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Well, you can't tell much from faces
It is no discredit to a warhorse of crime fiction like The Gaunt Stranger (1938) that its ending surprised me the most Doylistically. From my twenty-first-century vantage, it may be even more delightful than it would have played at the time.
My chances of coming to it unspoiled then, of course, would have been basically nil. It was the third screen and second sound version of its popular source material, the 1925 Edgar Wallace novel of the same name which had been definitively rewritten following its smash stage run as The Ringer (1926), so called after the alias of its central figure, the elusive master of disguise whose legal identity of Henry Arthur Milton has never helped Scotland Yard get a fix on his movements, his intentions, or his face. "Don't they call him the Ringer because he rings the changes on himself? Why, in Deptford they say he can even change the color of his eyes." What they've said for two years at the Yard is that he died trying to outswim a bullet in Sydney Harbour, but recently his reputation has disconcertingly resurfaced in the Karswell-like card accompanying the delivery of a wreath of lilies to a caddish crook of a London lawyer: "R.I.P. To the Memory of Maurice Meister, who will depart this life on the seventeenth of November. —'The Ringer.'" Copycat or resurrection, the threat has to be taken seriously. The smooth solicitor who doubles as an informer and a notoriously uncaught fence has on his hands, too, the suicide of the previous in his string of pretty secretaries, the Ringer's own sister. The forty-eight-hour deadline runs out on the anniversary of her death. Even if it's just some local villain trading on the scandal to raise a scare, the authorities can't take the chance of not scrambling round-the-clock protection for the victim-elect, devoting their slim margin for error to trying to outthink an adversary they have only the sketchiest, most contradictory clues toward, pointing as much to a runaround as to the unenviable prospect of the real, shape-shifting Ringer, who like all the best phantoms could be standing quietly at the elbow of the law all the while. "King Street! He'd walk on Regent Street. If he felt that way, he'd come right here to Scotland Yard and never turn a hair."
Properly a thriller rather than a fair-play detective story, The Gaunt Stranger has less of a plot than a mixed assortment of red herrings to be strewn liberally whenever the audience is in danger of guessing right; the tight cast renders it sort of the cop-shop equivalent of a country house mystery while the convolutions build to the point of comedy even as the clock ticks down to a dead serious stop. Christie-like, it has an excuse for its slip-sliding tone. Decent, dedicated, even a bit of an underdog with this case landed in his lap by divisional inconvenience, Detective Inspector Alan Wembury (Patrick Barr) sums up the problem with it: "If the Ringer does bump Meister off, he'll be doing a public service." The most extra-diegetically law-abiding viewer may see his point. With his silken sadist's voice and his smile folded like a knife, Meister (Wilfred Lawson) is the kind of bounder of the first water who even in nerve-racked protective custody, distracting himself from the pendulum slice of the hours with stiff drinks and gramophone records of Wagner, still finds time to toy with the well-bred, hard-up siblings of Mary and Johnny Lenley (Patricia Roc and Peter Croft), cultivating the one as his grateful secretary in brazen reprise of his old tricks and maneuvering the other into blowing his ticket of leave before he can talk his sister out of the trap. "Have you ever seen a weasel being kind to a rabbit?" Offered a year's remission on his sentence if he helps the police out, sarkily skittish second-story man Sam Hackett (Sonnie Hale) wants no part of this farrago of arch-criminals and threats from beyond the grave just because he once happened to share digs with the Ringer and drew the short straw of catching a more or less unobstructed view of the man; it accords him the dubious honor of the best lead on the case and he makes sure to state for the record as he resigns himself to the role, "Give my kindest regards to the Ringer and tell him I highly recommend rat poison." The audience might as well sit back and genre-savvily enjoy the ride. Should we trust the credentials of the glowering DI Bliss (John Longden), freshly returned from Australia on the supposed track of the Ringer's widow and grown such a mustache in his five years abroad that even his former collar doesn't recognize him until he's flashed his badge? Since the order for the funereal flowers was cabled from her stateroom aboard the liner Baronia, should we presume that Cora Ann Milton (Louise Henry) smuggled her living husband into the country or that she's the real mastermind of the