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I just didn't want you to think I was here for everybody
I don't want to oversell Anthony Asquith's The Woman in Question (U.S. Five Angles on Murder, 1950). Despite its round-robin of contradictory flashbacks, it's really not a British Rashomon (1950) so much as a nimble exercise in the kaleidoscope of unreliable narration, each turn of the murder investigation shaking motives, events, even personalities into new patterns while the audience tries to puzzle out with the police where if anywhere in this carnival swirl of perspective the truth lies. If the results are more thought-provoking than suspenseful, however, they still contain a trenchant element of misdirection which I didn't see coming and appreciate all the more in light of my ongoing argument with received images of the past. Plus if you like Jean Kent, as I have ever since she wrestled a surprising brittle sympathy out of the Clytaemnestra part in The Browning Version (1951), it's worth not missing for her performance alone.
It doesn't look at first as though we'll have much chance to appreciate her. Agnes Huston (Kent) is dead before the credits roll, strangled with a scarf in the upstairs bedroom of a slightly seedy terrace near the seaside arcade where the blonde young widow told fortunes as "Madame Astra"; we are not even shown her body, unless a blanket-wrapped weight on an ambulance stretcher counts. When she does appear on film at last, it's strictly mediated through the testimony of third parties and the speculation of the detectives on the case, and therein lies the catch and the charm of this shape-shifting story. Who was the woman in question? Depends who you ask. Charwoman Mrs. Finch (Hermione Baddeley) professes affection for the genteel neighbor who bravely made the best of her demeaning profession and the slow dying of her war-wounded husband, but shopgirl Catherine Taylor (Susan Shaw) admits she fought constantly with her day-drinking slattern of an older sister who mourned nothing more than the loss of a petty officer's pay. Music-hall mentalist Bob Baker (Dirk Bogarde) recalls an alluring but spiteful man-eater who interfered with his divorce after he rebuffed her advances, while Albert Pollard (Charles Victor), the older proprietor of the pet shop across the street, had to coax the shy housewife to accept his offers of odd jobs around the house. For the merchant sailor Michael Murray (John McCallum), the woman who greeted his win of a canary from a shooting gallery with the laughing challenge, "I bet that ain't the first time you've been given the bird, sailor!" was the earthy, free-spirited love of his life to whom he should have written just one letter on his last voyage. For ten-year-old Alfie Finch (Robert Scroggins), she was the lady with the parrot he was always trying to get to talk. "We've seen all these Astras," muses the rawboned, thoughtful Superintendent Lodge (Duncan Macrae) as the interviews pile up and the inconsistencies with them, "but which, if any, of them is the real one?"
This scenario is a coup for Kent, obviously, who proves she can be just as persuasive as an idealized woman as a demonized one and all the complicated possibilities in between, but the script by John Cresswell takes it wisely further and extends the same ambiguities of memory and embroidery to the rest of the cast. If you believe Mrs. Finch, Baker's a slick chancer whose American accent advertises violence and vulgarity as loudly as his flash ties, but for Catherine, he's a vulnerable, romantic figure who may win the audience's heart as well as her own when he punctures his transatlantic glamour with the blushing confession, "Catherine, I was born in Liverpool—I've never been farther west than Bristol in my life!" In his own words, he comes off as raffish and sincere, sympathetically a bit of a loser, and he never breaks his American kayfabe. His Catherine is a sensitive, sensible girl who'll wait steadily and honestly for her lover to be legally free and Mrs. Finch long ago wrote her off as a prissy chiseler with a nasty habit of interesting herself in other women's husbands. Then again, the older woman paints herself as an eternally accommodating caretaker while the young lovers seem to regard her as a self-important busybody and Murray remembers her trying to nick an extra tin of duty-free goodies out of the suitcase he brought for Astra. Ineffectual to the point of not even appearing in one version of the three-way confrontation on the stairs where all parties atypically agree that Astra was threatened to her face, Pollard when he relates the altercation is brisk and manly, taking charge of the situation like a keep-calm-and-carry-on poster personified. Everyone's the hero of their own vignette, just that extra dash sweeter, wittier, or more assured than we know can have been the case in real life—or more at fault, since it is nearly impossible for our storytelling species to resist the urge to edit either way. It's not a total cloud of unknowingness. Beyond the indisputable fact of Astra's corpse, there are lines or interactions that recur across multiple accounts, sometimes contextualized or interpreted quite differently, but nonetheless sufficiently attested that they can be rationally determined to have occurred. The question is whether any of them will shed more light on the murder than the lacuna of Astra herself.
