Libel (1959) is a deceptively bland title for one of the most compelling and satisfyingly twisty stories of doubling and imposture I have encountered in any medium. It plays with its questions of identity like science fiction or the nineteenth-century fantastic. It's late for a noir, but it's a true, great one. If you like Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar (1949), if you like Mary Stewart's The Ivy Tree (1961), you should be watching this film yesterday.
I know Dirk Bogarde knocked his matinée idolatry off its pedestal with Victim (1961), but I am wondering now if there was always a thread of not one of us in his mainstream work; the Rank Organisation really shouldn't have been able to avoid noticing his gift for it. Libel leads with it, introducing him in the elegant, diffident person of Sir Mark Loddon, 7th Baronet of Ingworth House in Dorset, which all sounds very grand except, as we are about to discover, the stately home is the kind that sustains itself with heritage tours because the title is about all the family's got left and a curiously similar vacancy underlies the baronet himself. A brief, stammering stall during an interview for BBC TV leaves him more unsettled than embarrassed, trying unconvincingly afterward to pass the one off as the other. "It was just bad luck," Lady Margaret Loddon (Olivia de Havilland) soothes the husband she knows well enough to tell the difference. "How could he know . . . that you can't always remember things that happened to you before the war?" The past may be another country, but trauma can make an entire other planet of it. Mark can relate scenes from his five years as a prisoner of war after Dunkirk; he can recount most of the three-man escape that got him safely across the Dutch border but left him in hospital for six months, his right hand permanently damaged from bullets and his hair prematurely grey from the strain; but beyond a few scattered stories from his childhood, he can recall nothing of his earlier life, not even the source of the "sort of dream" that keeps "coming up . . . like wreckage," the whistled tune that always breaks off at the same point, the vague sense of something moving in mist and water, and the nightmare foreboding of violence. He doesn't like to be reminded of his missing pieces. He doesn't like to show them, especially not on national television. But the night he stumbles over a genial question about his twenty-first birthday, his audience just happens to include a man who sees in the moment's tongue-tie not the natural drying-up of a shy person in the spotlight but the slip of a murderous understudy missing part of his script. Within days, the country is buzzing over an item in the sensational Sunday Gazette: "BOGUS BARONET." Despite his initial reluctance to dignify the smear with a response, Mark is eventually persuaded, in a move that the ghost of Oscar Wilde might have advised against, to bring an action for libel "against the Sunday Gazette and another." And the trap is sprung. On the defending side of the courtroom sits his old war buddy, the Canadian flyer Jeff Buckenham (Paul Massie), smiling grimly as he watches Mark in the witness box swear by Almighty God to tell nothing but the truth. He's been called by his counsel to refute the allegation that he's a pretender, a fellow inmate of Oflag IX-A who exploited his background in provincial theater and his uncanny resemblance to the real baronet in order to return from the war in place of his social better and appropriate his title, his fiancée, and all the rest of his life. Winning his case will require unimpeachable proof of identity—a tall order in the days before DNA evidence and even trickier for a man who has professed retrograde amnesia since 1945. Then again, Jeff who knew both men intimately in the prison camp, who made his escape with them and saw one leave the other for dead beside a bridge as the Germans closed in, has never put much stock in that excuse to begin with. "I remember. That's the trouble . . . You played the part pretty well, Frank, but I'm afraid the show is over."
Any impostor narrative worth its grain of salt should be able to keep its audience guessing as to the truth or falsehood of its central character. It's far cleverer for the character themselves not to know. Quite early on, Libel lets its audience in on the complicating factor that whatever else may or may not be true of—for convenience's sake, let's keep on calling him—Mark, his shot-to-hell memory is real. When he woke in the hospital after V-E Day, he couldn't remember how he'd gotten there. He couldn't remember his fiancée whose letters had been his lifeline in the camp. He was recognized as Mark Loddon and given no reason to doubt it; if it was always clear to his family that Mark 1939 and Mark 1945 were not quite the same person, wars have a habit of leaving fractured veterans in their wake. He built a life going forward and that's all anyone can do. But what did he build it on? As the trial twists and turns, as he confesses his paltry store of personal memories only to find that he hasn't told a single story his sharp-eared double wouldn't also have known, as his body itself is used as evidence against him, the question of self and other becomes even more urgent for our protagonist than it is for the High Court of Justice. They are concerned with offences and damages. He's falling into one of those existential gulfs that noir is heir to. Is he Frank Welney, that charming, dodgy, youthfully grey-haired spear-carrier with the slightly malformed right hand who used to imitate his upper-class doppelgänger for a passive-aggressive lark and was once caught by Jeff rehearsing his impersonation in a creepily serious key? When Mark observed measuringly, "You know, if you could dispose of me, I believe you could go back to Ingworth, take over, and no one would be any the wiser," was he merely forecasting his own end at the hands of his ambitious duplicate? Which side of the identity theft was our man on? Physically, he could be either one of them; cognitively, he seems to know only what they both knew. And on some level as deep and frightening as a reflection that never comes into focus while a little broken tune stops and stops again, what difference does it make when the trauma of their joint escape left him effectively memory-wiped? Whoever made it across the border that night, the damaged original or an incomplete copy of him, he ceased to be either the confident heir of Ingworth or his camp-concert substitute: they were both replaced by the loving, haunted, volatile man who thought of himself as Mark Loddon until all of a sudden he wondered if he should have been thinking of himself as Frank Welney instead. This is eerie, dizzying stuff, like watching an abyss gaze into a mirror or Schrödinger run a shell game. Normally it makes a narrative more predictable if the audience has privileged information, but here it only widens the field of uncertainty. Meanwhile, the respective counsels for the plaintiff and the defence (the delightful double act of Robert Morley and Wilfrid Hyde-White) are trying to prove or disprove something so much more bluntly binary that it's almost absurd except for the amount of pain it's causing the protagonist, for whom even legal vindication will not be the same as metaphysical peace of mind.
