by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ended up running a couple of 1940’s “B” movies. One was a film I had on the computer: Black Dragons, a 1942 Bela Lugosi vehicle for Monogram that’s one of those peculiar movies (like The Da Vinci Code — I defy anyone who hasn’t read Dan Brown’s source novel to make sense of The Da Vinci Code on film) that’s a lot more fun — because it’s a lot more comprehensible — if you go into it actually knowing the plot premise in advance. Like the MGM “A” Keeper of the Flame, released the following year, Black Dragons is supposed to be a suspense thriller with a surprise “twist” at the end, but most of the action is completely mystifying without advance awareness of what all of this is really about.
Made right after the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor by producers (Sam Katzman, Jack Dietz and Barney A. Sarecky) who were so determined to keep their story topical that they kept screenwriter Harvey Gates busy at his typewriter for rewrite after rewrite during the shoot (which must have driven Lugosi, who never learned much English and had to memorize his lines phonetically, utterly nuts) and came up with a confusing mess of a plot, Black Dragons opens in Washington, D.C. at an upper-class party where, as Tom Weaver put it in his book Poverty Row Horrors!, “business leaders, bankers and lawyers schmooze about the War; classified information is being bandied about like back-fence gossip.” The party is being hosted by Dr. Bill Saunders (George Pembroke), and after the guests leave Saunders and five other people, New York banker Amos Hanlin (Robert Fraser), Pittsburgh steel magnate Ryder (Edward Pell, Sr.), businessmen Phillip Wallace (Robert Fiske) and John Van Dyke (Irving Mitchell) and labor leader Kerney (Max Hoffman, Jr.) start discussing their real aims and boasting of how they’ve been able to sabotage the war effort by holding up financing and parts production, fomenting strikes and the like. In between these sequences there’s a series of stock clips edited into a montage of the saboteurs at work sinking ships, blowing up bridges and burning oil wells, so we know the plot is working.
Then a sinister Frenchman who calls himself “Monsieur Colomb” (Bela Lugosi) shows up at the Saunders house and hypnotizes him in the best Lugosi manner, keeping Saunders locked in his bedroom and establishing himself as Saunders’ house guest — and the other members of Saunders’ dinner party start turning up dead, some of them in hotel rooms but most of them at the now-closed Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C., where Colomb (well, it’s a Bela Lugosi movie, so there’s not a lot of suspense about who the killer is!) dumps them after he kills them at the Saunders home or wherever else he’s able to lure them. In a flashback sequence, stylishly directed by (or at least credited, like the rest of the film, to) William Nigh with far more interesting lighting and camera angles than the rest of the movie, it’s revealed that “Colomb” was really German plastic surgeon Dr. Melcher, who in an interesting case of Axis cooperation was sent to Japan to take six members of the sinister Black Dragon Society (which really existed; they operated from the 1890’s to the end of World War II and were a bunch of Right-wingers who systematically sabotaged any attempts by the Japanese government to pursue a peace policy, including staging the infamous military coup attempt of 1936 as well as murdering at least two prime ministers before that) and remodel their faces to look like six prominent American business and labor leaders whom the Japanese had kidnapped and killed.
After the operations are complete, the head of the Black Dragon Society (I. Stanford Jolley) double-crosses Melcher and imprisons him, but Melcher still has his surgical instruments with him and does a little D.I.Y. surgery on himself so that he resembles his about-to-be-released cellmate (also played by Lugosi, in his second and last dual role; his first was in the 1935 indie Murder by Television), and thereby escapes — and in the final scene it turns out that Lugosi has given Saunders a serum that has turned him into a monster, and as Lugosi’s character dies Saunders whines, “And now I must go on living!” (The gimmick was probably inspired by Lugosi’s similar manipulation of Boris Karloff in the 1935 The Raven by “uglifying” his face and then offering to make it good-looking if Karloff’s character would just follow orders.) After watching The Invisible Ghost it’s hard not to imagine what Joseph H. Lewis could have done with the script of Black Dragons (and, indeed, it’s entirely possible Lewis did direct the flashback sequence, which shows a richness and depth of visual imagination usually far beyond William Nigh), instead of the flat, dull, boring presentation we actually get even of some pretty far-out material: like many of the other Lugosi Monograms he’s shown doing a lot of Dracula-esque things even in the context of a story that, as far-fetched as it might be, doesn’t contain any supernatural elements.
Charles actually rather liked Black Dragons, mainly for its combination of whodunit, Old Dark House-style thriller and international intrigue — and it’s also of interest in that one of the good guys is FBI agent Dick Martin, played by future Lone Ranger Clayton Moore (who seems oddly shorter and gawkier without mask, silver bullets or horse), and the other is Joan Barclay, reunited with Lugosi after the 1936 serial Shadow of Chinatown and playing Saunders’ long-lost niece — only it turns out that she’s another government agent merely posing as Saunders’ long-lost niece (with the approval of the original, whom we never see).
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Friday, July 17, 2009
$9.99 (Australian Film Finance Corporation/Regent Releasing, 2008/9)
Charming Stop-Motion Movie Offers the Meaning of Life
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
“Have you ever wondered, ‘What’s the meaning of life? Why do we exist?’,” runs the advertising copy for a book called The Meaning of Life, offered for sale for the titular price in a charming new movie called $9.99. “The answer to this vexing question is now within your reach! You’ll find it in a small yet amazing booklet, which will explain, in easy-to-follow, simple terms your reason for being! The booklet, printed on the finest paper, contains illuminating, exquisite color pictures, and could be yours for a mere $9.99.”
$9.99 — the movie, not the price tag — is a stop-motion animation feature, a co-production from Australia, the U.S. and Israel, based on a series of short stories by an Israeli writer named Etgar Keret and co-written by him and the film’s director, Tatia Rosenthal. It’s set in a modernistic apartment building — the exterior looks sharp and new but the insides seem to be crumbling — and it brings together a set of characters who seem to have little in common but having ended up under the same roof.
The central characters, more or less, are the Peck family: single dad Jim (Anthony LaPaglia) and his two young-adult sons, Lenny (Ben Mendelsohn) and Dave (Samuel Johnson). Lenny has a sleazy job as a repossessor — a sort of employment that in today’s era of economic breakdown may seem incredibly timely, but which in this film means they can come into a debtor’s home and take not only whatever the person borrowed money on and isn’t repaying, but just about everything in the house that isn’t nailed down and possibly a few things that are, as well. Lenny also has a seemingly hopeless crush on the supermodel Tanita (Leeanna Walsman), who’s just occupied the penthouse of their building and is actually willing to have sex with him. But her price for her favors is a chilling set of physical transformations that would have scared even the late Michael Jackson.
As for Dave — the younger brother who orders The Meaning of Life — he doesn’t have a job at all. He gets a tryout with Lenny’s employer, only he bungles the first repossession he goes out on because he feels sorry for the guy, a long out-of-work magician named “Marcus Pocus.” Also in the building live several other tenants, each with equally odd problems and hopes. Ron (Joel Edgerton) gets dumped by his schoolteacher fiancée Michelle (Claudia Karvan) and hangs out in his apartment with three two-inch gnomes, identified as “students” in the official synopsis but recognizable as such only to the extent that they drink beer (which Ron feeds them with an eyedropper) and party a lot. They learn to activate Ron’s turntable (he listens to music on vinyl) and generally use his place as a frat house.
Zack (Jamie Katsamatsas) is a schoolboy in Michelle’s class, who’s got his heart set on an electronic toy called “Soccer Jack.” As one of those parental exercises in teaching fiscal responsibility, his single father (oddly, while there are women in this film, none of them are mothers) gives him a piggy bank and tells Zack he’ll give him 50 cents for every glass of milk he drinks — then, when he’s drunk enough milk to fill the piggy bank, they’ll break it open and he’ll be able to buy “Soccer Jack.” Only Zack falls in love with the piggy bank, bringing it in to show-and-tell day at school and boasting that it smiles at him whether he puts money in it or not.
The final strand in this eccentric plot concerns Albert (Barry Otto), a retiree who takes in a homeless man (Geoffrey Rush) who turns out to be a guardian angel — though, as he explains, that’s actually a demotion. The angel hasn’t quite mastered the art of using his wings, but he has become adept at wheedling money out of passers-by by threatening to commit suicide on the spot if they don’t give him a handout … and actually doing so. (He gets away with this because he’s an angel, so he can’t die permanently.)
As arbitrary as this plot sounds, not only in its free mixture of natural and supernatural elements (the sort of thing usually described by the vague and overworked phrase “magical realism”) but also in the rather tenuous connections between the plot lines — one gets the impression each strand was a separate Keret story and it was only while writing the film that he and Rosenthal figured out ways to link them — $9.99 mostly works. The relative crudity of stop-motion animation works better than any other conceivable way of telling the story — a live-action version would have come across as way too arch and a computer-animated one would have seemed too machine-made and lacked the tactile surfaces of the characters as we have them — and the voices, especially LaPaglia’s, supply depths of character the clay puppets lack.
$9.99 is a quite impressive film that uses animation to express intellectual content as well as to have fun. In that regard it’s reminiscent of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life — a film which used Rotoscoping (tracing over live-action footage to turn human actors into what appear to be hand-drawn cartoons) and told a similar story of individuals on an intellectual quest for the meaning of life. But whereas Linklater’s film seemed awfully preachy at times, Rosenthal’s expertly balances joy and thought, innocence and experience, and stays interesting despite the seeming arbitrariness of the plotting: this is one film in which “anything can happen” — and does.
It also helps that $9.99 carefully cultivates its universality. The plot description on imdb.com gives the location as Sydney, Australia — though the film’s title is American and the check Dave receives as a refund when his second book order doesn’t go through is in dollars — but it really could be happening anywhere in the world where there’s a white-majority population and English is the native language. (For that matter, it could be happening in a country where English isn’t the native language; with the relative crudity of the stop-motion puppets’ lip movements, it would be easy enough to dub it into other tongues.) It’s also nice to see an animated film that frankly admits that people not only possess sex organs (Lenny is enviably well-hung) but use them to have sex.
