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I'm the one with the bad memory
Libel (1959) is a deceptively bland title for one of the most compelling and satisfyingly twisty stories of doubling and imposture I have encountered in any medium. It plays with its questions of identity like science fiction or the nineteenth-century fantastic. It's late for a noir, but it's a true, great one. If you like Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar (1949), if you like Mary Stewart's The Ivy Tree (1961), you should be watching this film yesterday.
I know Dirk Bogarde knocked his matinée idolatry off its pedestal with Victim (1961), but I am wondering now if there was always a thread of not one of us in his mainstream work; the Rank Organisation really shouldn't have been able to avoid noticing his gift for it. Libel leads with it, introducing him in the elegant, diffident person of Sir Mark Loddon, 7th Baronet of Ingworth House in Dorset, which all sounds very grand except, as we are about to discover, the stately home is the kind that sustains itself with heritage tours because the title is about all the family's got left and a curiously similar vacancy underlies the baronet himself. A brief, stammering stall during an interview for BBC TV leaves him more unsettled than embarrassed, trying unconvincingly afterward to pass the one off as the other. "It was just bad luck," Lady Margaret Loddon (Olivia de Havilland) soothes the husband she knows well enough to tell the difference. "How could he know . . . that you can't always remember things that happened to you before the war?" The past may be another country, but trauma can make an entire other planet of it. Mark can relate scenes from his five years as a prisoner of war after Dunkirk; he can recount most of the three-man escape that got him safely across the Dutch border but left him in hospital for six months, his right hand permanently damaged from bullets and his hair prematurely grey from the strain; but beyond a few scattered stories from his childhood, he can recall nothing of his earlier life, not even the source of the "sort of dream" that keeps "coming up . . . like wreckage," the whistled tune that always breaks off at the same point, the vague sense of something moving in mist and water, and the nightmare foreboding of violence. He doesn't like to be reminded of his missing pieces. He doesn't like to show them, especially not on national television. But the night he stumbles over a genial question about his twenty-first birthday, his audience just happens to include a man who sees in the moment's tongue-tie not the natural drying-up of a shy person in the spotlight but the slip of a murderous understudy missing part of his script. Within days, the country is buzzing over an item in the sensational Sunday Gazette: "BOGUS BARONET." Despite his initial reluctance to dignify the smear with a response, Mark is eventually persuaded, in a move that the ghost of Oscar Wilde might have advised against, to bring an action for libel "against the Sunday Gazette and another." And the trap is sprung. On the defending side of the courtroom sits his old war buddy, the Canadian flyer Jeff Buckenham (Paul Massie), smiling grimly as he watches Mark in the witness box swear by Almighty God to tell nothing but the truth. He's been called by his counsel to refute the allegation that he's a pretender, a fellow inmate of Oflag IX-A who exploited his background in provincial theater and his uncanny resemblance to the real baronet in order to return from the war in place of his social better and appropriate his title, his fiancée, and all the rest of his life. Winning his case will require unimpeachable proof of identity—a tall order in the days before DNA evidence and even trickier for a man who has professed retrograde amnesia since 1945. Then again, Jeff who knew both men intimately in the prison camp, who made his escape with them and saw one leave the other for dead beside a bridge as the Germans closed in, has never put much stock in that excuse to begin with. "I remember. That's the trouble . . . You played the part pretty well, Frank, but I'm afraid the show is over."