plot against Meister, effectively impersonating her dead man to avenge his sister? The entrance she makes at the Flanders Lane station is as striking as her dark, insouciant looks or her American accent, too shrewd to be written off as a mere moll; stepping out of the mirror-door that leads so conveniently for a receiver of stolen goods down to the brick-arched river, she gives the locked-in lawyer the shock of a revenger's ghost herself. "Don't worry. I'm alone." Not only because one of his cherished classical records has played instead an ominous bulletin from the Ringer—a cold theatrical voice, as impossible to trace as greasepaint—the proceedings begin to take on a haunted-house quality, not unbefitting a film whose most important character heading into the home stretch is still Schrödinger's dead. At 71 minutes and fluttering out fast, rest assured it will not sober up too much for break-ins, fake-outs, or the dry commentary of Dr. Anthony Lomond (Alexander Knox), the division's irreplaceably cantankerous amateur criminologist who was introduced waving off a request for his medical opinion with the time-honored "Och, Wembury, I'm not a doctor, I'm a police surgeon. Call me in when he's been murdered." Grey-spry, he has a catlike habit of tucking his feet up on unexpected furniture, briar-smoking like a fumarole. Tragedy tomorrow, eccentricity tonight.
It would all be worth the ending. In the wake of the successful murder of Maurice Meister, adroitly accomplished with the man's own swordstick in the confusion of a blackout and a superabundance of police, the reveal of the divisional surgeon with his brush-white mustache and old-fashioned pince-nez as the latest masquerade of the Ringer is not in itself shocking, since unless the film was going to lie outright to its audience, the pool of suspects was never realistically broad, but as a twist it gets top marks for making more sense of everything that preceded it, most brilliantly the interactions of Dr. Lomond and Cora Ann. She was her husband's confederate from the start, as integral to his misdirections as the lady in such spangled tights, the punters gawk at her flash company instead of watching the magician's hands. "Just a second—I want to get the fly's angle on your web." The admission he seemed to trick out of her that Arthur Milton was alive to be seen three months ago in Sydney not only worked to throw suspicion on the recently Australian Bliss, it firmly disconnected the Ringer's timeline from the person of Dr. Lomond, the pawky fixture of Flanders Lane since his transfer in June. The trio of idling bobbies who sniggered around the office door at the spectacle of their clever doctor making an old fool of himself over an American beauty half his age had no idea they were eavesdropping on the coded negotiations of a couple, masking their concerns for one another in a key easier to misread. "A pretty girl like you, hooking onto a shadow. It's a dog's life. Do you really love him so much?" Meister himself went for her pitch, the exquisitely feminine psych-out that put in the nail in his pride to stay the night in the looming emptiness of his own house where the Ringer with the rest of the coppers could readily find him. No wonder she's married to a man of more than a thousand faces, when she can get away with so much with just her own coolly cut one. It should be taken as tribute to the persuasiveness of this pair of complementary tricksters that as the picture whipped through its last seconds when Chekhov's pills, pistol, and police ambulance all came off the wall with a terrific racket, I actually fell for its final sleight of hand, the terribly plausible, bittersweet suicide that settles even a righteous murderer's debts in the censor's severe ledger. Everyone who had a romantically amoral escape by air instead on their bingo card, remind me to recalibrate my expectations for the interwar tolerances of the BBFC. Especially in light of the near-supernatural stress on the facelessness of the Ringer, it is inexpressibly charming to be granted one parting shot of Henry Arthur Milton in his true ornament, ordinarily boyish with his round-faced grin and his dark hair blown all out of its brilliantine, joking as mischievously as the old doctor in the broad Scots of his discarded impersonation, "Ye love me, Cora Ann?" Not a last-minute lawful stinger, not an undoing irony to be seen, only her shining-eyed laugh of assent and the soaring night clouds—a revengers' comedy. Gwenda Milton was avenged, amply and in style. I am not sure I have seen a cuter case of vigilante justice since the automotive punch line of Night Nurse (1931). Wallace did write some further adventures of his antihero in Again the Ringer (1929), but as I seem to prefer this film to even the revised novel, I will simply leave it in the confidence that wherever the long-con couple of the Miltons touch down is never going to know what hit it.
