How Christina and Nicole Spent their Weekend Vacation

This post is part of The Best Hitchcock Movies (That Hitchcock Never Made) Blogathon, running from July 7th through July 13th, 2012. On July 7th, please wish Sir Alfred Hitchcock's lovely and talented daughter Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell a very happy 84th Birthday!

Henri-Georges Clouzot, the director of French suspense films such as The Wages of Fear and Le Corbeau, premiered his 1955 thriller Diabolique in New York City at what was then The Fine Arts Theater. How ironic that this premiere was doubling as a benefit for the Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund, considering the moviegoers found themselves gasping for breath from terror!  Produced by Vera Films, named after Clouzot’s leading lady in real and reel life, Vera Clouzot (The Wages of Fear; Les Espions), Diabolique continues to haunt audiences not only because of its fear factor, but also for its moving characterizations and performances. Diabolique’s title translates variously as Les Diaboliques; The Fiends; and The Devils, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s one of cinema’s most suspenseful films in any language! (For those of us who don’t speak French, distributor Janus Films provided subtitles.)

You're witnessing a rare sight:
Christina DeLassalle smiling!

It’s been said that no less than Team Bartilucci’s favorite fearmeister Alfred Hitchcock was itching to get the rights to the source material, the French suspense novel She Was No More (Celle qui n'tait plus) by Pierre Boileau &  Thomas Narcejac, only to find Clouzot had just beaten Hitch to the punch. Either way, Hitchcock made darn sure he got the rights to another Boileau & Narcejac thriller pronto: D’Entre Les Morts, translated as From Among the Dead—or as Hitchcock and company more intriguingly titled it, Vertigo. In any case, for Diabolique, director Clouzot worked with co-writers René Masson, Frédéric Grendel, and Jérôme Géronimi to adapt Diabolique for the big screen.

Over Diabolique’s opening credits, there’s a tight close-up of already-brackish water, accompanied by a quote from French author Barbey D’Aurevilly, who specialized in tales of mystery and suspense exploring hidden motivations, hinting at evil without being explicitly concerned with anything supernatural:

“A painting is always quite moral when it is tragic, and it gives the horror of the things it depicts.”

D’Aurevilly is starting to sound like the French granddaddy of film noir to me! Heck, even Armand Thirard’s saturated black-and-white cinematography plunges us viewers into a sense of eerie foreboding without even trying. Just watching a lady walking with an open umbrella primed me to get ready to flee, or at least duck!

Our story begins at Institution DeLassalle—or as the subtitles I.D. it, DeLassalle Boarding School, which has clearly seen better days.  It’s bad enough that Headmaster Michel DeLassalle (Paul Meurisse of Army of Shadows; The Truth; Le deuxième soufflé) is sadistically cruel to his lovely but sickly wife, Christina (Ms. Clouzot), who has a serious heart condition. Michel’s idea of kindness and sympathy is to cruelly tease Christina about being a “cute little ruin.” But Michel doesn’t stop there; he even mistreats his mistress and fellow teacher Nicole Horner (Simone Signoret, Oscar-winner for Room at the Top and nominee for Ship of Fools, among her other triumphs).  Indeed, when we first meet teachers Christina and Nicole, they’ve long since bonded over their mutual love-turned-hatred for Michel, to the amazement of the rest of the school’s mostly male staff. On top of that, Christina is paying for the school in every sense; she’s not only footing the bills (it’s clear Michel married Christina for her money), but she’s also paying in emotional abuse, including her sorrow for the way the schoolboys have to eat lousy food, and how she has to beg for every little thing, as if she was some kind of servant instead of being the head of the school.  No wonder she and Nicole have joined forces to put Michel’s lights out—and we’re not talking about the school’s electric bills! The murder plot has poor Christina even more jittery than usual, since she’s a staunch Catholic, and she takes the whole “Thou shalt not kill” thing seriously.  (Sadly, those were the only three films Vera Clouzot made; ironically enough, it turned out that like the character she played in Diabolique, she really did have a weak heart, and she died in 1960.) 

Anyone can have a love triangle,
but these three have a hate triangle!

Although Christina is glum and/or fearful more often than not, when she’s walking and talking with her fellow teachers early in the film, we briefly see her as the bright, happy young woman she must have been before Michel wormed his way into her heart and bank account in her native Brazil. The holiday weekend has begun, and Christina is wearing a perky little outfit and twirling her parasol.  Her lovely smile almost breaks my heart, because life with Michel gives her so few things to smile about. Let this be a lesson, all you headstrong movie romantics: Get to know your sweeties before you decide to make a life with them!  Heed the lessons learned the hard way by Christina, Audrey Hepburn as Reggie Lampert in Charade, and so many others! Oy!

You know, if the DeLassalle Boarding School was a real place and its shabby conditions were discovered today, some hotshot news team would make it a cause célèbre even before anyone got wind of the murder plot Nicole and Christina are hatching!  I can see it all now: muscular, no-nonsense Robert Irvine of The Food Network’s Restaurant: Impossible storming in to kick the entire staff’s collective butt while overhauling the menu big-time, then force-feeding Michel DeLassalle his own disgusting rotting fish. Meanwhile, the equally tough-as-nails Anthony Melchiorri of The Travel Channel’s Hotel Impossible would overhaul the kids’ shabby dorms, too!  Do the boys’ parents ever actually visit this neo-hellhole? If Diabolique took place today, there would be lawsuits galore!  By the way, fans of Michel Serrault, perhaps best known to us Yanks as the star of La Cage Aux Folles and its two sequels, as well as Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud and Deadly Circuit, plays one of the teachers, Monsieur Raymond. He and the other teachers mostly put-up and shut-up; I guess they figure a job in a crummy boarding school with a nasty headmaster and unappetizing food is better than no job at all. And don’t get me started on that nasty, brackish swimming pool; the best use for it would be for a remake of Creature from the Black Lagoon…or an ingeniously wicked murder plot which ultimately pulls our gals into a murderous game in which death is only the beginning of their nightmare! I can say no more!