Any impostor narrative worth its grain of salt should be able to keep its audience guessing as to the truth or falsehood of its central character. It's far cleverer for the character themselves not to know. Quite early on, Libel lets its audience in on the complicating factor that whatever else may or may not be true of—for convenience's sake, let's keep on calling him—Mark, his shot-to-hell memory is real. When he woke in the hospital after V-E Day, he couldn't remember how he'd gotten there. He couldn't remember his fiancée whose letters had been his lifeline in the camp. He was recognized as Mark Loddon and given no reason to doubt it; if it was always clear to his family that Mark 1939 and Mark 1945 were not quite the same person, wars have a habit of leaving fractured veterans in their wake. He built a life going forward and that's all anyone can do. But what did he build it on? As the trial twists and turns, as he confesses his paltry store of personal memories only to find that he hasn't told a single story his sharp-eared double wouldn't also have known, as his body itself is used as evidence against him, the question of self and other becomes even more urgent for our protagonist than it is for the High Court of Justice. They are concerned with offences and damages. He's falling into one of those existential gulfs that noir is heir to. Is he Frank Welney, that charming, dodgy, youthfully grey-haired spear-carrier with the slightly malformed right hand who used to imitate his upper-class doppelgänger for a passive-aggressive lark and was once caught by Jeff rehearsing his impersonation in a creepily serious key? When Mark observed measuringly, "You know, if you could dispose of me, I believe you could go back to Ingworth, take over, and no one would be any the wiser," was he merely forecasting his own end at the hands of his ambitious duplicate? Which side of the identity theft was our man on? Physically, he could be either one of them; cognitively, he seems to know only what they both knew. And on some level as deep and frightening as a reflection that never comes into focus while a little broken tune stops and stops again, what difference does it make when the trauma of their joint escape left him effectively memory-wiped? Whoever made it across the border that night, the damaged original or an incomplete copy of him, he ceased to be either the confident heir of Ingworth or his camp-concert substitute: they were both replaced by the loving, haunted, volatile man who thought of himself as Mark Loddon until all of a sudden he wondered if he should have been thinking of himself as Frank Welney instead. This is eerie, dizzying stuff, like watching an abyss gaze into a mirror or Schrödinger run a shell game. Normally it makes a narrative more predictable if the audience has privileged information, but here it only widens the field of uncertainty. Meanwhile, the respective counsels for the plaintiff and the defence (the delightful double act of Robert Morley and Wilfrid Hyde-White) are trying to prove or disprove something so much more bluntly binary that it's almost absurd except for the amount of pain it's causing the protagonist, for whom even legal vindication will not be the same as metaphysical peace of mind.
Unless it's going to pull a complete Heisenberg, a suspense story of this nature eventually has to resolve its incompatibilities: the audience must learn whether the character is an impostor or the real thing. The genius of Libel is that its protagonist is both.
Like the counsel for the defence, the film has one last abyssal mirror to spring on its protagonist's spiraling sense of self: the silent, shattered man known only as "Number Fifteen." Now in the permanent care of the mental hospital at Kleve, he was discovered under a bridge in the last days before the surrender in 1945, so badly beaten that his useless right arm had to be amputated, his face could be reconstructed only as a wasteland of scars, and his wits have never returned. "He breathes, it is true—he eats, he sleeps—but he is not alive." He was wearing a British battle jacket of the same rank as Major Loddon when he was found. There is something horribly medieval in the defence's gambit of bringing him face to face with the plaintiff, like a corpse that might bleed at its murderer's touch, but the results are almost as spectacular. While Number Fifteen shuffles a hesitant step forward, his mouth working wordlessly, Mark visibly cringes back from the mute apparition whose ruined face still bears a likeness to his own. He looks as though he can neither believe nor bear it; he covers his face with his hand, childlike, just as the orderly coaxes his nightmare charge out. Jeff has never made a secret of his contempt for Frank Welney, but somehow he finds even more as he looks down at the grey-haired man who can't meet his eyes and says deliberately, "Bloody swine." After that performance, it is hardly a shock that Maggie Loddon is not exactly the sterling witness for her husband's character that plaintiff's counsel was hoping; it is dully, logically painful that she bars her hotel door against him that night. "Who needs me?" she demands tersely, and the disheveled stranger in her husband's herringbone coat can only answer with desperate, nameless honesty, "I do. The man you loved. The man you married . . . You did love me, didn't you? And all through the years, you went on loving me, didn't you, even through the worst times? And it was me, wasn't it? Not just someone called Mark Loddon, but me—me, myself?" That question we're always asking one another, looking for Le Guin's hand held out in the dark. His wife's answer sends him out into the dark alone. All night, the camera follows him through the lit-up neon reel of London nightlife, the crowds and the buses and the marquees that he might as well be on the other side of glass from. Near dawn, he stands above a canal, his reflection bending and wavering at his feet. It's cold, misty. That tune that insouciant Frank was always whistling around the camp, that has clung like a dybbuk to the man who doesn't know any more if that used to be him, is sticking again like a record-scratch in his head. When it has words, it's the broadside ballad "Early One Morning," whose refrain runs oh, don't deceive me, oh, never leave me, how could you use a poor maiden so? And though we don't know what triggered it or even what it is, we watch him remember at last.
