by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Saint in London, an oddball entry in RKO’s late-1930’s series featuring Leslie Charteris’s character Simon Templar, a.k.a. The Saint — a suave, gentlemanly thief but one presented as a moral hero because he only steals from those who deserves it, and is usually alternately helping and trying to seduce some comely damsel in distress — because unlike most of RKO’s “The Saint in … ” or “The Falcon in … ” movies (RKO started making films based on Michael Arlen’s character The Falcon in 1940 after Charteris pulled the rights to The Saint, and did little more than change the character name in films that otherwise fit into the same formula; they even used the same star, George Sanders, and when Sanders bowed out after Falcon number four, The Falcon’s Brother, they cast his actual brother Tom Conway as his on-screen brother and killed the Sanders Falcon so the Conway Falcon could live, take over the character and continue the series), The Saint in London was actually filmed in Great Britain. (The American Film Institute Catalog relegated its listing to their appendix on the ground that it was a foreign-made film merely released by a U.S. studio.)
The damsel in distress this time around is Penelope “Penny” Parker (Sally Gray, less slinky and more charming than the actresses who got this assignment back in the U.S.), whom we first meet at a boring dinner party given by her Aunt Edith (Norah Howard) at which she’s somewhat disconsolately watching her aunt play bridge and wishing something exciting would happen to her. Something exciting turns up in the person of Simon Templar (George Sanders), who’s the good-bad guy after bad-bad guy Bruno Lang (Henry Oscar), a Moriarty-like crime boss whom the Saint is convinced must be up to no good even though he doesn’t have a visible criminal involvement until about a reel or two in. Simon breaks into Lang’s house and cracks his safe, stealing a mysterious document and then leaving while Lang’s bodyguard is in hot pursuit; he escapes the bodyguard’s bullets thanks to Penny, who’s been parked outside, ready for him, The good guys discover what sort of crime the bad guys are committing when they rescue a man who’s been beaten and left by the side of the road to die.
His name is Stephen Duni (John Abbott) and he’s the emissary of an unnamed central European country which has its currency printed in Britain; he was kidnapped by Kussella (Ralph Truman), one of Lang’s associates, and forced to increase the print run on his country’s latest currency issue by one million pounds so the baddies can flood Europe with authentic-looking but valueless whatevers and make a ton of money for themselves while undermining the economy of Duni’s country. There’s also an American crook, Dugan (David Burns), who makes the mistake of trying to lift Simon Templar’s watch — Templar gets him back by stealing Dugan’s own watch, and eventually they trade and Templar makes Dugan his sidekick (at least for the duration of the film). Penny and Dugan both fall into the clutches of the bad guys, and as with a lot of the Saint movies the first half of the film is delightful, full of nice comic banter by screenwriters Lynn Root and Frank Fenton (adapting a Charteris short story called “The Million-Pound Day”) and a clever ruse in which Templar adopts the alias “Claud Teal” — the real Teal (Gordon McLeod) being the Scotland Yard detective who, as is obligatory in these films, is convinced Templar is still a crook and is trying to nail him.
Filming The Saint in London in London was an audacious move on the part of usually cost-conscious RKO (MGM was shooting a few major films in the U.K. then, either importing American stars like Robert Taylor and Rosalind Russell or using people like Robert Donat, a Brit with solid followings on both sides of the Atlantic, but it was certainly unusual for an American studio to send a British star home for a “B”), but I’m not sure the film gained all that much from being shot on location; it benefited from the marvelous pool of British character actors and also from the marvelously atmospheric cinematography of Claude Friese-Greene (son of the hapless inventor William Friese-Greene, whose attempts to create the first successful movies were chronicled in the 1951 British film The Magic Box with Robert Donat playing him), but the locations didn’t seem all that convincingly “British” and at times only the right-hand drive steering wheels on the cars give the film’s British locale away.
Delightful for the first half, The Saint in London rather plods in the second — a common failing of the Saint movies and possibly the fault of Leslie Charteris (this is one detective series that did base most of its entries on stories by the character’s creator — though maybe it would have been better if it hadn’t!); the characters fall into and out of danger pretty much at whim and not even the fine hand of director John Paddy Carstairs (his real name was Nelson John Keys and his career lasted long enough for him to return to the Saint character and direct some episodes of the early-1960’s TV series with Roger Moore) can redeem a “thriller” ending that just isn’t all that thrilling. Also, Sanders seems to be wearing a more severe haircut than he did in his other films around the time. The Saint in London, like most of the other films in the series, is good light entertainment and an excellent showcase for Sanders — as I’ve commented here before, it’s a pity Sanders never got to play Sherlock Holmes (probably because when Sanders was at his artistic and commercial peak, Basil Rathbone owned Holmes on screen); his voice may not have had the clarion power of Rathbone’s but he too could have credibly dramatized both Holmes the cerebral thinker and Holmes the man of action, a balance that’s eluded all too many actors who’ve tried the role.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Sunday, October 17, 2010
The Pay-Off (RKO, 1930)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Pay-Off, a 1930 production from RKO noteworthy for the involvement of Lowell Sherman as both actor and director — he was known for both but this is the first time I’ve ever seen him both act and direct in the same movie — and the plot was familiar to us because we’d seen the 1939 remake, Law of the Underworld, which for once seemed better than the original. The story is perched uneasily between comedy and drama: a young couple, Tommy (William Janney) and Annabelle (Marian Nixon), spend an evening necking in Central Park, fall asleep in each other’s arms and are awakened by an officious cop who tells them it’s “almost morning” (it’s 12:30 a.m.) and they must move along or he’ll arrest them. Tommy tells Annabelle that he’s carrying $230 in cash (in the remake from nine years later his bankroll was down to $136 — were the 1930’s really that deflationary?), which will give them just enough money to get married on. They’re overheard by a robber, Rocky (Hugh Trevor), who holds them up and steals the money, leaving us to wonder, “Where’s that officious cop when they need him?”
Somehow — the script by Jane Murfin, adapted from a 1926 short story called “The Lost Game” by John Hymer and Samuel Shipman and a 1927 play called Crime they based on it, doesn’t explain how — the two young and rather stupid lovebirds trace Rocky to the home of Gene Fenmore (Lowell Sherman), gang boss of the unnamed city (though pretty clearly New York — the opening scene takes place in the same elaborate set of Central Park through which Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers did a dance on roller skates in Shall We Dance seven years later and the stock-footage montages of city scenes are clearly of New York locations) where all this is taking place, and wearing silly white handkerchief masks over their faces they hold up Rocky and Gene to steal back the $230. Only one of the gangsters turns out the lights in the room and when the lights come up again the gangsters have subdued the young lovers and Rocky has stolen the money back — whereupon Gene lifts it from Rocky’s pockets and gives it back to Tommy, but tells him that he can have Tommy and Annabelle arrested.
Gene insists that Tommy and Annabelle move in with him and give up their regular jobs — it’s more clear from this version than it was in the remake that his motive is that he’s after Annabelle himself and hopes that proximity will enable him to seduce her. Gene is a gentlemanly gangster (they abounded in films in the late 1920’s but were largely replaced by the snarling, almost bestial ones Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney played in their movies for Warners) who prides himself on the meticulous planning he has engaged in so that when his gang commits the robberies he’s planned for them, they can do so without bloodshed, since it’s a point of honor with him not to kill anyone. It’s also a point of honor with him only to rob people who are themselves corrupt, and his latest target is a jeweler named Colman — only he’s so distracted by Annabelle’s dubious charms that he’s holding off on giving the go-code for the Colman robbery.
Rocky decides to stick up Colman’s store without Gene’s go-ahead — he’s been angling to push Gene out of the gang and win over the gang’s other members by making them resent Gene for never taking part in the actual robberies himself, for operating an expensive nightclub called the Club Royal and for hob-nobbing with the rich (which Gene insists he needs to do to identify suitable targets for their crimes) — and he enlists Tommy and Annabelle to act as decoys. They’re to go into Colman’s store and ask to see engagement and wedding rings, and then the rest of the gang will burst in, guns drawn, and stick up the place. The idea is that Tommy and Annabelle are so naïve they don’t know that they’re helping facilitate a crime — a plot twist all too believable given the horrible way their characters are drawn, with their simple-minded gestures and annoying voices — and when the robbery occurs Rocky shoots and kills Colman, the gang members flee in time but Tommy and Annabelle are caught and grilled by the district attorney (Alan Roscoe). The D.A. is anxious to put Gene away for the robbery, and gets more than he bargained for when Rocky returns to Gene’s apartment after the Colman job, they get into an argument, they both reach for the gun, Sherman’s camera discreetly cuts away and when it returns to the scene Rocky has been shot dead by Gene, who claims to have done it in self-defense.