Murder mysteries are puzzles. They are narratives of investigation and explanation; they fit together jagged pieces of human emotion and aftermath and make a pattern, however terrible, of the chaos of the world. It's not an absolute that the most obviously missing piece will be the key, but it's enough of a trope that something like He Walked by Night (1948) still feels subversive merely because it refuses to fill in the blank. Even before the superintendent states it outright, we have been conditioned to believe that "if we knew what sort of woman this really was, we'd be a lot nearer to finding out who killed her and why." Which makes it all the more rewarding, diegetically and Doylistically, that in the case of The Woman in Question it's simply not true. The reasons for Astra's murder have nothing to do with the sort of woman she really was and everything to do with the sort of woman a man imagined her to be and then killed her for not being. Superintendent Lodge actually figures it out after the fourth interview, a good thirty years before that axiom of Margaret Atwood's so often formulated as men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them:
"It's not so funny as you think. An elderly, insignificant little man who's built an ideal world around a woman—a world in which for the first time he's the hero and she's a frail, trusting little thing who needs a strong man's protection. Suddenly she laughs at him and the whole thing goes smash."
And the film knows that's not an excuse for murder. A third-act delivery of red herrings temporarily causes the superintendent to reconsider his conclusions, but his original reasoning is borne out by the final vignette, which fuses reconstruction and memory into the reveal that the jealous Pollard, not the volatile Murray, was indeed the kind of man who would return late at night, in cold blood, to strangle a woman who'd hurt his feelings. That pedestal-perfect romance he related so proudly and touchingly to the interviewing cops was only a little less one-sided than stalking. It is extremely satisfying that he's turned in by his own parrot, a gift to Astra that she almost certainly did not accept as gratefully and admiringly as Pollard would have it, especially since it was replacing the canary that Murray left with her when he returned to sea. Lodge was introduced regretfully addressing it as "the one witness who knows all the answers—and he won't talk," but sometimes an out-of-season squawk of "Merry Christmas!" can be enough to see justice done.
The other thing that elevates this movie beyond its structure is its awareness of the unrecoverability of the dead. "Have we?" Lodge counters when one of his subordinates claims that they've seen everyone involved in the case for themselves. "What about Astra? We've seen her only through the eyes of other people. And she's always been different." There's no moment when the five women of the flashbacks cohere into a single, certain, real Astra. Murray's version feels the most three-dimensional and therefore the closest to plausibility, a fun-loving, hard-luck woman who was neither tramp nor angel and asked her lover to write her from his travels and made other arrangements when he did not, but we'll never know for ourselves. She's beyond the reach of anything but conjecture and the film isn't so clever with its alternate histories that we don't feel the loss. It may have backed into feminism accidentally, but in the most definitional recognition of its main character's humanity and the systems that enabled her death, I think it got there.
I am gradually realizing there are some fascinatingly weird objects in Asquith's well-made filmography and as much as I love some of the famous ones, so far I have been delighted every time I've run across the other kind. I had no idea this one existed until it bounced up on Criterion in a search for Dirk Bogarde. It's more than its conceit, but its conceit is terrifically realized—even the sets dressed by Carmen Dillon and the cinematography by Desmond Dickinson are shape-changers, lending the viewpoints of different characters almost the separate tones of an anthology film. It plays as experimentally with its narrative as any non-linear noir and as fair with its evidence as a detective novel of the Golden Age. To be honest, Macrae's gaunt, wry investigator is just enough of an eccentric that I'd have followed a series of him. I imagine it would be more productive to track down other films starring Jean Kent. This mosaic brought to you by my many-voiced backers at Patreon.
