![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
You might at least pay a little attention when a girl asks you to marry her
I don't think Murder by Proxy (U.S. Blackout, 1954) actually succeeds in fusing film noir and romantic comedy, but I am fascinated that it tried at all.
The premise of this pre-horror Hammer B-feature is noir, no chaser: having drunk himself down to his last ten shillings in his London hotel bar, vagabond ex-GI Casey Morrow (Dane Clark) is in no position to refuse when a very young, very poised, very mink-draped blonde (Belinda Lee) makes him an offer worth £500, even when the last thing he hears as he nods out in the lobby is that it's a proposal of marriage. He wakes the next morning in a strange flat full of sketches and paintings, most discomfitingly an unfinished canvas of last night's mysterious blonde smiling archly down on him as if enjoying his hungover predicament. She's not the woman making coffee in the kitchenette, however; that's astringent but not unfriendly artist Maggie Doone (Eleanor Summerfield) who explains that she found him leaning on her doorbell after midnight and brought him in out of the rain to dry out. With mingled relief and chagrin, Casey concludes that his encounter with "Miss Opportunity" was just a consequence of mixing his drinks with his host's interior decor: "As far as I'm concerned, last night was a complete blackout." He collects his camel-hair coat and his brown hat and his jacket that looks like he got into a fight in it and slinks gratefully out into the sun-bright streets of Chelsea, but no sooner has he passed a newsstand than that blonde face is looking archly at him again, this time from the front page of the Daily Mirror: "DARIUS BRUNNER IS MURDERED: HEIRESS DAUGHTER MISSING." When he reaches into his pocket, he doesn't even need to count the fat bundle of notes he finds there. As he checks hastily out of his hotel, the shrewd Inspector Johnson (Michael Golden) is already interviewing the barman (Alfie Bass) who watched a stone-broke American stumble out on the arm of the vanished Phyllis Brunner. Obviously he's been used for something, but he can't tell if it was as high-handed as putting one in the eye of a stuffy fiancé or as cold-blooded as knocking off Daddy. Or, as he pleads to his one exasperated ally, "Maggie, you've got to help me out—I've got to find out if I'm a murderer or a bridegroom!"
Adapted by Richard Landau from Helen Nielsen's Gold Coast Nocturne (1951)—retitled Murder by Proxy in the UK and reprinted in the U.S. as Dead on the Level—and directed by Terence Fisher with assistance from Jimmy Sangster, Murder by Proxy is not a spoof of its genre or even a rare screwball noir like The Big Sleep (1946), but it has some of the quirkiness I associate with early Hitchcock or Launder and Gilliat, finding as much humor as horror in the absurdity of its average Joe's sudden plummet into the straits of Kafka. "Be a detective? I could do that. I've seen enough movies." Casey says this last more than a touch wryly; it's warranted. He has Clark's Brooklyn wire of a voice and he looks as tough in his new trenchcoat as a hardboiled hero should, but he's anything but a natural gumshoe. He chats his way into the offices of shady solicitor Lance Gorden (Andrew Osborn) with convincing reportorial insinuation, but as soon as his bluff is called he panics, punches his prime suspect, and runs like hell. He manages to restrain his fight-or-flight instincts impersonating an insurance investigator for classily cagey secretary Lita Huntley (Alvys Maben), but when she gives him a brush-off answer to a patently silly question, he smacks himself in the forehead behind her back. He's less a cynical wisecracker than a beleaguered straight man, stunned to theatrics by his own drunken stupidity: "That's fine! I knew I wouldn't be happy unless I had my fingerprints all over the poker." Even when romance enters the picture with the reappearance of Phyllis Brunner, looking terribly fragile and earnest with her hair soaked straight and her motives obscure, the ghost marriage of their joint investigation retains a ruefully comic edge, as when an aggravated Casey begins, "And now, Miss Mastermind—" and his Schrödinger's wife demurely corrects him, "Mrs. Mastermind." It isn't romantic suspense à la The Big Steal (1949), not with the meet-cute of a potential shared murder. Even without the melting sense of events overtaking the protagonist no matter how he tries, the noir would come through in the way explanations and allegiances keep shifting and someone always seems to be pulling someone else's strings, whether that's Gorden as Phyllis insists or Phyllis as Casey fears; the audience can never relax into the romance because it might turn out to be just another red herring, like so much of the convoluted plot. Sometimes it seems to be switching modes as if on a timer, so much domesticity to so much mistrust. Damsel in distress or femme fatale? Alas, as usual that is the least interesting question I can think to ask about a woman in film noir. My investment in their relationship mostly derives from a late, neat interlude which is not particularly noir and not even really comedic, but which I didn't see coming more affectingly than any of the ostensible twists.