The gangsters agree to try Gene privately for Rocky’s murder — and Rocky pleads self-defense and also points out that under his leadership they’ve avoided murder charges (until now) and only one gang member has been successfully prosecuted for anything — and Gene escapes the vengeance of his fellow gangsters — and of Dot (Helene Millard), the slinky, dark-haired woman who was Gene’s girlfriend until she dumped him and took up with Rocky, only to get arrested by the police. In a final far-far-better-thing-I-do twist, Gene agrees to confess to Rocky’s murder (setting himself up for near-certain execution) if the D.A. will make sure to let the two kids off the hook and not prosecute them at all. The Pay-Off is an O.K. movie but, like a lot of crime films from the 1930’s, one can’t help but wish it could have been made at Warners, with faster-paced direction (the line delivery is relatively naturalistic but the film still suffers from the sluggishness endemic to early sound films) and the all-star cast for this sort of thing that Warners could have deployed, including James Cagney as Gene and Humphrey Bogart as Rocky. Law of the Underworld is a better movie in almost every way, from a more charismatic actor, Chester Morris, as Gene — Morris had real charisma while Sherman had all the charisma of a tailor’s dummy and seems almost impassive in some of his scenes — as well as two less annoying juveniles (the always charming Anne Shirley played Annabelle in the remake) and a Secret Six-derived subplot in which the D.A. is actually a special prosecutor recruiting the city’s leading businesspeople to join together against the gangs — and getting a cold shoulder from Gene, whom he thinks is just a nightclub owner and doesn’t realize actually is the big gang boss he’s after.
There are some odd diversions in The Pay-Off, especially a brief scene of a tango dance at the nightclub — it’s supposed to represent the club’s floor show and director Sherman (or was it Lynn Shores, who got credit as “pictorial director” — split credits like that were fairly common in the early sound era and usually meant that one person, the “dialogue director,” directed the actors while the other, the “pictorial director,” placed the cameras; on some of John Ford’s earliest talkies he was just the “pictorial director” and quite naturally he was upset at the demotion) takes his camera into the flies and shoots the dancers from above — and the basic story is a good one even though Gene’s noble-gangster character is literally too good to be true — but though it’s an engaging film it’s also a somewhat disappointing one, especially by comparison to the lighter-toned remake. When Charles and I watched Law of the Underworld I wrote, “I’d like to see the earlier version (assuming it exists) even though Lowell Sherman was never one of my favorites either as actor or director; it might have had more of a social context and better tapped into the doomed romanticism that’s apparently the point of the story but really doesn’t shine through the way it’s told in Law of the Underworld.”
Actually it doesn’t in The Pay-Off, either; just as the role of Gene cries out for James Cagney and gets Lowell Sherman, the directorial assignment cries out for Josef von Sternberg (who made his bones on movies like this at Paramount in the late 1920’s) and gets Sherman, a mediocre filmmaker whose best-known directorial credits, She Done Him Wrong and Morning Glory, are watchable today only because of the strong-willed female leads (Mae West and Katharine Hepburn, respectively) who triumphed over his almost nonexistent guidance (and incidentally Morning Glory established Hepburn’s reputation for winning her Academy Awards for the wrong movies; she got the statuette for that one even though the movies she made just before and just after it, Christopher Strong and Little Women, were finer films with superior directors — Dorothy Arzner and George Cukor, respectively — who got more subtle and finely honed performances out of her).
The film was The Pay-Off, a 1930 production from RKO noteworthy for the involvement of Lowell Sherman as both actor and director — he was known for both but this is the first time I’ve ever seen him both act and direct in the same movie — and the plot was familiar to us because we’d seen the 1939 remake, Law of the Underworld, which for once seemed better than the original. The story is perched uneasily between comedy and drama: a young couple, Tommy (William Janney) and Annabelle (Marian Nixon), spend an evening necking in Central Park, fall asleep in each other’s arms and are awakened by an officious cop who tells them it’s “almost morning” (it’s 12:30 a.m.) and they must move along or he’ll arrest them. Tommy tells Annabelle that he’s carrying $230 in cash (in the remake from nine years later his bankroll was down to $136 — were the 1930’s really that deflationary?), which will give them just enough money to get married on. They’re overheard by a robber, Rocky (Hugh Trevor), who holds them up and steals the money, leaving us to wonder, “Where’s that officious cop when they need him?”
Somehow — the script by Jane Murfin, adapted from a 1926 short story called “The Lost Game” by John Hymer and Samuel Shipman and a 1927 play called Crime they based on it, doesn’t explain how — the two young and rather stupid lovebirds trace Rocky to the home of Gene Fenmore (Lowell Sherman), gang boss of the unnamed city (though pretty clearly New York — the opening scene takes place in the same elaborate set of Central Park through which Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers did a dance on roller skates in Shall We Dance seven years later and the stock-footage montages of city scenes are clearly of New York locations) where all this is taking place, and wearing silly white handkerchief masks over their faces they hold up Rocky and Gene to steal back the $230. Only one of the gangsters turns out the lights in the room and when the lights come up again the gangsters have subdued the young lovers and Rocky has stolen the money back — whereupon Gene lifts it from Rocky’s pockets and gives it back to Tommy, but tells him that he can have Tommy and Annabelle arrested.
Gene insists that Tommy and Annabelle move in with him and give up their regular jobs — it’s more clear from this version than it was in the remake that his motive is that he’s after Annabelle himself and hopes that proximity will enable him to seduce her. Gene is a gentlemanly gangster (they abounded in films in the late 1920’s but were largely replaced by the snarling, almost bestial ones Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney played in their movies for Warners) who prides himself on the meticulous planning he has engaged in so that when his gang commits the robberies he’s planned for them, they can do so without bloodshed, since it’s a point of honor with him not to kill anyone. It’s also a point of honor with him only to rob people who are themselves corrupt, and his latest target is a jeweler named Colman — only he’s so distracted by Annabelle’s dubious charms that he’s holding off on giving the go-code for the Colman robbery.
Rocky decides to stick up Colman’s store without Gene’s go-ahead — he’s been angling to push Gene out of the gang and win over the gang’s other members by making them resent Gene for never taking part in the actual robberies himself, for operating an expensive nightclub called the Club Royal and for hob-nobbing with the rich (which Gene insists he needs to do to identify suitable targets for their crimes) — and he enlists Tommy and Annabelle to act as decoys. They’re to go into Colman’s store and ask to see engagement and wedding rings, and then the rest of the gang will burst in, guns drawn, and stick up the place. The idea is that Tommy and Annabelle are so naïve they don’t know that they’re helping facilitate a crime — a plot twist all too believable given the horrible way their characters are drawn, with their simple-minded gestures and annoying voices — and when the robbery occurs Rocky shoots and kills Colman, the gang members flee in time but Tommy and Annabelle are caught and grilled by the district attorney (Alan Roscoe). The D.A. is anxious to put Gene away for the robbery, and gets more than he bargained for when Rocky returns to Gene’s apartment after the Colman job, they get into an argument, they both reach for the gun, Sherman’s camera discreetly cuts away and when it returns to the scene Rocky has been shot dead by Gene, who claims to have done it in self-defense.
The gangsters agree to try Gene privately for Rocky’s murder — and Rocky pleads self-defense and also points out that under his leadership they’ve avoided murder charges (until now) and only one gang member has been successfully prosecuted for anything — and Gene escapes the vengeance of his fellow gangsters — and of Dot (Helene Millard), the slinky, dark-haired woman who was Gene’s girlfriend until she dumped him and took up with Rocky, only to get arrested by the police. In a final far-far-better-thing-I-do twist, Gene agrees to confess to Rocky’s murder (setting himself up for near-certain execution) if the D.A. will make sure to let the two kids off the hook and not prosecute them at all. The Pay-Off is an O.K. movie but, like a lot of crime films from the 1930’s, one can’t help but wish it could have been made at Warners, with faster-paced direction (the line delivery is relatively naturalistic but the film still suffers from the sluggishness endemic to early sound films) and the all-star cast for this sort of thing that Warners could have deployed, including James Cagney as Gene and Humphrey Bogart as Rocky. Law of the Underworld is a better movie in almost every way, from a more charismatic actor, Chester Morris, as Gene — Morris had real charisma while Sherman had all the charisma of a tailor’s dummy and seems almost impassive in some of his scenes — as well as two less annoying juveniles (the always charming Anne Shirley played Annabelle in the remake) and a Secret Six-derived subplot in which the D.A. is actually a special prosecutor recruiting the city’s leading businesspeople to join together against the gangs — and getting a cold shoulder from Gene, whom he thinks is just a nightclub owner and doesn’t realize actually is the big gang boss he’s after.
