Entry tags:
The body's gone
So long as Mr. Denning Drives North (1951) is running on nerves and irony, it's a sharp little noir with surprisingly little reputation; when it ends in racism played for comedy, the surprise becomes less so. I believe this is what the professionals call a qualified recommendation.
I have come to recognize that domestic noirs from a male perspective are not as rare as I once thought them, but I am still interested in the forms they take. This one begins inside the dreams of Tom Denning (John Mills), in medias res of going dramatically to pieces. Formerly, we gather, a loving husband to Kay (Phyllis Calvert), a doting father to Liz (Eileen Moore), and the responsible chief designer and chairman of the Denning Aircraft Company (Percival Aircraft), he has been lately distracted by nightmares, day-drinking, and pretending that nothing is wrong. He throws aside the evening paper as twitchily as he snaps off the six o'clock news, blames the police for breaking into his garage and is not consoled to hear he did it himself in his sleep. His paralysis at work has the production line on standby and the chief accountant on his case. He's unnerving his family and wanders through his sunlit house like a stranger. Whatever's got him strung up like piano wire, it reaches a crisis when he almost allows himself to commit suicide during a hangar-buzzing joy-ride, pulling himself out of a deliberate stall just in time to merely wreck his plane in flames instead. Now when the camera returns to the domestic sphere, it is as low-shadowed as all the lonely places of film noir, Kay on the sofa staring nowhere in a room full of things meant to be enjoyed, wordlessly refusing the drink her husband offered; he takes his own over to the fireplace to drink it and fails. Standing with the glass in his hand, he looks for a moment like a mechanism that has seized, the traditional male defenses of silence and alcohol locked against the pressures that have driven him to them until something has to break and it's the boyish crease of his face, shockingly into tears. No one should make those heaving, hopeless noises, even muffled on their wife's shoulder as she tries to hold him through it, murmuring the meaningless, anchoring words of love and comfort and finally, fatally, "Darling, come on, out with it. It can't be as bad as all that. You haven't murdered anybody, you know." It's an affectionate attempt at reality check; it might even work in a film that hadn't opened with the expressionist, echoing nightmare of a murder trial. Tom meets her gaze honestly, which means with a bleak sort of mischief and still crying a bit: "Well, that's the whole point. I have murdered somebody . . . Aren't you glad that's all it was?" Technically what he confesses is more like manslaughter, but he's made it rather difficult to believe. He never hid his dislike of Victor Mados (Herbert Lom), the suave middle-aged sponger who was willing to relinquish his romance with eighteen-year-old Liz in return for £500, which would have been the end of her father's distasteful errand to London if Mados hadn't slipped in a parting taunt and Tom hadn't indulged the damn-fool machismo of knocking the man down for it and suddenly instead of a tidily bought-off sleaze, he had an unplanned corpse on his hands. "I know," he protests, "I know, I know! I've been kicking myself ever since. Say I lost my head, say I lost my nerve, say anything you like, the fact is I didn't phone the police and that's that." Instead, he drove nearly four hours north to stage a hit-and-run where the car could never be linked to him or the body to Mados, trusting that he had scattered sufficient red herrings to see his never-identified victim safely buried under a verdict of accidental death. He's been sweating out the weeks since, spiraling into panic with the realization that his careful frame of a road accident would last only so long in the face of weather and roadworks, after which a body discovered with the back of its skull bashed in would surely be investigated as a murder. The efficacy of the cover-up depended on a quick resolution and he didn't get one. "With that thing still lying there in the ditch, I'm right back there with it!"