Nobody will be seated during
the disgusting rotting fish scene!

As is the case with Hitchcockian thrillers such as, say, Stanley Donen’s 1963 thriller Charade, Clouzot’s Diabolique is one of the (say it with me, people) Best Hitchcock Movies that Hitchcock Never Made! The crucial difference is that Charade and other playful Hitchcockian thrillers (as opposed to genuine Hitchcock films by Big Al himself) recall Hitchcock’s polished, soignée-yet-cheeky side a la North by Northwest, while Diabolique is more like a precursor of Hitchcock’s darker, more sinister thrillers such as Psycho; Shadow of a Doubt; The Wrong Man; Strangers on a Train; or Frenzy. I’ll admit it would have been fascinating to see how Hitchcock would have approached Diabolique. Darkly magnificent as Psycho is, Diabolique’s gloomy, misogynistic take on the story sinks into your gut and haunts your dreams, especially with the film’s taunting suggestions that perhaps there’s a touch of the supernatural in all this that nobody can escape. Even Diabolique’s opening credit sequence immediately makes us uneasy with that merciless close-up of the rainy, run-down DeLassalle Boarding School’s murky swimming pool, accompanied by children shrilly singing Georges Van Parys’ music off-key and off-screen. The film starts out at a leisurely pace, but as it goes along, the tension tightens like a noose, helped by skillful use of shadows and light. Without giving away its twists, I’ll only say that Diabolique gives new meaning to the phrase “cruel to be kind.”

“First I add a generous portion of gasoline. Then some nitroglycerine… a goodly amount of gunpowder…some Uranium 238…shake well, strike an ordinary match, make Michel drink it, and voila!”

"Do you have Prince Albert in the can?"

Has Michel come back to life just for
the school picture? Now that’s school spirit!

"Here's looking at you, kids!"

Vera Clouzot and Simone Signoret are electrifying as partners in suffering and murder. As the women plot to kill the bastard, Ms. Clouzot’s delicate loveliness and her anxious air plays beautifully off Signoret’s sexy, smoldering intensity and streetwise demeanor. As Christina and Nicole try to act like nothing is wrong after Michel takes his final dip in the DeLassalle School’s pool, weird things keep happening that make them wonder if Michel is somehow still alive after all their efforts. Michel’s suits unexpectedly turn up from the local cleaners, and in the school picture, there’s a shadowy figure who looks unnervingly like Michel!  Is the creep still alive and messing with the women’s heads, or is it karma, or could there really be something supernatural going on? (*GULP!*)  

On top of that, Inspector Fichet (Charles Vanel of Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear and Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, as well as several Tintin movies!) has been trying to help Christina in his kindly Columbo-esque way, but is this likable shaggy dog of a man actually a bulldog hot on the scent of the women’s guilt? That’s not to say there aren’t touches of comedy, albeit of the pitch-black variety. I especially got a kick out of of the scenes earlier in the film, when Nicole and Christina come to town for the next phase of their murder plot. As Christina and Nicole lure Michel to come to town for a permanent dip in the bathtub, their upstairs neighbors, Monsieur and Madame Herboux (Noel Roquevert and Therese Dorny) are unable to hear whether or not they won a prize on the radio show, because the tub the women use to weigh Michel down gets noisy when they have to drain the tub!  Diabolique is even darker than Hitchcock at his darkest! Which is scarier, the water sports in Diabolique or in Psycho? Watch them and decide for yourselves! :-)

I won't spoil the big shocker ending for you; I'll just repeat the request from the filmmakers:

"Don't be devils! Don't ruin the interest your friends could take in this film. Don't tell them what you saw. Thank you for them."
Trust me, your patience will be rewarded!

Hitchcock Blogathon update - lock in yer dates!

We've got 48 folks signed up for our Best Hitchcock Films Hitchcock Never Made Blogathon, which is a wonderful response, and thanks to all for wanting to participate!
With two weeks to go, we want to get the schedule for everybody's posts in place.  So if you're participating in the blogathon, please send me an email and let me know what day you'd like to post your contribution.  For the folks who haven't chosen a film, do let me know your choice as well!
To keep things spread out, we want to limit it to about six posts a day. So if more than six people ask to post on any one day, we'll take the first requests we get.
The deadline to reserve a day is Friday, June 29th.  After that, we'll assume you're able to post any day, and we'll assign days randomly, and post the final schedule that Saturday. 

(If you can't get your post up on the day selected, we won't send Leonard after you; just get it up as close as you can!)
When you post your contribution, please send me an email with the address of the post, so I can update the schedule quick like a bunny!

Feel free to link to the main info page on your blog to let everyone know about the event, and share the news with everybody!

HUDSON'S BAY: Eager for Cregar!

Take a gander at Laird Cregar as
lovable rogue Gooseberry!

To some people, the name Hudson’s Bay (HB) may simply bring to mind the famous Canadian department store, but of course there’s a rich history behind it—rich enough for 20th Century-Fox to green-light it as a lavish biopic directed by Irving Pichel (The Most Dangerous Game; the 1935 version of She), with a remarkable all-star cast!  Hudson’s Bay’s leading man was the great actor Paul Muni, whose amazing four-decade career included stage triumphs (born Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, Muni got his start in the Yiddish theater); movies (Muni won the Best Actor Oscar for the 1936 biopic The Story of Louis Pasteur, with another nomination in 1937 for The Life of Emile Zola, and six other Oscar nominations, along with a New York Film Critics Circle award for …Zola); and an Emmy nomination for his performance in the 1956 Playhouse 90 TV drama “The Last Clear Chance.”  No wonder: Muni was a true chameleon, renowned for his amazing ability to dive into every aspect of his roles. I wonder if Meryl Streep considered him as one of her role models? (Click here for a scene from the film!) 