There are some odd diversions in The Pay-Off, especially a brief scene of a tango dance at the nightclub — it’s supposed to represent the club’s floor show and director Sherman (or was it Lynn Shores, who got credit as “pictorial director” — split credits like that were fairly common in the early sound era and usually meant that one person, the “dialogue director,” directed the actors while the other, the “pictorial director,” placed the cameras; on some of John Ford’s earliest talkies he was just the “pictorial director” and quite naturally he was upset at the demotion) takes his camera into the flies and shoots the dancers from above — and the basic story is a good one even though Gene’s noble-gangster character is literally too good to be true — but though it’s an engaging film it’s also a somewhat disappointing one, especially by comparison to the lighter-toned remake. When Charles and I watched Law of the Underworld I wrote, “I’d like to see the earlier version (assuming it exists) even though Lowell Sherman was never one of my favorites either as actor or director; it might have had more of a social context and better tapped into the doomed romanticism that’s apparently the point of the story but really doesn’t shine through the way it’s told in Law of the Underworld.”
Actually it doesn’t in The Pay-Off, either; just as the role of Gene cries out for James Cagney and gets Lowell Sherman, the directorial assignment cries out for Josef von Sternberg (who made his bones on movies like this at Paramount in the late 1920’s) and gets Sherman, a mediocre filmmaker whose best-known directorial credits, She Done Him Wrong and Morning Glory, are watchable today only because of the strong-willed female leads (Mae West and Katharine Hepburn, respectively) who triumphed over his almost nonexistent guidance (and incidentally Morning Glory established Hepburn’s reputation for winning her Academy Awards for the wrong movies; she got the statuette for that one even though the movies she made just before and just after it, Christopher Strong and Little Women, were finer films with superior directors — Dorothy Arzner and George Cukor, respectively — who got more subtle and finely honed performances out of her).
Friday, October 15, 2010
Murder, She Said (MGM, 1961)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Murder, She Said, the first of four films made by MGM’s British operation in the early 1960’s starring Margaret Rutherford as Agatha Christie’s old spinster-lady detective heroine, Miss Jane Marple. William K. Everson thought Elizabeth Patterson would have been better casting, and ironically enough Joan Hickson, who has the supporting role of Mrs. Kimble here, would herself play Miss Marple in a later TV series from the BBC, but the four films established Rutherford as “the” Miss Marple much the way Basil Rathbone’s 14 films as Sherlock Holmes established him as “the” cinematic embodiment of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s great character. I’m a great fan of mysteries in general but I’ve never been able to raise much enthusiasm for Christie’s work, and I think what I don’t like about it is what Raymond Chandler didn’t like about it: her characters are singularly flat and uninteresting. She gives them just enough depth to suit their roles in her stories, and no more, and she manipulates them and twists their motives into what she needed to fulfill her elaborate plot constructions.
Chandler was particularly rough on Ten Little Indians a.k.a. And Then There Were None — the whole idea of a judge on a vigilante murder crusade rubbed him the wrong way — and also on Murder on the Orient Express, whose conceit he said was so ridiculous “only a half-wit could guess it.” (One Christie mystery he did admit enjoying was The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in which the conceit is that the first-person narrator of the book admits at the end that he is the murderer.) Christie herself said the only films of her work she cared for were Witness for the Prosecution and Murder on the Orient Express, and one can see why — though And Then There Were None abounds with filmic possibilities, most of Christie’s work is relentlessly unatmospheric and not at all dependent on interesting physical locations of which filmmakers could take advantage.
Murder, She Said starts off with a visually and dramatically marvelous scene — Miss Marple, traveling on a train, looks out the window and into the windows of another train passing hers on the same track, and she sees a man with black-gloved hands (she cannot see his face from her viewpoint) strangling a woman. Alas, after that the film is a real comedown: Miss Marple tries to report the murder to the police, and they say that nobody answering her description of either the killer or the victim was seen getting on or off the train, nobody removed a body and therefore they’re convinced the whole thing was a dream brought on by Miss Marple’s reading — you guessed it — mystery novels. (At the start of the movie she’s reading a fictitious book called Death Has Windows by “Michael Southcott”; at the end, as a filmmakers’ in-joke, she’s reading the genuine novel Murder Is Easy by, you guessed it, Agatha Christie.) She figures out that the killer must have dumped the body of his victim out of the train while it was still moving, and finds a piece of the fur garment she was wearing when she was killed, and from this deduces that the killer lived in or near Ackenthorpe Hall, inhabited by a cranky old cripple who’s the paterfamilias (James Robertson Justice in a marvelous performance; he, Rutherford and Thorley Walters as Cedric, 12-year-old grandson of the old man and a bitchy, superior-acting brat much like Michael Redgrave’s son in Secret Beyond the Door, are about the only reasons to watch this movie) and several other family members and assorted hangers-on, including an attractive ingénue named Emma (Muriel Pavlow).
Miss Marple decides to get close to the family by wangling a job as the Ackenthorpes’ maid, and when another murder occurs at the Ackenthorpe mansion — the victim is poisoned by arsenic and everyone else at the dining table gets sick because the food has been dosed, albeit with a sub-lethal amount — and a third killing happens before the villain is finally unmasked: Dr. Quimper (Arthur Kennedy), who wanted to marry Emma to get hold of the Ackenthorpe family fortune and strangled the woman on the train because he was already married to her and needed to get rid of her before he could pursue his gold-digging marriage to Emma, then gave the second victim a lethal dose of arsenic by injection while pretending to treat her. Christie’s stories are the kind people who don’t like mysteries love to hate — Edmund Wilson even titled his famously bitchy article denouncing the mystery genre, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” — and here, adapted by David Osborn and scripted by David Pursall and Jack Seddon, and directed by George Pollock, who seems to have blown whatever talent he had for intriguing visuals in the opening murder scene, Murder, She Said emerges as not much of a mystery (it really is less a whodunit and more of a whocareswhodunit) but a fun film mainly due to the sheer force of Rutherford’s slightly dotty but irrepressible personality overcoming an indifferent story, unatmospheric direction and an annoyingly bouncy musical score by Ron Goodwin that uneasily combines harpsichord and rock drums as the key instruments.
The film was Murder, She Said, the first of four films made by MGM’s British operation in the early 1960’s starring Margaret Rutherford as Agatha Christie’s old spinster-lady detective heroine, Miss Jane Marple. William K. Everson thought Elizabeth Patterson would have been better casting, and ironically enough Joan Hickson, who has the supporting role of Mrs. Kimble here, would herself play Miss Marple in a later TV series from the BBC, but the four films established Rutherford as “the” Miss Marple much the way Basil Rathbone’s 14 films as Sherlock Holmes established him as “the” cinematic embodiment of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s great character. I’m a great fan of mysteries in general but I’ve never been able to raise much enthusiasm for Christie’s work, and I think what I don’t like about it is what Raymond Chandler didn’t like about it: her characters are singularly flat and uninteresting. She gives them just enough depth to suit their roles in her stories, and no more, and she manipulates them and twists their motives into what she needed to fulfill her elaborate plot constructions.
Chandler was particularly rough on Ten Little Indians a.k.a. And Then There Were None — the whole idea of a judge on a vigilante murder crusade rubbed him the wrong way — and also on Murder on the Orient Express, whose conceit he said was so ridiculous “only a half-wit could guess it.” (One Christie mystery he did admit enjoying was The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in which the conceit is that the first-person narrator of the book admits at the end that he is the murderer.) Christie herself said the only films of her work she cared for were Witness for the Prosecution and Murder on the Orient Express, and one can see why — though And Then There Were None abounds with filmic possibilities, most of Christie’s work is relentlessly unatmospheric and not at all dependent on interesting physical locations of which filmmakers could take advantage.