From the moment he got on my radar with the diametric calling cards of Hobson's Choice (1954) and Tunes of Glory (1960), I have loved Mills as a physical actor because I find myself working to describe scenes which are effortlessly storytelling to the eye and that wry little smile with its telltale hitch of tears is the key to the best of Mr. Denning Drives North, countercoiling its narrative around a protagonist whose predicament would be farcical if it weren't so likely to end with someone hanged. "Good heavens," Tom explodes at the suggestion that it might reassure him to check on the status of his erstwhile victim for himself, "wild horses wouldn't drag me back there! Listen, I know that criminals are supposed to be fascinated by the scene of their crime, but I'm different, that's all." It is thus inevitable that as soon as he falters in this resolution, he seems to cross a kind of event horizon where as inexorably as a road trip by Sartre or Buñuel, Mr. Denning will find himself driving north and north again, unraveling a little more of his cover and his composure each time. The title assumes the tone of a sardonic aorist, or perhaps a catch-22. Thanks in no small part to Tom's anxious obsession with the "sequel . . . no body, no inquest, no burial!" he's more conspicuous as an investigator after the fact than he ever was as a malefactor on the night. He interviews a potential lead in the disguise of his own horn-rimmed glasses, so distinctive that they become the defining feature by which an inquisitive visitor to the mortuary can be recalled; he pursues a piece of missing evidence so forcefully that it leads straight to the police station. He's too jaggedly wound for the film ever to settle into a joke, but it's fair that after a certain point he reacts to the quagmire of his situation with as much absurdism as fear and the sense of black comedy simultaneous with nightmare only heightens with each proof of something else he's done to cock up his perfectly adequate crime, culminating in the revelation that it need never have happened at all. Opportunistic, insinuating, and an all-round no-goodnik he may have been, but Victor Mados wasn't a worm in the rose of the Denning household, he was an adolescent rebellion a girl was already getting wise to. "Another week and I'd have hated the sight of him. You said I couldn't have him, so I said I wanted him. I didn't really at all in the end." Liz admits it cheerfully, as if smiling at her youthful folly from the great maturity of a season later: she's unprepared for the convulsion of laughter it will provoke from her father, as disgraceful and irrepressible as his tears. But what sane reaction is there to finding out that even the paternal confrontation that touched off all this mishegos was itself a fool's errand? Tom was so afraid of embroiling his daughter in a scandal, he dropped his entire family into one and now that includes the wild card of the new man in Liz's life, an American lawyer with the unenviable name of Chick Eddowes (Sam Wanamaker) and the inconvenient gift of the gumshoe. He makes, and keeps, promises like "Not till I find the missing link, as they say in the dime novels." The papers have taken to calling it the "Denning Ring Case." It is considerably harder these days to smile convincingly for the caller from Scotland Yard.
Even when the perpetually twisting plot errs more on the side of trivia than intricacy, the tension between Tom's conscience, his sense of self-preservation, and his sense of gallows humor carries the film well into its third act, where to his troubles it adds the public stage of a courtroom drama. The problem is that once the script has involved the Romanichal community, it's not possible to separate the beautiful self-complicating ironies from some much less beautiful ideas about the uses of stereotypes.
I want to be clear that I do not dislike the ending of Mr. Denning Drives North because it's happy: I dislike it because its day-saving comic whiplash comes so far out of left field that it might as well have been in a different ballpark and in the process it throws its marginalized characters under a bus, all the more egregiously since the film to that point has made intermittent, at least well-intentioned efforts to steer around them. I would be lying if I said that either of them looks cliché-free to me, but they are not unsympathetically presented, the young couple of Ted and Matilda Smith (Trader Faulkner and Sheila Shand Gibbs). She's fair-haired, deaf-mute, and fey, drawn as innocently as the myth of the magpie to shiny things; he's dark and cagey, for which we soon learn he has good reasons. Sullen and hot-headed as he comes off when he won't talk to Tom even for money and attacks the other man as soon as he tries to question Matilda, with a little hindsight we understand that he was trying both to keep clear of a death he was rightly afraid of being implicated in and to protect his wife from being hassled by a stranger who didn't understand her disability. When the inopportune arrival of a policeman escalates the confusion into the hands of the law, Tom finds himself obliged to secure the services of the technically qualified Chick—called to the bar, never practiced—to defend Matilda from charges of theft and, more acutely and riskily, Ted from suspicion of murder, all without revealing his own complicity to this clever young man who is almost his son-in-law. "Oh, Tom," Kay mourns, "what have you started?" He would never have found the Smiths if he hadn't been canvassing the countryside for Romani families, following the seasonal routes and his own memory of a horse's moonlit whinny the night he dumped Mados. They represented his only clue to the further whereabouts of the body, but he did them no favors bringing them to the attention of "English justice" which makes little jokes about their honesty to their faces in court and twits their counsel for taking his clients at their word. It's a neat, slightly self-subversive swerve. Just because Mados was disposable Eurotrash doesn't make a Rom an acceptable scapegoat for his death. Ted may have rolled what he thought was a drunk for a ring to give his wife, but he was quite right when he found out otherwise that no one would believe he'd just tripped over a corpse in the dark. However ambivalently the film presents the Romanichal culture—at times it seems to be trying for a kind of neutral ethnography, at others it deploys lines like "I can't get into the office for the gypsies! They were willing to adopt anybody for a hundred pounds" and I lose another millimeter of enamel off my back teeth—it is clear about the fact that Ted and Matilda were just going about their lives when a noir happened to them. With Chick now fully convinced of a murder rather than a misadventure and P.I.-ing it like Perry Mason, we wait to see whether it will be possible to extricate the Smiths without incriminating Tom or whether he'll have to take his own fall after all.