What he's remembered, he explains in court the next morning, is that he's Mark Loddon. Really Mark Loddon, not just the man who accepted the name; he can fill in all the gaps of his story now. The key was Number Fifteen, whose broken face looked at him like an image in moving water and mist: "I knew quite clearly that one of us was Welney, one of us was Loddon, but I didn't know which was which." His own wind-twisted reflection unlocked the rest. Where earlier he could remember nothing beyond himself and Frank waiting under the bridge while Jeff scrounged a nearby farm for food, now he recalls that as he leaned over to drink some water from the canal, he saw his reflection from the wrong angle—Frank's reflection as the other man stood over him with an iron bar in his hand, ready to take over the star part after all. Frank was the one who ended the fight with his head bashed in, though, his leather jacket stolen for camouflage as an already dissociating Mark fled the shots of the same German patrol that Jeff arrived back at the bridge just in time to hear declare the battle-dressed body tot. "Two days later I was picked up by a forward patrol of British troops." Six months after that, sufficiently healed in body but not in mind, he was released from hospital into the care of his new life, which was his own life, which he no longer recognized.
It's just so beautiful. Everything that the impostor Frank was accused of, the real Mark has done. "Your terror was real," his wife coldly summed him up, the night he pleaded with her to believe that whoever he was, he couldn't have been all a lie. "But it wasn't the terror of something you couldn't remember. Your terror was of something you couldn't forget—the murder of a friend." Double-speaking as an oracle, she told the truth to the man she didn't intend it for. He did kill a friend, even if he left his body alive. He changed identities with his double. He stepped into another man's life and lived it until his right to it was questioned and then the nerves and evasions of a man afraid he might be an impostor looked exactly like the nerves and evasions of a man well aware he was one. Frank Welney became no one, the unidentified blank of Number Fifteen. Mark Loddon became both himself and his replacement, Narcissus and his flirtatious, murderous reflection. (I have the gaydar of a rock, but Frank isn't subtle. His first words onscreen, having been caught intercepting one of Mark's letters on the strength of their mutual resemblance, are the bitchily mollifying "All right, all right, all right, you boring Canadian lumberjack, just remember you gave it to me!" Practicing his Mark-impression before the mirror, glancing up at his model as he modestly admits himself "quite talented," he gives the Ripleyesque air of not knowing whether he wants to be the other man or do him. Right up until he decides to kill him instead, he looks like he'd settle for both.) Indeed, like sympathetic magic, the moment one man loses himself, so does the other, and they must be reunited to be restored; they are so entangled that it takes a recognition token of which Frank never had any knowledge to confirm Mark's claim to himself in the eyes of the law and the faith of Maggie and Jeff. No wonder he was always uneasy of mirrors, when he could never be sure whose face he was seeing and the answer was both. Himself and his other self, the one that tried to kill him and the one he killed. E.T.A. Hoffmann would respect this chiasmus. Nothing in this movie is as simple as blaming the evil twin.
In case I have made this movie sound like a mere exercise in pattern recognition, let me assure you it is also just a damn fine film. I am mildly interested in the source play of the same name by Edward Wooll because its 1935 Broadway transfer starred Colin Clive, but the weirdest and most affecting aspects of the doubling actually appear to have been introduced by screenwriters Karl Tunberg and Anatole de Grunwald and then showcased by the low-lit photography of Robert Krasker, who could catch the shadow sides of people as well as cities, and the sensitive direction of Anthony Asquith, who knew a thing or two about haunted, compromised men. Anyone still unimpressed with Dirk Bogarde should watch the scene where Frank combs his silvery hair out of its side-parting, adjusts the drawling irony out of his voice, and all of a sudden even the way he puts his hands behind his back as if to survey himself on parade belongs to another man and it has nothing to do with them being played by the same actor. At times I was reminded of The Captive Heart (1946); at others, The Glass Pearls (1966). I would love to know if Christopher Nolan ever saw this thing. To get back to ragging on the Rank Organisation, I am now officially bewildered their A Tale of Two Cities (1958) didn't cast Bogarde in a dual role. This proof brought to you by my ambiguous backers at Patreon.