Murder, She Said starts off with a visually and dramatically marvelous scene — Miss Marple, traveling on a train, looks out the window and into the windows of another train passing hers on the same track, and she sees a man with black-gloved hands (she cannot see his face from her viewpoint) strangling a woman. Alas, after that the film is a real comedown: Miss Marple tries to report the murder to the police, and they say that nobody answering her description of either the killer or the victim was seen getting on or off the train, nobody removed a body and therefore they’re convinced the whole thing was a dream brought on by Miss Marple’s reading — you guessed it — mystery novels. (At the start of the movie she’s reading a fictitious book called Death Has Windows by “Michael Southcott”; at the end, as a filmmakers’ in-joke, she’s reading the genuine novel Murder Is Easy by, you guessed it, Agatha Christie.) She figures out that the killer must have dumped the body of his victim out of the train while it was still moving, and finds a piece of the fur garment she was wearing when she was killed, and from this deduces that the killer lived in or near Ackenthorpe Hall, inhabited by a cranky old cripple who’s the paterfamilias (James Robertson Justice in a marvelous performance; he, Rutherford and Thorley Walters as Cedric, 12-year-old grandson of the old man and a bitchy, superior-acting brat much like Michael Redgrave’s son in Secret Beyond the Door, are about the only reasons to watch this movie) and several other family members and assorted hangers-on, including an attractive ingénue named Emma (Muriel Pavlow).
Miss Marple decides to get close to the family by wangling a job as the Ackenthorpes’ maid, and when another murder occurs at the Ackenthorpe mansion — the victim is poisoned by arsenic and everyone else at the dining table gets sick because the food has been dosed, albeit with a sub-lethal amount — and a third killing happens before the villain is finally unmasked: Dr. Quimper (Arthur Kennedy), who wanted to marry Emma to get hold of the Ackenthorpe family fortune and strangled the woman on the train because he was already married to her and needed to get rid of her before he could pursue his gold-digging marriage to Emma, then gave the second victim a lethal dose of arsenic by injection while pretending to treat her. Christie’s stories are the kind people who don’t like mysteries love to hate — Edmund Wilson even titled his famously bitchy article denouncing the mystery genre, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” — and here, adapted by David Osborn and scripted by David Pursall and Jack Seddon, and directed by George Pollock, who seems to have blown whatever talent he had for intriguing visuals in the opening murder scene, Murder, She Said emerges as not much of a mystery (it really is less a whodunit and more of a whocareswhodunit) but a fun film mainly due to the sheer force of Rutherford’s slightly dotty but irrepressible personality overcoming an indifferent story, unatmospheric direction and an annoyingly bouncy musical score by Ron Goodwin that uneasily combines harpsichord and rock drums as the key instruments.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Carnival of Souls (Harcourt Productions, 1962)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Carnival of Souls, a 1962 independent production made by director and (uncredited) co-writer Herk Harvey, filmed in Lawrence, Kansas (where he raised the estimated $30,000 budget from local businesspeople) and at Saltair, an abandoned amusement park outside Salt Lake City, Utah that originally inspired the story (Harvey saw it and immediately conceived of the idea of making a film there, incorporating the place’s real backstory: it was originally built and marketed as a natural health spa in which people could take healing baths in the waters of the Great Salt Lake; then, as the waters receded and that was no longer possible, they built a fun house and other carnival-style attractions until the place’s remoteness from the major freeways cost them their customer base and ultimately drove them out of business). Harvey never got to direct a film again, even though Carnival of Souls — a box-office failure on theatrical release — acquired an audience on late-night TV showings in the 1960’s, then was rediscovered in 1989 and ballyhooed as a major “find,” and Harvey and his star, Candace Hilligoss, made public appearances to promote it.
Carnival of Souls begins on a back-country road in Kansas; Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) is riding with two other women in a car when another car with males inside pulls up and challenges them to a drag. Usually a “drag” simply meant an acceleration contest on a straight-line course, but this “drag” actually goes over a considerable distance and involves the drivers making sharp turns and ultimately puts them on a bridge, where the driver of Mary’s car loses control and it crashes off the bridge. (Harvey had to pay the Kansas highways department $17 for the cost of repairing the bridge after it was damaged filming this scene.) The car sinks to the bottom of the river the bridge was built over and it appears as if everyone in it is going to drown and die, but Mary emerges from the water, standing straight up and walking towards the camera like Venus arising from the sea in the paintings based on the old myths. She materializes inside another car — presumably her own — and drives out to Salt Lake City, where she’s been promised a job as a church organist, and she stops along the way in another town so she can try out an organ similar to the one she’ll be playing for a living.
Along the way she’s beset by hallucinatory visions, mostly of a ghoulish-looking guy in white makeup (played by director Harvey himself) emerging from a brackish-looking body of water and sometimes dancing with other, similarly made up and attired (all in black, natch) figures. When she arrives in Salt Lake City she moves into a boarding house run by Mrs. Thomas (Frances Feist) which has just one other lodger, John Linden (Sidney Berger), who’s desperate to get to know Mary for romantic and/or sexual purposes. The film alternates between relatively realistic scenes and long stretches of pure (or almost pure) abstraction, as Mary explores the ruined amusement park (which practically becomes a character in the film itself), sees the ghoul couples dancing as streamers hang from the ceiling and blow in the air currents, in one sequence is startled as a sliding mat comes down the fun house’s long slide without anybody on it (we hear the sound before we see its source — Val Lewton would have been proud!), and in general occupies a disquieting state between normal existence and total weirdness.
At one point Mary goes into her hallucinations while she’s in the church practicing on the organ, and the minister (Art Ellison) immediately decides she’s playing the devil’s music and fires her on the spot. In the next sequence she meets John for what turns out to be an utterly joyless date at a cheap restaurant/bar in which the jukebox plays the sort of big-band music to which a rock ’n’ roll backbeat was added in order to make it more salable in the early 1960’s. (This is a rare point in the movie in which we hear any sort of music on the soundtrack other than gloom-’n’-doom organ playing, a background score that absolutely fits the mood of the piece.) They go back to the boarding house and John invites himself into her room and tries to get her to have sex with him, and she rebuffs him and drives him out — which only convinces him that she’s weird. (Both Mary and John are played by actors who aren’t unattractive but aren’t drop-dead gorgeous either, making their awkwardness around sexual attractions, real or perceived, believable.) Then there’s a scene in which Mary takes her car into a local garage where the mechanic tells her it needs a transmission repair, and he puts it on the hydraulic lift — while she insists on remaining inside it as he works even though he warns her it’ll take hours. Then she falls out of the elevated car and goes for a walk through the streets, during which she tries to greet people and they totally ignore her, as if she isn’t there — a marvelous visual symbol of alienation not that different from Ingmar Bergman’s plunking his heroine, in The Silence, into a country where the only language is one she can’t understand. She also tries to get a bus going out of town — only the one that’s leaving immediately is full of the ghouls from the carnival.
The fact that an ultra-cheap horror movie from the early 1960’s, filmed mostly in low-contrast, rather grainy black-and-white (though even with the limitations of this lousy, cheap film, cinematographer Maurice Prather still gets some nice and appropriately unsettling visual effects), could evoke comparisons with Bergman as well with even earlier classics like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (especially in the scenes in which Mary talks to a doctor, played by Stan Levitt, who admits he’s not qualified as a psychiatrist but is trying to act as one anyway — and in one scene he’s replaced by the lead ghoul, though Harvey either accidentally or intentionally shot the scene in such a way that we know it’s the ghoul and it becomes, not a shock/horror scene, but a suspense scene in which the interest is in how Mary will react when she finds out) is a testament to Herk Harvey’s remarkable achievement in this movie.
What makes Carnival of Souls distinctive is it’s one of the few attempts to merge two distinct types of filmmaking, the abstract, underground, avant-garde film and the conventional narrative feature — about the only precedent I could think of was the interesting 1961 Canadian production The Mask (spoofed in the 1992 feature of the same title, with Jim Carrey), but that merely was a plainly photographed, tacky black-and-white horror cheapie with three stunning 3-D montage sequences by veteran Slavko Vorkapich spliced in at appropriate intervals. (The Mask was only partially in 3-D; the montages represented the hero’s hallucinations while wearing the mask, and just before each started a voice on the soundtrack said, “PUT THE MASK ON — NOW,” which was supposed to be a signal to the audience members to put on the 3-D glasses.) Carnival of Souls is a remarkable movie in which the avant-garde sequences and the conventional narrative mutually reinforce each other and create a stunning whole, and it’s so good a movie it seems utterly incomprehensible that this was the only time Herk Harvey got to direct — especially since Night of the Living Dead, made six years later on a similarly tiny budget and a far less interesting and imaginative film, launched its director, George Romero, on a long and profitable career.
