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He's misjudged the size of my britches
Fourteen years ago when I first saw Don Siegel's The Verdict (1946), I said it started as a costume drama and finished as a film noir that just happened to be set in 1890. Nowadays I believe we call that combination a gaslight noir, but with Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet starring above the title, it would be just as much fun by any other name.
I still don't know how faithfully the screenplay by Peter Milne follows the seminal locked-room plot of Israel Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery (1892), but truthfully it is the kind of movie where I care most about the pledge, the turn, and the prestige insofar as they provide an excuse for the characters to knock around their mise-en-scène, here full of shadows and red herrings and so Victorian London that the fog practically deserves a supporting credit. A vertiginous dissolve through the memento mori of a tolling bell into the grates and bars of Newgate Prison introduces us to Greenstreet's Superintendent George Grodman of New Scotland Yard, who does not yet know that the black flag unfurling into the coal-smoke dawn heralds the last moments of his career as well as the life of the man he sent innocent to the gallows; his conscientiously circumstantial case and the thirty years of decorated service behind it will be smashed at a stroke by the fractionally too late production of a vital witness by the ambitious Inspector Buckley, played by George Coulouris with a Dickensian two-fer of aggression and unction. Of course it smells like a set-up, but in the face of such a high-profile miscarriage of justice, the Yard can't be seen to play thin blue line. With a dignity as immense and graceful as his bulk, Grodman retires to write his memoirs and flinch whenever a stranger in the street exclaims, "Well, I'll be hanged!" Even at a party thrown in his honor by Lorre's Victor Emmric, his closest and concerned friend, the former superintendent can't escape the long shadow of the Kendall case, but it paradoxically seems to provide an opportunity for redemption when the murdered woman's nephew turns up dead himself under even more inexplicable circumstances and Grodman sets out to solve this fresh crime on his own account, an alternately bored and enthralled Victor in his wake. Newly Superintendent Buckley has his eye on Paul Cavanagh's Clive Russell, the Liberal MP with whom Arthur Kendall—Morton Lowry, primly unrecognizable from his wrecked, queer, film-stealing turn in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)—quarreled over workers' rights on the night of his death. Grodman and Victor witnessed for themselves the threats made by Joan Lorring's Lottie Rawson, the music-hall singer who snapped her fingers at her slumming ex-lover like she was cracking his neck between them. "There's always a clue," Buckley sneered once at Grodman, "if you can find it." Now he's the one scrambling for leads from graves and burglars, but then again our heroes' investigation seems to be stalling in its own dead end of orchids and stalkers and nameless alibis, and yet another man innocent of murder might be setting up to hang for it all the same. Is it all just a little overcrowded? Did I mention the musical number? I like the exhumation, too.
I don't want to shortchange Greenstreet who so rarely got the leading role even in B-movies, but I am deeply fond of Lorre as a sweet, louche artist with a roving eye and a flair for the macabre, playfully reproved by one of his fellow-lodgers, "If you aren't with a new girl, you're with an old bottle," and sighing over a commission, "Oh, no, I've done three stabbings in a row. How about a nice strangling for a change?" He has the crucial Code-dodging knack of taking innocuous statements on paper and making them sound, in his oft-imitated and incomparable voice, like the dirtiest things in the world; in their second and sadly final pairing, Lorring can match him. One finger tracing the rim of her champagne glass, Lottie preens herself on her demimondaine's stock of kompromat for the benefit of "Mr. G," but the glint in her eye is directed strictly at Victor: "I know a thing or two, I do." When she mourns with tipsily rambling but genuine feeling, "I liked Arthur, I did. Even though he turned out a bad lot. I guess I always get the bad ones, Vicky," the entendre is barely double as Victor murmurs, "Oh, but I assure you, Lottie, I'm very good." Nothing more intimate transpires on screen between them than a kiss on one bare shoulder after Lottie has invited the artist to hook