We gather early on that Casey has a past—in these dark cities, who doesn't? He deflects some gentle fishing from Maggie about his origins before admitting to Chicago, the poor, unglamorous, ashcans-and-alleys part of the city he never wants to revisit, not when he's got a chance at "plate glass, chrome, expensive furniture." Nevertheless, after a close shave with a hit-and-run in broad daylight, he decides it's time to go to ground: "Not your home. My home." What this turns out to mean is not a transatlantic ticket, but a short drive to a pub in Lancaster Mews (played by the Mitre, judging by its distinctive wrought iron) where the burly, dark-browed proprietor recognizes Casey at once and coldly: "So you finally came to see us." Bracketed by shelves of pint glasses like a prisoner in the dock, Casey in his bruises and trenchcoat stands defenseless and tongue-tied, faltering to silence until the man we realize must be his stepfather sends him upstairs with the most cursory permission. Casey's mother (Nora Gordon) rises from her knitting as though she's seen a ghost, crosses herself, and then speaks so steadily, it's worse than screaming. "You didn't write. I thought you were dead. I burned candles. John said, 'Do not expect Casimir to come back.' I looked for you to come back. You didn't come." Her accent is Polish as that hardscrabble immigrant neighborhood her son ran from, a country and a war ago; his eight years at demobbed loose ends are working up to an old, ashamed fight before Phyllis intervenes, as gracefully as the bride brought home to meet the parents, and Casey all out of pretenses can finally accept—and return—his mother's embrace. Later, as couples waltz in the crowded pub to the homely strains of an accordion and Phyllis attends to her mother-in-law's animated litany of family recipes, Casey returns with the belated wedding ring; he's as shy and jittery as a real bridegroom as he puts it on her small, fine hand, but he can't resist burlesquing himself a little as his mother calls for a celebration of the happy couple, the girl with her name in Debrett's and the first-generation drifter she picked up so drunk he still can't remember whether they're married for real or not: "That's me, Casimir Morokowski. Now you know why I changed my name to Casey Morrow." Debrett's or no, Phyllis doesn't take the bait. As easily and deliberately as if she's been hearing the name all her life, she holds his gaze and answers, "Thanks for the ring, Casimir." They dance for the first time in a circle of approving strangers; on the roof afterward where Casey smokes as moodily as Walter J. Harvey's underlit photography can frame him, they literally stumble into a kiss, the ghost marriage coming to clumsy, spontaneous life. He levels with her seriously, not clowning this time about the gulfs of class and trust between them. She starts to tease him, but clings to him suddenly, desperately instead. "And when we do—you and me—" Even as the plot warps itself up to Chandlerian levels of perplexity, that glimpse of connection holds out hope of a future that doesn't involve quite so many fisticuffs in hotel rooms and shootouts in stairwells and cut-glass confrontations with the upper crust. I could have used more glimpses like it.