I know Dirk Bogarde knocked his matinée idolatry off its pedestal with Victim (1961), but I am wondering now if there was always a thread of not one of us in his mainstream work; the Rank Organisation really shouldn't have been able to avoid noticing his gift for it. Libel leads with it, introducing him in the elegant, diffident person of Sir Mark Loddon, 7th Baronet of Ingworth House in Dorset, which all sounds very grand except, as we are about to discover, the stately home is the kind that sustains itself with heritage tours because the title is about all the family's got left and a curiously similar vacancy underlies the baronet himself. A brief, stammering stall during an interview for BBC TV leaves him more unsettled than embarrassed, trying unconvincingly afterward to pass the one off as the other. "It was just bad luck," Lady Margaret Loddon (Olivia de Havilland) soothes the husband she knows well enough to tell the difference. "How could he know . . . that you can't always remember things that happened to you before the war?" The past may be another country, but trauma can make an entire other planet of it. Mark can relate scenes from his five years as a prisoner of war after Dunkirk; he can recount most of the three-man escape that got him safely across the Dutch border but left him in hospital for six months, his right hand permanently damaged from bullets and his hair prematurely grey from the strain; but beyond a few scattered stories from his childhood, he can recall nothing of his earlier life, not even the source of the "sort of dream" that keeps "coming up . . . like wreckage," the whistled tune that always breaks off at the same point, the vague sense of something moving in mist and water, and the nightmare foreboding of violence. He doesn't like to be reminded of his missing pieces. He doesn't like to show them, especially not on national television. But the night he stumbles over a genial question about his twenty-first birthday, his audience just happens to include a man who sees in the moment's tongue-tie not the natural drying-up of a shy person in the spotlight but the slip of a murderous understudy missing part of his script. Within days, the country is buzzing over an item in the sensational Sunday Gazette: "BOGUS BARONET." Despite his initial reluctance to dignify the smear with a response, Mark is eventually persuaded, in a move that the ghost of Oscar Wilde might have advised against, to bring an action for libel "against the Sunday Gazette and another." And the trap is sprung. On the defending side of the courtroom sits his old war buddy, the Canadian flyer Jeff Buckenham (Paul Massie), smiling grimly as he watches Mark in the witness box swear by Almighty God to tell nothing but the truth. He's been called by his counsel to refute the allegation that he's a pretender, a fellow inmate of Oflag IX-A who exploited his background in provincial theater and his uncanny resemblance to the real baronet in order to return from the war in place of his social better and appropriate his title, his fiancée, and all the rest of his life. Winning his case will require unimpeachable proof of identity—a tall order in the days before DNA evidence and even trickier for a man who has professed retrograde amnesia since 1945. Then again, Jeff who knew both men intimately in the prison camp, who made his escape with them and saw one leave the other for dead beside a bridge as the Germans closed in, has never put much stock in that excuse to begin with. "I remember. That's the trouble . . . You played the part pretty well, Frank, but I'm afraid the show is over."