her up after the show, but she does it with what the literature used to call a look of unmistakable invitation, much more casual and no less convincing than their soul-saving bond in Three Strangers (1946) and all the sexier for the frisson of suspicion of murder. He sketches her on the tablecloth like Toulouse-Lautrec, walks home humming her signature number "Give Me a Little Bit." It's about as authentically Victorian as her costume, which is to say no threat to Ada Reeve, but Lorring puts it over buoyantly and it's a nice touch to find the normally businesslike Grodman applauding alongside a flushed Victor, not incapable of appreciating the actress beyond her importance to the Kendall murders. "Big bubbles and little bubbles," she nicknames the two of them, underlining the odd-couple appeal of the especially impish "little man" and the legitimately imposing "fat man" in the last of their nine collaborations. The results are effervescent—a debonair Lorre is treasure enough, but an upright Greenstreet is a unicorn. No matter how the plot twists around him, Grodman is never even charmingly shady; he is a man who believes in justice like faith or gravity and is devastated in every personal as well as professional fiber to have been complicit in the railroading of an innocent man. It doesn't just shame him, it haunts him, the real killer's cruelty, his successor's equally callous opportunism, the wrongness of the whole affair. It's no surprise that he throws himself so implacably into his amateur detecting, even taking to the Continent to pursue an elusive witness as something that looked at first like a Holmesian brain-teaser darkens steadily from the improbable to the incredible. It's just that in a noir universe, one must always be prepared to credit the worst.
For all the script's creaks and squeaks and eleventh-hour misdirections, it nails the ending with full marks for genre and characterization. The deepest noir element of The Verdict is not its visual style, dark-drenched though it may be, but the revelation that Grodman himself is the murderer of Arthur Kendall, the impossible crime of the locked room and the ostentatious investigation thereof all just shadowboxing and dust in Buckley's eyes, except for the cold white flame of justice that meant far more than humiliating a rival or risking another scapegoat's life: "He had not only killed his aunt, but he had knowingly permitted an innocent man to hang for his crime. He was a double murderer. There was no other way to bring him to book." It's a fair twist in that all of the clues have been left lying where the audience can put them together, as Victor did with a furtive reluctance that made him look like the one with a conscience; it's a credible one in that it is a natural and ambivalent extension of Grodman's rectitude beyond the bounds of the law; it's a compelling one in that it permits one last bravura moment between the ex-policeman and the artist, the one going with monumental calm to his fate and the other left holding the manuscript of his friend's memoirs—his life, his confession—as the fog-bound bell tolls once again. As if giving his last words from the steps of the gallows, Grodman declares, "There'll be many to say I've done deeds of calculated and unfathomable villainy. Whether I have or have not will probably remain an open verdict." There's nothing else to say then and Victor says it: "Goodbye, Mr. G."
The Verdict was Siegel's feature debut and it's not impossible to see, even in the studio assignment, the seeds of his career-defining interest not just in moral ambiguity but in crossings and reversals such as he showcased in Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954) or Private Hell 36 (1954); it's also just a compact job of low-budget directing, shot with economical expressionism by Ernest Haller and filled out with character actors like Arthur Shields, Clyde Cook, and Rosalind Ivan who add the necessary color to this silver-shadow piece. It's a compliment to all three films, but I can never think of this one separately from Three Strangers and The Mask of Dimitrios (1944) and so I appreciate that it too now exists on DVD, which none of them did the first time around except in the sense that I had taped them off TCM. I want to see them triple-featured in a theater someday. I don't know if Warners thought that Lorre and Lorring rhymed too obviously, but I'd have watched them gladly in a nine-film run of their own. As for Lorre and Greenstreet, if their partnership had to come to a close, at least they got a ripping yarn to go out on. This clue brought to you by my open backers at Patreon.