The ending itself is not unbelievable; I'm just wary of the three-card monte required to reach it and while I understand after the fact that a particularly abrupt episode of violence was staged for benefit of a third party, I still feel the second party was owed a little more explanation along with appropriately profuse apologies. It seems unkind of the film, too, to lose track of sardonic, supportive Maggie in the last-minute coils of the plot when she's been as snared in them as anyone—"I take in a drunk so he won't freeze to death and I find myself knee-deep in murder!"—from the start. (I don't OT3 here, but I'd have third-billed the actress. The familiarity of her long quizzical brows puzzled me until I realized how much she resembled her son Robin Sachs.) I should check out the original novel in case its proportions of romance to nightmare were more credibly balanced. I'm also curious, frankly, if its withholdings and misdirections worked better on the page. An authorial voice can hold otherwise immiscible elements in suspension; from this film, my disbelief mostly got a crick in the neck. Still, you got 87 minutes to burn, this soft-boiled slice of amateur sleuthing and location shooting isn't the worst thing you could spend them on. The title's no masterwork, but Lee's as glamorous as camouflage, Summerfield as tart and poignant as the heroine of the next noir over, Dane Clark is never so funny in his investigative flailing that he isn't also vulnerable and real. Cleo Laine sings "St. Louis Woman" and some uncredited musicians play a nice Polish wedding dance. This bender brought to you by my bridal backers at Patreon.
The premise of this pre-horror Hammer B-feature is noir, no chaser: having drunk himself down to his last ten shillings in his London hotel bar, vagabond ex-GI Casey Morrow (Dane Clark) is in no position to refuse when a very young, very poised, very mink-draped blonde (Belinda Lee) makes him an offer worth £500, even when the last thing he hears as he nods out in the lobby is that it's a proposal of marriage. He wakes the next morning in a strange flat full of sketches and paintings, most discomfitingly an unfinished canvas of last night's mysterious blonde smiling archly down on him as if enjoying his hungover predicament. She's not the woman making coffee in the kitchenette, however; that's astringent but not unfriendly artist Maggie Doone (Eleanor Summerfield) who explains that she found him leaning on her doorbell after midnight and brought him in out of the rain to dry out. With mingled relief and chagrin, Casey concludes that his encounter with "Miss Opportunity" was just a consequence of mixing his drinks with his host's interior decor: "As far as I'm concerned, last night was a complete blackout." He collects his camel-hair coat and his brown hat and his jacket that looks like he got into a fight in it and slinks gratefully out into the sun-bright streets of Chelsea, but no sooner has he passed a newsstand than that blonde face is looking archly at him again, this time from the front page of the Daily Mirror: "DARIUS BRUNNER IS MURDERED: HEIRESS DAUGHTER MISSING." When he reaches into his pocket, he doesn't even need to count the fat bundle of notes he finds there. As he checks hastily out of his hotel, the shrewd Inspector Johnson (Michael Golden) is already interviewing the barman (Alfie Bass) who watched a stone-broke American stumble out on the arm of the vanished Phyllis Brunner. Obviously he's been used for something, but he can't tell if it was as high-handed as putting one in the eye of a stuffy fiancé or as cold-blooded as knocking off Daddy. Or, as he pleads to his one exasperated ally, "Maggie, you've got to help me out—I've got to find out if I'm a murderer or a bridegroom!"