Any impostor narrative worth its grain of salt should be able to keep its audience guessing as to the truth or falsehood of its central character. It's far cleverer for the character themselves not to know. Quite early on, Libel lets its audience in on the complicating factor that whatever else may or may not be true of—for convenience's sake, let's keep on calling him—Mark, his shot-to-hell memory is real. When he woke in the hospital after V-E Day, he couldn't remember how he'd gotten there. He couldn't remember his fiancée whose letters had been his lifeline in the camp. He was recognized as Mark Loddon and given no reason to doubt it; if it was always clear to his family that Mark 1939 and Mark 1945 were not quite the same person, wars have a habit of leaving fractured veterans in their wake. He built a life going forward and that's all anyone can do. But what did he build it on? As the trial twists and turns, as he confesses his paltry store of personal memories only to find that he hasn't told a single story his sharp-eared double wouldn't also have known, as his body itself is used as evidence against him, the question of self and other becomes even more urgent for our protagonist than it is for the High Court of Justice. They are concerned with offences and damages. He's falling into one of those existential gulfs that noir is heir to. Is he Frank Welney, that charming, dodgy, youthfully grey-haired spear-carrier with the slightly malformed right hand who used to imitate his upper-class doppelgänger for a passive-aggressive lark and was once caught by Jeff rehearsing his impersonation in a creepily serious key? When Mark observed measuringly, "You know, if you could dispose of me, I believe you could go back to Ingworth, take over, and no one would be any the wiser," was he merely forecasting his own end at the hands of his ambitious duplicate? Which side of the identity theft was our man on? Physically, he could be either one of them; cognitively, he seems to know only what they both knew. And on some level as deep and frightening as a reflection that never comes into focus while a little broken tune stops and stops again, what difference does it make when the trauma of their joint escape left him effectively memory-wiped? Whoever made it across the border that night, the damaged original or an incomplete copy of him, he ceased to be either the confident heir of Ingworth or his camp-concert substitute: they were both replaced by the loving, haunted, volatile man who thought of himself as Mark Loddon until all of a sudden he wondered if he should have been thinking of himself as Frank Welney instead. This is eerie, dizzying stuff, like watching an abyss gaze into a mirror or Schrödinger run a shell game. Normally it makes a narrative more predictable if the audience has privileged information, but here it only widens the field of uncertainty. Meanwhile, the respective counsels for the plaintiff and the defence (the delightful double act of Robert Morley and Wilfrid Hyde-White) are trying to prove or disprove something so much more bluntly binary that it's almost absurd except for the amount of pain it's causing the protagonist, for whom even legal vindication will not be the same as metaphysical peace of mind.
Unless it's going to pull a complete Heisenberg, a suspense story of this nature eventually has to resolve its incompatibilities: the audience must learn whether the character is an impostor or the real thing. The genius of Libel is that its protagonist is both.
Like the counsel for the defence, the film has one last abyssal mirror to spring on its protagonist's spiraling sense of self: the silent, shattered man known only as "Number Fifteen." Now in the permanent care of the mental hospital at Kleve, he was discovered under a bridge in the last days before the surrender in 1945, so badly beaten that his useless right arm had to be amputated, his face could be reconstructed only as a wasteland of scars, and his wits have never returned. "He breathes, it is true—he eats, he sleeps—but he is not alive." He was wearing a British battle jacket of the same rank as Major Loddon when he was found. There is something horribly medieval in the defence's gambit of bringing him face to face with the plaintiff, like a corpse that might bleed at its murderer's touch, but the results are almost as spectacular. While Number Fifteen shuffles a hesitant step forward, his mouth working wordlessly, Mark visibly cringes back from the mute apparition whose ruined face still bears a likeness to his own. He looks as though he can neither believe nor bear it; he covers his face with his hand, childlike, just as the orderly coaxes his nightmare charge out. Jeff has never made a secret of his contempt for Frank Welney, but somehow he finds even more as he looks down at the grey-haired man who can't meet his eyes and says deliberately, "Bloody swine." After that performance, it is hardly a shock that Maggie Loddon is not exactly the sterling witness for her husband's character that plaintiff's counsel was hoping; it is dully, logically painful that she bars her hotel door against him that night. "Who needs me?" she demands tersely, and the disheveled stranger in her husband's herringbone coat can only answer with desperate, nameless honesty, "I do. The man you loved. The man you married . . . You did love me, didn't you? And all through the years, you went on loving me, didn't you, even through the worst times? And it was me, wasn't it? Not just someone called Mark Loddon, but me—me, myself?" That question we're always asking one another, looking for Le Guin's hand held out in the dark. His wife's answer sends him out into the dark alone. All night, the camera follows him through the lit-up neon reel of London nightlife, the crowds and the buses and the marquees that he might as well be on the other side of glass from. Near dawn, he stands above a canal, his reflection bending and wavering at his feet. It's cold, misty. That tune that insouciant Frank was always whistling around the camp, that has clung like a dybbuk to the man who doesn't know any more if that used to be him, is sticking again like a record-scratch in his head. When it has words, it's the broadside ballad "Early One Morning," whose refrain runs oh, don't deceive me, oh, never leave me, how could you use a poor maiden so? And though we don't know what triggered it or even what it is, we watch him remember at last.