Carnival of Souls ends with something that’s supposed to be a surprise ending but was actually pretty predictable — the film cuts back to the car wreck in Lawrence, Kansas and the car carrying Mary and her two companions is pulled out of the water and all three are dead, suggesting that the bulk of the film has been Mary’s hallucinations during the last few minutes of her life — though (once again either intentionally or by accident — imdb.com said it was an accident but I’m not so sure — both Candace Hilligoss and another woman in the car blink their eyes when they’re supposed to be ‘dead,” suggesting either a mistake left in by a director who didn’t have the money for a retake or a hint that we’re supposed to read these characters as still being alive). But in the meantime the film is so imaginative, so well-done and pushed so far beyond the usual bounds of a micro-budget movie (much the way Teenagers from Outer Space did, though Carnival of Souls is an even finer, richer work, and though it was weakened by its budget limitations it didn’t have any of the bits of low-budget tackiness that marred Teenagers from Outer Space — and Carnival of Souls was also released with a title that emphasized its good qualities instead of one that made it seem stupid) one can readily imagine why it acquired a major cult following (especially on its 1989 re-release) and has been remade twice (in 1998 and 2009).
It’s also helped by a performance by Candace Hilligoss (who also, inexplicably, never made a film again), who’s utterly right for her role; like Joan Woodbury, she’s basically attractive but has a rather bony facial structure that probably kept her from being cast as “normal” romantic leads but both her appearance and her rather out-of-it acting style are utterly appropriate to her role here. (The rest of the cast is either serviceable or — in the cases of Stan Levitt as that smarmy doctor and Sidney Berger as the creepy fellow roomer who wants to get into Mary’s pants — considerably better than that.) This one turned out to be a really unexpected treat!
The film was Carnival of Souls, a 1962 independent production made by director and (uncredited) co-writer Herk Harvey, filmed in Lawrence, Kansas (where he raised the estimated $30,000 budget from local businesspeople) and at Saltair, an abandoned amusement park outside Salt Lake City, Utah that originally inspired the story (Harvey saw it and immediately conceived of the idea of making a film there, incorporating the place’s real backstory: it was originally built and marketed as a natural health spa in which people could take healing baths in the waters of the Great Salt Lake; then, as the waters receded and that was no longer possible, they built a fun house and other carnival-style attractions until the place’s remoteness from the major freeways cost them their customer base and ultimately drove them out of business). Harvey never got to direct a film again, even though Carnival of Souls — a box-office failure on theatrical release — acquired an audience on late-night TV showings in the 1960’s, then was rediscovered in 1989 and ballyhooed as a major “find,” and Harvey and his star, Candace Hilligoss, made public appearances to promote it.
Carnival of Souls begins on a back-country road in Kansas; Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) is riding with two other women in a car when another car with males inside pulls up and challenges them to a drag. Usually a “drag” simply meant an acceleration contest on a straight-line course, but this “drag” actually goes over a considerable distance and involves the drivers making sharp turns and ultimately puts them on a bridge, where the driver of Mary’s car loses control and it crashes off the bridge. (Harvey had to pay the Kansas highways department $17 for the cost of repairing the bridge after it was damaged filming this scene.) The car sinks to the bottom of the river the bridge was built over and it appears as if everyone in it is going to drown and die, but Mary emerges from the water, standing straight up and walking towards the camera like Venus arising from the sea in the paintings based on the old myths. She materializes inside another car — presumably her own — and drives out to Salt Lake City, where she’s been promised a job as a church organist, and she stops along the way in another town so she can try out an organ similar to the one she’ll be playing for a living.
Along the way she’s beset by hallucinatory visions, mostly of a ghoulish-looking guy in white makeup (played by director Harvey himself) emerging from a brackish-looking body of water and sometimes dancing with other, similarly made up and attired (all in black, natch) figures. When she arrives in Salt Lake City she moves into a boarding house run by Mrs. Thomas (Frances Feist) which has just one other lodger, John Linden (Sidney Berger), who’s desperate to get to know Mary for romantic and/or sexual purposes. The film alternates between relatively realistic scenes and long stretches of pure (or almost pure) abstraction, as Mary explores the ruined amusement park (which practically becomes a character in the film itself), sees the ghoul couples dancing as streamers hang from the ceiling and blow in the air currents, in one sequence is startled as a sliding mat comes down the fun house’s long slide without anybody on it (we hear the sound before we see its source — Val Lewton would have been proud!), and in general occupies a disquieting state between normal existence and total weirdness.
At one point Mary goes into her hallucinations while she’s in the church practicing on the organ, and the minister (Art Ellison) immediately decides she’s playing the devil’s music and fires her on the spot. In the next sequence she meets John for what turns out to be an utterly joyless date at a cheap restaurant/bar in which the jukebox plays the sort of big-band music to which a rock ’n’ roll backbeat was added in order to make it more salable in the early 1960’s. (This is a rare point in the movie in which we hear any sort of music on the soundtrack other than gloom-’n’-doom organ playing, a background score that absolutely fits the mood of the piece.) They go back to the boarding house and John invites himself into her room and tries to get her to have sex with him, and she rebuffs him and drives him out — which only convinces him that she’s weird. (Both Mary and John are played by actors who aren’t unattractive but aren’t drop-dead gorgeous either, making their awkwardness around sexual attractions, real or perceived, believable.) Then there’s a scene in which Mary takes her car into a local garage where the mechanic tells her it needs a transmission repair, and he puts it on the hydraulic lift — while she insists on remaining inside it as he works even though he warns her it’ll take hours. Then she falls out of the elevated car and goes for a walk through the streets, during which she tries to greet people and they totally ignore her, as if she isn’t there — a marvelous visual symbol of alienation not that different from Ingmar Bergman’s plunking his heroine, in The Silence, into a country where the only language is one she can’t understand. She also tries to get a bus going out of town — only the one that’s leaving immediately is full of the ghouls from the carnival.
The fact that an ultra-cheap horror movie from the early 1960’s, filmed mostly in low-contrast, rather grainy black-and-white (though even with the limitations of this lousy, cheap film, cinematographer Maurice Prather still gets some nice and appropriately unsettling visual effects), could evoke comparisons with Bergman as well with even earlier classics like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (especially in the scenes in which Mary talks to a doctor, played by Stan Levitt, who admits he’s not qualified as a psychiatrist but is trying to act as one anyway — and in one scene he’s replaced by the lead ghoul, though Harvey either accidentally or intentionally shot the scene in such a way that we know it’s the ghoul and it becomes, not a shock/horror scene, but a suspense scene in which the interest is in how Mary will react when she finds out) is a testament to Herk Harvey’s remarkable achievement in this movie.
What makes Carnival of Souls distinctive is it’s one of the few attempts to merge two distinct types of filmmaking, the abstract, underground, avant-garde film and the conventional narrative feature — about the only precedent I could think of was the interesting 1961 Canadian production The Mask (spoofed in the 1992 feature of the same title, with Jim Carrey), but that merely was a plainly photographed, tacky black-and-white horror cheapie with three stunning 3-D montage sequences by veteran Slavko Vorkapich spliced in at appropriate intervals. (The Mask was only partially in 3-D; the montages represented the hero’s hallucinations while wearing the mask, and just before each started a voice on the soundtrack said, “PUT THE MASK ON — NOW,” which was supposed to be a signal to the audience members to put on the 3-D glasses.) Carnival of Souls is a remarkable movie in which the avant-garde sequences and the conventional narrative mutually reinforce each other and create a stunning whole, and it’s so good a movie it seems utterly incomprehensible that this was the only time Herk Harvey got to direct — especially since Night of the Living Dead, made six years later on a similarly tiny budget and a far less interesting and imaginative film, launched its director, George Romero, on a long and profitable career.