Despite its programmer values, The Gaunt Stranger has a quirkily important pedigree: in the clever titles of theatrical posters caught in a passing constable's torch-flash, I spotted Sidney Gilliat as the author of the fleetly tangled screenplay and Ronald Neame as the DP who made more out of low light than the studio sets, but did not realize until after the fact that it was the very first film produced at Ealing under the auspices of Michael Balcon. I had known it was the first screen credit of Alex Knox. I don't know what about his face made casting directors want to stick a mustache and at least ten years' worth of stage grey on it, but he was playing middle-aged again when he reappeared for Ealing in a small, astringent, bookkeeperly role in the next year's Cheer Boys Cheer (1939), now regarded thanks to its plot of a small traditional brewery wilily outwitting its heavier-weight corporate competitor as the forerunner of the classic post-war Ealing comedies. By 1940 he had been collected by Hollywood from Broadway and I don't see how not to wonder if under less transatlantic conditions he might have continued with Ealing into the '40's and their splendidly weird array of wartime films. Or pulled a John Clements and stuck for most of his life to the stage: I have been calling him a shape-changer because it was obviously one of his gifts and his inclination—and in hindsight, something of a joke on this movie—but it makes it very difficult to guess seriously where he could have ended up. In any case, the existence in this timeline of The Gaunt Stranger on out-of-print Region 2 DVD makes me all the more grateful that someone just stuck it up on Dailymotion. It's a modest B-film, not a mislaid gem, but any number of movies of that class have infinitely improved my life. The title pertains in no way to the action. "And don't be so darned sure there's nothing to be afraid of at Scotland Yard." This shadow brought to you by my pretty backers at Patreon.
My chances of coming to it unspoiled then, of course, would have been basically nil. It was the third screen and second sound version of its popular source material, the 1925 Edgar Wallace novel of the same name which had been definitively rewritten following its smash stage run as The Ringer (1926), so called after the alias of its central figure, the elusive master of disguise whose legal identity of Henry Arthur Milton has never helped Scotland Yard get a fix on his movements, his intentions, or his face. "Don't they call him the Ringer because he rings the changes on himself? Why, in Deptford they say he can even change the color of his eyes." What they've said for two years at the Yard is that he died trying to outswim a bullet in Sydney Harbour, but recently his reputation has disconcertingly resurfaced in the Karswell-like card accompanying the delivery of a wreath of lilies to a caddish crook of a London lawyer: "R.I.P. To the Memory of Maurice Meister, who will depart this life on the seventeenth of November. —'The Ringer.'" Copycat or resurrection, the threat has to be taken seriously. The smooth solicitor who doubles as an informer and a notoriously uncaught fence has on his hands, too, the suicide of the previous in his string of pretty secretaries, the Ringer's own sister. The forty-eight-hour deadline runs out on the anniversary of her death. Even if it's just some local villain trading on the scandal to raise a scare, the authorities can't take the chance of not scrambling round-the-clock protection for the victim-elect, devoting their slim margin for error to trying to outthink an adversary they have only the sketchiest, most contradictory clues toward, pointing as much to a runaround as to the unenviable prospect of the real, shape-shifting Ringer, who like all the best phantoms could be standing quietly at the elbow of the law all the while. "King Street! He'd walk on Regent Street. If he felt that way, he'd come right here to Scotland Yard and never turn a hair."