I try not to bet on the endings of film noir, but I was expecting the latter. Tom's efforts at damage control have backfired on him so reliably, why not this penultimate irony—that he wanted to see Liz with a better man than Victor Mados and that better man is about to expose him as a murderer and a rather bungling one at that? Chick's investigations among the Romanichals have paid off like Vegas. Ted provided the explanation for the disappearance of the body and his mother made it possible for it to be exhumed, but Matilda with her eye for shinies has actually furnished a conclusive trace of the killer's identity, a chromium-plated AA badge discovered in the verge the morning after a faked hit-and-run smashed a couple of guide posts and a crucial accessory of the killer's car. Preparing to attend the last day of the inquest which promises to be a circus, Tom glances at Kay with one of his flickering, breaking smiles: "You know, as a student of human nature, I wouldn't miss Chick's face for all the tea in China." Indeed, it is a study when the owner of the badge is identified under oath by Inspector Dodds (Bernard Lee), but not because he has to face his prospective father-in-law as the murderer he so eagerly hunted down. It's because the badge he turned over to the inspector was his own. His beautiful theory in flinders and his very short career as a barrister with it, he holds the broken-off metal dumbfounded as a ripple of snickering broadens through the courtroom and the inspector explains kindly, "The gypsy girl had to say something when you found it under her basket. She made up that story about finding it last April." Or as the coroner rubs it in, chuckling at the crestfallen American: "Just another gypsy story, eh, Mr. Eddowes?" Except it isn't. It's a true-blue English switcheroo, performed that morning under everyone's noses by Liz who put together all the clues to her father's guilt—"Oh, everything stuck out a mile"—and decided to save him at the cost of her fiancé's pride, casually handing over the wrong chromium-plated badge and correctly trusting that Chick in excited conversation with the inspector wouldn't look too closely at it. It's tricky, it's breezy, it resolves the nightmare in a wave of laughter and a closing meta-joke in which I am fairly certain the celebrity Tom Denning is supposed to be mistaken for is John Mills, and if it were only a jarring departure from the bittersweet finish the last few turns of the screw had seemed to be tightening toward, I wouldn't care so much about it. I care because Liz gets away with it because of anti-Romani racism.
The film doesn't endorse the racism per se. We know as well as Liz that Matilda was telling the truth about the badge and parted with it in good faith. But the film permits her to exploit the racist assumptions of the inspector and the coroner and everyone in the courtroom who will laugh so thoroughly at Chick for ever believing a girl who lives in a vardo that he'll never wonder if anyone else could have fooled him, the unquestioned acceptance of light-fingered lying as a way of life—and therefore, even more damningly, to reinforce it. We have already seen that the levels of casual prejudice are so high that when Tom grabbed Matilda's hand to get a better look at her ring, she was assumed to have stolen it from him. Ted was nearly up for murder for nothing more than falling literally across a body in the best tradition of innocent bystanders in mysteries. I understand that nothing worse will happen to them beyond Ted's fourteen days for bashing a policeman, they will return to their traveling, guilty in the eyes of the law of nothing more than helping a cocksure American waste the court's time, but it feels like scapegoating all the same. It's not fair to them. They weren't in on the trick. And it is probably not fair of me to think of Liz as genocidally irresponsible for passing off her filial job of tampering with evidence as just more gypsy mischief, but it really sours the triumphantly cheeky ending. The credits music by Benjamin Frankel is sprightly, jolly, a little nudging, as if inviting us to laugh along with it. I felt somewhat slapped upside the head and indignant on behalf of Matilda Smith.