( If I am Welney, what became of Loddon? )
In case I have made this movie sound like a mere exercise in pattern recognition, let me assure you it is also just a damn fine film. I am mildly interested in the source play of the same name by Edward Wooll because its 1935 Broadway transfer starred Colin Clive, but the weirdest and most affecting aspects of the doubling actually appear to have been introduced by screenwriters Karl Tunberg and Anatole de Grunwald and then showcased by the low-lit photography of Robert Krasker, who could catch the shadow sides of people as well as cities, and the sensitive direction of Anthony Asquith, who knew a thing or two about haunted, compromised men. Anyone still unimpressed with Dirk Bogarde should watch the scene where Frank combs his silvery hair out of its side-parting, adjusts the drawling irony out of his voice, and all of a sudden even the way he puts his hands behind his back as if to survey himself on parade belongs to another man and it has nothing to do with them being played by the same actor. At times I was reminded of The Captive Heart (1946); at others, The Glass Pearls (1966). I would love to know if Christopher Nolan ever saw this thing. To get back to ragging on the Rank Organisation, I am now officially bewildered their A Tale of Two Cities (1958) didn't cast Bogarde in a dual role. This proof brought to you by my ambiguous backers at Patreon.
I know Dirk Bogarde knocked his matinée idolatry off its pedestal with Victim (1961), but I am wondering now if there was always a thread of not one of us in his mainstream work; the Rank Organisation really shouldn't have been able to avoid noticing his gift for it. Libel leads with it, introducing him in the elegant, diffident person of Sir Mark Loddon, 7th Baronet of Ingworth House in Dorset, which all sounds very grand except, as we are about to discover, the stately home is the kind that sustains itself with heritage tours because the title is about all the family's got left and a curiously similar vacancy underlies the baronet himself. A brief, stammering stall during an interview for BBC TV leaves him more unsettled than embarrassed, trying unconvincingly afterward to pass the one off as the other. "It was just bad luck," Lady Margaret Loddon (Olivia de Havilland) soothes the husband she knows well enough to tell the difference. "How could he know . . . that you can't always remember things that happened to you before the war?" The past may be another country, but trauma can make an entire other planet of it. Mark can relate scenes from his five years as a prisoner of war after Dunkirk; he can recount most of the three-man escape that got him safely across the Dutch border but left him in hospital for six months, his right hand permanently damaged from bullets and his hair prematurely grey from the strain; but beyond a few scattered stories from his childhood, he can recall nothing of his earlier life, not even the source of the "sort of dream" that keeps "coming up . . . like wreckage," the whistled tune that always breaks off at the same point, the vague sense of something moving in mist and water, and the nightmare foreboding of violence. He doesn't like to be reminded of his missing pieces. He doesn't like to show them, especially not on national television. But the night he stumbles over a genial question about his twenty-first birthday, his audience just happens to include a man who sees in the moment's tongue-tie not the natural drying-up of a shy person in the spotlight but the slip of a murderous understudy missing part of his script. Within days, the country is buzzing over an item in the sensational Sunday Gazette: "BOGUS BARONET." Despite his initial reluctance to dignify the smear with a response, Mark is eventually persuaded, in a move that the ghost of Oscar Wilde might have advised against, to bring an action for libel "against the Sunday Gazette and another." And the trap is sprung. On the defending side of the courtroom sits his old war buddy, the Canadian flyer Jeff Buckenham (Paul Massie), smiling grimly as he watches Mark in the witness box swear by Almighty God to tell nothing but the truth. He's been called by his counsel to refute the allegation that he's a pretender, a fellow inmate of Oflag IX-A who exploited his background in provincial theater and his uncanny resemblance to the real baronet in order to return from the war in place of his social better and appropriate his title, his fiancée, and all the rest of his life. Winning his case will require unimpeachable proof of identity—a tall order in the days before DNA evidence and even trickier for a man who has professed retrograde amnesia since 1945. Then again, Jeff who knew both men intimately in the prison camp, who made his escape with them and saw one leave the other for dead beside a bridge as the Germans closed in, has never put much stock in that excuse to begin with. "I remember. That's the trouble . . . You played the part pretty well, Frank, but I'm afraid the show is over."