It doesn't look at first as though we'll have much chance to appreciate her. Agnes Huston (Kent) is dead before the credits roll, strangled with a scarf in the upstairs bedroom of a slightly seedy terrace near the seaside arcade where the blonde young widow told fortunes as "Madame Astra"; we are not even shown her body, unless a blanket-wrapped weight on an ambulance stretcher counts. When she does appear on film at last, it's strictly mediated through the testimony of third parties and the speculation of the detectives on the case, and therein lies the catch and the charm of this shape-shifting story. Who was the woman in question? Depends who you ask. Charwoman Mrs. Finch (Hermione Baddeley) professes affection for the genteel neighbor who bravely made the best of her demeaning profession and the slow dying of her war-wounded husband, but shopgirl Catherine Taylor (Susan Shaw) admits she fought constantly with her day-drinking slattern of an older sister who mourned nothing more than the loss of a petty officer's pay. Music-hall mentalist Bob Baker (Dirk Bogarde) recalls an alluring but spiteful man-eater who interfered with his divorce after he rebuffed her advances, while Albert Pollard (Charles Victor), the older proprietor of the pet shop across the street, had to coax the shy housewife to accept his offers of odd jobs around the house. For the merchant sailor Michael Murray (John McCallum), the woman who greeted his win of a canary from a shooting gallery with the laughing challenge, "I bet that ain't the first time you've been given the bird, sailor!" was the earthy, free-spirited love of his life to whom he should have written just one letter on his last voyage. For ten-year-old Alfie Finch (Robert Scroggins), she was the lady with the parrot he was always trying to get to talk. "We've seen all these Astras," muses the rawboned, thoughtful Superintendent Lodge (Duncan Macrae) as the interviews pile up and the inconsistencies with them, "but which, if any, of them is the real one?"
This scenario is a coup for Kent, obviously, who proves she can be just as persuasive as an idealized woman as a demonized one and all the complicated possibilities in between, but the script by John Cresswell takes it wisely further and extends the same ambiguities of memory and embroidery to the rest of the cast. If you believe Mrs. Finch, Baker's a slick chancer whose American accent advertises violence and vulgarity as loudly as his flash ties, but for Catherine, he's a vulnerable, romantic figure who may win the audience's heart as well as her own when he punctures his transatlantic glamour with the blushing confession, "Catherine, I was born in Liverpool—I've never been farther west than Bristol in my life!" In his own words, he comes off as raffish and sincere, sympathetically a bit of a loser, and he never breaks his American kayfabe. His Catherine is a sensitive, sensible girl who'll wait steadily and honestly for her lover to be legally free and Mrs. Finch long ago wrote her off as a prissy chiseler with a nasty habit of interesting herself in other women's husbands. Then again, the older woman paints herself as an eternally accommodating caretaker while the young lovers seem to regard her as a self-important busybody and Murray remembers her trying to nick an extra tin of duty-free goodies out of the suitcase he brought for Astra. Ineffectual to the point of not even appearing in one version of the three-way confrontation on the stairs where all parties atypically agree that Astra was threatened to her face, Pollard when he relates the altercation is brisk and manly, taking charge of the situation like a keep-calm-and-carry-on poster personified. Everyone's the hero of their own vignette, just that extra dash sweeter, wittier, or more assured than we know can have been the case in real life—or more at fault, since it is nearly impossible for our storytelling species to resist the urge to edit either way. It's not a total cloud of unknowingness. Beyond the indisputable fact of Astra's corpse, there are lines or interactions that recur across multiple accounts, sometimes contextualized or interpreted quite differently, but nonetheless sufficiently attested that they can be rationally determined to have occurred. The question is whether any of them will shed more light on the murder than the lacuna of Astra herself.