Carnival of Souls ends with something that’s supposed to be a surprise ending but was actually pretty predictable — the film cuts back to the car wreck in Lawrence, Kansas and the car carrying Mary and her two companions is pulled out of the water and all three are dead, suggesting that the bulk of the film has been Mary’s hallucinations during the last few minutes of her life — though (once again either intentionally or by accident — imdb.com said it was an accident but I’m not so sure — both Candace Hilligoss and another woman in the car blink their eyes when they’re supposed to be ‘dead,” suggesting either a mistake left in by a director who didn’t have the money for a retake or a hint that we’re supposed to read these characters as still being alive). But in the meantime the film is so imaginative, so well-done and pushed so far beyond the usual bounds of a micro-budget movie (much the way Teenagers from Outer Space did, though Carnival of Souls is an even finer, richer work, and though it was weakened by its budget limitations it didn’t have any of the bits of low-budget tackiness that marred Teenagers from Outer Space — and Carnival of Souls was also released with a title that emphasized its good qualities instead of one that made it seem stupid) one can readily imagine why it acquired a major cult following (especially on its 1989 re-release) and has been remade twice (in 1998 and 2009).
It’s also helped by a performance by Candace Hilligoss (who also, inexplicably, never made a film again), who’s utterly right for her role; like Joan Woodbury, she’s basically attractive but has a rather bony facial structure that probably kept her from being cast as “normal” romantic leads but both her appearance and her rather out-of-it acting style are utterly appropriate to her role here. (The rest of the cast is either serviceable or — in the cases of Stan Levitt as that smarmy doctor and Sidney Berger as the creepy fellow roomer who wants to get into Mary’s pants — considerably better than that.) This one turned out to be a really unexpected treat!
Trapped (Eagle-Lion, 1949)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran another movie, with some trepidation because I was worried it would seem a letdown after Carnival of Souls, but it turned out to be quite good in its own right: Trapped, an Eagle-Lion production from 1949 dealing with the U.S. Treasury Department and a Secret Service campaign to bust a gang of counterfeiters. If this seems like a familiar premise, it’s because Eagle-Lion released a better-known film called T-Men on the same subject the same year, with a more highly regarded director (Anthony Mann instead of Trapped’s Richard Fleischer) and cinematographer (John Alton instead of Trapped’s Guy Roe), but Trapped emerges as an even better movie, partly because its plot is more unified, partly because there are fewer pseudo-documentary pretensions (there’s a stentorian narrator at the beginning over footage of the actual Treasury Department in action, stressing the sheer number of separate steps by separate people needed to create authentic money, almost as if to put off potential counterfeiters by making the process seem extraordinarily and intimidatingly difficult: “Do not try this at home!” — and Charles recognized some of the same documentary footage as was used in T-Men; fortunately, in this film, after the opening scene the narrator shuts up) and partly because, if anything, it’s even more stylized as film noir despite being shot largely on actual Los Angeles locations.
The plot begins with a middle-age woman restaurateur complaining when a $20 bill that’s part of a bank deposit she’s making is identified as counterfeit and confiscated by the bank. When the bank turns it over to the Treasury Department, the agents who examine it realize it was printed on the same plates as the ones used by previously convicted counterfeiter Tris Stewart (Lloyd Bridges), but Stewart has been in prison for three years and is looking at seven more. The feds offer him a deal — they’ll facilitate his “escape” from prison and get his ultimate sentence shortened if he helps them find the people who are now using his plates. Tris reluctantly goes along with the plan, but it becomes clear when he gets really rough with the Secret Service agent he’s supposed to be “escaping” from that he’s really a loose cannon and it’s not at all clear from moment to moment exactly which side he’s on: is he using the feds to get to the crooks and make money off them, using the feds to get to the crooks and have his revenge on them for sticking him with the rap, or sincerely living up to his deal?
There’s a nice shock scene at the beginning when Stewart is led into the Secret Service office and briefed on the deal they’re offering him — the shock, of course, is that Lloyd Bridges, of all people, is cast as a crook — and throughout the movie his character just drips with the moral ambiguity that’s the basis of all truly great film noir (the writers are Earl Felton and George Zuckerman — the latter a favorite of Douglas Sirk’s during his Universal years). He’s bitter about his former partner, not only for leaving him to take the rap way back when but also for selling the priceless plates to Jack Sylvester (James Todd); he gets a gambler to stake him to the $25,000 in (real) money Sylvester demands as his price for letting him back into the operation; ultimately he runs afoul of another Treasury agent who’s working undercover and, unbeknownst to Tris, has already infiltrated Sylvester’s organization; and though the plot sometimes gets confusing and the atmospherics a little too dense (it’s not all that clear during the final sequence — a shoot-out in a trolley barn — precisely what’s supposed to be happening), for the most part Trapped is a marvelously amoral film in which the crusading Treasury agents (except for the one who’s deep undercover and is so good at projecting criminal sleaze it’s a major surprise when we find out he’s really a cop!) are kept at a distance, and we get to see the crooks — including the marvelous Barbara Payton, who in real life was as unscrupulous a femme fatale as the roles she played on screen, playing Tris’s ex-girlfriend who jilted him for Sylvester — up close and personal, looking for their main chances and screwing each other. This film and the original The Narrow Margin are so good it’s hard to think of Fleischer’s subsequent career — mostly glossy big-budget assignments in conventional Hollywood grooves — without a sense of regret that he rarely got to do movies this good once he became more conventionally successful!
I ran another movie, with some trepidation because I was worried it would seem a letdown after Carnival of Souls, but it turned out to be quite good in its own right: Trapped, an Eagle-Lion production from 1949 dealing with the U.S. Treasury Department and a Secret Service campaign to bust a gang of counterfeiters. If this seems like a familiar premise, it’s because Eagle-Lion released a better-known film called T-Men on the same subject the same year, with a more highly regarded director (Anthony Mann instead of Trapped’s Richard Fleischer) and cinematographer (John Alton instead of Trapped’s Guy Roe), but Trapped emerges as an even better movie, partly because its plot is more unified, partly because there are fewer pseudo-documentary pretensions (there’s a stentorian narrator at the beginning over footage of the actual Treasury Department in action, stressing the sheer number of separate steps by separate people needed to create authentic money, almost as if to put off potential counterfeiters by making the process seem extraordinarily and intimidatingly difficult: “Do not try this at home!” — and Charles recognized some of the same documentary footage as was used in T-Men; fortunately, in this film, after the opening scene the narrator shuts up) and partly because, if anything, it’s even more stylized as film noir despite being shot largely on actual Los Angeles locations.
The plot begins with a middle-age woman restaurateur complaining when a $20 bill that’s part of a bank deposit she’s making is identified as counterfeit and confiscated by the bank. When the bank turns it over to the Treasury Department, the agents who examine it realize it was printed on the same plates as the ones used by previously convicted counterfeiter Tris Stewart (Lloyd Bridges), but Stewart has been in prison for three years and is looking at seven more. The feds offer him a deal — they’ll facilitate his “escape” from prison and get his ultimate sentence shortened if he helps them find the people who are now using his plates. Tris reluctantly goes along with the plan, but it becomes clear when he gets really rough with the Secret Service agent he’s supposed to be “escaping” from that he’s really a loose cannon and it’s not at all clear from moment to moment exactly which side he’s on: is he using the feds to get to the crooks and make money off them, using the feds to get to the crooks and have his revenge on them for sticking him with the rap, or sincerely living up to his deal?
There’s a nice shock scene at the beginning when Stewart is led into the Secret Service office and briefed on the deal they’re offering him — the shock, of course, is that Lloyd Bridges, of all people, is cast as a crook — and throughout the movie his character just drips with the moral ambiguity that’s the basis of all truly great film noir (the writers are Earl Felton and George Zuckerman — the latter a favorite of Douglas Sirk’s during his Universal years). He’s bitter about his former partner, not only for leaving him to take the rap way back when but also for selling the priceless plates to Jack Sylvester (James Todd); he gets a gambler to stake him to the $25,000 in (real) money Sylvester demands as his price for letting him back into the operation; ultimately he runs afoul of another Treasury agent who’s working undercover and, unbeknownst to Tris, has already infiltrated Sylvester’s organization; and though the plot sometimes gets confusing and the atmospherics a little too dense (it’s not all that clear during the final sequence — a shoot-out in a trolley barn — precisely what’s supposed to be happening), for the most part Trapped is a marvelously amoral film in which the crusading Treasury agents (except for the one who’s deep undercover and is so good at projecting criminal sleaze it’s a major surprise when we find out he’s really a cop!) are kept at a distance, and we get to see the crooks — including the marvelous Barbara Payton, who in real life was as unscrupulous a femme fatale as the roles she played on screen, playing Tris’s ex-girlfriend who jilted him for Sylvester — up close and personal, looking for their main chances and screwing each other. This film and the original The Narrow Margin are so good it’s hard to think of Fleischer’s subsequent career — mostly glossy big-budget assignments in conventional Hollywood grooves — without a sense of regret that he rarely got to do movies this good once he became more conventionally successful!
