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As you know, detective stories sell very well
Jean Negulesco's The Mask of Dimitrios (1944) was delightful when I discovered it a dozen years ago and it is still delightful, which is a fun thing to be able to say about a political film noir whose stated theme is the Nietzschean abyss between writing about human evil in fiction and meeting the thing itself in real life. I blame Peter Lorre.
Adapted for the screen by Frank Gruber from Eric Ambler's 1939 novel of the same name, the premise plays like the missing link between Citizen Kane (1941) and The Third Man (1949): a mild-mannered writer of detective novels happens to be on vacation in interwar Istanbul when a body washes up on the coast of the Bosporus, the papers in its pocket and the label stitched into its coat identifying it as that of a notorious criminal whose sordid rise from small-time thief and cutthroat to international smuggler and spy so intrigues the writer who admits to wanting "real characters for [his] stories" that before long he's tracing a decades-cold trail from Smyrna to Athens to Sofia to Belgrade to Paris, meeting with former employers and betrayed lovers and feeling himself increasingly, uneasily complicit in the undisclosed schemes of an elegantly disingenuous stranger who claims there's a million francs to be gained if they share their information, an offer that might sound more generous if it weren't delivered at gunpoint. He learns secondhand about seduction, treason, and assassination, firsthand about blackmail and murder. He might as well be delivering the moral of the film when he turns away from his very first view of a real corpse with an apologetic little swallow: "It isn't quite what I thought it would be." But he keeps going, because he's a writer, because he's got the loose end of a story and he's bound to follow it until it's raveled up someone's life or death, even his own.
With this kind of puzzle-plot, much of the runtime is taken up with the despicably compelling history of the eponymous Dimitrios Makropoulos, played by Zachary Scott in his film debut as a kind of Mediterranean Reynardine, smiling most sweetly before the sharp white teeth bite in. He has the character's crucial, feral charm and the role launched him as one of his era's leading exponents of sleaze, but he can't steal the film because he's sharing it with Peter Lorre. Prior to this movie, the closest thing I'd seen to a Lorre hero was Dr. Einstein in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), who is only the most reasonable character in that plot because everyone else cranked it up to eleven while he was still sleeping his last bender off. Here, cast sympathetically against type as Cornelius Latimer Leyden who used to teach economics at the University of Amsterdam and now writes mysteries with titles like A Bloody Shovel and either way owns some of the dorkiest reading glasses available to 1938, he's our classically innocent lens on the underworld, one of those decent, diffident heroes who's so far in over his head, he doesn't even know what he should be afraid of. He can't explain his obsession with Dimitrios, but he doesn't try to fight it even as it pulls him into strange interviews and shadier associations. At times he almost seems to be trying on his own genre for size, as when he leans over an unwelcome late-night visitor with a poker in his hand, murmuring, "I'm not a violent man, Mr. Peters. As a matter of fact, I hate violence. But there are times when the most peace-loving simply must do it—and this may be one of them." For a moment it seems that the soft-spoken writer, like so many a delicately unbalanced madman of Lorre's repertoire, might commit murder out of nothing more than temper if pushed too far. Finding himself on the business end of the pistol he was assured his guest hadn't brought this time, however, Leyden throws up his hands and collapses into an armchair with a resigned cry of "There it is! I knew it, I knew it!" as if less intimidated than exasperated by his failure to threaten to equal effect. (Having previously returned to ransacked hotel rooms, he started the scene with a fearlessly sarcastic "Oh, you're knocking at doors now!") His one fight scene works because it is just as ridiculously ineffective as you would expect from a person with no practical experience of violence and therefore it takes by surprise an opponent who was prepared for a real fight, not to have his gun literally slapped out of his hand as if it were a rude gesture by a tiny, bowtied ex-professor sputtering, "He was my friend! No, he wasn't my friend, but he was a nice man—compared to you, he was!" I am sure a fight choreographer was involved in the action that follows, but it really just looks like Lorre screaming and flailing, and Lorre with his background in Expressionist theater could scream and flail like nobody's business. Sydney Greenstreet is not cast against type at all as Mr. Peters who obviously knows more than he's telling about the object of Leyden's quest, but he is so magisterially untrustworthy in the part that I forgive Warners for it. "There's not enough kindness in the world," he sighs, pulling a gun on the grudgingly beguiled author again.
I don't know if The Mask of Dimitrios should be considered a top-shelf noir, but I am also not sure it matters given the chance to see Greenstreet and Lorre in one of the stronger of their celebrated nine pairings—Three Strangers (1946) and The Verdict (1946) are my other two favorites, along with the usual suspects of The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Casablanca (1942)—and Lorre, for a wonder, not as an antihero or even an amiable second lead but a hero full stop, brave as a holy fool to the end. It also looks fantastic, as it should when photographed in the full-blown noir style by Arthur Edeson whose resume includes the aforementioned usual suspects as well as a bunch of James Whale. Sometimes it's just shadows coaxing a European illusion out of a B-budget's interiors, but there are also fine images like the dissolve of the stirred flames of a punch bowl into the vortex of a roulette wheel or Greenstreet crawling with terrible singlemindedness across a floor papered with thousand-franc notes. The cosmopolitan cast includes Steven Geray, Victor Francen, Faye Emerson, and Kurt Katch, but I can't imagine I would care as much about this movie if it had a more standardized leading man. It was not out on DVD the last time I saw it; thanks to the Warner Archive, it is now. This mask brought to you by my mild-mannered backers at Patreon.