$9.99 is a movie that’s well worth seeing if you can get into its quirky charm. It’s only 78 minutes long — it doesn’t overstay its welcome, though the ending seems abrupt and one could easily imagine it going on for another half-hour or so — and it’s certainly not the sort of cookie-cutter entertainment with which the major studios regularly bludgeon us these days. If you’re looking for something different at the movies, give it a chance.
$9.99 is now playing at the Ken Cinema, 4061 Adams Avenue in San Diego. Please call (619) 819-0236 for showtimes and other information.
The International (Relativity Media/Sony/Columbia, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film Charles and I watched last night was a quite good recent one: The International, a recent (February 2009) release and a piece of international intrigue spiced with anti-capitalist comment — this is probably the most cynical movie made about international capitalism since Network — in which Interpol agent Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) and New York assistant district attorney Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts) team up to go after the International Bank of Commerce and Credit (a thinly veiled reference to the real Bank of Credit and Commerce International, or BCCI, which fell apart as a result of a series of scandals in the 1990’s and which is described thusly on its Wikipedia page:
“The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was a major international bank founded in Karachi, Pakistan in 1972 by Agha Hasan Abedi, a Pakistani financier. The company was registered in Luxembourg. Within a decade BCCI touched its peak, it operated in 78 countries, had over 400 branches, and had assets in excess of US$ 20 billion making it the 7th largest private bank in the world by assets.[1][2]
“BCCI came under the radar of regulatory bodies and intelligence agencies in the 1980’s due to its perceived avoidance of falling under one regulatory banking authority, a fact that was later, after extensive investigations, proven to be true. BCCI became the focus of a massive regulatory battle in 1991 and was described as a ‘$20-billion-plus heist’.
“Investigators in the U.S. and the UK revealed that BCCI had been ‘set up deliberately to avoid centralized regulatory review, and operated extensively in bank secrecy jurisdictions. Its affairs were extraordinarily complex. Its officers were sophisticated international bankers whose apparent objective was to keep their affairs secret, to commit fraud on a massive scale, and to avoid detection.’ BCCI organized its own intelligence network, diplomatic corps and shipping & trading companies.
“The liquidators, Deloitte & Touche, filed a lawsuit against Price Waterhouse and Ernst & Young — the bank’s auditors — which was settled for $175 million in 1998. A further lawsuit against the Emir of Abu Dhabi, a major shareholder, was launched in 1999 for approximately $400 million. BCCI creditors also instituted a $1 billion suit against the Bank of England as a regulatory body. After a nine-year struggle, due to the Bank’s statutory immunity, the case went to trial in January 2004. However, in November 2005, Deloitte dropped its action against the Bank of England as contrary to creditors’ interests.[citation needed][vague][which?] To date liquidators have recovered about 75% of the creditors’ lost money.[3]”
In the movie, the bank goes far beyond regulatory evasion and gets into all sorts of unsavory activities, including arms dealing and bankrolling an African revolutionary, Charles Motomba of Liberia (Lucian Msamati) — a character pretty obviously based on the late Laurent Kabila of the Congo — just so the bank will hold the country’s loans after he takes over the government and thereby will be able to boost its Third World assets. The bank’s plot, worked out by CEO Jonas Skarssen (Ulrich Thomsen) and his principal advisors, is to provide arms to all sorts of civil conflicts throughout the world, on both sides. To pull this off he needs a sophisticated missile guidance system that’s made by only two companies in the world: one owned by Italian businessman and aspiring politician (writer Eric Singer seems to have been thinking of Silvio Berlusconi here) Umberto Calvini (Luca Giorgio Barbareschi) and Turkish arms maker Ahmet Sunay (Haluk Bilginer). The bank also hires its own hit man (Brian F. O’Byrne), listing him on the books as a “consultant” (which is what the character is called in the credits), to remove anyone and everyone who threatens to expose the scope of its operations — including one of its own executives, André Clement (Georges Bigot), who’s murdered early on in what’s faked to look like an auto accident — this after he met with one of Salinger’s agents, who was also killed by being administered a poison that made it look like he’d had a heart attack.
The International is directed by Tom Tykwer, whose most famous credit is Run, Lola, Run, and while this isn’t as nervy a film it is a quite capable thriller, a marvelously structured film in which the good guys, Salinger and Whitman, are caught up in a Kafka-esque web of frustration, eventually explained when a disgusted former bank insider, Wilhelm Wexler (Armin Mueller-Stahl), explains it all to them in a speech strikingly reminiscent of the “there is no America, there is no democracy” speech in Network, saying that the bank is involved with so many governments in the world, including the U.S.’s, and so many people on all sides of the world’s conflicts — including Israel and Hezbollah — are dependent on the bank’s services that the governments of the world will simply not allow people like Salinger and Whitman to hold it accountable for anything.
The spirit of Alfred Hitchcock hangs heavy over this movie — especially in a shoot-out inside the Guggenheim Museum in New York (the real museum couldn’t be used since Singer’s script called for it to be riddled with bullet holes at the end, so the filmmakers acquired the original plans for it and used those to build an exact duplicate of its interior inside a sound stage), the sort of exotic and picturesque location in which Hitchcock liked to stage his climaxes — and The International isn’t as fast or exciting as it would have been if Hitchcock had been around to make it, but on its own it’s a first-rate thriller and far, far better than Clive Owen’s subsequent foray into international intrigue in the hopelessly confusing (on purpose!) Duplicity.
The International got a big promotional “push,” including a TV ad campaign, by its distributor, Sony, and sank virtually without a trace at the box office, which is a pity — this is a quite good modern movie, plotted in a linear fashion and without the deliberately obfuscating welter of flashbacks that weighed down Duplicity, with the characters having clear motives for what they do and a blessed lack of sexual tension between Owen and Watts — her character is established early on as having a husband and kids in New York and she’s therefore not interested in anyone else (and there’s only a brief, passing hint of him having any interest in her).
Several people on an imdb.com message board criticized Watts for an impersonal performance and said she’d got as far as she has in Hollywood only by being Nicole Kidman’s friend, but I found her performance here just fine. The impassivity some of the imdb.com commentators criticized seemed to me credible as a portrayal of a rather impersonal character, who’s able to function at work only by tuning everything else out and just doing her job (and not dwelling on how her activities against the International might jeopardize the safety of hubby and kids back home), though it’s actually Mueller-Stahl who takes the acting honors, portraying a sad little man who worked for the East Germans, defied their government and its abuses, then ended up selling out to the bank and is only now getting cold feet about that.
The International deserved a better fate than it got — indeed, I could readily see a Leftist group like Activist San Diego showing it at a meeting and using it to spark a discussion of the power of international banks and just how far they will go to maximize their profits — and it’s a real pity that films like this (which got bad preview scores when it was originally completed for release in August 2008 — the release was moved to February 2009 to allow the filmmakers to include more action) are such a hard sell these days; for all its melodrama and some barely credible plot devices, more than most movies The International levels with the audience about who we are as a race and how we are governed, by whom and why.
The film Charles and I watched last night was a quite good recent one: The International, a recent (February 2009) release and a piece of international intrigue spiced with anti-capitalist comment — this is probably the most cynical movie made about international capitalism since Network — in which Interpol agent Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) and New York assistant district attorney Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts) team up to go after the International Bank of Commerce and Credit (a thinly veiled reference to the real Bank of Credit and Commerce International, or BCCI, which fell apart as a result of a series of scandals in the 1990’s and which is described thusly on its Wikipedia page:
“The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was a major international bank founded in Karachi, Pakistan in 1972 by Agha Hasan Abedi, a Pakistani financier. The company was registered in Luxembourg. Within a decade BCCI touched its peak, it operated in 78 countries, had over 400 branches, and had assets in excess of US$ 20 billion making it the 7th largest private bank in the world by assets.[1][2]
“BCCI came under the radar of regulatory bodies and intelligence agencies in the 1980’s due to its perceived avoidance of falling under one regulatory banking authority, a fact that was later, after extensive investigations, proven to be true. BCCI became the focus of a massive regulatory battle in 1991 and was described as a ‘$20-billion-plus heist’.
“Investigators in the U.S. and the UK revealed that BCCI had been ‘set up deliberately to avoid centralized regulatory review, and operated extensively in bank secrecy jurisdictions. Its affairs were extraordinarily complex. Its officers were sophisticated international bankers whose apparent objective was to keep their affairs secret, to commit fraud on a massive scale, and to avoid detection.’ BCCI organized its own intelligence network, diplomatic corps and shipping & trading companies.
“The liquidators, Deloitte & Touche, filed a lawsuit against Price Waterhouse and Ernst & Young — the bank’s auditors — which was settled for $175 million in 1998. A further lawsuit against the Emir of Abu Dhabi, a major shareholder, was launched in 1999 for approximately $400 million. BCCI creditors also instituted a $1 billion suit against the Bank of England as a regulatory body. After a nine-year struggle, due to the Bank’s statutory immunity, the case went to trial in January 2004. However, in November 2005, Deloitte dropped its action against the Bank of England as contrary to creditors’ interests.[citation needed][vague][which?] To date liquidators have recovered about 75% of the creditors’ lost money.[3]”
In the movie, the bank goes far beyond regulatory evasion and gets into all sorts of unsavory activities, including arms dealing and bankrolling an African revolutionary, Charles Motomba of Liberia (Lucian Msamati) — a character pretty obviously based on the late Laurent Kabila of the Congo — just so the bank will hold the country’s loans after he takes over the government and thereby will be able to boost its Third World assets. The bank’s plot, worked out by CEO Jonas Skarssen (Ulrich Thomsen) and his principal advisors, is to provide arms to all sorts of civil conflicts throughout the world, on both sides. To pull this off he needs a sophisticated missile guidance system that’s made by only two companies in the world: one owned by Italian businessman and aspiring politician (writer Eric Singer seems to have been thinking of Silvio Berlusconi here) Umberto Calvini (Luca Giorgio Barbareschi) and Turkish arms maker Ahmet Sunay (Haluk Bilginer). The bank also hires its own hit man (Brian F. O’Byrne), listing him on the books as a “consultant” (which is what the character is called in the credits), to remove anyone and everyone who threatens to expose the scope of its operations — including one of its own executives, André Clement (Georges Bigot), who’s murdered early on in what’s faked to look like an auto accident — this after he met with one of Salinger’s agents, who was also killed by being administered a poison that made it look like he’d had a heart attack.
