Today has been almost totally not worth description, which is a description anyway. Let's hear it for apophasis.
I can add Obsession (1949) to the list of films whose obscurity confuses me, because it was very good. Very low-budget, but they were getting value for their money: screenplay by Alec Coppel from his novel A Man About a Dog (1947), score by Nino Rota right before he partnered with Fellini. I wouldn't quite describe it as either a thriller or a crime film, but I don't know what genre it does belong to—one of its strengths is that it's not the lurid shocker its premise sounds like.
It does open with an absolutely unnecessary scene. After dinner at his club, a husband confronts his serially unfaithful wife and her latest dalliance with a small pistol and some cutting assessments of both their characters before goading her out of the room and shepherding lover-boy off to parts unknown. It is dramatically significant because it establishes that Dr. Clive Riordan (Robert Newton) is not a wild-eyed madman or, title notwithstanding, a particularly fixated individual, but the calm and strategic kind of murderer who simply decided one morning that if his wife ever brought home another lover, he'd kill the man in such a way that she'd always know and he'd still get away with it; it's the short course in his intelligence and the ease with which he predicts and manipulates the people around him, anticipating even his quarry's rather humorous disbelief at being informed of his expiration date; there are a few physical details it sets up that will be important later in the plot. It still feels like the story's stopped dead before it starts. We could have gotten the same information from a brief flashback or even the usual kind of conversation in medias res. Fortunately, we cut next from an ordinary end of Riordan's day on Harley Street to the basement of an abandoned garage where he's keeping the now reported missing Bill Kronin (Phil Brown) chained within the perimeter of a line painted on the cement, on the correct side of which he places sandwiches and a thermos of tea before going into the other room to take care of his mysterious murder-arrangements—constantly alluded to, carefully concealed—and all of a sudden we're in a completely different film, one which isn't trying to startle us with drawing-room violence, but which knows exactly how to navigate the weird intimacy between the two men, the shifting cat-and-mouse footing of their conversation as Bill racks his brains against his captor's brisk, civil imperviousness and Riordan does not torment him in any of the expected ways, because the point is not to frighten Bill, to discomfit or humiliate him, the point is to kill him when it's safe to do so.
Riordan doesn't have anything against him personally, after all. Bill was merely the next man. Until such time as the murder can be unobtrusively committed, it doesn't cost him anything to bring his prisoner the day's paper and Boswell's four-volume Life of Johnson, to talk with him about current events and apologize for feeding him nothing but sandwiches (it's apparently all he can bring without attracting notice), and never to let Bill forget that he's going to die. Newton was often accused of overacting. It isn't true of his Bill Walker or his Bill Sikes, but as Long John Silver he buzzsawed his way through the scenery and probably chased it with one of the focus pullers by mistake. Riordan is all underplaying, though, and genuinely the scarier for it—it's not the affectless detachment of the sociopath or the just slightly too fixed gleam of a manic eye, it's the same hobbyist's attention he applies to his model trains. It's a new project, a sort of experiment. He's enjoying himself, but he's not getting off on it. There's no sense of transgression. It's just the famous English amateurism gone badly, badly wrong. Even the denouement, which we are led to fear will be something as cringingly gruesome as Sayers' "The Abominable History of the Man with Copper Fingers," unexpectedly averts its tropes into something much more low-key and oddly satisfying. If Dmytryk had just pruned those first few scenes, everything in the film would be perfectly in place.