Properly a thriller rather than a fair-play detective story, The Gaunt Stranger has less of a plot than a mixed assortment of red herrings to be strewn liberally whenever the audience is in danger of guessing right; the tight cast renders it sort of the cop-shop equivalent of a country house mystery while the convolutions build to the point of comedy even as the clock ticks down to a dead serious stop. Christie-like, it has an excuse for its slip-sliding tone. Decent, dedicated, even a bit of an underdog with this case landed in his lap by divisional inconvenience, Detective Inspector Alan Wembury (Patrick Barr) sums up the problem with it: "If the Ringer does bump Meister off, he'll be doing a public service." The most extra-diegetically law-abiding viewer may see his point. With his silken sadist's voice and his smile folded like a knife, Meister (Wilfred Lawson) is the kind of bounder of the first water who even in nerve-racked protective custody, distracting himself from the pendulum slice of the hours with stiff drinks and gramophone records of Wagner, still finds time to toy with the well-bred, hard-up siblings of Mary and Johnny Lenley (Patricia Roc and Peter Croft), cultivating the one as his grateful secretary in brazen reprise of his old tricks and maneuvering the other into blowing his ticket of leave before he can talk his sister out of the trap. "Have you ever seen a weasel being kind to a rabbit?" Offered a year's remission on his sentence if he helps the police out, sarkily skittish second-story man Sam Hackett (Sonnie Hale) wants no part of this farrago of arch-criminals and threats from beyond the grave just because he once happened to share digs with the Ringer and drew the short straw of catching a more or less unobstructed view of the man; it accords him the dubious honor of the best lead on the case and he makes sure to state for the record as he resigns himself to the role, "Give my kindest regards to the Ringer and tell him I highly recommend rat poison." The audience might as well sit back and genre-savvily enjoy the ride. Should we trust the credentials of the glowering DI Bliss (John Longden), freshly returned from Australia on the supposed track of the Ringer's widow and grown such a mustache in his five years abroad that even his former collar doesn't recognize him until he's flashed his badge? Since the order for the funereal flowers was cabled from her stateroom aboard the liner Baronia, should we presume that Cora Ann Milton (Louise Henry) smuggled her living husband into the country or that she's the real mastermind of the plot against Meister, effectively impersonating her dead man to avenge his sister? The entrance she makes at the Flanders Lane station is as striking as her dark, insouciant looks or her American accent, too shrewd to be written off as a mere moll; stepping out of the mirror-door that leads so conveniently for a receiver of stolen goods down to the brick-arched river, she gives the locked-in lawyer the shock of a revenger's ghost herself. "Don't worry. I'm alone." Not only because one of his cherished classical records has played instead an ominous bulletin from the Ringer—a cold theatrical voice, as impossible to trace as greasepaint—the proceedings begin to take on a haunted-house quality, not unbefitting a film whose most important character heading into the home stretch is still Schrödinger's dead. At 71 minutes and fluttering out fast, rest assured it will not sober up too much for break-ins, fake-outs, or the dry commentary of Dr. Anthony Lomond (Alexander Knox), the division's irreplaceably cantankerous amateur criminologist who was introduced waving off a request for his medical opinion with the time-honored "Och, Wembury, I'm not a doctor, I'm a police surgeon. Call me in when he's been murdered." Grey-spry, he has a catlike habit of tucking his feet up on unexpected furniture, briar-smoking like a fumarole. Tragedy tomorrow, eccentricity tonight.
It would all be worth the ending. In the wake of the successful murder of Maurice Meister, adroitly accomplished with the man's own swordstick in the confusion of a blackout and a superabundance of police, the reveal of the divisional surgeon with his brush-white mustache and old-fashioned pince-nez as the latest masquerade of the Ringer is not in itself shocking, since unless the film was going to lie outright to its audience, the pool of suspects was never realistically broad, but as a twist it gets top marks for making more sense of everything that preceded it, most brilliantly the interactions of Dr. Lomond and Cora Ann. She was her husband's confederate from the start, as integral to his misdirections as the lady in such spangled tights, the punters gawk at her flash company instead of watching the magician's hands. "Just a second—I want to get the fly's angle on your web." The admission he seemed to trick out of her that Arthur Milton was alive to be seen three months ago in Sydney not only worked to throw suspicion on the recently Australian Bliss, it firmly disconnected the Ringer's timeline from the person of Dr. Lomond, the pawky fixture of Flanders Lane since his transfer in June. The trio of idling bobbies who sniggered around the office door at the spectacle of their clever doctor making an old fool of himself over an American