Adapted by Richard Landau from Helen Nielsen's Gold Coast Nocturne (1951)—retitled Murder by Proxy in the UK and reprinted in the U.S. as Dead on the Level—and directed by Terence Fisher with assistance from Jimmy Sangster, Murder by Proxy is not a spoof of its genre or even a rare screwball noir like The Big Sleep (1946), but it has some of the quirkiness I associate with early Hitchcock or Launder and Gilliat, finding as much humor as horror in the absurdity of its average Joe's sudden plummet into the straits of Kafka. "Be a detective? I could do that. I've seen enough movies." Casey says this last more than a touch wryly; it's warranted. He has Clark's Brooklyn wire of a voice and he looks as tough in his new trenchcoat as a hardboiled hero should, but he's anything but a natural gumshoe. He chats his way into the offices of shady solicitor Lance Gorden (Andrew Osborn) with convincing reportorial insinuation, but as soon as his bluff is called he panics, punches his prime suspect, and runs like hell. He manages to restrain his fight-or-flight instincts impersonating an insurance investigator for classily cagey secretary Lita Huntley (Alvys Maben), but when she gives him a brush-off answer to a patently silly question, he smacks himself in the forehead behind her back. He's less a cynical wisecracker than a beleaguered straight man, stunned to theatrics by his own drunken stupidity: "That's fine! I knew I wouldn't be happy unless I had my fingerprints all over the poker." Even when romance enters the picture with the reappearance of Phyllis Brunner, looking terribly fragile and earnest with her hair soaked straight and her motives obscure, the ghost marriage of their joint investigation retains a ruefully comic edge, as when an aggravated Casey begins, "And now, Miss Mastermind—" and his Schrödinger's wife demurely corrects him, "Mrs. Mastermind." It isn't romantic suspense à la The Big Steal (1949), not with the meet-cute of a potential shared murder. Even without the melting sense of events overtaking the protagonist no matter how he tries, the noir would come through in the way explanations and allegiances keep shifting and someone always seems to be pulling someone else's strings, whether that's Gorden as Phyllis insists or Phyllis as Casey fears; the audience can never relax into the romance because it might turn out to be just another red herring, like so much of the convoluted plot. Sometimes it seems to be switching modes as if on a timer, so much domesticity to so much mistrust. Damsel in distress or femme fatale? Alas, as usual that is the least interesting question I can think to ask about a woman in film noir. My investment in their relationship mostly derives from a late, neat interlude which is not particularly noir and not even really comedic, but which I didn't see coming more affectingly than any of the ostensible twists.
We gather early on that Casey has a past—in these dark cities, who doesn't? He deflects some gentle fishing from Maggie about his origins before admitting to Chicago, the poor, unglamorous, ashcans-and-alleys part of the city he never wants to revisit, not when he's got a chance at "plate glass, chrome, expensive furniture." Nevertheless, after a close shave with a hit-and-run in broad daylight, he decides it's time to go to ground: "Not your home. My home." What this turns out to mean is not a transatlantic ticket, but a short drive to a pub in Lancaster Mews (played by the Mitre, judging by its distinctive wrought iron) where the burly, dark-browed proprietor recognizes Casey at once and coldly: "So you finally came to see us." Bracketed by shelves of pint glasses like a prisoner in the dock, Casey in his bruises and trenchcoat stands defenseless and tongue-tied, faltering to silence until the man we realize must be his stepfather sends him upstairs with the most cursory permission. Casey's mother (Nora Gordon) rises from her knitting as though she's seen a ghost, crosses herself, and then speaks so steadily, it's worse than screaming. "You didn't write. I thought you were dead. I burned candles. John said, 'Do not expect Casimir to come back.' I looked for you to come back. You didn't come." Her accent is Polish as that hardscrabble immigrant neighborhood her son ran from, a country and a war ago; his eight years at demobbed loose ends are working up to an old, ashamed fight before Phyllis intervenes, as gracefully as the bride brought home to meet the parents, and Casey all out of pretenses can finally accept—and return—his mother's embrace. Later, as couples waltz in the crowded pub to the homely strains of an accordion and Phyllis attends to her mother-in-law's animated litany of family recipes, Casey returns with the belated wedding ring; he's as shy and jittery as a real bridegroom as he puts it on her small, fine hand, but he can't resist burlesquing himself a little as his mother calls for a celebration of the happy couple, the girl with her name in Debrett's and the first-generation drifter she picked up so drunk he still can't remember whether they're married for real or not: "That's me, Casimir Morokowski. Now you know why I changed my name to Casey Morrow." Debrett's or no, Phyllis doesn't take the bait. As easily and deliberately as if she's been hearing the name all her life, she holds his gaze and answers, "Thanks for the ring, Casimir." They dance for the first time in a circle of approving strangers; on the roof afterward where Casey smokes as moodily as Walter J. Harvey's underlit photography can frame him, they literally stumble into a kiss, the ghost marriage coming to clumsy, spontaneous life. He levels with her seriously, not clowning this time about the gulfs of class and trust between them. She starts to tease him, but clings to him suddenly, desperately instead. "And when we do—you and me—" Even as the plot warps itself up to Chandlerian levels of perplexity, that glimpse of connection holds out hope of a future that doesn't involve quite so many fisticuffs in hotel rooms and shootouts in stairwells and cut-glass confrontations with the upper crust. I could have used more glimpses like it.