The International is directed by Tom Tykwer, whose most famous credit is Run, Lola, Run, and while this isn’t as nervy a film it is a quite capable thriller, a marvelously structured film in which the good guys, Salinger and Whitman, are caught up in a Kafka-esque web of frustration, eventually explained when a disgusted former bank insider, Wilhelm Wexler (Armin Mueller-Stahl), explains it all to them in a speech strikingly reminiscent of the “there is no America, there is no democracy” speech in Network, saying that the bank is involved with so many governments in the world, including the U.S.’s, and so many people on all sides of the world’s conflicts — including Israel and Hezbollah — are dependent on the bank’s services that the governments of the world will simply not allow people like Salinger and Whitman to hold it accountable for anything.
The spirit of Alfred Hitchcock hangs heavy over this movie — especially in a shoot-out inside the Guggenheim Museum in New York (the real museum couldn’t be used since Singer’s script called for it to be riddled with bullet holes at the end, so the filmmakers acquired the original plans for it and used those to build an exact duplicate of its interior inside a sound stage), the sort of exotic and picturesque location in which Hitchcock liked to stage his climaxes — and The International isn’t as fast or exciting as it would have been if Hitchcock had been around to make it, but on its own it’s a first-rate thriller and far, far better than Clive Owen’s subsequent foray into international intrigue in the hopelessly confusing (on purpose!) Duplicity.
The International got a big promotional “push,” including a TV ad campaign, by its distributor, Sony, and sank virtually without a trace at the box office, which is a pity — this is a quite good modern movie, plotted in a linear fashion and without the deliberately obfuscating welter of flashbacks that weighed down Duplicity, with the characters having clear motives for what they do and a blessed lack of sexual tension between Owen and Watts — her character is established early on as having a husband and kids in New York and she’s therefore not interested in anyone else (and there’s only a brief, passing hint of him having any interest in her).
Several people on an imdb.com message board criticized Watts for an impersonal performance and said she’d got as far as she has in Hollywood only by being Nicole Kidman’s friend, but I found her performance here just fine. The impassivity some of the imdb.com commentators criticized seemed to me credible as a portrayal of a rather impersonal character, who’s able to function at work only by tuning everything else out and just doing her job (and not dwelling on how her activities against the International might jeopardize the safety of hubby and kids back home), though it’s actually Mueller-Stahl who takes the acting honors, portraying a sad little man who worked for the East Germans, defied their government and its abuses, then ended up selling out to the bank and is only now getting cold feet about that.
The International deserved a better fate than it got — indeed, I could readily see a Leftist group like Activist San Diego showing it at a meeting and using it to spark a discussion of the power of international banks and just how far they will go to maximize their profits — and it’s a real pity that films like this (which got bad preview scores when it was originally completed for release in August 2008 — the release was moved to February 2009 to allow the filmmakers to include more action) are such a hard sell these days; for all its melodrama and some barely credible plot devices, more than most movies The International levels with the audience about who we are as a race and how we are governed, by whom and why.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Dillinger (King Brothers/Monogram, 1945)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a movie I’d actually videotaped earlier: Dillinger, the 1945 Monogram version with Lawrence Tierney in the title role and Anne Jeffreys as his girlfriend (they meet when he holds up the movie theatre at which she’s working in the box office, and she gets him off the hook when she gets such a bad case of the hots for him that she backs off the positive identification she had made of him earlier — happens all the time, at least in Hollywood’s version of the criminal life). Surprisingly, the film had some major names attached to it: Dimitri Tiomkin did the music (not that it sounded all that much better than the dreary library-stock music Monogram usually used) and the director was Max Nosseck, a refugee who’d had a major reputation in France as a director of slow, moody thrillers.
Unfortunately, any attempts at atmosphere or style Nosseck may have been tempted to try for were lost in the unrelenting cheapness and tackiness of Monogram’s production, with its liberal use of clips from other movies — not only did they copy one entire robbery out of Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once eight years before, they printed the stock footage so that the frame jumped as it ran — and its flat, clear photography (only one scene — showing Dillinger hiding out, just before his death — has that kind of shadowy, maudit quality Nosseck and the other 1930’s French thriller directors so loved) undermines any attempt to make this more than a gangster potboiler with an imposing name in the title.
A pity this microbudget production wastes not only a good story but a good cast (Elisha Cook, Jr. and Eduardo Ciannelli are especially effective in supporting roles) — a pity, too, that the Production Code people flatly prohibited the studios from making a Dillinger movie for a full decade after he was killed by FBI agents in 1934; one can only dream of what kind of a movie Warners might have been able to make of the Dillinger story in the late 1930’s when the actor who so strongly resembled Dillinger that his entire early career in films was built on the resemblance — Humphrey Bogart — was still available for this sort of thing (not that Lawrence Tierney was bad — actually his portrayal was good, though his career proved limited because all he could be was a tough guy, whereas Bogart could have sounded more depths in the role). — 1/16/98
•••••
The film I picked out was Dillinger, the 1945 Monogram version (there’ve been at least two “open” Dillinger biopics since: a 1973 version directed by John Milius with Warren Oates as star, and the currently in-release Public Enemies, directed by Michael Mann and starring Johnny Depp). I just got this from the Columbia House DVD Club along with two recent movies that have been on my want-to-see list, The International and Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, and almost certainly Warners, the current holders of the Monogram catalog (at least those parts of it that haven’t lapsed into the public domain), reissued it on DVD now to take advantage of any interest in John Dillinger among moviegoers from the promotion of Public Enemies.
Incidentally, everyone in this movie pronounces “Dillinger” with a soft “g,” which according to biographer John Toland (whose book The Dillinger Days would have made an excellent basis for a Dillinger movie, though the film it did inspire wasn’t about him at all; Toland periodically cut in the stories of other notorious gangsters of the period, and his descriptions of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow inspired the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde) was wrong: the Dillingers were descendants of German immigrants and pronounced the name German-style, with a hard “g.”
I’d seen the 1945 Dillinger before and not been especially impressed, even though it was clearly reaching beyond the usual Monogram tackiness: the director was French émigré Max Nosseck, the writer was Philip Yordan (who actually achieved an Academy Award nomination!), there was an original music score by Dimitri Tiomkin (though it wasn’t recorded especially well and ended up sounding much like the usual Monogram sludge anyway) and the supporting characters included Edmund Lowe, Eduardo Ciannelli (whose role here as one of Dillinger’s henchmen must have had him looking nostalgically back on the days when, as a Lucky Luciano-based character in Warners’ Marked Woman, he had run the entire underworld in New York City!) and Elisha Cook, Jr.
Dillinger was played by Lawrence Tierney, who gets an “introducing” credit here and was apparently as tough off screen as on — he got into a lot of real-life fights and other embarrassing situations, behaving as much as possible like the tough guy he played in his films without actually becoming an outlaw — and he’s certainly good casting for the part, though one still regrets the 10-year ban on Dillinger as a movie subject imposed by the Production Code Administration after the real one was killed in 1934 because it cost us the putative Dillinger movie Warners could have made with the actor who was almost literally born to play the part, Humphrey Bogart. (I once read a biography of Dillinger by Ovid Demaris which featured a cover photo that looked astonishingly like Bogart — though the resemblance between the two wasn’t as great by the time Dillinger died because he’d had a bad plastic surgery job and the leftover scars were clearly visible in the photos of his corpse — and in any case it was Bogart’s resemblance to Dillinger that launched his career: it won Bogart the Dillingeresque role of Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest on both stage and film, and the part made him a star.)
Needless to say, Yordan’s script has only a bare resemblance to the facts of Dillinger’s life; though like the real one, the movie Dillinger meets some ace bank robbers while in prison for a minor stick-up, joins their gang and ultimately takes it over, evades state and local cops throughout the Midwest only to be nabbed in Tucson, Arizona, gets sent back to jail in his native Indiana, escapes by using a wooden gun he made in his cell, is finally tracked down by the FBI and shot to death outside a movie theatre showing the 1934 MGM production Manhattan Melodrama (a gangster film — what else?). Dillinger has some of the usual Monogram tackiness — notably the Farmers’ Bank robbery sequence, which was lifted almost completely from Fritz Lang’s 1937 classic You Only Live Once (just a couple of crude cut-ins of Tierney and Cook serve to integrate it into the main action) and printed in a jumpy, off-sprocket fashion at that (a technical glitch I was hoping would have been addressed in this DVD transfer — it wasn’t, and the original trailer, included on the DVD, also included shots from this jumpily reproduced clip from another, greater film) — but it also has some surprisingly substantial sets, notably the prison interiors (though they may have just rented space at a major studio that had standing prison sets already), a quite good cast and a relatively literate script.