That said, as awesome as Muni was, I must confess that although he gets top billing in HB, it was actually a member of HB’s fine supporting cast that really made me eager to see it: Laird Cregar (Samuel Laird Cregar, for completists)! I’ve been a fan of Cregar’s ever since I first saw him as the smilingly sinister NYPD Inspector Ed Cornell in the film adaptation of Steve Fisher’s novel I Wake Up Screaming. I found myself fascinated by Cregar’s relentless pursuit of Victor Mature, wondering if there was more to it (if you haven’t seen the movie, I won’t spoil it for you).  I had to know more about this actor!  With each new (to me) Cregar film, I’ve been wowed by his ability to be a witty, smooth-talking adversary, or a tormented but terrifying foe. In fact, for those of you who may not have read Team Bartilucci’s Flico Suave blog post, here’s our entry about our lad Laird:

LAIRD CREGAR. Silky-voiced, Philadelphia-born Cregar looked like a fearsome mountain of a man, an image that served him well in such classics as I Wake Up Screaming (1941), Heaven Can Wait (1943), and the 1944 remake of The Lodger. However, he blazed his own trail, mounting his own acclaimed stage productions of Oscar Wilde and The Man Who Came To Dinner. His smooth voice served him well in radio plays, including the role of Caspar Gutman in a production of The Maltese Falcon. But Cregar longed to leave his villain roles behind and move into romantic leading man parts, and to his frustration, his 300-pound girth stood in his way. He slimmed down on an insane crash diet in order to look as suave as his voice sounded. Tragically, the diet took a terrible toll on Cregar’s health, and he died of heart failure at the age of 31, just before the debut of the film that essentially killed him, Hangover Square (1945). Ah, the suavity that could have been….  For more about our special Flico Suave post, in which Fredrico Fabuloso of noirbabes.com has joined forces with Team Bartilucci to craft a terrific slide show devoted to Cregar, please click this link:

The Supremes, in a command performance!

When our friend and fellow blogger Laura of Laura’s Miscellaneous Musings recently wrote about several films showing up on the Fox Movie Channel, I was intrigued when I saw HB would be among them. It seemed like a typical costume epic, certainly a departure from the film noirs and comedy-thrillers that I usually blog about here at TotED. But once I saw Cregar’s name among the cast members, I was definitely interested, especially when it became clear that both Muni’s and Cregar’s characters would be more scrappy and lighthearted, with lots of joking and brawling—and don’t forget those suave French-Canadian accents! Alfred Newman’s score understandably leans on instrumental versions of the moving anthem “O Canada.”  HB frequently uses another song whose title escapes me. It’s derived from a beloved traditional folk tune, but I keep remembering hearing it in, of all things, the Elvis Presley comedy-thriller Double Trouble, with these lyrics: “I only love one girl/The one I have my arms around/I only love one girl/One in every town!” (Just as well I never opted for a career in music—but if you need a gal who can hum or whistle, let me know!)

For those of us who were too easily distracted to give our history classes our full attention back in school (and even if we had, I’m betting 20th Century-Fox probably took liberties with the real facts anyway), the script by Lamar Trotti (The Razor’s Edge; The Ox-Bow Incident; There’s No Business Like Show Business) helpfully provides this preamble:

“In 1667 Canada, under the French flag, was a vast uncharted wilderness. Montreal and Quebec were hardly more than trading posts on the St. Lawrence River. Our story opens farther south, at the Albany Government House, in the British colonies.” Does it ever! First we viewers see Indians getting thrown in prison for alleged thievery at the hands of stern-looking upper-class twits with long curly wigs and fancy clothes. One of the stuffed shirts sniffs, “These savages must realize that New York is a British possession…twenty lashes in the public square!” I couldn’t help thinking of a sarcastic line from Witness for the Prosecution: “Lovely you all look in them wigs.…”  As the understandably sullen Indians are given the heave-ho, two fur trappers/traders arrive: diminutive Pierre Esprit Radisson (Muni) and tall, wide, bear-shaped Médard Chouart Sieur des Groseilliers, a.k.a. Gooseberry (Cregar). (I’m guessing this is where/how today’s Radisson Hotel chain got its name?) It’s clear that these French-accented, smooth-talking yet scrappy trappers have been here before, asking for the money and supplies they need for an expedition into the north country. Radisson and Gooseberry kinda freak out the stuffed shirts with their boisterous barging-in, their ruddy cheeks, handmade buckskin, and fur hats; I liked them immediately!

Pierre gets no kick from champagne,
but he’s always up for a brawl!

The bewigged bigwigs aren’t interested in our boys’ proposed expedition to Canada’s Hudson’s Bay because “His Majesty’s government is not in the fur trade,” and besides, they’re convinced that Radisson and Gooseberry must be “rogues,” if they can’t get the funding from their own government.  Humph! They say “rogues” like it’s a bad thing! Those silly “suits” in suits don’t realize our boys aren’t the types to meekly take no for an answer, especially when they’re threatened with jail. It’s clobbering time as a royal rumble breaks out! Radisson and Gooseberry get tossed in Ye Olde Holding Cell, but at least it’s a good place to make friends: Lord Edward Crewe (John Sutton from Jane Eyre; My Gal Sal; A Yank in the R.A.F.) is cooling his heels in the slammer, too!  Seems Lord Eddie was banished by Prince Charles (the great Vincent Price, one of Team B.’s favorite scene-stealers) on account of drunken pranks that went too far. Edward convinces Radisson and Gooseberry to help him blow this popsicle stand, and after our scamps hit Montreal, Radisson and Gooseberry sell Edward on the idea of putting up capital for their Hudson’s Bay expedition.
It helps that Radisson happens to be best buds with the Indians, and he’s adamant about sharing their booty with them, fair and square. In fact, Orimha (Chief Thundercloud, who graced many a Western and even comedies like The Cat and the Canary during his 21-year film career) is Radisson’s Indian foster dad. Still, it takes lots of brawling to make Edward and the other city-boy white guys get their act together, stop treating the helpful Indians like “savages,” and get it into their fool heads that you can’t just pay the Indians in trinkets and brandy if you’re serious about making Hudson’s Bay a solid nation full of decent, fair-minded human beings. As Radisson explains in his charming patois during what I like to think of as his Yoda Moments:

“Wine very bad for Indians—make him crazy like the wolf. He get one little drink, pretty soon he drunk, go on warpath, kill everybody, cut their throat, maybe get his own throat cut. Then he don’t know where he is. What he do? By and by, he don’t hunt no more, he don’t fish, he don’t catch the beaver, he don’t do nothing but make trouble. He in pretty bad fix, no?”

Frankly, I was itching to see Edward get punched in the nose in the 1660’s equivalent of a playground!  With a little help from Radisson and Gooseberry, who are already tight with their Indian pals, “Holier than Thou” Edward eventually gets an attitude adjustment, courtesy of Yoda Radisson:

“This Country, this Canada, she’s like a pretty woman, waiting for big, strong fella to come live with her, raise big family. She say, ‘Look, I have fine prairie to make big farm. I have nice trees for house, rivers to fish. I have big heart to love all the world, make you very happy.’ And she say, ‘Those fellows who live in Europe, they crazy, they fight all the time, kill one another for a little dirt that don’t grow anything. (Sarcastically) They got to bow down when Edward Crewe comes in the room. But here, I give you nice big place to live in, I give plenty to eat, I not let anybody be better than you. ‘Then she say, ‘But you must not cheat my little children because they are not so strong as you. You must not make them drunk, bring war with you. You will love, like the Bon Dieu planned, or I give you big tweak in the nose…I think maybe this Canada have plenty happy people someday, feel same way. Them maybe people, they say, ‘This Radisson, he big fool, but he’s right. Now I think we talk too much.”

(Lamar Trotti not only knew how to write rousing speeches, he knew when to stop!)

As Lady Barbara, lovely Gene Tierney
is worth risking prison for!

“Think of it, darling, there are millions
of beavers waiting to be caught!”
(Actual line from the film!)

All the agita of starting a new colony is finally paying off—until French Governor  D’Argensen seizes our heroes’ furs (polyester and microfibers weren’t invented yet) as “payment” for fines enacted that very morning! So Radisson and Gooseberry indignantly steal their furs back and return to England with Edward; that’ll show ‘em!  Eddie’s nervous about being back in England—remember, he’s supposed to be banished—but Edward’s cousin Sir Rupert (Nigel Bruce—Dr. Watson himself!—not to mention Bruce’s supporting roles in Hitchcock’s Rebecca and Suspicion) is willing to help sort things out, with encouragement from the intrigued Prince Charles, who admits to liking “rogues” (there’s that word again!), and is willing to help Radisson, Gooseberry, and Edward as long as they can keep it on the QT until they get their booty. Besides, news of fabulous furs from the New World goes a long way toward our guys being forgiven, especially when Edward is reunited with his beloved fiancée, Lady Barbara Hall (Gene Tierney at her most beautiful and winsome). I love the way Edward and Barbara only have eyes for each other as Prince Charles’ scolding falls on deaf ears; Charles might as well be talking in that Peanuts “blah blah blah” gibberish!  Radisson sagely notes, “These English, they like to make a little money, no?” Prince Charles gives them the supplies and boats they need, though he cautions them: “There will be no talk of a charter until we see 300,000 pelts that the Governor of New France did not steal.” Radisson sweetens the pot by naming the first Hudson’s Bay post Fort Charles after the King himself.

No lackeys in Canada?
You mean I have to w-w-w-work?!

Lady Barbara is so impressed with Edward’s new success, maturity, and overall manly-man qualities that she suggests that when they return to Hudson’s Bay, they should bring her younger brother Gerald (Morton Lowry of The Hound of the Baskervilles; The Picture of Dorian Gray; How Green was My Valley). Bad move, guys! The novelty wears thin fast for spoiled baby brother Gerald Whiny-Pants;  he’s more interested in plying the Indians with brandy and cheap useless tchotchkes than in making Hudson’s Bay succeed and flourish by getting off his bratty butt and *gasp* pull his weight! When Gerald disobeys Radisson’s rules, drunken violence erupts all over the colony, and a friendly Indian tribe is senselessly slaughtered. This means war, since the Indians are understandably furious at these Eurotrash white guys making a mess of things. Having witnessed similar massacres in his time, Radisson reaches a grim decision: in order to patch things up with the warring Indians, he elects himself judge, jury, and executioner, ties up Gerald, and shoots him dead. Our heroes aren’t exactly happy campers (even though Gerald had it coming, in my opinion).  When Radisson, Gooseberry, and Edward return to London and explain the tragedy, Prince Charles fumes: “The very idea, going around shooting my subjects, and without my consent!”

Lesson learned: Don't bring troublemaking
siblings to faraway outposts!

Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Radisson, Gooseberry, and Edward? Luckily for our boys, riches triumph over dead trouble-making relatives: 4,000 pelts in perfect condition is an end that justifies the means, big-time! In fact, as Edward urgently points out, if Radisson and Gooseberry are hanged, there won’t be any Hudson’s Bay Company, because Canada would then belong to France, not England! Turns out our lovable slyboots Radisson fixed it in advance with the Indians that if anything happened to them in England, the Indians would take all those lovely, expensive furs to the French, Radisson’s biggest fans!  All is forgiven; I think even Lady Barbara knew in her heart of hearts that Gerald was a little good-for-nothing creep. Our roguish heroes are the toast of the town, Radisson and Gooseberry walk off singing, boy gets girl, Hudson’s Bay is born—what’s not to love?

Asterix and Obelix

Vinnie imagines Laird Cregar
and Paul Muni as Obelix & Asterix!

My husband Vinnie is a big fan of the Franco-Belgian series of Asterix comics created by René Goscinny and illustrated by Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo (if you haven’t had the pleasure of reading Asterix, click this link), and he noticed that Muni and Cregar had a striking resemblance to Asterix and his big pal Obelix! Anyway, just hearing the cheerfully boisterous Cregar doing a French-Canadian accent made me smile.

It was fun to see another side of our lad Laird, since I’d seen him showing a flair for comedy even in his bad-guy roles. To my surprise and delight, Muni and Cregar turned out to be a rollicking comedy team, stealing their scenes and my heart!  With their rambunctious, devil-may-care shenanigans and great buddy chemistry, Muni and Cregar make a totally appealing pair! Muni has a playfulness about him, and a clever way of talking around things when the suits in London and France get restless; nevertheless, when push comes to shove, he does the right thing when it counts most.  HB has great production values, too, with Travis Banton’s costumes including posh threads at the palace and buckskin in the wilderness, as needed. For my money, Muni and Cregar are so good together, I was wishing 20th Century-Fox had figured out a way to make one or more sequels about Radisson and Gooseberry’s exploits. Even their accents and mischievous grins had me laughing and smiling (for all the right reasons)! In particular, Vinnie and I thought it was tons of fun to watch Cregar launch his monstrously huge body at smug, unsuspecting fops and dandies, knocking those pretty-boys over like bowling pins!  Go, Team Gooseberry!

"Poor lady!" (Another actual line from HB!)

It's Spring Break in Canada, and they're gonna party like it's 1667!

You can meet the most interesting people at these pot luck dinners!
(Left to right: Laird Cregar, Nigel Bruce, Vincent Price, and Virginia Field)

Hey, Gooseberry cleans up pretty good!
He's going do-me-do-ing in his do-me-do duds!

Radisson's livin' on a wink and a prayer!

Iron bars do not a prison make — when the prisoner is Gooseberry!

Hey, just imagine Laird Cregar, Paul Muni, and John Sutton cleaned up some, wearing musketeer garb. Would Laird have been an awesome Porthos, or what?

MINISTRY OF FEAR: The Cake is a Lie!

I proudly proclaim that as of this writing, it's my birthday!  I’m now a fresh-faced lass of 49 summers!  Director Fritz Lang’s 1944 film adaptation of Graham Greene’s 1943 suspense novel Ministry of Fear (MoF) struck me as the perfect movie to blog about today. It’s got everything this birthday girl could want in a suspense movie blog post: suspense; paranoia; atmospheric lighting and cinematography by Henry Sharp (Duck Soup; The Crowd; It Happened on Fifth Avenue); offbeat comedy, and most importantly for any celebration, cake!

"I took my troubles down to Madame Ruth...."

Stephen's thrilled to be free to
eat tasty cake again!

The setting is wartime 1941 England, and our hero, Stephen Neale, is played by Ray Milland, always awesome whether he’s in comedies such as Easy Living or The Major and The Minor; suspenseful yet urbane thrillers like The Big Clock and Dial M for Murder; chilling science fiction like X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes; and of course, his Oscar-winning performance in The Lost Weekend. I’ve always particularly liked Milland’s sensitive side. For me,  MoF works so well because the character he plays seems so likable and poignant, especially considering what he’s been through. Milland should’ve gotten an Oscar nomination for MoF.  The script by screenwriter/producer Seton I. Miller (Scarface, The Dawn Patrol; Here Comes Mr. Jordan; The Adventures of Robin Hood) is pretty wild, but it had me hooked!

We first meet Stephen sitting in a dimly-litroom as he waits for parting advice from Dr. Norton (Niagara; The Prize; TV’s 77 Sunset Strip). As Stephen literally watches the clock, the dialogue sets the scene:

Stephen: “You know, it’s interesting to watch the last minutes crawl by, after so many of them.”

Dr. Norton: “I always meant to speed it up.”
Stephen (wryly yet ruefully): “Fine time to think of it.”

Although the good doctor urges Stephen to make his fresh start in a quiet town far from the madding crowd of Blitz-plagued World War Two London, Stephen says thanks, but no thanks: “I’m gonna spend the first month being pushed and jammed by the biggest crowds I can find. I want to hear people talk and laugh…seeing faces will be a good tonic.” We finally see the name of the place Stephen’s leaving: Lembridge Asylum! Dr. Norton kindly but firmly advises Stephen not to get involved with the police: “A second charge wouldn’t be easy.”  Um, we’re not talking about a ticket for jaywalking here, are we, Stephen?

As our hero awaits the next train, he finds himself at a jolly village fete with games, kids, and food, particularly a tasty-looking cake set to be raffled off for a local charity, The Mothers of the Free Nations. The fortune-teller, one Mrs. Bellane (Aminta Dyne), gives Stephen unusually specific weight and measurements for the cake in order to win that tasty dessert. Who knew innocent charity fetes were fixed? But it’s easy to understand why the cake is so coveted, considering flour and butter weren’t easy to come by during wartime.  In fact, the ladies in charge of the fete get awfully anxious when it appears Stephen won the cake in error, to the visible annoyance of another apparent cake-lover, a gent named Cost (Dan Duryea, the man people loved to hate in other Fritz Lang noirs, including Scarlet Street and The Woman in the Window, not to mention Duryea’s funny/menacing henchman in Howard Hawks’ Ball of Fire). No wonder Cost and Mrs. Bellane look pretty darn peeved when Stephen leaves with the cake.
As our friend and fellow blogger Yvette of …in so many words put it so well in her own 2010 MoF post:

That's the second-biggest scissors I've ever seen!