Any impostor narrative worth its grain of salt should be able to keep its audience guessing as to the truth or falsehood of its central character. It's far cleverer for the character themselves not to know. Quite early on, Libel lets its audience in on the complicating factor that whatever else may or may not be true of—for convenience's sake, let's keep on calling him—Mark, his shot-to-hell memory is real. When he woke in the hospital after V-E Day, he couldn't remember how he'd gotten there. He couldn't remember his fiancée whose letters had been his lifeline in the camp. He was recognized as Mark Loddon and given no reason to doubt it; if it was always clear to his family that Mark 1939 and Mark 1945 were not quite the same person, wars have a habit of leaving fractured veterans in their wake. He built a life going forward and that's all anyone can do. But what did he build it on? As the trial twists and turns, as he confesses his paltry store of personal memories only to find that he hasn't told a single story his sharp-eared double wouldn't also have known, as his body itself is used as evidence against him, the question of self and other becomes even more urgent for our protagonist than it is for the High Court of Justice. They are concerned with offences and damages. He's falling into one of those existential gulfs that noir is heir to. Is he Frank Welney, that charming, dodgy, youthfully grey-haired spear-carrier with the slightly malformed right hand who used to imitate his upper-class doppelgänger for a passive-aggressive lark and was once caught by Jeff rehearsing his impersonation in a creepily serious key? When Mark observed measuringly, "You know, if you could dispose of me, I believe you could go back to Ingworth, take over, and no one would be any the wiser," was he merely forecasting his own end at the hands of his ambitious duplicate? Which side of the identity theft was our man on? Physically, he could be either one of them; cognitively, he seems to know only what they both knew. And on some level as deep and frightening as a reflection that never comes into focus while a little broken tune stops and stops again, what difference does it make when the trauma of their joint escape left him effectively memory-wiped? Whoever made it across the border that night, the damaged original or an incomplete copy of him, he ceased to be either the confident heir of Ingworth or his camp-concert substitute: they were both replaced by the loving, haunted, volatile man who thought of himself as Mark Loddon until all of a sudden he wondered if he should have been thinking of himself as Frank Welney instead. This is eerie, dizzying stuff, like watching an abyss gaze into a mirror or Schrödinger run a shell game. Normally it makes a narrative more predictable if the audience has privileged information, but here it only widens the field of uncertainty. Meanwhile, the respective counsels for the plaintiff and the defence (the delightful double act of Robert Morley and Wilfrid Hyde-White) are trying to prove or disprove something so much more bluntly binary that it's almost absurd except for the amount of pain it's causing the protagonist, for whom even legal vindication will not be the same as metaphysical peace of mind.
( If I am Welney, what became of Loddon? )
In case I have made this movie sound like a mere exercise in pattern recognition, let me assure you it is also just a damn fine film. I am mildly interested in the source play of the same name by Edward Wooll because its 1935 Broadway transfer starred Colin Clive, but the weirdest and most affecting aspects of the doubling actually appear to have been introduced by screenwriters Karl Tunberg and Anatole de Grunwald and then showcased by the low-lit photography of Robert Krasker, who could catch the shadow sides of people as well as cities, and the sensitive direction of Anthony Asquith, who knew a thing or two about haunted, compromised men. Anyone still unimpressed with Dirk Bogarde should watch the scene where Frank combs his silvery hair out of its side-parting, adjusts the drawling irony out of his voice, and all of a sudden even the way he puts his hands behind his back as if to survey himself on parade belongs to another man and it has nothing to do with them being played by the same actor. At times I was reminded of The Captive Heart (1946); at others, The Glass Pearls (1966). I would love to know if Christopher Nolan ever saw this thing. To get back to ragging on the Rank Organisation, I am now officially bewildered their A Tale of Two Cities (1958) didn't cast Bogarde in a dual role. This proof brought to you by my ambiguous backers at Patreon.
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