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
The Saint Strikes Back (RKO, 1939)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Saint Strikes Back — one of the appallingly generic titles that got fastened to these movies by RKO (it wasn’t always that easy to tell apart The Saint Strikes Back, The Saint Takes Over and The Falcon Takes Over, to name just three of these films), though to RKO’s credit they actually based the film on one of the novels by the Saint character’s creator, Leslie Charteris (the book had the much more appealing title Aspects of Doom), rather than basing just the first film in the series on a story by the person who invented the character and making the subsequent ones either original stories or adaptations of other mystery writers’ stories featuring other detectives, as was done with the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes stories and the Michael Shayne films with Lloyd Nolan.
The Saint Strikes Back is the second RKO Saint film and is actually presented as a direct sequel to the first one, The Saint in New York, though there’s an all-important casting change: George Sanders replaces Louis Hayward as the Saint. Hayward was generally a serviceable but rather dull leading man — in his two appearances as the Saint (here and in the very last film in the series, the 1954 production The Saint’s Girl Friday), he proved he was no Sanders; and in his 1950 Columbia remake of Captain Blood he proved he was no Errol Flynn either — while Sanders captured the combination of insouciance and sardonicism at the heart of Charteris’s character. (The only other actor who pulled that off was Roger Moore in the early-1960’s TV series; the other three Saints — Hayward, Hugh Sinclair, and Alec Baldwin in a leaden attempt to revive the character in 1994 — missed the mark.)
The plot (adapted by John Twist and A. C. Edington from the Charteris novel) has the Saint coming to San Francisco just after the events of The Saint in New York and ringing in the New Year at San Francisco’s swank Colony Club — only one gangster comes to the club with a gun intending to kill another, but gets killed himself. The Saint ushers socialite Val Travers (Wendy Barrie) out of the club just before the local police arrive; Travers, it turns out, is the daughter of a San Francisco police detective who was framed for corruption by a mysterious criminal boss named “Waldeman,” and she’s hooked up with the lower levels of Waldeman’s gang in hopes of finding information that will exonerate her father (posthumously, since he responded to his exposure by committing suicide). The Saint flies back to New York and turns up in the private home of Inspector Fernack of the New York Police Department just as Fernack was going to fly to San Francisco to help the San Francisco police investigate the Saint. In the film’s most delightful scene, Fernack and the Saint end up on the same plane going back from New York to San Francisco, and Fernack insists that he’s going to keep an eye on the Saint for the whole journey — only the Saint slips out of the plane when it stops in Fort Worth (this was the era in which transcontinental air travel still took long enough that the planes were equipped with sleeping berths) and lures Fernack out of the plane in his dressing gown, stranding him in Fort Worth when the plane — with the Saint back on board — takes off without him.
Fernack eventually finds his way to San Francisco and the Saint, a.k.a. Simon Templar, shows up at Val Travers’ apartment for what he thinks is going to be a tête-a-tête — only when he arrives Val’s attorney/boyfriend, Allan Breck (Neil Hamilton), is there. Cullis (Jerome Cowan — a real treat for us fans of this marvelous actor who regret that in his most famous film, The Maltese Falcon, he’s killed off in the first reel), a criminologist with the San Francisco Police Department, is convinced — or at least he says he’s convinced — that Templar is the mysterious Waldeman. Templar traces the murder victim from the Colony Club to retired philanthropist Martin Eastman (Gilbert Emery) and cracks Eastman’s safe, where he recovers the packet of $1,000 bills Val’s father was supposed to have received from Waldeman’s organization as a bribe. Eastman doesn’t report the theft to the police, which convinces Templar that he’s part of Waldeman’s gang — instead he contacts Cullis, who also turns out to be part of the Waldeman organization — and when Eastman tries to flee after Templar and Val have confronted him at his home, he’s shot, presumably by other members of the Waldeman gang. For a finale the police and Templar assemble all the principals in Cullis’s office and wire it so they can eavesdrop on his confrontation with Templar and Val — whereupon Cullis admits that he framed Val’s father but insists that Breck is actually Waldman (though we don’t see Breck again and we never get a clue how he could have conducted the imposture of being both an attorney and Val’s boyfriend while running a far-reaching criminal enterprise — a cop-out ending similar to that of the first Secret Agent X-9 newspaper comic serial scripted by Dashiell Hammett and drawn by Alex Raymond in a Hearst effort to compete with Dick Tracy).
Nothing much happens in The Saint Strikes Back — after that marvelous scene in Fort Worth it’s really just a series of confrontations in rooms — but it’s nonetheless a tour de force for Sanders and also an important apprentice assignment for director John Farrow (Mia’s father), who drenches this relatively simple-minded mystery in proto-noir atmospherics and surprising camera angles (Frank Redman was the cinematographer) that anticipate his back-to-back noir masterpieces from 1948, The Big Clock and The Night Has a Thousand Eyes.
The film was The Saint Strikes Back — one of the appallingly generic titles that got fastened to these movies by RKO (it wasn’t always that easy to tell apart The Saint Strikes Back, The Saint Takes Over and The Falcon Takes Over, to name just three of these films), though to RKO’s credit they actually based the film on one of the novels by the Saint character’s creator, Leslie Charteris (the book had the much more appealing title Aspects of Doom), rather than basing just the first film in the series on a story by the person who invented the character and making the subsequent ones either original stories or adaptations of other mystery writers’ stories featuring other detectives, as was done with the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes stories and the Michael Shayne films with Lloyd Nolan.
The Saint Strikes Back is the second RKO Saint film and is actually presented as a direct sequel to the first one, The Saint in New York, though there’s an all-important casting change: George Sanders replaces Louis Hayward as the Saint. Hayward was generally a serviceable but rather dull leading man — in his two appearances as the Saint (here and in the very last film in the series, the 1954 production The Saint’s Girl Friday), he proved he was no Sanders; and in his 1950 Columbia remake of Captain Blood he proved he was no Errol Flynn either — while Sanders captured the combination of insouciance and sardonicism at the heart of Charteris’s character. (The only other actor who pulled that off was Roger Moore in the early-1960’s TV series; the other three Saints — Hayward, Hugh Sinclair, and Alec Baldwin in a leaden attempt to revive the character in 1994 — missed the mark.)
The plot (adapted by John Twist and A. C. Edington from the Charteris novel) has the Saint coming to San Francisco just after the events of The Saint in New York and ringing in the New Year at San Francisco’s swank Colony Club — only one gangster comes to the club with a gun intending to kill another, but gets killed himself. The Saint ushers socialite Val Travers (Wendy Barrie) out of the club just before the local police arrive; Travers, it turns out, is the daughter of a San Francisco police detective who was framed for corruption by a mysterious criminal boss named “Waldeman,” and she’s hooked up with the lower levels of Waldeman’s gang in hopes of finding information that will exonerate her father (posthumously, since he responded to his exposure by committing suicide). The Saint flies back to New York and turns up in the private home of Inspector Fernack of the New York Police Department just as Fernack was going to fly to San Francisco to help the San Francisco police investigate the Saint. In the film’s most delightful scene, Fernack and the Saint end up on the same plane going back from New York to San Francisco, and Fernack insists that he’s going to keep an eye on the Saint for the whole journey — only the Saint slips out of the plane when it stops in Fort Worth (this was the era in which transcontinental air travel still took long enough that the planes were equipped with sleeping berths) and lures Fernack out of the plane in his dressing gown, stranding him in Fort Worth when the plane — with the Saint back on board — takes off without him.
