develop leprosy lesions on screen in full view of the audience. The technique involved using special makeups and colored filters on the lights, so the makeup would be invisible under one light color and become visible under another. Later director Rouben Mamoulian would use the same technique to show Fredric March as Dr. Henry Jekyll transform on-screen into Edward Hyde in his 1932 film of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic. When sound came in Paramount needed someone who could learn the new technology and teach it to everybody else on the lot, and Pomeroy volunteered. He rose so quickly through the ranks that he got to direct the sound version of Interference, though William DeMille, Cecil’s older brother, was assigned to help him.

One actor who had nice things to say about Pomeroy was Clive Brook, who recalled that when he shot his first scene with sound (all the principal actors from the silent version got to repeat their roles in the sound one), he spoke his lines at full volume because as a veteran stage actor he was trained to “project.” When he saw his first rushes, he couldn’t believe that the sounds he was hearing were his own voice. He asked Pomeroy for advice, and the director told him, “Try it again, and this time speak as you would in a small room in your home.” In an interview Brook gave shortly after Interference was released, he marveled at how much better he sounded: although his voice “was not loud, it seemed to fill every corner of the huge room. I had learned my first lesson in microphone acting.” Oddly, despite Brook’s comments (and the scenes in which he’s trying to deduce who’s sending the mysterious blank postcards and correctly guesses it’s a woman, which anticipate the three movies Brook would make as Sherlock Holmes in the next four years), it’s William Powell and Evelyn Brent who come off most naturalistically among the cast members. Modern audiences would probably wonder why Powell was billed third (after Brent and Brook, in that order), when he clearly has more screen time than Brook does and he’s playing a much more interesting and multifaceted character. He even gets a great drunk scene that comes closer than anything else in this movie to anticipating the great William Powell roles to come, including The Thin Man and its sequelae as well as his marvelous turn as the alcoholic reporter in Libeled Lady. (When Charles and I watched the 1946 film Ziegfeld Follies, in which Powell repeated his role as Florenz Ziegfeld in heaven and postured what it would be like to do one more big Ziegfeld Follies show with MGM’s talent list, I joked, “Now it looks like a William Powell movie; the first thing we see him do is take a drink.”) Interference is a movie that’s actually quite good despite the limits of early talkies as well as the overall staginess (Charles correctly guessed it was based on a stage play before I told him), and it’s at least a bit surprising that Paramount never remade it. It had all the elements to be reworked into a quite credible film noir: a distressed serviceman returning from a major war and facing an identity crisis, a femme fatale, and a socially well-positioned couple with a dark secret hanging over them that threatens to destroy their lives.