beauty half his age had no idea they were eavesdropping on the coded negotiations of a couple, masking their concerns for one another in a key easier to misread. "A pretty girl like you, hooking onto a shadow. It's a dog's life. Do you really love him so much?" Meister himself went for her pitch, the exquisitely feminine psych-out that put in the nail in his pride to stay the night in the looming emptiness of his own house where the Ringer with the rest of the coppers could readily find him. No wonder she's married to a man of more than a thousand faces, when she can get away with so much with just her own coolly cut one. It should be taken as tribute to the persuasiveness of this pair of complementary tricksters that as the picture whipped through its last seconds when Chekhov's pills, pistol, and police ambulance all came off the wall with a terrific racket, I actually fell for its final sleight of hand, the terribly plausible, bittersweet suicide that settles even a righteous murderer's debts in the censor's severe ledger. Everyone who had a romantically amoral escape by air instead on their bingo card, remind me to recalibrate my expectations for the interwar tolerances of the BBFC. Especially in light of the near-supernatural stress on the facelessness of the Ringer, it is inexpressibly charming to be granted one parting shot of Henry Arthur Milton in his true ornament, ordinarily boyish with his round-faced grin and his dark hair blown all out of its brilliantine, joking as mischievously as the old doctor in the broad Scots of his discarded impersonation, "Ye love me, Cora Ann?" Not a last-minute lawful stinger, not an undoing irony to be seen, only her shining-eyed laugh of assent and the soaring night clouds—a revengers' comedy. Gwenda Milton was avenged, amply and in style. I am not sure I have seen a cuter case of vigilante justice since the automotive punch line of Night Nurse (1931). Wallace did write some further adventures of his antihero in Again the Ringer (1929), but as I seem to prefer this film to even the revised novel, I will simply leave it in the confidence that wherever the long-con couple of the Miltons touch down is never going to know what hit it.
Despite its programmer values, The Gaunt Stranger has a quirkily important pedigree: in the clever titles of theatrical posters caught in a passing constable's torch-flash, I spotted Sidney Gilliat as the author of the fleetly tangled screenplay and Ronald Neame as the DP who made more out of low light than the studio sets, but did not realize until after the fact that it was the very first film produced at Ealing under the auspices of Michael Balcon. I had known it was the first screen credit of Alex Knox. I don't know what about his face made casting directors want to stick a mustache and at least ten years' worth of stage grey on it, but he was playing middle-aged again when he reappeared for Ealing in a small, astringent, bookkeeperly role in the next year's Cheer Boys Cheer (1939), now regarded thanks to its plot of a small traditional brewery wilily outwitting its heavier-weight corporate competitor as the forerunner of the classic post-war Ealing comedies. By 1940 he had been collected by Hollywood from Broadway and I don't see how not to wonder if under less transatlantic conditions he might have continued with Ealing into the '40's and their splendidly weird array of wartime films. Or pulled a John Clements and stuck for most of his life to the stage: I have been calling him a shape-changer because it was obviously one of his gifts and his inclination—and in hindsight, something of a joke on this movie—but it makes it very difficult to guess seriously where he could have ended up. In any case, the existence in this timeline of The Gaunt Stranger on out-of-print Region 2 DVD makes me all the more grateful that someone just stuck it up on Dailymotion. It's a modest B-film, not a mislaid gem, but any number of movies of that class have infinitely improved my life. The title pertains in no way to the action. "And don't be so darned sure there's nothing to be afraid of at Scotland Yard." This shadow brought to you by my pretty backers at Patreon.
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Sometimes a nation just has to face things.
This sounds bananacrackers. Thank you for writing about it! And I do, of course, love that they get away nimbly.
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You're welcome! It delighted me! I would have laid money on the kind of noirish ending which honored the lengths to which Arthur was willing to go to avenge his sister while still requiring him to pay for them and nope! Balance sheet clear! It was a public service.
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It is a lot of fun! I found it in the process of ricocheting off Alexander Knox's pre-war British stage career. Louise Henry seems to have done mostly American musicals and not very many of them and she's great.
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I approved of it so much and expected it zero!
(Cora Ann Milton turning out to be not just a decoy or an accessory but a co-avenger in her own right was the other part of the ending I did not see generically coming and it's so good. Shine on, you crazy kids, go defraud some deserving millionaire.)