Some years ago,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks coined the concept of the cheese sandwich ending: it denotes a narrative that, whatever its other merits, ends so badly that it can be recommended only to audiences willing to replace the last ten pages or minutes with a cheese sandwich. Mr. Denning Drives North varies slightly from this definition in that it requires the viewer to have a cheese sandwich on hand on and off for much of the third act, but there will still need to be a sufficient amount left for the denouement and it's frustrating; it relegates the film to the rank of a lesser noir when there's so much of interest in it. Premise-wise, it's so close to The Reckless Moment (1949) that despite the signal differences in the emotional terrain of the two movies and the mechanics of who's covering for whom, I would love to know if Alec Coppel, who adapted the screenplay from his own 1950 novel, was familiar with either the Ophüls film or its source material of Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's The Blank Wall (1947). I have never seen anything else directed by Anthony Kimmins, but I recognize several titles from his catalogue and at least one of them looks potentially noir-adjacent. I am not sure what to make of the radio-style spoken credits that play so much like a trailer that I had to double-check with another source before I was confident of watching the correct print, but I like some of the script's other, experimental touches, like populating Tom's nightmare with figures from his waking life whose significance will click only in hindsight. A late-night movie on TV plays a crucial part in the plot. As I go on tracking attitudes toward mental health in this period, I have registered the disapproval of "If you need a psychiatrist and all his patent drugs—" I am sorry that neither Dane Clark nor Patricia Roc featured as originally announced in the roles ultimately taken by Wanamaker and Calvert, but the supporting cast is stocked with character players like Wilfrid Hyde-White, Raymond Huntley, Ronald Adam, and Freda Jackson, plus a decent amount of vintage aircraft if you like that sort of thing, which I do. It was yet another of the fruits of TVTime and can be found on Region 2 DVD as well as what looks honest to God like a home-taped VHS rip on the Internet Archive; for all its faults, I should like someday to see a decent-quality copy, mostly for the crisp-shadowed cinematography by John Wilcox and the microexpressions by John Mills. Wish me no cheese sandwich with his next noir. This difference brought to you by my learning backers at Patreon.
I have come to recognize that domestic noirs from a male perspective are not as rare as I once thought them, but I am still interested in the forms they take. This one begins inside the dreams of Tom Denning (John Mills), in medias res of going dramatically to pieces. Formerly, we gather, a loving husband to Kay (Phyllis Calvert), a doting father to Liz (Eileen Moore), and the responsible chief designer and chairman of the Denning Aircraft Company (Percival Aircraft), he has been lately distracted by nightmares, day-drinking, and pretending that nothing is wrong. He throws aside the evening paper as twitchily as he snaps off the six o'clock news, blames the police for breaking into his garage and is not consoled to hear he did it himself in his sleep. His paralysis at work has the production line on standby and the chief accountant on his case. He's unnerving his family and wanders through his sunlit house like a stranger. Whatever's got him strung up like piano wire, it reaches a crisis when he almost allows himself to commit suicide during a hangar-buzzing joy-ride, pulling himself out of a deliberate stall just in time to merely wreck his plane in flames instead. Now when the camera returns to the domestic sphere, it is as low-shadowed as all the lonely places of film noir, Kay on the sofa staring nowhere in a room full of things meant to be enjoyed, wordlessly refusing the drink her husband offered; he takes his own over to the fireplace to drink it and fails. Standing with the glass in his hand, he looks for a moment like a mechanism that has seized, the traditional male defenses of silence and alcohol locked against the pressures that have driven him to them until something has to break and it's the boyish crease of his face, shockingly into tears. No one should make those heaving, hopeless noises, even muffled on their wife's shoulder as she tries to hold him through it, murmuring the meaningless, anchoring words of love and comfort and finally, fatally, "Darling, come on, out with it. It can't be as bad as all that. You haven't murdered anybody, you know." It's an affectionate attempt at reality check; it might even work in a film that hadn't opened with the expressionist, echoing nightmare of a murder trial. Tom meets her gaze honestly, which means with a bleak sort of mischief