Where it falls short of the film it could have been is in the pace — the movie has some individually exciting moments but just sort of rambles on between them, and one misses the sheer energy with which Warners would have staged this script — but I still found myself liking it a good deal better than I had before. The excellent DVD transfer helps a lot — for the first time I got to see this in a print that did full justice to Jackson Rose’s chiaroscuro cinematography — and among the good points are Anne Jeffreys, an unjustly neglected actress who plays a (fictitious) girlfriend of Dillinger’s who ultimately becomes the fabled “Lady in Red” who set him up to be killed by the FBI; she manages to capture the emotional tumult inside this basically decent person who finds herself irresistibly attracted to a kill-crazy thug. The supporting cast in general live up to their reputations, though Dillinger’s relationship with Kirk Otto (Elisha Cook, Jr.) is pretty straightforward and doesn’t have the deliciously homoerotic aspects of their subsequent teaming in the otherwise disappointing Born to Kill. Edmund Lowe is particularly good as Specs Green, the expert who’s Dillinger’s cellmate and teaches him all he needs to know about bank robbery (though Dillinger never thinks to ask him, “Hey, if you’re so good at it, what are you doing here in prison with me?”) and tells him, “Never kill somebody except for a reason” — advice Dillinger, of course, ignores.
Needless to say, a lot of the potentially fascinating angles that could be taken on Dillinger aren’t followed up in this movie — there’s only a hint of the media frenzy around him (though there’s an early establishing shot of Dillinger and a date at a movie theatre where the featured attraction is Dillinger’s actual father, hosting a newsreel about him); there’s nothing about the clash between local law enforcement and the FBI (when I read Toland’s The Dillinger Days I remember thinking that the movie I’d like to have seen made from it would have been called Dillinger and Leach — Leach being Matt Leach, head of the Indiana State Police, who became personally obsessed with Dillinger and, after the FBI took over the manhunt for him, got so paranoid about Hoover’s G-men that he actually urged Indianians not to cooperate with FBI agents),and I also fear that the release of the Public Enemies movie may have discouraged Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City — the marvelous book that combined the story of a real-life Chicago serial killer, H. H. Holmes, with the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair — from doing the obvious follow-up: a conflation of Dillinger’s story with that of the 1933-34 Century of Progress Exposition, also in Chicago, which Dillinger actually attended frequently.
The 1945 Dillinger was made at the height of the film noir era and is sometimes referred to as a noir (though The Film Noir Encyclopedia doesn’t list it), but it doesn’t really have the moral ambiguity needed for noir and, despite the credit to a French director, only one sequence — Dillinger alone in a cheap hotel room shortly before his death, lonely, miserable and frustrated despite the amount of money he’s stolen and the public assumption that he’s living the high life — even looks like a scene from a French thriller, Nonetheless, the 1945 Dillinger is a quite competent movie and Tierney plays the part as well as anyone except Bogart could have at the time — and it helped producers Frank and Maurice King and screenwriter Yordan achieve major-studio careers. — 7/16/09
I watched a movie I’d actually videotaped earlier: Dillinger, the 1945 Monogram version with Lawrence Tierney in the title role and Anne Jeffreys as his girlfriend (they meet when he holds up the movie theatre at which she’s working in the box office, and she gets him off the hook when she gets such a bad case of the hots for him that she backs off the positive identification she had made of him earlier — happens all the time, at least in Hollywood’s version of the criminal life). Surprisingly, the film had some major names attached to it: Dimitri Tiomkin did the music (not that it sounded all that much better than the dreary library-stock music Monogram usually used) and the director was Max Nosseck, a refugee who’d had a major reputation in France as a director of slow, moody thrillers.
Unfortunately, any attempts at atmosphere or style Nosseck may have been tempted to try for were lost in the unrelenting cheapness and tackiness of Monogram’s production, with its liberal use of clips from other movies — not only did they copy one entire robbery out of Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once eight years before, they printed the stock footage so that the frame jumped as it ran — and its flat, clear photography (only one scene — showing Dillinger hiding out, just before his death — has that kind of shadowy, maudit quality Nosseck and the other 1930’s French thriller directors so loved) undermines any attempt to make this more than a gangster potboiler with an imposing name in the title.
A pity this microbudget production wastes not only a good story but a good cast (Elisha Cook, Jr. and Eduardo Ciannelli are especially effective in supporting roles) — a pity, too, that the Production Code people flatly prohibited the studios from making a Dillinger movie for a full decade after he was killed by FBI agents in 1934; one can only dream of what kind of a movie Warners might have been able to make of the Dillinger story in the late 1930’s when the actor who so strongly resembled Dillinger that his entire early career in films was built on the resemblance — Humphrey Bogart — was still available for this sort of thing (not that Lawrence Tierney was bad — actually his portrayal was good, though his career proved limited because all he could be was a tough guy, whereas Bogart could have sounded more depths in the role). — 1/16/98
•••••
The film I picked out was Dillinger, the 1945 Monogram version (there’ve been at least two “open” Dillinger biopics since: a 1973 version directed by John Milius with Warren Oates as star, and the currently in-release Public Enemies, directed by Michael Mann and starring Johnny Depp). I just got this from the Columbia House DVD Club along with two recent movies that have been on my want-to-see list, The International and Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, and almost certainly Warners, the current holders of the Monogram catalog (at least those parts of it that haven’t lapsed into the public domain), reissued it on DVD now to take advantage of any interest in John Dillinger among moviegoers from the promotion of Public Enemies.
Incidentally, everyone in this movie pronounces “Dillinger” with a soft “g,” which according to biographer John Toland (whose book The Dillinger Days would have made an excellent basis for a Dillinger movie, though the film it did inspire wasn’t about him at all; Toland periodically cut in the stories of other notorious gangsters of the period, and his descriptions of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow inspired the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde) was wrong: the Dillingers were descendants of German immigrants and pronounced the name German-style, with a hard “g.”
I’d seen the 1945 Dillinger before and not been especially impressed, even though it was clearly reaching beyond the usual Monogram tackiness: the director was French émigré Max Nosseck, the writer was Philip Yordan (who actually achieved an Academy Award nomination!), there was an original music score by Dimitri Tiomkin (though it wasn’t recorded especially well and ended up sounding much like the usual Monogram sludge anyway) and the supporting characters included Edmund Lowe, Eduardo Ciannelli (whose role here as one of Dillinger’s henchmen must have had him looking nostalgically back on the days when, as a Lucky Luciano-based character in Warners’ Marked Woman, he had run the entire underworld in New York City!) and Elisha Cook, Jr.
Dillinger was played by Lawrence Tierney, who gets an “introducing” credit here and was apparently as tough off screen as on — he got into a lot of real-life fights and other embarrassing situations, behaving as much as possible like the tough guy he played in his films without actually becoming an outlaw — and he’s certainly good casting for the part, though one still regrets the 10-year ban on Dillinger as a movie subject imposed by the Production Code Administration after the real one was killed in 1934 because it cost us the putative Dillinger movie Warners could have made with the actor who was almost literally born to play the part, Humphrey Bogart. (I once read a biography of Dillinger by Ovid Demaris which featured a cover photo that looked astonishingly like Bogart — though the resemblance between the two wasn’t as great by the time Dillinger died because he’d had a bad plastic surgery job and the leftover scars were clearly visible in the photos of his corpse — and in any case it was Bogart’s resemblance to Dillinger that launched his career: it won Bogart the Dillingeresque role of Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest on both stage and film, and the part made him a star.)
Needless to say, Yordan’s script has only a bare resemblance to the facts of Dillinger’s life; though like the real one, the movie Dillinger meets some ace bank robbers while in prison for a minor stick-up, joins their gang and ultimately takes it over, evades state and local cops throughout the Midwest only to be nabbed in Tucson, Arizona, gets sent back to jail in his native Indiana, escapes by using a wooden gun he made in his cell, is finally tracked down by the FBI and shot to death outside a movie theatre showing the 1934 MGM production Manhattan Melodrama (a gangster film — what else?). Dillinger has some of the usual Monogram tackiness — notably the Farmers’ Bank robbery sequence, which was lifted almost completely from Fritz Lang’s 1937 classic You Only Live Once (just a couple of crude cut-ins of Tierney and Cook serve to integrate it into the main action) and printed in a jumpy, off-sprocket fashion at that (a technical glitch I was hoping would have been addressed in this DVD transfer — it wasn’t, and the original trailer, included on the DVD, also included shots from this jumpily reproduced clip from another, greater film) — but it also has some surprisingly substantial sets, notably the prison interiors (though they may have just rented space at a major studio that had standing prison sets already), a quite good cast and a relatively literate script.
Where it falls short of the film it could have been is in the pace — the movie has some individually exciting moments but just sort of rambles on between them, and one misses the sheer energy with which Warners would have staged this script — but I still found myself liking it a good deal better than I had before. The excellent DVD transfer helps a lot — for the first time I got to see this in a print that did full justice to Jackson Rose’s chiaroscuro cinematography — and among the good points are Anne Jeffreys, an unjustly neglected actress who plays a (fictitious) girlfriend of Dillinger’s who ultimately becomes the fabled “Lady in Red” who set him up to be killed by the FBI; she manages to capture the emotional tumult inside this basically decent person who finds herself irresistibly attracted to a kill-crazy thug. The supporting cast in general live up to their reputations, though Dillinger’s relationship with Kirk Otto (Elisha Cook, Jr.) is pretty straightforward and doesn’t have the deliciously homoerotic aspects of their subsequent teaming in the otherwise disappointing Born to Kill. Edmund Lowe is particularly good as Specs Green, the expert who’s Dillinger’s cellmate and teaches him all he needs to know about bank robbery (though Dillinger never thinks to ask him, “Hey, if you’re so good at it, what are you doing here in prison with me?”) and tells him, “Never kill somebody except for a reason” — advice Dillinger, of course, ignores.