The ending itself is not unbelievable; I'm just wary of the three-card monte required to reach it and while I understand after the fact that a particularly abrupt episode of violence was staged for benefit of a third party, I still feel the second party was owed a little more explanation along with appropriately profuse apologies. It seems unkind of the film, too, to lose track of sardonic, supportive Maggie in the last-minute coils of the plot when she's been as snared in them as anyone—"I take in a drunk so he won't freeze to death and I find myself knee-deep in murder!"—from the start. (I don't OT3 here, but I'd have third-billed the actress. The familiarity of her long quizzical brows puzzled me until I realized how much she resembled her son Robin Sachs.) I should check out the original novel in case its proportions of romance to nightmare were more credibly balanced. I'm also curious, frankly, if its withholdings and misdirections worked better on the page. An authorial voice can hold otherwise immiscible elements in suspension; from this film, my disbelief mostly got a crick in the neck. Still, you got 87 minutes to burn, this soft-boiled slice of amateur sleuthing and location shooting isn't the worst thing you could spend them on. The title's no masterwork, but Lee's as glamorous as camouflage, Summerfield as tart and poignant as the heroine of the next noir over, Dane Clark is never so funny in his investigative flailing that he isn't also vulnerable and real. Cleo Laine sings "St. Louis Woman" and some uncredited musicians play a nice Polish wedding dance. This bender brought to you by my bridal backers at Patreon.
no subject
no subject
That's a good question! I don't think so, although I agree that Chandler's tall-talk similes are a mainstay of noir parodies—the "Girl Hunt Ballet" in The Band Wagon (1953 is specifically a parody of Mickey Spillane and my memories of The Cheap Detective (1978) suggest that it doesn't work unless you have at least had the plot of The Maltese Falcon—by Dashiell Hammett—described to you. How would you classify Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1978)? Or Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)?
no subject
no subject
It is legally available on DVD from VCI, but also *cough*
no subject
no subject
That was Dorothy Parker clever.
A very entertaining review - possibly more than I'd have found the film itself!
no subject
Thank you!
A very entertaining review - possibly more than I'd have found the film itself!
I did enjoy it—I have enjoyed Dane Clark in everything I've seen him in so far, even as the left-field heavy of a truly stupid B-noir by the name of Backfire (1950) and that one scene in The Glass Key (1942) where he gets tossed through a plate-glass window. The premise is a neat experiment and I like the emotional core when the script stays out of its way. It certainly won't give you brain damage if you catch it on TV, if people still catch things on TV anymore. Just know what you're in for if you go looking.
no subject
no subject
“If you read TV Guide, you don’t need to watch TV!” - The Lost Boys
In truth, I doubt that I would ever know of these films or bother with them. These discerning reviews are an entertaining substitute!
no subject
no subject
I am glad you both like it!
no subject
He's less a cynical wisecracker than a beleaguered straight man, stunned to theatrics by his own drunken stupidity
And also, I like the surprise surfacing of family background, and that our protagonist is Polish and then "dropped" that in his flight from his roots. Interesting!
no subject
Thank you!
And also, I like the surprise surfacing of family background, and that our protagonist is Polish and then "dropped" that in his flight from his roots. Interesting!
I loved that turn. The plot would have run much the same without it, but it didn't feel superfluous or tangential—it's part of the person our protagonist is and it's an important one. I really think the thing I like best about Phyllis is that she calls him, without irony or derision, by his original name.