“(Duryea is) everyone's favorite sleaze of a villain, so you know right away something is definitely up. The thing about the 'country fete' is this: the place appears 'normal' but with a very sinister vibe, seriously creepy. Yet Milland, just released from incarceration, pretends, I suppose, that he doesn't notice or maybe he thinks this is the way the world acts on the 'outside'. Hard to tell. The war is a burden on everyone and maybe this is the new normal.”  For the record, my favorite bit in this scene is when Stephen guesses right about the cake’s weight; suddenly everyone and everything goes silent, as if it was one of those E.F. Hutton commercials from the 1960s and ’70s!  It’s a brief, deft blend of comedy and foreboding.  Talk about a strange twist of fete! 

Figuring out the tasty treat's weight
is a piece of cake!

“Jai Guru Deva. Ommm…
nothing’s gonna change my séance…”

War is hell, but at least
they have slumber parties!

I hope Miss Penteel's pad won't be hard to find!

Stephen’s sudden journey down the rabbit hole gets progressively more surreal when he boards his train to London. A blind man (Eustace Wyatt of Gaslight; Journey Into Fear; Madame Curie) sits there, and they share the cake. Too bad Stephen doesn’t notice that the supposedly-blind man keeps darting glances at our hero! When the guy tries to kill Stephen and grab the cake, things start blowing up real good, and that’s only the beginning of Stephen’s suspenseful, nutzoid ordeal! Increasingly paranoid, our beleaguered hero retains irascible, mercurial private detective George Rennit (Erskine Sanford, who performed with Orson Welles and his Mercury Players in Citizen Kane; The Magnificent Ambersons; The Lady from Shanghai), only to find Rennit's office ransacked.  The strange trail of clues leads to Mrs. Bellane—but not the one we viewers met at the fete! This new Mrs. Bellane is a babe, played by the ever-slinky and mysterious Hillary Brooke (Invaders from Mars; The Maze; Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much; and quite a few Sherlock Holmes films and Abbott and Costello comedies).  Too bad this rather glamorous séance ends up in murder, with Stephen the victim of the biggest frame-up since Whistler's Mother! Without giving too much away, I can sum up Stephen’s plight in two words: Nazi scum!   Even with everything Stephen goes through in this cinematic rollercoaster ride, he often manages to be saner than the oddball characters (including Alan Napier in his pre-Batman days) who are out to get him! At least Stephen seems to have found allies in Carla Hilfe (Marjorie Reynolds of His Kind of Woman; Holiday Inn; and The Time of Their Lives, not to mention playing Peg Riley on TV’s Life of Riley) and her brother, Willi (Carl Esmond of Sergeant York; The Dawn Patrol; Her Highness and the Bellboy), good-natured Viennese refugees who are helping The Mothers of the Free Nations. Need I say romance between Stephen and Carla isn’t far behind? My heart really went out to poor Stephen, and he truly engaged my sympathy as he did his best to hold onto his hard-won sanity in the midst of chaos not of his own making. I was especially touched by the scene where Stephen confides in Carla about the tragic circumstances surrounding the “mercy killing” of his beloved wife, resulting in his two-year stint at Lembridge Asylum.

If, like me, you love fast-moving, complicated, convoluted plots, chases, and eccentric touches, I think you’ll find MoF worth celebrating anytime!

For more MoF fun and info, check out these links:

* From the TCM Web site* From Yvette’s 2010 …in so many words blog post about Ministry of Fear

Er, I’m not into nonfiction. Where’s your mystery/suspense section?

Even in life during wartime, there's always time for romance, by George!

 

Stephen takes a shot at making Mrs. Bellane v.2 confess!

One of my birthdays during high school.
Note the movie motif, including a plastic film reel!

ARABESQUE: Burnoose Notice, Special 2012 Horseathon Edition!

Our great pal and fellow blogger Page of My Love of Old Hollywood created a Blogathon dedicated to great horses in movie history: the Horseathon! From May 25th through May 27, you'll find a bevy of splendid steeds for every horse-lover's needs! I'll be revising a new-and-improved post about one of my favorite comedy-thrillers, the 1966 comedy-thriller Arabesque. Hope you'll enjoy it!!
Saddle up and CLICK HERE here for the post

HAVING WONDERFUL CRIME: Like, Write On, Rice!

(Apologies in advance for the photos not being quite as sharp as I'd hoped!)

With a novel based on the work of the funniest, zaniest, most surreal mystery writer the comedy-thriller genre had ever known at that time, I would have been more surprised if I hadn’t enjoyed the 1945 film version of Craig Rice’s novel Having Wonderful Crime (HWC)!  What’s more, despite the masculine nom de plume, Craig Rice was a woman; specifically, she became the first female mystery novelist to make the cover of Time Magazine, plus she practically invented the screwball noir!  Back in high school at dear old St. Catharine Academy in the Bronx, I read and very much enjoyed several of Rice’s books, especially the Malone stories I’d found in mystery anthologies in our school library. After graduating from Fordham University, I’d been prowling used bookstores to find Rice’s books. Even now, with eBay making it easier to track down hard-to-find books, I’ve barely scratched the surface, partly from rarity, partly from poverty. All I need is a winning lottery ticket to actually afford all the vintage books I want!