I still don't know how faithfully the screenplay by Peter Milne follows the seminal locked-room plot of Israel Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery (1892), but truthfully it is the kind of movie where I care most about the pledge, the turn, and the prestige insofar as they provide an excuse for the characters to knock around their mise-en-scène, here full of shadows and red herrings and so Victorian London that the fog practically deserves a supporting credit. A vertiginous dissolve through the memento mori of a tolling bell into the grates and bars of Newgate Prison introduces us to Greenstreet's Superintendent George Grodman of New Scotland Yard, who does not yet know that the black flag unfurling into the coal-smoke dawn heralds the last moments of his career as well as the life of the man he sent innocent to the gallows; his conscientiously circumstantial case and the thirty years of decorated service behind it will be smashed at a stroke by the fractionally too late production of a vital witness by the ambitious Inspector Buckley, played by George Coulouris with a Dickensian two-fer of aggression and unction. Of course it smells like a set-up, but in the face of such a high-profile miscarriage of justice, the Yard can't be seen to play thin blue line. With a dignity as immense and graceful as his bulk, Grodman retires to write his memoirs and flinch whenever a stranger in the street exclaims, "Well, I'll be hanged!" Even at a party thrown in his honor by Lorre's Victor Emmric, his closest and concerned friend, the former superintendent can't escape the long shadow of the Kendall case, but it paradoxically seems to provide an opportunity for redemption when the murdered woman's nephew turns up dead himself under even more inexplicable circumstances and Grodman sets out to solve this fresh crime on his own account, an alternately bored and enthralled Victor in his wake. Newly Superintendent Buckley has his eye on Paul Cavanagh's Clive Russell, the Liberal MP with whom Arthur Kendall—Morton Lowry, primly unrecognizable from his wrecked, queer, film-stealing turn in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)—quarreled over workers' rights on the night of his death. Grodman and Victor witnessed for themselves the threats made by Joan Lorring's Lottie Rawson, the music-hall singer who snapped her fingers at her slumming ex-lover like she was cracking his neck between them. "There's always a clue," Buckley sneered once at Grodman, "if you can find it." Now he's the one scrambling for leads from graves and burglars, but then again our heroes' investigation seems to be stalling in its own dead end of orchids and stalkers and nameless alibis, and yet another man innocent of murder might be setting up to hang for it all the same. Is it all just a little overcrowded? Did I mention the musical number? I like the exhumation, too.
I don't want to shortchange Greenstreet who so rarely got the leading role even in B-movies, but I am deeply fond of Lorre as a sweet, louche artist with a roving eye and a flair for the macabre, playfully reproved by one of his fellow-lodgers, "If you aren't with a new girl, you're with an old bottle," and sighing over a commission, "Oh, no, I've done three stabbings in a row. How about a nice strangling for a change?" He has the crucial Code-dodging knack of taking innocuous statements on paper and making them sound, in his oft-imitated and incomparable voice, like the dirtiest things in the world; in their second and sadly final pairing, Lorring can match him. One finger tracing the rim of her champagne glass, Lottie preens herself on her demimondaine's stock of kompromat for the benefit of "Mr. G," but the glint in her eye is directed strictly at Victor: "I know a thing or two, I do." When she mourns with tipsily rambling but genuine feeling, "I liked Arthur, I did. Even though he turned out a bad lot. I guess I always get the bad ones, Vicky," the entendre is barely double as Victor murmurs, "Oh, but I assure you, Lottie, I'm very good." Nothing more intimate transpires on screen between them than a kiss on one bare shoulder after Lottie has invited the artist to hook her up after the show, but she does it with what the literature used to call a look of unmistakable invitation, much more casual and no less convincing than their soul-saving bond in Three Strangers (1946) and all the sexier for the frisson of suspicion of murder. He sketches her on the tablecloth like Toulouse-Lautrec, walks home humming her signature number "Give Me a Little Bit." It's about as authentically Victorian as her costume, which is to say no threat to Ada Reeve, but Lorring puts it over buoyantly and it's a nice touch to find the normally businesslike Grodman applauding alongside a flushed Victor, not incapable of appreciating the actress beyond her importance to the Kendall murders. "Big bubbles and little bubbles," she nicknames the two of them, underlining the odd-couple appeal of the especially impish "little man" and the legitimately imposing "fat man" in the last of their nine collaborations. The results are effervescent—a debonair Lorre is treasure enough, but an upright Greenstreet is a unicorn. No matter how the plot twists around him, Grodman is never even charmingly shady; he is a man who believes in justice like faith or gravity and is devastated in every personal as well as professional fiber to have been complicit in the railroading of an innocent man. It doesn't just shame him, it haunts him, the real killer's cruelty, his successor's equally callous opportunism, the wrongness of the whole affair. It's no surprise that he throws himself so implacably into his amateur detecting, even taking to the Continent to pursue an elusive witness as something that looked at first like a Holmesian brain-teaser darkens steadily from the improbable to the incredible. It's just that in a noir universe, one must always be prepared to credit the worst.