At least once it's in the right mode, it never looks back. Because it is not behaving like a standard-issue thriller, it feels paradoxically tenser, less predictable. It can introduce a fluffy little dog as a bit of business and then turn him into a moment of real suspense, the most desperately Bill has ever tried for anything in his good-humored, lightly-held life. There are moments when it feels as though it could have been a pure two-hander between Bill and Riordan, without ever seeing the glamorous, insincere woman whose flirtation with the young American seems to have sealed his fate, although then it would have needed a very different sort of ending. (It feints at one; again, zigzags.) More importantly, then we would never have gotten to see Naunton Wayne's Superintendent Finsbury, who is lovely. Like most other people, I suspect, I'd only seen the actor as half of Charters and Caldicott in The Lady Vanishes (1938), Night Train to Munich (1940), and Millions Like Us (1943), where he's rather adorable, but also about 99,999,999,997 neurons short of a brain fit for anything other than reading cricket scores. (Charters is Basil Radford—the straight man, taller, blustery, with his moustache and his no-nonsense blinders; Caldicott is the vague little fellow who takes too much literally and sometimes appears to be receiving communications from some other planet entirely. Their dialogue is classic cross-talk.1) It is therefore quite wonderful to see him in an intelligent role, because years of fame have conditioned the viewer to expect him to be a fool, and the character takes advantage of his ineffectual in-world appearance and the audience's expectations to surprise. His first conversation with Riordan is a beautifully orchestrated wrong-footing, as it begins to dawn on the doctor, slowly and annoyedly, that this apparent nobody of a name-taker—not busy enough to be bumbling, too pleasant to be a nuisance—is far more than he's saying, all without ever quite having lied. There's a bit of proto-Columbo about him, as he reappears apologetically for that just one thing that slipped his mind, except there's no real attempt at pretense; and no moment when the mask drops. He remains friendly, diffident, slightly distracted, and probably the smartest person in the film, although one of the other pleasant surprises is Bill.2
And the movie is of course not available on DVD or Netflix, so I can only encourage you to keep an eye out in libraries and maybe someone will bring it back into print. In the meantime, I'm going to watch Jane Eyre (2011).
1. Because I've seen Night Train to Munich more recently, I'm thinking of Charters trying to read Mein Kampf: "Might shed a spot of light on all this how-de-do . . . I understand they give a copy to all the bridal couples over here." Caldicott blinks, apologetically shocked: "I don't think it's that sort of book, old man!" Later on, when Caldicott thinks he's recognized Rex Harrison's counterfeit "Major Ulrich Herzoff" as his old schoolfellow Dickie Randall from Balliol, the verbal contortions the two of them go through in order to determine whether a Nazi officer could ever have played for the Gentlemen are almost worthy of the Marx Brothers. That, of course, is one of the problems with the film.
2. I had never heard of Phil Brown before; he's excellent. It seems unfair that he should be mostly remembered for being fridged on Tattooine.
I can add Obsession (1949) to the list of films whose obscurity confuses me, because it was very good. Very low-budget, but they were getting value for their money: screenplay by Alec Coppel from his novel A Man About a Dog (1947), score by Nino Rota right before he partnered with Fellini. I wouldn't quite describe it as either a thriller or a crime film, but I don't know what genre it does belong to—one of its strengths is that it's not the lurid shocker its premise sounds like.
It does open with an absolutely unnecessary scene. After dinner at his club, a husband confronts his serially unfaithful wife and her latest dalliance with a small pistol and some cutting assessments of both their characters before goading her out of the room and shepherding lover-boy off to parts unknown. It is dramatically significant because it establishes that Dr. Clive Riordan (Robert Newton) is not a wild-eyed madman or, title notwithstanding, a particularly fixated individual, but the calm and strategic kind of murderer who simply decided one morning that if his wife ever brought home another lover, he'd kill the man in such a way that she'd always know and he'd still get away with it; it's the short course in his intelligence and the ease with which he predicts and manipulates the people around him, anticipating even his quarry's rather humorous disbelief at being informed of his expiration date; there are a few physical details it sets up that will be important later in the plot. It still feels like the story's stopped dead before it starts. We could have gotten the same information from a brief flashback or even the usual kind of conversation in medias res. Fortunately, we cut next from an ordinary end of Riordan's day on Harley Street to the basement of an abandoned garage where he's keeping the now reported missing Bill Kronin (Phil Brown) chained within the perimeter of a line painted on the cement, on the correct side of which he places sandwiches and a thermos of tea before going into the other room to take care of his mysterious murder-arrangements—constantly alluded to, carefully concealed—and all of a sudden we're in a completely different film, one which isn't trying to startle us with drawing-room violence, but which knows exactly how to navigate the weird intimacy between the two men, the shifting cat-and-mouse footing of their conversation as Bill racks his brains against his captor's brisk, civil imperviousness and Riordan does not torment him in any of the expected ways, because the point is not to frighten Bill, to discomfit or humiliate him, the point is to kill him when it's safe to do so.