Needless to say, a lot of the potentially fascinating angles that could be taken on Dillinger aren’t followed up in this movie — there’s only a hint of the media frenzy around him (though there’s an early establishing shot of Dillinger and a date at a movie theatre where the featured attraction is Dillinger’s actual father, hosting a newsreel about him); there’s nothing about the clash between local law enforcement and the FBI (when I read Toland’s The Dillinger Days I remember thinking that the movie I’d like to have seen made from it would have been called Dillinger and Leach — Leach being Matt Leach, head of the Indiana State Police, who became personally obsessed with Dillinger and, after the FBI took over the manhunt for him, got so paranoid about Hoover’s G-men that he actually urged Indianians not to cooperate with FBI agents),and I also fear that the release of the Public Enemies movie may have discouraged Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City — the marvelous book that combined the story of a real-life Chicago serial killer, H. H. Holmes, with the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair — from doing the obvious follow-up: a conflation of Dillinger’s story with that of the 1933-34 Century of Progress Exposition, also in Chicago, which Dillinger actually attended frequently.
The 1945 Dillinger was made at the height of the film noir era and is sometimes referred to as a noir (though The Film Noir Encyclopedia doesn’t list it), but it doesn’t really have the moral ambiguity needed for noir and, despite the credit to a French director, only one sequence — Dillinger alone in a cheap hotel room shortly before his death, lonely, miserable and frustrated despite the amount of money he’s stolen and the public assumption that he’s living the high life — even looks like a scene from a French thriller, Nonetheless, the 1945 Dillinger is a quite competent movie and Tierney plays the part as well as anyone except Bogart could have at the time — and it helped producers Frank and Maurice King and screenwriter Yordan achieve major-studio careers. — 7/16/09
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
The Invisible Ghost (Banner/Monogram, 1941)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I picked the film The Invisible Ghost — a 1941 Monogram vehicle for Bela Lugosi — mainly because Joseph H. Lewis was the director and after having watched My Name Is Julia Ross, Lewis’s “breakthrough” film from Columbia four years later, I thought it would be fun to see Lewis’s eye for artistic compositions and instinct for using them to liven up a rather silly movie up against the demented stupidity of one of Sam Katzman’s Banner Productions, released through Monogram. The Invisible Ghost was the first film Lugosi made for Katzman (earlier Lugosi had made The Mysterious Mr. Wong for the first iteration of Monogram in 1935, but that was not one of the studio’s most distinguished pictures, a Mask of Fu Manchu knockoff in which Lugosi played a Chinese madman obsessed with collecting the 12 coins of Confucius and thereby establishing himself as the ruler of the Chinese province of Keelat) and its script was by Helen and Al Martin.
I presume the Martins were a married couple (though they could have been brother and sister — imdb.com lists Al Martin but doesn’t mention either a wife or a sister in the business, and doesn’t list this particular Helen Martin at all) — later Al would write, solo, a better horror vehicle which Lewis directed at Universal, The Mad Doctor of Market Street — and on this occasion they came forth with a potentially interesting plot premise: Charles Kessler (Lugosi) mourns the death of his wife (former silent-screen star Betty Compson), to the point that not only is his living room dominated by a Laura-style portrait of her but every year, on the evening of their wedding anniversary, he has his manservant Evans (Clarence Muse, who though he’s playing a Black servant gets to portray a genuinely dignified, actually intelligent character with none of the eye-rolling stupidity of Stepin Fetchit or Willie Best) serve a dinner for both of them, presenting “her” portion to an empty chair which he addresses as if she were still alive.
Only she is still alive; she supposedly died in a car crash while running off with her lover (“the usual best friend,” Lugosi explains to his daughter’s boyfriend, in a low-keyed line reading that’s not at all the kind of acting we expect from him), but in fact she survived, badly scarred (at least that’s what the script tells us; it looks like all she needs is a comb-over and some fresh makeup) and unwilling to present herself to her husband in her current state for fear he’d reject her. She hides out in the basement of the estate (later reused by Monogram as the basement of Lugosi’s mission in Bowery at Midnight), where she’s fed and looked after by Kessler’s gardener, Jules (Ernie Adams) — only periodically she slips out and appears at Kessler’s window, hypnotizing him into murdering the first available victim, which means he spends most of the movie knocking off his own household staff.
This being a Monogram movie, the police never even bother to suspect Kessler despite all of the victims having been on his payroll; instead, when Cecile (Terry Walker), a former girlfriend of Kessler’s daughter’s boyfriend Ralph Dickson (John McGuire), hires on as Kessler’s new maid and is promptly found dead — strangled, like all the other victims, with a long black robe (yet another attempt in a Lugosi movie to tap the Dracula imagery even though this film has nothing to do with vampirism) so there are no fingerprints on her — the cops nail Ralph for it and he’s arrested, sentenced to death and actually executed. Only it turns out Ralph had a brother, Paul (also played by John McGuire), who shows up to investigate the crimes himself and see if he can exonerate the dead Ralph (a little late, don’t you think?) — a gimmick that had been used in a previous Lugosi film, Murder by Television, in which it was Lugosi’s character who was killed midway through and replaced by a lookalike “brother” whom he also played.
Kessler gets hypnotized three more times, knocking off Jules and nearly killing his daughter Virginia (Polly Ann Young) — she’s saved by a bolt of lightning that de-hypnotizes him and snaps him to his usual moral state — and on the fourth go-round he tries to kill Evans before his wife actually appears on the scene, then collapses and dies, and in the end Kessler is taken into custody by the police. There are a few elements of this script that don’t follow the usual trend of a Lugosi vehicle — he’s the hypnotism victim instead of the hypnotizer, and at the end he’s actually arrested instead of killed (the number of films in which Bela Lugosi’s character didn’t die is about the same as the number of films John Wayne made in which he did die) — but for the most part The Invisible Ghost is the usual malarkey Lugosi got saddled with after Universal let him go.
As for Lewis, he tries — he really tries — to enliven this stupid story with creative visuals; the man who brought along a collection of wagon wheels to the set of his “B” Westerns and shot through them to give scenes visual distinction not surprisingly looks for similar devices in a modern-dress setting, and he finds them. Much of the exposition is shot with the camera pointing out through the Kessler fireplace, with the action framed by licking flames and air currents that, like the wagon wheels in Lewis’s Westerns, distract us from how silly the dialogue is; and Compson’s last two appearances as Lugosi’s (unwitting) hypnotist both take place in driving rain, anticipating the rainstorm that began My Name Is Julia Ross. “Unlike the typical Monogram hack who viewed the studio only as a last stop,” Tom Weaver writes in his book Poverty Row Horrors!, “Lewis looked on it as only a First Step, and he loads the film with mildly interesting camera moves, lighting effects, editing tricks and the like. … The camera, often immobile in low-budget pictures, dollies and swoops around regularly, and there are many high- and low-angle shots; it even passes through walls as characters troop from one room to another.”
Weaver also notes the sequences that are shot in mirrors (many creative directors, including Orson Welles and Douglas Sirk, were fascinated with mirrors) and the creativity with which Lewis and his cinematographers, Marcel Le Picard and Harvey Gould, shoot the first meeting between Mr. and Mrs. Kessler — though the scene’s power gets vitiated when it’s repeated again and again, almost identically, whenever the script calls for her to hypnotize him (a typical trick at ultra-cheap studios like Monogram, where it probably was the identical footage each time!). The Invisible Ghost is a silly movie — why this script got a talented and visually imaginative director like Lewis while the far superior Bowery at Midnight, with which Lewis could have had a field day, got stuck with hack director Wallace Fox is a mystery. Weaver notes that The Invisible Ghost is a particular favorite of Lugosi fans because he got to play a character who was (mostly) kindly and paternal — though the gimmick of the serial killer who’s an ultra-nice guy when he isn’t actually killing was pulled far, far better by Edgar G. Ulmer and Pierre Gendron in PRC’s 1944 Bluebeard — but it’s of interest, if at all, only for Lewis’s visually stunning direction and his ability to make a classy-looking film even with a penny-pinching budget, a quickie schedule, a cheesy script and only two genuinely good actors, Lugosi and Compson.
I picked the film The Invisible Ghost — a 1941 Monogram vehicle for Bela Lugosi — mainly because Joseph H. Lewis was the director and after having watched My Name Is Julia Ross, Lewis’s “breakthrough” film from Columbia four years later, I thought it would be fun to see Lewis’s eye for artistic compositions and instinct for using them to liven up a rather silly movie up against the demented stupidity of one of Sam Katzman’s Banner Productions, released through Monogram. The Invisible Ghost was the first film Lugosi made for Katzman (earlier Lugosi had made The Mysterious Mr. Wong for the first iteration of Monogram in 1935, but that was not one of the studio’s most distinguished pictures, a Mask of Fu Manchu knockoff in which Lugosi played a Chinese madman obsessed with collecting the 12 coins of Confucius and thereby establishing himself as the ruler of the Chinese province of Keelat) and its script was by Helen and Al Martin.
I presume the Martins were a married couple (though they could have been brother and sister — imdb.com lists Al Martin but doesn’t mention either a wife or a sister in the business, and doesn’t list this particular Helen Martin at all) — later Al would write, solo, a better horror vehicle which Lewis directed at Universal, The Mad Doctor of Market Street — and on this occasion they came forth with a potentially interesting plot premise: Charles Kessler (Lugosi) mourns the death of his wife (former silent-screen star Betty Compson), to the point that not only is his living room dominated by a Laura-style portrait of her but every year, on the evening of their wedding anniversary, he has his manservant Evans (Clarence Muse, who though he’s playing a Black servant gets to portray a genuinely dignified, actually intelligent character with none of the eye-rolling stupidity of Stepin Fetchit or Willie Best) serve a dinner for both of them, presenting “her” portion to an empty chair which he addresses as if she were still alive.