But first, a little background: Rice’s original stories and novels are set in 1940s Chicago with her popular protagonist, Attorney-at-Law John J. Malone. These stories were especially popular, with their lively blend of zaniness and surrealism. If Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man showed that marriage and murder-solving was a match made in mystery fiction heaven, then consider the books showcasing Malone and his friends to be screwball noir turned up to 11!  Meet our protagonists:

• Malone, our lovable girl-chasing hero, renamed Michael J. Malone for the film version of HWC.  (Apparently someone at RKO was fond of the letter M.)  Malone is played in HWC by Pat O’Brien (Knute Rockne All-American; Crack-Up; Angels with Dirty Faces; Some Like it Hot);
• Malone’s breezy pal, the two-fisted (but only when necessary) press agent Jake Justus, played by George Murphy (Broadway Melody of 1940; This is The Army; Battleground);
• Helene Brand, Jake’s lovely, wealthy, eccentric sweetheart, who becomes Mrs. Justus in both the novel and movie versions of HWC when the newlyweds break the happy news to Malone early on—not that these lovebirds would ever let a little thing like a honeymoon put the kibosh on their penchant for recreational sleuthing. The new Mr. and Mrs. Justus are compulsive amateur gumshoes, always cooking up new murders to solve! To borrow a line from Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, these two just love “weird excitement!” Helene is played by the lively, lovely, luminous Carole Landis, dubbed “The Ping Girl” by a press agent who explained, “She makes you purr.” In happier days, Landis lent her bubbly personality, talent, and beauty to such films as Team Bartilucci favorite I Wake Up Screaming; My Gal Sal; Turnabout; Topper Returns; One Million B.C.; Four Jills in a Jeep, in which co-writer Landis and her fellow actresses Kay Francis, Martha Raye, and Mitzi Mayfair reenact their real-life USO tour during World War 2; and The Powers Girl, a film close to Team Bartilucci’s heart because our late mom and aunt were both John Robert Powers models back in the day! (More about Landis and Murphy shortly.)

Sweet, sassy Helene can
get on our case anytime!

If you thought The Thin Man’s Nick and Nora Charles could put away liquor with the greatest of ease, wait’ll you get a snootful of Malone, Jake, and Helene! In Rice’s novels, when our trio wasn’t solving murders, they hung out at Joe the Angel’s City Hall Bar, where they’d good-naturedly rib homicide cop Daniel von Flanagan (he’d added the “von” so he wouldn’t seem like just another just another Irish cop. Sorry, von Flanagan isn’t in the film version of HWC). According to Tom & Enid Schantz of Rue Morgue Press, “such antics eventually earned (Rice) the unheard-of sum (for a mystery writer) of $46,000 a year by 1945.” Is it any wonder Rice’s inimitable brand of daftness made her books smash hits, with her kisser on the cover of Time in the bargain?

That said, Rice's life wasn't necessarily a bed of roses—or maybe it was, if you count all the thorns. So many talented comedy writers and comedy novelists seem to have a “sad clown” thing going on. Alas, Rice wasn’t immune.  She was born Georgiana Craig in 1908 to a wanna-be painter and a wanna-be sculptress, who named the little girl Georgiana. Too bad her folks apparently didn’t wanna-be responsible, loving parents; poor kid! To make a long, sad story a bit shorter, little Georgiana was schlepped from pillar to post. Being unable to conceive a child of their own, Craig’s half-sister Nan and her husband Elton were happy to adopt the child, whose name officially became Georgiana Craig Rice. Still, even with all her success in her adult life as an author, it seems Rice was never quite able to get past the rejection she’d experienced during her childhood. Over time, her life was further complicated by her chronic alcoholism (what is it about renowned authors and substance abuse?!), glaucoma, deafness in one ear, blindness in one eye, and possibly bipolar disorder. With everything Rice had to contend with, I’m surprised she even made it to the age of 49! And yet with all these obstacles in her way, somehow she managed to achieve success as a popular author, blending nutzoid comedy and suspense like nobody's business!

When you smile, the world smiles with you.
When Helene and Jake are the only ones smiling,
it means you’d better get tea bags, because
they’re about to get Malone into hot water!

Rice’s novel output (in every sense of the term) ranged from her 1939 novel 8 Faces at 3, through her 1957 novel My Kingdom for a Hearse, published two weeks after her untimely death at the age of 49 from a fall down the stairs. Several posthumous Craig Rice story collections were completed by other authors and published: The Name is Malone (1958); The People vs. Withers and Malone, a 1963 short story collection completed by author Stuart Palmer, featuring his beloved Hildegarde Withers character; the short story collection Murder, Mystery and Malone (2002); and The Pickled Poodles (1960) by Larry M. Harris,  a continuation of the John J. Malone series.

A number of Craig Rice’s books were adapted for the big screen, and of course, HWC was among them!  The trio of screenwriters include:

•  Howard J. Green (I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang; Morning Glory; Reveille with Beverly);
•  Parke Levy (My Friend Irma and its sequel, My Friend Irma Goes West; TV’s Many Happy Returns; Pete and Gladys; and December Bride);
• Stewart Sterling, a.k.a. Prentice Winchell, popular and prolific pulp author of the Gil Vine and Fire Marshal Pedley novels, as well as a producer of crime fiction for radio and magazines. For the record, I am the proud owner of a 1954 book Sterling and Dev Collans co-authored, I Was a House Detective.

Admittedly, HWC takes liberties with Rice’s plot, but the film’s frantic and funny shenanigans nevertheless have that Craig Rice feeling (not to be confused with that Barton Fink feeling), capturing the overall madcap air and good-natured goofiness of Rice’s storytelling style. With its fleet-footed 70-minute running time, its sharp and snappy comedic timing, and its great cast, I enjoyed HWC  all the way!