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Amen!
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It does have that shell-game-within-a-shell-game feel, where the audience thinks they can see one kind of blow-off coming and instead it's the one they did not! And I know the British Board of Film Censors was not interchangeable with the Production Code Administration, but neither was it normally at home to admirable murderers who get clean away from the authorities under their very noses, which means again it's not cheating for the moralizing ending to look like the real one. It's just so much nicer that it isn't. The picture got an American release; I checked. I hope it gave Breen heartburn.
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That is also delightful! I remain spoiler-indifferent to the normal degree of a person who reads a lot about movies they have no expectation of seeing, but the ending of this one turning out to be a surprise made me so happy.
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--How wonderful! I wonder if there were revengers' comedies back in the Elizabethan period, or if it was only ever tragedies.
And honestly, reading along, I was not expecting surprise Alexander Knox (though I should have maybe? But you're allowed to watch and enjoy some films without him in them?) --it really did seem too early! So: he's playing old even when he takes off the disguise as the surgeon, right? i.e., the character of the Ringer was older, even out of disguise, than he was at the time, yes?
Properly a thriller rather than a fair-play detective story, The Gaunt Stranger has less of a plot than a mixed assortment of red herrings to be strewn liberally whenever the audience is in danger of guessing right; the tight cast renders it sort of the cop-shop equivalent of a country house mystery while the convolutions build to the point of comedy even as the clock ticks down to a dead serious stop.. --loved that line. Giggling over the strewing of red herrings.
I also really liked Schrödinger's dead, a superabundance of police, and Chekhov's pills, pistol, and police ambulance.
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I am afraid it is supposed to have been only the latter, but some of them are so over-the-top that I agree with the interpretation that we cannot possibly have been intended to take them all totally straight.
And honestly, reading along, I was not expecting surprise Alexander Knox (though I should have maybe? But you're allowed to watch and enjoy some films without him in them?)
It is still happening occasionally!
(I have got three other Alexander Knox-containing films in my queue of things to write about because they are taking up space in my head. I need an intercalary life.)
--it really did seem too early! So: he's playing old even when he takes off the disguise as the surgeon, right? i.e., the character of the Ringer was older, even out of disguise, than he was at the time, yes?
He's playing his own age in the final scene! He would have been thirty-one at the time, just off his success of a season at the Old Vic and about to head into Shaw in the West End. The brevity of the scene, the quality of the copy, and the general mise-en-scène of shadows and aeroplane struts all make it difficult to get a decent screencap, but vaguely:
I did not expect the last unmasking, diegetically or extra-. Apparently the Ringer just looks like your cousin c. the third quarter of 1938.
In the process of double-checking the theater dates, I discovered that thanks to the cast around him, he shows up on two pages—the second for his own play—of the site dedicated to Ernest Thesiger maintained by the person with whom I had intense discussions about the character of Dr. Prunesquallor for about three years beginning on a message board for fans of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast in the fall of my junior year of college. I have no copies of any of our correspondence except for the first exchange which I saved for the historical record and the ego boost, but but I still have an image of one of their sculptures which they sent me. What a deeply small and weird world.
--loved that line. Giggling over the strewing of red herrings.
I sort of picture them flopping all over the stage.
I also really liked Schrödinger's dead, a superabundance of police, and Chekhov's pills, pistol, and police ambulance.
Thank you! It was that inspiring kind of film.
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And the second of the photos you link to reminds me a little of my brother, whom I normally think of as looking entirely like the Italian side of our family but maybe not!
What a deeply small and weird world IT REALLY IS.
And yes, I was picturing those red herrings flopping about on the stage too.
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It's such a good ending! (He had a great smile.)
And the second of the photos you link to reminds me a little of my brother, whom I normally think of as looking entirely like the Italian side of our family but maybe not!
Oh, that's wonderful. I love when you can see those flashes of family in a face. Traditionally my brother looks much more like our mother's side and I like our father's, but every now and then there's some angle or expression caught by the camera and it's flipped.
And yes, I was picturing those red herrings flopping about on the stage too.
A moment of silence for the stagehand who has to come on with the push broom . . .