For all the script's creaks and squeaks and eleventh-hour misdirections, it nails the ending with full marks for genre and characterization. The deepest noir element of The Verdict is not its visual style, dark-drenched though it may be, but the revelation that Grodman himself is the murderer of Arthur Kendall, the impossible crime of the locked room and the ostentatious investigation thereof all just shadowboxing and dust in Buckley's eyes, except for the cold white flame of justice that meant far more than humiliating a rival or risking another scapegoat's life: "He had not only killed his aunt, but he had knowingly permitted an innocent man to hang for his crime. He was a double murderer. There was no other way to bring him to book." It's a fair twist in that all of the clues have been left lying where the audience can put them together, as Victor did with a furtive reluctance that made him look like the one with a conscience; it's a credible one in that it is a natural and ambivalent extension of Grodman's rectitude beyond the bounds of the law; it's a compelling one in that it permits one last bravura moment between the ex-policeman and the artist, the one going with monumental calm to his fate and the other left holding the manuscript of his friend's memoirs—his life, his confession—as the fog-bound bell tolls once again. As if giving his last words from the steps of the gallows, Grodman declares, "There'll be many to say I've done deeds of calculated and unfathomable villainy. Whether I have or have not will probably remain an open verdict." There's nothing else to say then and Victor says it: "Goodbye, Mr. G."
The Verdict was Siegel's feature debut and it's not impossible to see, even in the studio assignment, the seeds of his career-defining interest not just in moral ambiguity but in crossings and reversals such as he showcased in Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954) or Private Hell 36 (1954); it's also just a compact job of low-budget directing, shot with economical expressionism by Ernest Haller and filled out with character actors like Arthur Shields, Clyde Cook, and Rosalind Ivan who add the necessary color to this silver-shadow piece. It's a compliment to all three films, but I can never think of this one separately from Three Strangers and The Mask of Dimitrios (1944) and so I appreciate that it too now exists on DVD, which none of them did the first time around except in the sense that I had taped them off TCM. I want to see them triple-featured in a theater someday. I don't know if Warners thought that Lorre and Lorring rhymed too obviously, but I'd have watched them gladly in a nine-film run of their own. As for Lorre and Greenstreet, if their partnership had to come to a close, at least they got a ripping yarn to go out on. This clue brought to you by my open backers at Patreon.
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You're welcome! I am glad to be able to share so.
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It really is. He had such presence and so often it was in service of characters you couldn't trust as far as you could throw—you couldn't throw them—but he's just as believable as a character of principle. I wish I knew what he'd have looked like as a straight-up hero. He must have played one on stage sometime.
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It was a stroke of genius and I have no idea. She feels to me like one of the people who got lost in the studio system: I've seen her in a couple of more conventional "girl" parts, then TV or nothing. Warners should have recognized what they'd got. (And teamed her with Lorre again.)
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You're welcome! I hope a copy comes to you as easily as other Victorian oddities, and thank you for reading!
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"If you aren't with a new girl, you're with an old bottle" --Nice one!
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"She needs seagull sounds, grey air, and long rocky walks."
I hadn't seen that! (Still plan to see Ammonite.)
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I love when people can do that.