and still crying a bit: "Well, that's the whole point. I have murdered somebody . . . Aren't you glad that's all it was?" Technically what he confesses is more like manslaughter, but he's made it rather difficult to believe. He never hid his dislike of Victor Mados (Herbert Lom), the suave middle-aged sponger who was willing to relinquish his romance with eighteen-year-old Liz in return for £500, which would have been the end of her father's distasteful errand to London if Mados hadn't slipped in a parting taunt and Tom hadn't indulged the damn-fool machismo of knocking the man down for it and suddenly instead of a tidily bought-off sleaze, he had an unplanned corpse on his hands. "I know," he protests, "I know, I know! I've been kicking myself ever since. Say I lost my head, say I lost my nerve, say anything you like, the fact is I didn't phone the police and that's that." Instead, he drove nearly four hours north to stage a hit-and-run where the car could never be linked to him or the body to Mados, trusting that he had scattered sufficient red herrings to see his never-identified victim safely buried under a verdict of accidental death. He's been sweating out the weeks since, spiraling into panic with the realization that his careful frame of a road accident would last only so long in the face of weather and roadworks, after which a body discovered with the back of its skull bashed in would surely be investigated as a murder. The efficacy of the cover-up depended on a quick resolution and he didn't get one. "With that thing still lying there in the ditch, I'm right back there with it!"
From the moment he got on my radar with the diametric calling cards of Hobson's Choice (1954) and Tunes of Glory (1960), I have loved Mills as a physical actor because I find myself working to describe scenes which are effortlessly storytelling to the eye and that wry little smile with its telltale hitch of tears is the key to the best of Mr. Denning Drives North, countercoiling its narrative around a protagonist whose predicament would be farcical if it weren't so likely to end with someone hanged. "Good heavens," Tom explodes at the suggestion that it might reassure him to check on the status of his erstwhile victim for himself, "wild horses wouldn't drag me back there! Listen, I know that criminals are supposed to be fascinated by the scene of their crime, but I'm different, that's all." It is thus inevitable that as soon as he falters in this resolution, he seems to cross a kind of event horizon where as inexorably as a road trip by Sartre or Buñuel, Mr. Denning will find himself driving north and north again, unraveling a little more of his cover and his composure each time. The title assumes the tone of a sardonic aorist, or perhaps a catch-22. Thanks in no small part to Tom's anxious obsession with the "sequel . . . no body, no inquest, no burial!" he's more conspicuous as an investigator after the fact than he ever was as a malefactor on the night. He interviews a potential lead in the disguise of his own horn-rimmed glasses, so distinctive that they become the defining feature by which an inquisitive visitor to the mortuary can be recalled; he pursues a piece of missing evidence so forcefully that it leads straight to the police station. He's too jaggedly wound for the film ever to settle into a joke, but it's fair that after a certain point he reacts to the quagmire of his situation with as much absurdism as fear and the sense of black comedy simultaneous with nightmare only heightens with each proof of something else he's done to cock up his perfectly adequate crime, culminating in the revelation that it need never have happened at all. Opportunistic, insinuating, and an all-round no-goodnik he may have been, but Victor Mados wasn't a worm in the rose of the Denning household, he was an adolescent rebellion a girl was already getting wise to. "Another week and I'd have hated the sight of him. You said I couldn't have him, so I said I wanted him. I didn't really at all in the end." Liz admits it cheerfully, as if smiling at her youthful folly from the great maturity of a season later: she's unprepared for the convulsion of laughter it will provoke from her father, as disgraceful and irrepressible as his tears. But what sane reaction is there to finding out that even the paternal confrontation that touched off all this mishegos was itself a fool's errand? Tom was so afraid of embroiling his daughter in a scandal, he dropped his entire family into one and now that includes the wild card of the new man in Liz's life, an American lawyer with the unenviable name of Chick Eddowes (Sam Wanamaker) and the inconvenient gift of the gumshoe. He makes, and keeps, promises like "Not till I find the missing link, as they say in the dime novels." The papers have taken to calling it the "Denning Ring Case." It is considerably harder these days to smile convincingly for the caller from Scotland Yard.