Riordan doesn't have anything against him personally, after all. Bill was merely the next man. Until such time as the murder can be unobtrusively committed, it doesn't cost him anything to bring his prisoner the day's paper and Boswell's four-volume Life of Johnson, to talk with him about current events and apologize for feeding him nothing but sandwiches (it's apparently all he can bring without attracting notice), and never to let Bill forget that he's going to die. Newton was often accused of overacting. It isn't true of his Bill Walker or his Bill Sikes, but as Long John Silver he buzzsawed his way through the scenery and probably chased it with one of the focus pullers by mistake. Riordan is all underplaying, though, and genuinely the scarier for it—it's not the affectless detachment of the sociopath or the just slightly too fixed gleam of a manic eye, it's the same hobbyist's attention he applies to his model trains. It's a new project, a sort of experiment. He's enjoying himself, but he's not getting off on it. There's no sense of transgression. It's just the famous English amateurism gone badly, badly wrong. Even the denouement, which we are led to fear will be something as cringingly gruesome as Sayers' "The Abominable History of the Man with Copper Fingers," unexpectedly averts its tropes into something much more low-key and oddly satisfying. If Dmytryk had just pruned those first few scenes, everything in the film would be perfectly in place.
At least once it's in the right mode, it never looks back. Because it is not behaving like a standard-issue thriller, it feels paradoxically tenser, less predictable. It can introduce a fluffy little dog as a bit of business and then turn him into a moment of real suspense, the most desperately Bill has ever tried for anything in his good-humored, lightly-held life. There are moments when it feels as though it could have been a pure two-hander between Bill and Riordan, without ever seeing the glamorous, insincere woman whose flirtation with the young American seems to have sealed his fate, although then it would have needed a very different sort of ending. (It feints at one; again, zigzags.) More importantly, then we would never have gotten to see Naunton Wayne's Superintendent Finsbury, who is lovely. Like most other people, I suspect, I'd only seen the actor as half of Charters and Caldicott in The Lady Vanishes (1938), Night Train to Munich (1940), and Millions Like Us (1943), where he's rather adorable, but also about 99,999,999,997 neurons short of a brain fit for anything other than reading cricket scores. (Charters is Basil Radford—the straight man, taller, blustery, with his moustache and his no-nonsense blinders; Caldicott is the vague little fellow who takes too much literally and sometimes appears to be receiving communications from some other planet entirely. Their dialogue is classic cross-talk.1) It is therefore quite wonderful to see him in an intelligent role, because years of fame have conditioned the viewer to expect him to be a fool, and the character takes advantage of his ineffectual in-world appearance and the audience's expectations to surprise. His first conversation with Riordan is a beautifully orchestrated wrong-footing, as it begins to dawn on the doctor, slowly and annoyedly, that this apparent nobody of a name-taker—not busy enough to be bumbling, too pleasant to be a nuisance—is far more than he's saying, all without ever quite having lied. There's a bit of proto-Columbo about him, as he reappears apologetically for that just one thing that slipped his mind, except there's no real attempt at pretense; and no moment when the mask drops. He remains friendly, diffident, slightly distracted, and probably the smartest person in the film, although one of the other pleasant surprises is Bill.2
And the movie is of course not available on DVD or Netflix, so I can only encourage you to keep an eye out in libraries and maybe someone will bring it back into print. In the meantime, I'm going to watch Jane Eyre (2011).
1. Because I've seen Night Train to Munich more recently, I'm thinking of Charters trying to read Mein Kampf: "Might shed a spot of light on all this how-de-do . . . I understand they give a copy to all the bridal couples over here." Caldicott blinks, apologetically shocked: "I don't think it's that sort of book, old man!" Later on, when Caldicott thinks he's recognized Rex Harrison's counterfeit "Major Ulrich Herzoff" as his old schoolfellow Dickie Randall from Balliol, the verbal contortions the two of them go through in order to determine whether a Nazi officer could ever have played for the Gentlemen are almost worthy of the Marx Brothers. That, of course, is one of the problems with the film.
2. I had never heard of Phil Brown before; he's excellent. It seems unfair that he should be mostly remembered for being fridged on Tattooine.
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