What he's remembered, he explains in court the next morning, is that he's Mark Loddon. Really Mark Loddon, not just the man who accepted the name; he can fill in all the gaps of his story now. The key was Number Fifteen, whose broken face looked at him like an image in moving water and mist: "I knew quite clearly that one of us was Welney, one of us was Loddon, but I didn't know which was which." His own wind-twisted reflection unlocked the rest. Where earlier he could remember nothing beyond himself and Frank waiting under the bridge while Jeff scrounged a nearby farm for food, now he recalls that as he leaned over to drink some water from the canal, he saw his reflection from the wrong angle—Frank's reflection as the other man stood over him with an iron bar in his hand, ready to take over the star part after all. Frank was the one who ended the fight with his head bashed in, though, his leather jacket stolen for camouflage as an already dissociating Mark fled the shots of the same German patrol that Jeff arrived back at the bridge just in time to hear declare the battle-dressed body tot. "Two days later I was picked up by a forward patrol of British troops." Six months after that, sufficiently healed in body but not in mind, he was released from hospital into the care of his new life, which was his own life, which he no longer recognized.
It's just so beautiful. Everything that the impostor Frank was accused of, the real Mark has done. "Your terror was real," his wife coldly summed him up, the night he pleaded with her to believe that whoever he was, he couldn't have been all a lie. "But it wasn't the terror of something you couldn't remember. Your terror was of something you couldn't forget—the murder of a friend." Double-speaking as an oracle, she told the truth to the man she didn't intend it for. He did kill a friend, even if he left his body alive. He changed identities with his double. He stepped into another man's life and lived it until his right to it was questioned and then the nerves and evasions of a man afraid he might be an impostor looked exactly like the nerves and evasions of a man well aware he was one. Frank Welney became no one, the unidentified blank of Number Fifteen. Mark Loddon became both himself and his replacement, Narcissus and his flirtatious, murderous reflection. (I have the gaydar of a rock, but Frank isn't subtle. His first words onscreen, having been caught intercepting one of Mark's letters on the strength of their mutual resemblance, are the bitchily mollifying "All right, all right, all right, you boring Canadian lumberjack, just remember you gave it to me!" Practicing his Mark-impression before the mirror, glancing up at his model as he modestly admits himself "quite talented," he gives the Ripleyesque air of not knowing whether he wants to be the other man or do him. Right up until he decides to kill him instead, he looks like he'd settle for both.) Indeed, like sympathetic magic, the moment one man loses himself, so does the other, and they must be reunited to be restored; they are so entangled that it takes a recognition token of which Frank never had any knowledge to confirm Mark's claim to himself in the eyes of the law and the faith of Maggie and Jeff. No wonder he was always uneasy of mirrors, when he could never be sure whose face he was seeing and the answer was both. Himself and his other self, the one that tried to kill him and the one he killed. E.T.A. Hoffmann would respect this chiasmus. Nothing in this movie is as simple as blaming the evil twin.
In case I have made this movie sound like a mere exercise in pattern recognition, let me assure you it is also just a damn fine film. I am mildly interested in the source play of the same name by Edward Wooll because its 1935 Broadway transfer starred Colin Clive, but the weirdest and most affecting aspects of the doubling actually appear to have been introduced by screenwriters Karl Tunberg and Anatole de Grunwald and then showcased by the low-lit photography of Robert Krasker, who could catch the shadow sides of people as well as cities, and the sensitive direction of Anthony Asquith, who knew a thing or two about haunted, compromised men. Anyone still unimpressed with Dirk Bogarde should watch the scene where Frank combs his silvery hair out of its side-parting, adjusts the drawling irony out of his voice, and all of a sudden even the way he puts his hands behind his back as if to survey himself on parade belongs to another man and it has nothing to do with them being played by the same actor. At times I was reminded of The Captive Heart (1946); at others, The Glass Pearls (1966). I would love to know if Christopher Nolan ever saw this thing. To get back to ragging on the Rank Organisation, I am now officially bewildered their A Tale of Two Cities (1958) didn't cast Bogarde in a dual role. This proof brought to you by my ambiguous backers at Patreon.
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It was so much more than I was expecting. The one-line summary on TCM was once again technically accurate, but sold the film so short.