Adapted for the screen by Frank Gruber from Eric Ambler's 1939 novel of the same name, the premise plays like the missing link between Citizen Kane (1941) and The Third Man (1949): a mild-mannered writer of detective novels happens to be on vacation in interwar Istanbul when a body washes up on the coast of the Bosporus, the papers in its pocket and the label stitched into its coat identifying it as that of a notorious criminal whose sordid rise from small-time thief and cutthroat to international smuggler and spy so intrigues the writer who admits to wanting "real characters for [his] stories" that before long he's tracing a decades-cold trail from Smyrna to Athens to Sofia to Belgrade to Paris, meeting with former employers and betrayed lovers and feeling himself increasingly, uneasily complicit in the undisclosed schemes of an elegantly disingenuous stranger who claims there's a million francs to be gained if they share their information, an offer that might sound more generous if it weren't delivered at gunpoint. He learns secondhand about seduction, treason, and assassination, firsthand about blackmail and murder. He might as well be delivering the moral of the film when he turns away from his very first view of a real corpse with an apologetic little swallow: "It isn't quite what I thought it would be." But he keeps going, because he's a writer, because he's got the loose end of a story and he's bound to follow it until it's raveled up someone's life or death, even his own.
With this kind of puzzle-plot, much of the runtime is taken up with the despicably compelling history of the eponymous Dimitrios Makropoulos, played by Zachary Scott in his film debut as a kind of Mediterranean Reynardine, smiling most sweetly before the sharp white teeth bite in. He has the character's crucial, feral charm and the role launched him as one of his era's leading exponents of sleaze, but he can't steal the film because he's sharing it with Peter Lorre. Prior to this movie, the closest thing I'd seen to a Lorre hero was Dr. Einstein in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), who is only the most reasonable character in that plot because everyone else cranked it up to eleven while he was still sleeping his last bender off. Here, cast sympathetically against type as Cornelius Latimer Leyden who used to teach economics at the University of Amsterdam and now writes mysteries with titles like A Bloody Shovel and either way owns some of the dorkiest reading glasses available to 1938, he's our classically innocent lens on the underworld, one of those decent, diffident heroes who's so far in over his head, he doesn't even know what he should be afraid of. He can't explain his obsession with Dimitrios, but he doesn't try to fight it even as it pulls him into strange interviews and shadier associations. At times he almost seems to be trying on his own genre for size, as when he leans over an unwelcome late-night visitor with a poker in his hand, murmuring, "I'm not a violent man, Mr. Peters. As a matter of fact, I hate violence. But there are times when the most peace-loving simply must do it—and this may be one of them." For a moment it seems that the soft-spoken writer, like so many a delicately unbalanced madman of Lorre's repertoire, might commit murder out of nothing more than temper if pushed too far. Finding himself on the business end of the pistol he was assured his guest hadn't brought this time, however, Leyden throws up his hands and collapses into an armchair with a resigned cry of "There it is! I knew it, I knew it!" as if less intimidated than exasperated by his failure to threaten to equal effect. (Having previously returned to ransacked hotel rooms, he started the scene with a fearlessly sarcastic "Oh, you're knocking at doors now!") His one fight scene works because it is just as ridiculously ineffective as you would expect from a person with no practical experience of violence and therefore it takes by surprise an opponent who was prepared for a real fight, not to have his gun literally slapped out of his hand as if it were a rude gesture by a tiny, bowtied ex-professor sputtering, "He was my friend! No, he wasn't my friend, but he was a nice man—compared to you, he was!" I am sure a fight choreographer was involved in the action that follows, but it really just looks like Lorre screaming and flailing, and Lorre with his background in Expressionist theater could scream and flail like nobody's business. Sydney Greenstreet is not cast against type at all as Mr. Peters who obviously knows more than he's telling about the object of Leyden's quest, but he is so magisterially untrustworthy in the part that I forgive Warners for it. "There's not enough kindness in the world," he sighs, pulling a gun on the grudgingly beguiled author again.
I don't know if The Mask of Dimitrios should be considered a top-shelf noir, but I am also not sure it matters given the chance to see Greenstreet and Lorre in one of the stronger of their celebrated nine pairings—Three Strangers (1946) and The Verdict (1946) are my other two favorites, along with the usual suspects of The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Casablanca (1942)—and Lorre, for a wonder, not as an antihero or even an amiable second lead but a hero full stop, brave as a holy fool to the end. It also looks fantastic, as it should when photographed in the full-blown noir style by Arthur Edeson whose resume includes the aforementioned usual suspects as well as a bunch of James Whale. Sometimes it's just shadows coaxing a European illusion out of a B-budget's interiors, but there are also fine images like the dissolve of the stirred flames of a punch bowl into the vortex of a roulette wheel or Greenstreet crawling with terrible singlemindedness across a floor papered with thousand-franc notes. The cosmopolitan cast includes Steven Geray, Victor Francen, Faye Emerson, and Kurt Katch, but I can't imagine I would care as much about this movie if it had a more standardized leading man. It was not out on DVD the last time I saw it; thanks to the Warner Archive, it is now. This mask brought to you by my mild-mannered backers at Patreon.
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TCM had better run either The Verdict or Three Strangers sometime soon. I have a comfort-viewing niche to assuage.
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I saw Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) for the first time (and many times) as a small child, so my default impression of him is adorable.
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Exactly!
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He's a wonderful protagonist!
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-Nameseeker
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I have never heard this song and I must.
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Song starts around 1:30, because the man does like to talk...
-Ruthanna
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Thank you.