Murder mysteries are puzzles. They are narratives of investigation and explanation; they fit together jagged pieces of human emotion and aftermath and make a pattern, however terrible, of the chaos of the world. It's not an absolute that the most obviously missing piece will be the key, but it's enough of a trope that something like He Walked by Night (1948) still feels subversive merely because it refuses to fill in the blank. Even before the superintendent states it outright, we have been conditioned to believe that "if we knew what sort of woman this really was, we'd be a lot nearer to finding out who killed her and why." Which makes it all the more rewarding, diegetically and Doylistically, that in the case of The Woman in Question it's simply not true. The reasons for Astra's murder have nothing to do with the sort of woman she really was and everything to do with the sort of woman a man imagined her to be and then killed her for not being. Superintendent Lodge actually figures it out after the fourth interview, a good thirty years before that axiom of Margaret Atwood's so often formulated as men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them:
"It's not so funny as you think. An elderly, insignificant little man who's built an ideal world around a woman—a world in which for the first time he's the hero and she's a frail, trusting little thing who needs a strong man's protection. Suddenly she laughs at him and the whole thing goes smash."
And the film knows that's not an excuse for murder. A third-act delivery of red herrings temporarily causes the superintendent to reconsider his conclusions, but his original reasoning is borne out by the final vignette, which fuses reconstruction and memory into the reveal that the jealous Pollard, not the volatile Murray, was indeed the kind of man who would return late at night, in cold blood, to strangle a woman who'd hurt his feelings. That pedestal-perfect romance he related so proudly and touchingly to the interviewing cops was only a little less one-sided than stalking. It is extremely satisfying that he's turned in by his own parrot, a gift to Astra that she almost certainly did not accept as gratefully and admiringly as Pollard would have it, especially since it was replacing the canary that Murray left with her when he returned to sea. Lodge was introduced regretfully addressing it as "the one witness who knows all the answers—and he won't talk," but sometimes an out-of-season squawk of "Merry Christmas!" can be enough to see justice done.
The other thing that elevates this movie beyond its structure is its awareness of the unrecoverability of the dead. "Have we?" Lodge counters when one of his subordinates claims that they've seen everyone involved in the case for themselves. "What about Astra? We've seen her only through the eyes of other people. And she's always been different." There's no moment when the five women of the flashbacks cohere into a single, certain, real Astra. Murray's version feels the most three-dimensional and therefore the closest to plausibility, a fun-loving, hard-luck woman who was neither tramp nor angel and asked her lover to write her from his travels and made other arrangements when he did not, but we'll never know for ourselves. She's beyond the reach of anything but conjecture and the film isn't so clever with its alternate histories that we don't feel the loss. It may have backed into feminism accidentally, but in the most definitional recognition of its main character's humanity and the systems that enabled her death, I think it got there.
I am gradually realizing there are some fascinatingly weird objects in Asquith's well-made filmography and as much as I love some of the famous ones, so far I have been delighted every time I've run across the other kind. I had no idea this one existed until it bounced up on Criterion in a search for Dirk Bogarde. It's more than its conceit, but its conceit is terrifically realized—even the sets dressed by Carmen Dillon and the cinematography by Desmond Dickinson are shape-changers, lending the viewpoints of different characters almost the separate tones of an anthology film. It plays as experimentally with its narrative as any non-linear noir and as fair with its evidence as a detective novel of the Golden Age. To be honest, Macrae's gaunt, wry investigator is just enough of an eccentric that I'd have followed a series of him. I imagine it would be more productive to track down other films starring Jean Kent. This mosaic brought to you by my many-voiced backers at Patreon.
no subject
You're welcome! I am glad to be that kind of lens.
no subject
That sort of lens with bonus
It is extremely satisfying that he's turned in by his own parrot, talking birds