With composer Leigh Harline’s sparkling score in the background, we first meet Helene onscreen in media res, nervously holding a gun on an ominous thug (who looks and sounds like the guy running Florian's in Murder, My Sweet, but he's not credited) as she talks to an impatient desk sergeant who’s obviously used to Jake and Helene playing amateur detective: “Please hurry, Sergeant, I’m biting my fingernails already, and you know how hard it is to get a manicure these days!” Luckily, the long-suffering Malone manages to save his friends’ bacon in the proverbial nick of time!

Slipping out of their firearms and into a nearby theater once Malone points out he’d withheld important evidence to crack their current case, our heroes have no sooner found three on the aisle than it’s announced that the show won’t go on: it seems someone’s misplaced the star attraction, The Great Movel (George Zucco from My Favorite Blonde; Topper Returns; The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, as Professor Moriarty; The Mad Ghoul with Lady on a Train’s David Bruce; and Team B’s fave, After the Thin Man, as  Dr. Adolph Kammer)! You’d think that since Jake and Helene are on their honeymoon (heck, they seemed to be truly into each other even without the homicide angle), they’d surely be more interested in, as the song says, the “sweet mystery of life” rather than scampering around solving other people’s murders. (Maybe it’s the lovebirds’ idea of foreplay? Hey, whatever floats their collective boat!)

With Chili Williams around,
everyone has spots before their eyes!

Jake and Helene are spending their honeymoon at charming Lenhart Lodge, with Malone aiming to take a separate room and check out the single girls, including a cutie with a polka-dot wardrobe (model/actress Chili Williams, a nice bit of eye candy). However, a fender-bender involving our merry trio changes everyone’s plans when the hot young couple from The Great Movel’s act, French-accented Gilda Mayfair (Lenore Aubert from the Bob Hope/Dorothy Lamour comedy-thriller They Got Me Covered; Bud Abbott & Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein; and Bud Abbott & Lou Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff), and her hunky hottie, Lance (Richard Martin, seen in The Bamboo Blonde and such Westerns as West of the Pecos with Robert Mitchum) find themselves in a trunk full of trouble, literally. Soon the exasperated Malone and our kooky newlyweds find themselves embroiled in a murder mystery involving the fussy hotel manager (Charles D. Brown from The Killers; The Grapes of Wrath; and Team B’s favorite among Brown’s roles, Norris the butler in The Big Sleep), the Lenhart sisters, one of whom signs checks in vanishing ink (silent film actress Blanche Ring); sleepwalking after practically each member of the cast unwittingly doses Gilda with a sedative (The Great Movel sees a lawsuit in the Lenhart Lodge’s future!); falling ladders; hairbreadth escapes; a lovely swimming champ (Anje Behrens, better known as Gloria Holden of Dracula’s Daughter; The Life of Emile Zola; The Corsican Brothers) and speedy, snappy patter that makes His Girl Friday sound tongue-tied!

Poor tearful Helene! It’s no laughing
matter when you're cornered by a killer.

Yikes! Has The Great Movel
played his final matinee?

Not to be a downer, but it’s such a shame that Craig Rice and Carole Landis both ended up being “sad clowns” who died too young. Landis had so much charm, beauty, and screen presence, yet somehow her career began to flounder in the mid-1940s. Only 29 years old, Landis had already been married and divorced twice, and her third marriage was already going down for the last time.  She had an adulterous romance with Rex Harrison, who was apparently was also about to end their relationship. What happened? Did poor Landis have emotional problems in addition to the health issues with malaria and pneumonia she’d been battling since her days of entertaining the troops during World War 2?  Whatever contributed to Landis’ downward spiral, it all tragically ended for her in July of 1948, when she left a suicide note and took a lethal overdose of Seconal; Rex Harrison reportedly found her body. Landis’ pallbearers included HWC co-star Pat O’Brien, actor Cesar Romero, director Eddie Sutherland, actor Willard Parker (A Slight Case of Murder; Kiss Me Kate); and Carole’s close friend and personal make-up man William Nye. Aw, man! It’s times like that that I wish I had a time machine and could help folks like Landis to get their lives turned around live in joy and triumph. Incidentally, author Jacqueline Susann based tragic character Jennifer North partly on Landis in her best-seller Valley of the Dolls.

As for Rice, The April Robin Murders was her final novel after her fatal fall. In fact, the novel was only two-thirds finished at the time of Rice’s death, so the rest was completed by the great Ed McBain, a.k.a. Evan Hunter, author of the 87th Precinct novel series and screenwriter of Alfred Hitchcock’s movie adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's The Birds, among other triumphs. I remember reading and enjoying The April Robin Murders years ago and finding it quite entertaining, with a nice balance of comedy and sentiment. Several posthumous Craig Rice story collections were completed by other authors and published: The Name is Malone (1958); The People vs. Withers and Malone, a 1963 short story collection completed by author Stuart Palmer, featuring his beloved Hildegarde Withers character; the short story collection Murder, Mystery and Malone (2002); and The Pickled Poodles (1960) by Larry M. Harris, a continuation of the John J. Malone series.

Sim Sala Bim! Now you see
The Great Movel, now you don't!

HWC co-stars Pat O’Brien and George Murphy had much happier endings to their life stories. O’Brien had a long career and lived to the ripe old age of 84. George Murphy served as president of the Screen Actors Guild in the 1940s, and retired from acting in 1952. He was eventually elected Senator of California in 1964 and served for six years.

With so many Rice books and films I haven’t caught up with yet, I think it’s time for a Craig Rice renaissance, in both books and films! Who’s with me?

We crown Helene the Queen of Screwball Noir!

I don't know about you guys, but
I'm a sucker for a romantic ending!