Only she is still alive; she supposedly died in a car crash while running off with her lover (“the usual best friend,” Lugosi explains to his daughter’s boyfriend, in a low-keyed line reading that’s not at all the kind of acting we expect from him), but in fact she survived, badly scarred (at least that’s what the script tells us; it looks like all she needs is a comb-over and some fresh makeup) and unwilling to present herself to her husband in her current state for fear he’d reject her. She hides out in the basement of the estate (later reused by Monogram as the basement of Lugosi’s mission in Bowery at Midnight), where she’s fed and looked after by Kessler’s gardener, Jules (Ernie Adams) — only periodically she slips out and appears at Kessler’s window, hypnotizing him into murdering the first available victim, which means he spends most of the movie knocking off his own household staff.
This being a Monogram movie, the police never even bother to suspect Kessler despite all of the victims having been on his payroll; instead, when Cecile (Terry Walker), a former girlfriend of Kessler’s daughter’s boyfriend Ralph Dickson (John McGuire), hires on as Kessler’s new maid and is promptly found dead — strangled, like all the other victims, with a long black robe (yet another attempt in a Lugosi movie to tap the Dracula imagery even though this film has nothing to do with vampirism) so there are no fingerprints on her — the cops nail Ralph for it and he’s arrested, sentenced to death and actually executed. Only it turns out Ralph had a brother, Paul (also played by John McGuire), who shows up to investigate the crimes himself and see if he can exonerate the dead Ralph (a little late, don’t you think?) — a gimmick that had been used in a previous Lugosi film, Murder by Television, in which it was Lugosi’s character who was killed midway through and replaced by a lookalike “brother” whom he also played.
Kessler gets hypnotized three more times, knocking off Jules and nearly killing his daughter Virginia (Polly Ann Young) — she’s saved by a bolt of lightning that de-hypnotizes him and snaps him to his usual moral state — and on the fourth go-round he tries to kill Evans before his wife actually appears on the scene, then collapses and dies, and in the end Kessler is taken into custody by the police. There are a few elements of this script that don’t follow the usual trend of a Lugosi vehicle — he’s the hypnotism victim instead of the hypnotizer, and at the end he’s actually arrested instead of killed (the number of films in which Bela Lugosi’s character didn’t die is about the same as the number of films John Wayne made in which he did die) — but for the most part The Invisible Ghost is the usual malarkey Lugosi got saddled with after Universal let him go.
As for Lewis, he tries — he really tries — to enliven this stupid story with creative visuals; the man who brought along a collection of wagon wheels to the set of his “B” Westerns and shot through them to give scenes visual distinction not surprisingly looks for similar devices in a modern-dress setting, and he finds them. Much of the exposition is shot with the camera pointing out through the Kessler fireplace, with the action framed by licking flames and air currents that, like the wagon wheels in Lewis’s Westerns, distract us from how silly the dialogue is; and Compson’s last two appearances as Lugosi’s (unwitting) hypnotist both take place in driving rain, anticipating the rainstorm that began My Name Is Julia Ross. “Unlike the typical Monogram hack who viewed the studio only as a last stop,” Tom Weaver writes in his book Poverty Row Horrors!, “Lewis looked on it as only a First Step, and he loads the film with mildly interesting camera moves, lighting effects, editing tricks and the like. … The camera, often immobile in low-budget pictures, dollies and swoops around regularly, and there are many high- and low-angle shots; it even passes through walls as characters troop from one room to another.”
Weaver also notes the sequences that are shot in mirrors (many creative directors, including Orson Welles and Douglas Sirk, were fascinated with mirrors) and the creativity with which Lewis and his cinematographers, Marcel Le Picard and Harvey Gould, shoot the first meeting between Mr. and Mrs. Kessler — though the scene’s power gets vitiated when it’s repeated again and again, almost identically, whenever the script calls for her to hypnotize him (a typical trick at ultra-cheap studios like Monogram, where it probably was the identical footage each time!). The Invisible Ghost is a silly movie — why this script got a talented and visually imaginative director like Lewis while the far superior Bowery at Midnight, with which Lewis could have had a field day, got stuck with hack director Wallace Fox is a mystery. Weaver notes that The Invisible Ghost is a particular favorite of Lugosi fans because he got to play a character who was (mostly) kindly and paternal — though the gimmick of the serial killer who’s an ultra-nice guy when he isn’t actually killing was pulled far, far better by Edgar G. Ulmer and Pierre Gendron in PRC’s 1944 Bluebeard — but it’s of interest, if at all, only for Lewis’s visually stunning direction and his ability to make a classy-looking film even with a penny-pinching budget, a quickie schedule, a cheesy script and only two genuinely good actors, Lugosi and Compson.
Natalee Holloway (Sony/Lifetime, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The show I watched this morning was Natalee Holloway, a Lifetime made-for-TV movie based upon the real case — the disappearance of a high-school girl from Mississippi with a pretentiously misspelled name on a vacation to Aruba, which previously I’d heard of only in the title of an Andrew Holleran novel, Nights in Aruba, which I’d never read. I hadn’t realized until the Natalee Holloway story broke (I hate to admit it, but the pretentious spelling of her first name always rankled me — if “Natalie” was good enough for Ms. Wood, why wasn’t it good enough for Mrs. Holloway, who by the time of her daughter’s disappearance had long since divorced Natalee’s dad and married a guy named Twitty?) that Aruba was actually a Dutch colony. One doesn’t expect to find colonies anywhere in the world in the 21st century, and indeed it turns out that at least according to this movie (scripted by one Teena Booth from Beth Holloway-Twitty’s own memoir) part of the problem was that the local Aruban authorities ran the police department but it was under the authority of the overall government, which was Dutch.
In case someone has been resting in tabloid-free heaven for the last five years and missed it all, the story was that Natalee and a bunch of her friends decided to celebrate their graduation from high school with a vacation in Aruba, and like all stupid teenage girls (and quite a few stupid older women as well!) in Lifetime movies, they got drunk, partied, either lost their virginity with some of the locals or came close to doing so (the fact that a lot of real high-school girls have sex before they graduate seems to have been lost on Ms. Booth — or maybe on Mrs. Twitty née Holloway, for that matter) and went home somewhat the worse for wear, except for Natalee who never got home at all. She simply disappeared — the last her friend Hayley (Natasha Loring) saw Natalee (Amy Gumenick, who’s seen throughout the movie in various flashbacks dramatizing the differing accounts of what happened to her — and who can’t be credited with either a good or a bad performance since all that was required of her was to play an airhead and then a victim), she had got in a car with three strange men and driven off with them under the mistaken idea that they were going to drive her back to her hotel.
Instead they took her to the beach and either let her pass out there or gave her a drug, whereupon they either had sex with her (consensually or otherwise) or they didn’t, and either killed her or left her to die or left her alive. It can’t have been easy for either writer Booth or director Mikael Salomon (which gives him at least one thing in common with his title character: a pretentiously spelled first name!) to make a movie about a story this open-ended, in which nobody really knows for sure quite what happened (“Somebody knows the truth,” ran the advertising copy for this film, but it sure wasn’t the filmmakers themselves!), but it didn’t help that they made most of the characters such ninnies we didn’t really care what happened to them — and that included Natalee herself, who we were told was incredibly intelligent and wanted to be a doctor but comes off as such an idiot one ends up entertaining the dreadful idea that maybe it was a good thing she disappeared off the world before carrying on her sorry-ass airhead genes to another generation.
The film attempts to grapple with some of the interesting themes raised by the real story — the effects of the media (for both good and ill) on the search, the clash between American and Aruban values, the influence the prime suspect supposedly had to evade responsibility since his father was an Aruban judge (they relocated to the home country, the Netherlands, after he was more or less cleared by the Aruban authorities and freed to go) and the contrast between the sheer physical beauty of the setting and the horror of the events that took place there — but it doesn’t really do more than touch on them. (Needless to say, the filmmakers weren’t allowed anywhere near Aruba — and, rather than do their location work at another Caribbean island, they trekked all the way to Cape Town, South Africa, maybe so they could find Afrikaans-speaking whites to stand in for the Dutch-descended people on the real Aruba.) The accents are also a bit strange — especially the silly one used by Sean Higgs as the corpulent chief detective, Frank Sneider, which makes one wonder how a white person running a police force in a Dutch colony ends up with a Frito Bandito version of a Latino accent — but what makes this film almost worth watching in spite of the silliness, the incredibly unsympathetic characterizations and the fallback on Lifetime (and other people’s) clichés, is the powerful performance by Tracy Pollan as Beth.
An imdb.com comment by Michael Elliott dissed her acting, but I found her legitimately powerful, nailing each of her big emotional moments and showing the trauma of not only losing your daughter but not knowing for sure what happened to her and facing a wall of official indifference on one side and media exploitation on the other. (When Beth gets a false tip that Natalee is being held inside a crack house — we’re told that gangs in Aruba hold rich white tourists hostage, feed them drugs and keep them there until they’ve extracted their ATM cards and code numbers and drained their bank accounts — the media come along for the ride, and Beth’s fury at them for denying her a private moment with her daughter only gets worse when she finds she’s been fed a bum steer.) Whatever its defects in other respects, Booth’s script gives Beth a series of intense scenes — when she finds a private place to pray just so she can feel God’s presence; when she confronts one of the principal suspects at the copy store where he works and says she’ll be bringing in a photo of Natalee every day until he comes clean about her disappearance and his role in it; later, back home, when the stresses of Natalee’s disappearance break up her marriage and leave Natalee’s younger brother Matt (Kai Coetzee) traumatized; and the final sequence in which a Dutch crime reporter entraps the lead suspect, Joran Van Der Sloot (Jacques Strydom) into a videotaped confession by sending a staff member to pose as a potential partner in a drug-dealing enterprise and film him inside an SUV with hidden cameras (at least two hidden cameras, since director Salomon and film editor Sidney Wolinsky do conventional shot-reverse shot editing in the confession scene) and then shows it to Beth on live TV in Amsterdam — later Joran repudiates the confession but Beth accepts it as true and finally gains (that horrible word!) “closure” — and Pollan plays them all to the hilt, making us forget she’s an actress and getting us to accept her as a grief-stricken mother desperately searching for the truth about her daughter.