Even when the perpetually twisting plot errs more on the side of trivia than intricacy, the tension between Tom's conscience, his sense of self-preservation, and his sense of gallows humor carries the film well into its third act, where to his troubles it adds the public stage of a courtroom drama. The problem is that once the script has involved the Romanichal community, it's not possible to separate the beautiful self-complicating ironies from some much less beautiful ideas about the uses of stereotypes.
I want to be clear that I do not dislike the ending of Mr. Denning Drives North because it's happy: I dislike it because its day-saving comic whiplash comes so far out of left field that it might as well have been in a different ballpark and in the process it throws its marginalized characters under a bus, all the more egregiously since the film to that point has made intermittent, at least well-intentioned efforts to steer around them. I would be lying if I said that either of them looks cliché-free to me, but they are not unsympathetically presented, the young couple of Ted and Matilda Smith (Trader Faulkner and Sheila Shand Gibbs). She's fair-haired, deaf-mute, and fey, drawn as innocently as the myth of the magpie to shiny things; he's dark and cagey, for which we soon learn he has good reasons. Sullen and hot-headed as he comes off when he won't talk to Tom even for money and attacks the other man as soon as he tries to question Matilda, with a little hindsight we understand that he was trying both to keep clear of a death he was rightly afraid of being implicated in and to protect his wife from being hassled by a stranger who didn't understand her disability. When the inopportune arrival of a policeman escalates the confusion into the hands of the law, Tom finds himself obliged to secure the services of the technically qualified Chick—called to the bar, never practiced—to defend Matilda from charges of theft and, more acutely and riskily, Ted from suspicion of murder, all without revealing his own complicity to this clever young man who is almost his son-in-law. "Oh, Tom," Kay mourns, "what have you started?" He would never have found the Smiths if he hadn't been canvassing the countryside for Romani families, following the seasonal routes and his own memory of a horse's moonlit whinny the night he dumped Mados. They represented his only clue to the further whereabouts of the body, but he did them no favors bringing them to the attention of "English justice" which makes little jokes about their honesty to their faces in court and twits their counsel for taking his clients at their word. It's a neat, slightly self-subversive swerve. Just because Mados was disposable Eurotrash doesn't make a Rom an acceptable scapegoat for his death. Ted may have rolled what he thought was a drunk for a ring to give his wife, but he was quite right when he found out otherwise that no one would believe he'd just tripped over a corpse in the dark. However ambivalently the film presents the Romanichal culture—at times it seems to be trying for a kind of neutral ethnography, at others it deploys lines like "I can't get into the office for the gypsies! They were willing to adopt anybody for a hundred pounds" and I lose another millimeter of enamel off my back teeth—it is clear about the fact that Ted and Matilda were just going about their lives when a noir happened to them. With Chick now fully convinced of a murder rather than a misadventure and P.I.-ing it like Perry Mason, we wait to see whether it will be possible to extricate the Smiths without incriminating Tom or whether he'll have to take his own fall after all.