Fernack eventually finds his way to San Francisco and the Saint, a.k.a. Simon Templar, shows up at Val Travers’ apartment for what he thinks is going to be a tête-a-tête — only when he arrives Val’s attorney/boyfriend, Allan Breck (Neil Hamilton), is there. Cullis (Jerome Cowan — a real treat for us fans of this marvelous actor who regret that in his most famous film, The Maltese Falcon, he’s killed off in the first reel), a criminologist with the San Francisco Police Department, is convinced — or at least he says he’s convinced — that Templar is the mysterious Waldeman. Templar traces the murder victim from the Colony Club to retired philanthropist Martin Eastman (Gilbert Emery) and cracks Eastman’s safe, where he recovers the packet of $1,000 bills Val’s father was supposed to have received from Waldeman’s organization as a bribe. Eastman doesn’t report the theft to the police, which convinces Templar that he’s part of Waldeman’s gang — instead he contacts Cullis, who also turns out to be part of the Waldeman organization — and when Eastman tries to flee after Templar and Val have confronted him at his home, he’s shot, presumably by other members of the Waldeman gang. For a finale the police and Templar assemble all the principals in Cullis’s office and wire it so they can eavesdrop on his confrontation with Templar and Val — whereupon Cullis admits that he framed Val’s father but insists that Breck is actually Waldman (though we don’t see Breck again and we never get a clue how he could have conducted the imposture of being both an attorney and Val’s boyfriend while running a far-reaching criminal enterprise — a cop-out ending similar to that of the first Secret Agent X-9 newspaper comic serial scripted by Dashiell Hammett and drawn by Alex Raymond in a Hearst effort to compete with Dick Tracy).
Nothing much happens in The Saint Strikes Back — after that marvelous scene in Fort Worth it’s really just a series of confrontations in rooms — but it’s nonetheless a tour de force for Sanders and also an important apprentice assignment for director John Farrow (Mia’s father), who drenches this relatively simple-minded mystery in proto-noir atmospherics and surprising camera angles (Frank Redman was the cinematographer) that anticipate his back-to-back noir masterpieces from 1948, The Big Clock and The Night Has a Thousand Eyes.
Monday, October 11, 2010
The Limping Man (Banner/Eros, 1951/53)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Limping Man, a 1953 British production by Banner Films, released through Eros Films (whose logo, the company’s name emblazoned on a disc with two wings sprouting from either end, also appeared on the 1951 thriller Another Man’s Poison, the second of three films co-starring Bette Davis and her fourth and last husband, Gary Merrill), and a potentially good thriller that turned out in practice to be surprisingly dull. The credited director was Charles De La Tour, but apparently the main director was American expat Cy Endfield, who despite his very British-sounding name had ended up in the U.K. because he’d been blacklisted here and scarfed up whatever jobs he could get, including producing the surprisingly interesting TV show Col. March Investigates (a show about the real-life Department of Queer Complaints at Scotland Yard — a unit set up to investigate out-of-the-ordinary crimes — which effectively cast Boris Karloff as the head of it) and directing its first three episodes, which were later spliced together to form a theatrical feature.
The Limping Man opens with World War II veteran Frank Prior (Lloyd Bridges) flying back to the U.K. to get back in touch with his wartime girlfriend, Pauline French (Moira Lister). As he gets off the plane he sees a fellow passenger gunned down by a man with a limp, who had concealed a sniper rifle in his cane. The victim is, or appears to be, Kendal Brown (Bruce Beeby), and it turns out that Pauline married him and became part of his criminal enterprises just for the thrill of it all. There’s also a subplot involving a magician and his assistant, a singer named Helene Castle, played by Hélène Cordet, a Frenchwoman — at least if one goes by her name and her accent — who gets to warble a couple of songs, “I Couldn’t Care Less” by Hugh Raker and Arthur Wilkinson (Wilkinson also composed the film’s background score) and “Hey Presto!” by Cyril Orundel and David Croft, that have nothing to do with the main plot but are still among the most entertaining parts of the film. Eventually it turns out that Kendal Brown is still alive — after The Third Man British screens were inundated with stories in which master criminals faked their own deaths and turned up alive (including a second one in which Orson Welles played that character, Trent’s Last Case) — and he was not the victim at the airport, but the killer — and Frank is caught between Brown and the police until … suddenly Endfield and/or de la Tour cuts back to him asleep on the airplane taking him to England, and just when you’re thinking, “Oh, no, they’re not going to have the whole film turn out to be a dream,” they have the whole film turn out to be a dream.
I was really anxious to watch The Limping Man — it was the companion item to The Hoodlum on the disc within the Dark Crimes 50-CD boxed set and the description of it on the sleeve made it seem interesting — but it turned out to be an ill-paced film, with a serviceable but not especially interesting script by Ian Stuart Black and Reginald Long based on a story called “Death on the Tideway” by Anthony Verney (and was it he who thought up that horrible trick ending or was that Black’s and/or Long’s brilliant idea?) and good acting all around — Bridges holds his own against the Brits in the rest of the cast — but it’s still a surprisingly dull film for something that in purpose and intent was supposed to be a thriller. There’s also some confusion about exactly when this film was made, since the Mill Creek Entertainment package lists it as 1951 but imdb.com gives 1953 — my guess is it was made in 1951 (the dialogue referred to the war as having ended six years earlier) but it wasn’t released in the U.S. until 1953 and that was what imdb.com was going by.
The film was The Limping Man, a 1953 British production by Banner Films, released through Eros Films (whose logo, the company’s name emblazoned on a disc with two wings sprouting from either end, also appeared on the 1951 thriller Another Man’s Poison, the second of three films co-starring Bette Davis and her fourth and last husband, Gary Merrill), and a potentially good thriller that turned out in practice to be surprisingly dull. The credited director was Charles De La Tour, but apparently the main director was American expat Cy Endfield, who despite his very British-sounding name had ended up in the U.K. because he’d been blacklisted here and scarfed up whatever jobs he could get, including producing the surprisingly interesting TV show Col. March Investigates (a show about the real-life Department of Queer Complaints at Scotland Yard — a unit set up to investigate out-of-the-ordinary crimes — which effectively cast Boris Karloff as the head of it) and directing its first three episodes, which were later spliced together to form a theatrical feature.
The Limping Man opens with World War II veteran Frank Prior (Lloyd Bridges) flying back to the U.K. to get back in touch with his wartime girlfriend, Pauline French (Moira Lister). As he gets off the plane he sees a fellow passenger gunned down by a man with a limp, who had concealed a sniper rifle in his cane. The victim is, or appears to be, Kendal Brown (Bruce Beeby), and it turns out that Pauline married him and became part of his criminal enterprises just for the thrill of it all. There’s also a subplot involving a magician and his assistant, a singer named Helene Castle, played by Hélène Cordet, a Frenchwoman — at least if one goes by her name and her accent — who gets to warble a couple of songs, “I Couldn’t Care Less” by Hugh Raker and Arthur Wilkinson (Wilkinson also composed the film’s background score) and “Hey Presto!” by Cyril Orundel and David Croft, that have nothing to do with the main plot but are still among the most entertaining parts of the film. Eventually it turns out that Kendal Brown is still alive — after The Third Man British screens were inundated with stories in which master criminals faked their own deaths and turned up alive (including a second one in which Orson Welles played that character, Trent’s Last Case) — and he was not the victim at the airport, but the killer — and Frank is caught between Brown and the police until … suddenly Endfield and/or de la Tour cuts back to him asleep on the airplane taking him to England, and just when you’re thinking, “Oh, no, they’re not going to have the whole film turn out to be a dream,” they have the whole film turn out to be a dream.
I was really anxious to watch The Limping Man — it was the companion item to The Hoodlum on the disc within the Dark Crimes 50-CD boxed set and the description of it on the sleeve made it seem interesting — but it turned out to be an ill-paced film, with a serviceable but not especially interesting script by Ian Stuart Black and Reginald Long based on a story called “Death on the Tideway” by Anthony Verney (and was it he who thought up that horrible trick ending or was that Black’s and/or Long’s brilliant idea?) and good acting all around — Bridges holds his own against the Brits in the rest of the cast — but it’s still a surprisingly dull film for something that in purpose and intent was supposed to be a thriller. There’s also some confusion about exactly when this film was made, since the Mill Creek Entertainment package lists it as 1951 but imdb.com gives 1953 — my guess is it was made in 1951 (the dialogue referred to the war as having ended six years earlier) but it wasn’t released in the U.S. until 1953 and that was what imdb.com was going by.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)