Incidentally, there’s a rather ham-handed epilogue in which both Pollan and the real Beth Holloway-Twitty tell young Americans taking exotic vacations in foreign lands to plan out their evenings ahead of time and stick to their plans (the most jarringly dumb ending to a film since Thea von Harbou implored the parents in her audience to “watch your children” at the end of her then-husband Fritz Lang’s film M) — and (memo to Charles) the real Beth pronounces the “t” in “often.”
The show I watched this morning was Natalee Holloway, a Lifetime made-for-TV movie based upon the real case — the disappearance of a high-school girl from Mississippi with a pretentiously misspelled name on a vacation to Aruba, which previously I’d heard of only in the title of an Andrew Holleran novel, Nights in Aruba, which I’d never read. I hadn’t realized until the Natalee Holloway story broke (I hate to admit it, but the pretentious spelling of her first name always rankled me — if “Natalie” was good enough for Ms. Wood, why wasn’t it good enough for Mrs. Holloway, who by the time of her daughter’s disappearance had long since divorced Natalee’s dad and married a guy named Twitty?) that Aruba was actually a Dutch colony. One doesn’t expect to find colonies anywhere in the world in the 21st century, and indeed it turns out that at least according to this movie (scripted by one Teena Booth from Beth Holloway-Twitty’s own memoir) part of the problem was that the local Aruban authorities ran the police department but it was under the authority of the overall government, which was Dutch.
In case someone has been resting in tabloid-free heaven for the last five years and missed it all, the story was that Natalee and a bunch of her friends decided to celebrate their graduation from high school with a vacation in Aruba, and like all stupid teenage girls (and quite a few stupid older women as well!) in Lifetime movies, they got drunk, partied, either lost their virginity with some of the locals or came close to doing so (the fact that a lot of real high-school girls have sex before they graduate seems to have been lost on Ms. Booth — or maybe on Mrs. Twitty née Holloway, for that matter) and went home somewhat the worse for wear, except for Natalee who never got home at all. She simply disappeared — the last her friend Hayley (Natasha Loring) saw Natalee (Amy Gumenick, who’s seen throughout the movie in various flashbacks dramatizing the differing accounts of what happened to her — and who can’t be credited with either a good or a bad performance since all that was required of her was to play an airhead and then a victim), she had got in a car with three strange men and driven off with them under the mistaken idea that they were going to drive her back to her hotel.
Instead they took her to the beach and either let her pass out there or gave her a drug, whereupon they either had sex with her (consensually or otherwise) or they didn’t, and either killed her or left her to die or left her alive. It can’t have been easy for either writer Booth or director Mikael Salomon (which gives him at least one thing in common with his title character: a pretentiously spelled first name!) to make a movie about a story this open-ended, in which nobody really knows for sure quite what happened (“Somebody knows the truth,” ran the advertising copy for this film, but it sure wasn’t the filmmakers themselves!), but it didn’t help that they made most of the characters such ninnies we didn’t really care what happened to them — and that included Natalee herself, who we were told was incredibly intelligent and wanted to be a doctor but comes off as such an idiot one ends up entertaining the dreadful idea that maybe it was a good thing she disappeared off the world before carrying on her sorry-ass airhead genes to another generation.
The film attempts to grapple with some of the interesting themes raised by the real story — the effects of the media (for both good and ill) on the search, the clash between American and Aruban values, the influence the prime suspect supposedly had to evade responsibility since his father was an Aruban judge (they relocated to the home country, the Netherlands, after he was more or less cleared by the Aruban authorities and freed to go) and the contrast between the sheer physical beauty of the setting and the horror of the events that took place there — but it doesn’t really do more than touch on them. (Needless to say, the filmmakers weren’t allowed anywhere near Aruba — and, rather than do their location work at another Caribbean island, they trekked all the way to Cape Town, South Africa, maybe so they could find Afrikaans-speaking whites to stand in for the Dutch-descended people on the real Aruba.) The accents are also a bit strange — especially the silly one used by Sean Higgs as the corpulent chief detective, Frank Sneider, which makes one wonder how a white person running a police force in a Dutch colony ends up with a Frito Bandito version of a Latino accent — but what makes this film almost worth watching in spite of the silliness, the incredibly unsympathetic characterizations and the fallback on Lifetime (and other people’s) clichés, is the powerful performance by Tracy Pollan as Beth.
An imdb.com comment by Michael Elliott dissed her acting, but I found her legitimately powerful, nailing each of her big emotional moments and showing the trauma of not only losing your daughter but not knowing for sure what happened to her and facing a wall of official indifference on one side and media exploitation on the other. (When Beth gets a false tip that Natalee is being held inside a crack house — we’re told that gangs in Aruba hold rich white tourists hostage, feed them drugs and keep them there until they’ve extracted their ATM cards and code numbers and drained their bank accounts — the media come along for the ride, and Beth’s fury at them for denying her a private moment with her daughter only gets worse when she finds she’s been fed a bum steer.) Whatever its defects in other respects, Booth’s script gives Beth a series of intense scenes — when she finds a private place to pray just so she can feel God’s presence; when she confronts one of the principal suspects at the copy store where he works and says she’ll be bringing in a photo of Natalee every day until he comes clean about her disappearance and his role in it; later, back home, when the stresses of Natalee’s disappearance break up her marriage and leave Natalee’s younger brother Matt (Kai Coetzee) traumatized; and the final sequence in which a Dutch crime reporter entraps the lead suspect, Joran Van Der Sloot (Jacques Strydom) into a videotaped confession by sending a staff member to pose as a potential partner in a drug-dealing enterprise and film him inside an SUV with hidden cameras (at least two hidden cameras, since director Salomon and film editor Sidney Wolinsky do conventional shot-reverse shot editing in the confession scene) and then shows it to Beth on live TV in Amsterdam — later Joran repudiates the confession but Beth accepts it as true and finally gains (that horrible word!) “closure” — and Pollan plays them all to the hilt, making us forget she’s an actress and getting us to accept her as a grief-stricken mother desperately searching for the truth about her daughter.
Incidentally, there’s a rather ham-handed epilogue in which both Pollan and the real Beth Holloway-Twitty tell young Americans taking exotic vacations in foreign lands to plan out their evenings ahead of time and stick to their plans (the most jarringly dumb ending to a film since Thea von Harbou implored the parents in her audience to “watch your children” at the end of her then-husband Fritz Lang’s film M) — and (memo to Charles) the real Beth pronounces the “t” in “often.”
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
My Name Is Julia Ross (Columbia, 1945)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran My Name Is Julia Ross, a quite engaging Columbia “B” from director Joseph H. Lewis in 1945 that was one of those occasional “B”’s that stepped so far out of its class that it got “A” playing time on its own (despite a 64-minute running time and a cast of solidly talented actors who weren’t exactly stars of the day — Nina Foch, George Macready, Dame May Whitty) and helped launch Lewis’s career. Lewis had already worked his way up the Hollywood food chain from Monogram (several East Side Kids adventures and the Bela Lugosi vehicle The Invisible Ghost) to Universal (The Mad Doctor of Market Street) and now Columbia, but Bob Porfirio in The Film Noir Encyclopedia said My Name Is Julia Ross “is the film that Lewis likes to consider as the ‘real’ beginning of his career.” (The present tense is appropriate because The Film Noir Encyclopedia was first published in 1979, my edition (the third) is from 1992, and Lewis lived until August 30, 2000, when he died at the age of 97.)
When I first saw it in the 1970’s I noticed immediately its similarities to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story “The Copper Beeches,” since both deal with a young woman being hired for a live-in job by a sinister family living in the boondocks because of her resemblance to a now-deceased family member. The story began as the novel The Woman in Red by Anthony Gilbert (and the film was apparently shot with that as a working title even though no one is described as wearing red at any time in the film) and was adapted by Muriel Ray Bolton — and as great as Lewis’s work (with Burnett Guffey as cinematographer, he fills the movie with atmospheric shots and chiaroscuro lighting, as well as far more close-ups than were typical in a low-budget film) is, Bolton’s script also has a good deal to do with the quality of this film even though it didn’t break open her career the way it did his (she’d been a writer on the Aldrich family movies in the 1930’s — they were Paramount’s attempt to mount a series to compete with the Hardy series at MGM — and after a few more “B” credits she decamped to TV in the 1950’s, returning to My Name Is Julia Ross for a 1955 TV remake on Lux Video Theatre).
The story: Julia Ross (Nina Foch — incidentally I’d always pronounced her name as “Fohsh,” with a long “o,” but in Robert Osborne’s introduction he called her “Fawsh,” and since he probably knew her I’d take that as authoritative) is a young single woman living in London. Her only living relative is an aunt in America, and she’s just broken up with her fiancé Dennis Bruce (Roland Varno) because he’s left her to marry someone else. She’s also three weeks behind in her room rent to boarding-house owner Mrs. Mackie (Doris Lloyd), and, desperate for a job, she eagerly applies to an ad from the Allyson Employment Agency for a live-in position as secretary to dowager Mrs. Hughes (Dame May Whitty). Mrs. Hughes, her son Ralph (George Macready) and the hatchet-faced woman who’s in charge of the agency interview Julia and get her to swear that she has neither relatives nor “a young man” who would be interested in her and concerned about her fate, and on that condition Julia accepts her job and reports to work at a London address. The night before she takes the job, though, Dennis returns to her life — he didn’t marry the other woman after all and he wants to resume his relationship with Julia — but she says she’s already taken the job and so that would be impossible.