I try not to bet on the endings of film noir, but I was expecting the latter. Tom's efforts at damage control have backfired on him so reliably, why not this penultimate irony—that he wanted to see Liz with a better man than Victor Mados and that better man is about to expose him as a murderer and a rather bungling one at that? Chick's investigations among the Romanichals have paid off like Vegas. Ted provided the explanation for the disappearance of the body and his mother made it possible for it to be exhumed, but Matilda with her eye for shinies has actually furnished a conclusive trace of the killer's identity, a chromium-plated AA badge discovered in the verge the morning after a faked hit-and-run smashed a couple of guide posts and a crucial accessory of the killer's car. Preparing to attend the last day of the inquest which promises to be a circus, Tom glances at Kay with one of his flickering, breaking smiles: "You know, as a student of human nature, I wouldn't miss Chick's face for all the tea in China." Indeed, it is a study when the owner of the badge is identified under oath by Inspector Dodds (Bernard Lee), but not because he has to face his prospective father-in-law as the murderer he so eagerly hunted down. It's because the badge he turned over to the inspector was his own. His beautiful theory in flinders and his very short career as a barrister with it, he holds the broken-off metal dumbfounded as a ripple of snickering broadens through the courtroom and the inspector explains kindly, "The gypsy girl had to say something when you found it under her basket. She made up that story about finding it last April." Or as the coroner rubs it in, chuckling at the crestfallen American: "Just another gypsy story, eh, Mr. Eddowes?" Except it isn't. It's a true-blue English switcheroo, performed that morning under everyone's noses by Liz who put together all the clues to her father's guilt—"Oh, everything stuck out a mile"—and decided to save him at the cost of her fiancé's pride, casually handing over the wrong chromium-plated badge and correctly trusting that Chick in excited conversation with the inspector wouldn't look too closely at it. It's tricky, it's breezy, it resolves the nightmare in a wave of laughter and a closing meta-joke in which I am fairly certain the celebrity Tom Denning is supposed to be mistaken for is John Mills, and if it were only a jarring departure from the bittersweet finish the last few turns of the screw had seemed to be tightening toward, I wouldn't care so much about it. I care because Liz gets away with it because of anti-Romani racism.
The film doesn't endorse the racism per se. We know as well as Liz that Matilda was telling the truth about the badge and parted with it in good faith. But the film permits her to exploit the racist assumptions of the inspector and the coroner and everyone in the courtroom who will laugh so thoroughly at Chick for ever believing a girl who lives in a vardo that he'll never wonder if anyone else could have fooled him, the unquestioned acceptance of light-fingered lying as a way of life—and therefore, even more damningly, to reinforce it. We have already seen that the levels of casual prejudice are so high that when Tom grabbed Matilda's hand to get a better look at her ring, she was assumed to have stolen it from him. Ted was nearly up for murder for nothing more than falling literally across a body in the best tradition of innocent bystanders in mysteries. I understand that nothing worse will happen to them beyond Ted's fourteen days for bashing a policeman, they will return to their traveling, guilty in the eyes of the law of nothing more than helping a cocksure American waste the court's time, but it feels like scapegoating all the same. It's not fair to them. They weren't in on the trick. And it is probably not fair of me to think of Liz as genocidally irresponsible for passing off her filial job of tampering with evidence as just more gypsy mischief, but it really sours the triumphantly cheeky ending. The credits music by Benjamin Frankel is sprightly, jolly, a little nudging, as if inviting us to laugh along with it. I felt somewhat slapped upside the head and indignant on behalf of Matilda Smith.