She goes to her employer’s presumed home in London, spends the day there (after using their advance to pay off her boarding-house bill — which the maid at the boarding-house attempts to steal!) and goes to sleep at the usual hour — and wakes up not in the same house, but in a seaside estate in Cornwall (“played” by Malibu, as usual in an American film about Britain). Gradually she realizes that she’s being forced to assume the identity of another woman — Ralph’s now-dead wife Marian — and her protestations that her name is Julia Ross are passed off as mental illness, the delusions of a woman who had just returned from an asylum. Eventually she (and we) learn that the real Marian is dead — killed by Ralph in a psychopathic rage and dumped in the ocean off one of the Cornwall cliffs — and Ralph and his mother have plotted to hire a girl who looked like Marian and drive her to suicide so they can pass off her body as Marian’s and escape legal responsibility for her death.
The film and its plotting clearly owe a lot to Conan Doyle (not only “The Copper Beeches” but also the gimmick of the phony business, designed solely to lure someone into a plot, which was used in “The Red-Headed League” and “The Stock-Broker’s Clerk”) and also to Alfred Hitchcock: the murder on the beach from Young and Innocent, the fish-out-of-water aspects of Rebecca (Lewis even cribs one of Hitchcock’s famous shots of the heroine confronted with the late wife’s initials on her hand mirror) and the gimmick in Suspicion (Hitchcock’s original draft of Suspicion, anyway) of having the heroine trick the husband who intends to do her in into mailing a letter that will expose his plot.
At the same time My Name Is Julia Ross anticipates gimmicks in Hitchcock films yet to come: our roommate noted the similarities to Vertigo (a rich man recruits a young woman to participate in a plot to cover up his murder of his wife) and I picked up on the Strangers on a Train-ish aspect of the psycho’s mother covering for him. My Name is Julia Ross is vividly directed — Lewis’s and Guffey’s noir atmospherics brilliantly depict the almost Kafka-esque plight the story puts its heroine through — and marvelously cast. Foch and Macready had been teamed before, including the first of Columbia’s three films based on the radio show I Love a Mystery, but here they get roles worthy of their talents: Foch starts the film looking a bit like the young Dietrich, but as the plot gets more intense she loses any sense of reserve and leaves us in suspense (as Ingrid Bergman did in George Cukor’s Gaslight) whether she’ll genuinely lose her sanity before the plot to drive her crazy can be exposed; and Macready plays the psycho husband in a low-keyed way that anticipates the performances Alfred Hitchcock got out of Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train and Anthony Perkins in Psycho and is a far cry from the scenery-chewing Macready got away with in films with more prestigious directors like Charles Vidor and Stanley Kubrick.
But I suspect the reason My Name Is Julia Ross launched Lewis’s career is that it was the first time he got to work with a genuinely strong story, a plot that for all its far-fetched aspects at least made sense and gave him and his cast members real emotions to grab onto instead of the charades of stylishly directed nonsense most of Lewis’s previous films had been. (Lewis was aware of how dreadful his earlier scripts had been; at Universal he was nicknamed “Wagon-Wheel Joe” because when he was shooting “B” Westerns and he came upon a passage of particularly lousy dialogue, he would go to his wagon-wheel collection — he had several, of different sizes — and put one on the set and aim the camera through it, thereby creating an “artistic” effect and distracting the audience from the awfulness of what the actors were saying.) On a tiny budget and with a cast of talented unknowns who were boosted to stardom from this movie (well, the two leads were, at least), My Name Is Julia Ross offers some of the same intensity as Rebecca and Gaslight and deserves its enduring reputation as a “B” that stepped up from its class and rated “A” playing time.
I ran My Name Is Julia Ross, a quite engaging Columbia “B” from director Joseph H. Lewis in 1945 that was one of those occasional “B”’s that stepped so far out of its class that it got “A” playing time on its own (despite a 64-minute running time and a cast of solidly talented actors who weren’t exactly stars of the day — Nina Foch, George Macready, Dame May Whitty) and helped launch Lewis’s career. Lewis had already worked his way up the Hollywood food chain from Monogram (several East Side Kids adventures and the Bela Lugosi vehicle The Invisible Ghost) to Universal (The Mad Doctor of Market Street) and now Columbia, but Bob Porfirio in The Film Noir Encyclopedia said My Name Is Julia Ross “is the film that Lewis likes to consider as the ‘real’ beginning of his career.” (The present tense is appropriate because The Film Noir Encyclopedia was first published in 1979, my edition (the third) is from 1992, and Lewis lived until August 30, 2000, when he died at the age of 97.)
When I first saw it in the 1970’s I noticed immediately its similarities to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story “The Copper Beeches,” since both deal with a young woman being hired for a live-in job by a sinister family living in the boondocks because of her resemblance to a now-deceased family member. The story began as the novel The Woman in Red by Anthony Gilbert (and the film was apparently shot with that as a working title even though no one is described as wearing red at any time in the film) and was adapted by Muriel Ray Bolton — and as great as Lewis’s work (with Burnett Guffey as cinematographer, he fills the movie with atmospheric shots and chiaroscuro lighting, as well as far more close-ups than were typical in a low-budget film) is, Bolton’s script also has a good deal to do with the quality of this film even though it didn’t break open her career the way it did his (she’d been a writer on the Aldrich family movies in the 1930’s — they were Paramount’s attempt to mount a series to compete with the Hardy series at MGM — and after a few more “B” credits she decamped to TV in the 1950’s, returning to My Name Is Julia Ross for a 1955 TV remake on Lux Video Theatre).
The story: Julia Ross (Nina Foch — incidentally I’d always pronounced her name as “Fohsh,” with a long “o,” but in Robert Osborne’s introduction he called her “Fawsh,” and since he probably knew her I’d take that as authoritative) is a young single woman living in London. Her only living relative is an aunt in America, and she’s just broken up with her fiancé Dennis Bruce (Roland Varno) because he’s left her to marry someone else. She’s also three weeks behind in her room rent to boarding-house owner Mrs. Mackie (Doris Lloyd), and, desperate for a job, she eagerly applies to an ad from the Allyson Employment Agency for a live-in position as secretary to dowager Mrs. Hughes (Dame May Whitty). Mrs. Hughes, her son Ralph (George Macready) and the hatchet-faced woman who’s in charge of the agency interview Julia and get her to swear that she has neither relatives nor “a young man” who would be interested in her and concerned about her fate, and on that condition Julia accepts her job and reports to work at a London address. The night before she takes the job, though, Dennis returns to her life — he didn’t marry the other woman after all and he wants to resume his relationship with Julia — but she says she’s already taken the job and so that would be impossible.
She goes to her employer’s presumed home in London, spends the day there (after using their advance to pay off her boarding-house bill — which the maid at the boarding-house attempts to steal!) and goes to sleep at the usual hour — and wakes up not in the same house, but in a seaside estate in Cornwall (“played” by Malibu, as usual in an American film about Britain). Gradually she realizes that she’s being forced to assume the identity of another woman — Ralph’s now-dead wife Marian — and her protestations that her name is Julia Ross are passed off as mental illness, the delusions of a woman who had just returned from an asylum. Eventually she (and we) learn that the real Marian is dead — killed by Ralph in a psychopathic rage and dumped in the ocean off one of the Cornwall cliffs — and Ralph and his mother have plotted to hire a girl who looked like Marian and drive her to suicide so they can pass off her body as Marian’s and escape legal responsibility for her death.
The film and its plotting clearly owe a lot to Conan Doyle (not only “The Copper Beeches” but also the gimmick of the phony business, designed solely to lure someone into a plot, which was used in “The Red-Headed League” and “The Stock-Broker’s Clerk”) and also to Alfred Hitchcock: the murder on the beach from Young and Innocent, the fish-out-of-water aspects of Rebecca (Lewis even cribs one of Hitchcock’s famous shots of the heroine confronted with the late wife’s initials on her hand mirror) and the gimmick in Suspicion (Hitchcock’s original draft of Suspicion, anyway) of having the heroine trick the husband who intends to do her in into mailing a letter that will expose his plot.
At the same time My Name Is Julia Ross anticipates gimmicks in Hitchcock films yet to come: our roommate noted the similarities to Vertigo (a rich man recruits a young woman to participate in a plot to cover up his murder of his wife) and I picked up on the Strangers on a Train-ish aspect of the psycho’s mother covering for him. My Name is Julia Ross is vividly directed — Lewis’s and Guffey’s noir atmospherics brilliantly depict the almost Kafka-esque plight the story puts its heroine through — and marvelously cast. Foch and Macready had been teamed before, including the first of Columbia’s three films based on the radio show I Love a Mystery, but here they get roles worthy of their talents: Foch starts the film looking a bit like the young Dietrich, but as the plot gets more intense she loses any sense of reserve and leaves us in suspense (as Ingrid Bergman did in George Cukor’s Gaslight) whether she’ll genuinely lose her sanity before the plot to drive her crazy can be exposed; and Macready plays the psycho husband in a low-keyed way that anticipates the performances Alfred Hitchcock got out of Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train and Anthony Perkins in Psycho and is a far cry from the scenery-chewing Macready got away with in films with more prestigious directors like Charles Vidor and Stanley Kubrick.
But I suspect the reason My Name Is Julia Ross launched Lewis’s career is that it was the first time he got to work with a genuinely strong story, a plot that for all its far-fetched aspects at least made sense and gave him and his cast members real emotions to grab onto instead of the charades of stylishly directed nonsense most of Lewis’s previous films had been. (Lewis was aware of how dreadful his earlier scripts had been; at Universal he was nicknamed “Wagon-Wheel Joe” because when he was shooting “B” Westerns and he came upon a passage of particularly lousy dialogue, he would go to his wagon-wheel collection — he had several, of different sizes — and put one on the set and aim the camera through it, thereby creating an “artistic” effect and distracting the audience from the awfulness of what the actors were saying.) On a tiny budget and with a cast of talented unknowns who were boosted to stardom from this movie (well, the two leads were, at least), My Name Is Julia Ross offers some of the same intensity as Rebecca and Gaslight and deserves its enduring reputation as a “B” that stepped up from its class and rated “A” playing time.
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