Some years ago,
rushthatspeaks coined the concept of the cheese sandwich ending: it denotes a narrative that, whatever its other merits, ends so badly that it can be recommended only to audiences willing to replace the last ten pages or minutes with a cheese sandwich. Mr. Denning Drives North varies slightly from this definition in that it requires the viewer to have a cheese sandwich on hand on and off for much of the third act, but there will still need to be a sufficient amount left for the denouement and it's frustrating; it relegates the film to the rank of a lesser noir when there's so much of interest in it. Premise-wise, it's so close to The Reckless Moment (1949) that despite the signal differences in the emotional terrain of the two movies and the mechanics of who's covering for whom, I would love to know if Alec Coppel, who adapted the screenplay from his own 1950 novel, was familiar with either the Ophüls film or its source material of Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's The Blank Wall (1947). I have never seen anything else directed by Anthony Kimmins, but I recognize several titles from his catalogue and at least one of them looks potentially noir-adjacent. I am not sure what to make of the radio-style spoken credits that play so much like a trailer that I had to double-check with another source before I was confident of watching the correct print, but I like some of the script's other, experimental touches, like populating Tom's nightmare with figures from his waking life whose significance will click only in hindsight. A late-night movie on TV plays a crucial part in the plot. As I go on tracking attitudes toward mental health in this period, I have registered the disapproval of "If you need a psychiatrist and all his patent drugs—" I am sorry that neither Dane Clark nor Patricia Roc featured as originally announced in the roles ultimately taken by Wanamaker and Calvert, but the supporting cast is stocked with character players like Wilfrid Hyde-White, Raymond Huntley, Ronald Adam, and Freda Jackson, plus a decent amount of vintage aircraft if you like that sort of thing, which I do. It was yet another of the fruits of TVTime and can be found on Region 2 DVD as well as what looks honest to God like a home-taped VHS rip on the Internet Archive; for all its faults, I should like someday to see a decent-quality copy, mostly for the crisp-shadowed cinematography by John Wilcox and the microexpressions by John Mills. Wish me no cheese sandwich with his next noir. This difference brought to you by my learning backers at Patreon.
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I spent some time trying to figure out if I was overreacting, but I really think it's just that questionable an ending. Like the film seems to view it as a victimless lark and it's true that no one ends up falsely convicted of murder or even much more socially stigmatized than before, but you still don't go around blaming your own crimes on marginalized groups! It's not cricket and it throws me out of a film so fast, it's a good thing this one had only a minute or two left! It's a major reason I want to get hold of the original novel, because I can't imagine there wasn't a better way to achieve the same effect without relying on sparkling racism and I don't know if Coppel just never thought of it or if it went sideways in filming or if the book ended differently or what. It would be a weird ending no matter what, Liz making a fool of her lover to save her father who did after all manslaughter her previous boyfriend even if she had mostly gotten over him by that time. But at least we'd just be asking as usual if the straights are okay. (I do not see how Liz and Chick are going to be okay.)
I am glad it seems to have good faces to watch while it goes by.
Mills gives a great performance! It was especially neat to see in close proximity to The October Man (1947) because it emphasized what a fine-grained and flexible actor he was: Tom Denning and Jim Ackland are both film noir protagonists under fearful strain, but they could never be mistaken for one another even in the ways they cope with not coping. I have seen him in other roles where he can't cope, either, and they don't repeat this one. And I have seen him in roles where he coped just fine and I still believed him. I don't hold the cheese sandwich part of this movie against him.
(And I, for one, am usually here for a murderer not getting caught in the Forties.)
I am sure it could have been done persuasively, but not with this plot! Justice for Tilda Smith.
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I wasn't expecting it to! I maintain it was not inevitable.
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I am happy to share! I have found it useful from the start and very annoying every time I have to use it.
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I have a very hard time, honestly, not thinking of one as at least a partial remix of the other. It's just not a set of elements I see so commonly floating around film noir that they could plausibly condense at random into this particular premise. It's much more patriarchal when it's a father rather than a mother doing the confronting and the covering up, of course, but then it interests me that Tom is so much more shaken by his plunge into crime than Lucia. I don't think she'd have made the mistake of returning to the scene.
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And yes, I see what you mean about the racism--it doesn't matter if Ted isn't convicted if everyone is led to believe that Matilda lied, and if the implicit message is that Chick was foolish to believe her. Yuck.
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Condolences?
And yes, I see what you mean about the racism--it doesn't matter if Ted isn't convicted if everyone is led to believe that Matilda lied, and if the implicit message is that Chick was foolish to believe her. Yuck.
It's just infuriating! And I didn't see it coming, because I don't expect to see casual racism extra-diegetically approved as a get-out-of-jail-free card, and I still can't believe it was the only way to secure a happy ending, if indeed the film required one. Tom had reconciled himself to the alternative. I really need to find the original novel.
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Condolences? --¿cómo se te ocurre? (as they say on all our novelas)
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Local libraries have panned out bupkes, but I perservere.