I don't want to oversell Anthony Asquith's The Woman in Question (U.S. Five Angles on Murder, 1950). Despite its round-robin of contradictory flashbacks, it's really not a British Rashomon (1950) so much as a nimble exercise in the kaleidoscope of unreliable narration, each turn of the murder investigation shaking motives, events, even personalities into new patterns while the audience tries to puzzle out with the police where if anywhere in this carnival swirl of perspective the truth lies. If the results are more thought-provoking than suspenseful, however, they still contain a trenchant element of misdirection which I didn't see coming and appreciate all the more in light of my ongoing argument with received images of the past. Plus if you like Jean Kent, as I have ever since she wrestled a surprising brittle sympathy out of the Clytaemnestra part in The Browning Version (1951), it's worth not missing for her performance alone.
It doesn't look at first as though we'll have much chance to appreciate her. Agnes Huston (Kent) is dead before the credits roll, strangled with a scarf in the upstairs bedroom of a slightly seedy terrace near the seaside arcade where the blonde young widow told fortunes as "Madame Astra"; we are not even shown her body, unless a blanket-wrapped weight on an ambulance stretcher counts. When she does appear on film at last, it's strictly mediated through the testimony of third parties and the speculation of the detectives on the case, and therein lies the catch and the charm of this shape-shifting story. Who was the woman in question? Depends who you ask. Charwoman Mrs. Finch (Hermione Baddeley) professes affection for the genteel neighbor who bravely made the best of her demeaning profession and the slow dying of her war-wounded husband, but shopgirl Catherine Taylor (Susan Shaw) admits she fought constantly with her day-drinking slattern of an older sister who mourned nothing more than the loss of a petty officer's pay. Music-hall mentalist Bob Baker (Dirk Bogarde) recalls an alluring but spiteful man-eater who interfered with his divorce after he rebuffed her advances, while Albert Pollard (Charles Victor), the older proprietor of the pet shop across the street, had to coax the shy housewife to accept his offers of odd jobs around the house. For the merchant sailor Michael Murray (John McCallum), the woman who greeted his win of a canary from a shooting gallery with the laughing challenge, "I bet that ain't the first time you've been given the bird, sailor!" was the earthy, free-spirited love of his life to whom he should have written just one letter on his last voyage. For ten-year-old Alfie Finch (Robert Scroggins), she was the lady with the parrot he was always trying to get to talk. "We've seen all these Astras," muses the rawboned, thoughtful Superintendent Lodge (Duncan Macrae) as the interviews pile up and the inconsistencies with them, "but which, if any, of them is the real one?"
This scenario is a coup for Kent, obviously, who proves she can be just as persuasive as an idealized woman as a demonized one and all the complicated possibilities in between, but the script by John Cresswell takes it wisely further and extends the same ambiguities of memory and embroidery to the rest of the cast. If you believe Mrs. Finch, Baker's a slick chancer whose American accent advertises violence and vulgarity as loudly as his flash ties, but for Catherine, he's a vulnerable, romantic figure who may win the audience's heart as well as her own when he punctures his transatlantic glamour with the blushing confession, "Catherine, I was born in Liverpool—I've never been farther west than Bristol in my life!" In his own words, he comes off as raffish and sincere, sympathetically a bit of a loser, and he never breaks his American kayfabe. His Catherine is a sensitive, sensible girl who'll wait steadily and honestly for her lover to be legally free and Mrs. Finch long ago wrote her off as a prissy chiseler with a nasty habit of interesting herself in other women's husbands. Then again, the older woman paints herself as an eternally accommodating caretaker while the young lovers seem to regard her as a self-important busybody and Murray remembers her trying to nick an extra tin of duty-free goodies out of the suitcase he brought for Astra. Ineffectual to the point of not even appearing in one version of the three-way confrontation on the stairs where all parties atypically agree that Astra was threatened to her face, Pollard when he relates the altercation is brisk and manly, taking charge of the situation like a keep-calm-and-carry-on poster personified. Everyone's the hero of their own vignette, just that extra dash sweeter, wittier, or more assured than we know can have been the case in real life—or more at fault, since it is nearly impossible for our storytelling species to resist the urge to edit either way. It's not a total cloud of unknowingness. Beyond the indisputable fact of Astra's corpse, there are lines or interactions that recur across multiple accounts, sometimes contextualized or interpreted quite differently, but nonetheless sufficiently attested that they can be rationally determined to have occurred. The question is whether any of them will shed more light on the murder than the lacuna of Astra herself.
( Aye, but what did he mean to her? )
I am gradually realizing there are some fascinatingly weird objects in Asquith's well-made filmography and as much as I love some of the famous ones, so far I have been delighted every time I've run across the other kind. I had no idea this one existed until it bounced up on Criterion in a search for Dirk Bogarde. It's more than its conceit, but its conceit is terrifically realized—even the sets dressed by Carmen Dillon and the cinematography by Desmond Dickinson are shape-changers, lending the viewpoints of different characters almost the separate tones of an anthology film. It plays as experimentally with its narrative as any non-linear noir and as fair with its evidence as a detective novel of the Golden Age. To be honest, Macrae's gaunt, wry investigator is just enough of an eccentric that I'd have followed a series of him. I imagine it would be more productive to track down other films starring Jean Kent. This mosaic brought to you by my many-voiced backers at Patreon.
It doesn't look at first as though we'll have much chance to appreciate her. Agnes Huston (Kent) is dead before the credits roll, strangled with a scarf in the upstairs bedroom of a slightly seedy terrace near the seaside arcade where the blonde young widow told fortunes as "Madame Astra"; we are not even shown her body, unless a blanket-wrapped weight on an ambulance stretcher counts. When she does appear on film at last, it's strictly mediated through the testimony of third parties and the speculation of the detectives on the case, and therein lies the catch and the charm of this shape-shifting story. Who was the woman in question? Depends who you ask. Charwoman Mrs. Finch (Hermione Baddeley) professes affection for the genteel neighbor who bravely made the best of her demeaning profession and the slow dying of her war-wounded husband, but shopgirl Catherine Taylor (Susan Shaw) admits she fought constantly with her day-drinking slattern of an older sister who mourned nothing more than the loss of a petty officer's pay. Music-hall mentalist Bob Baker (Dirk Bogarde) recalls an alluring but spiteful man-eater who interfered with his divorce after he rebuffed her advances, while Albert Pollard (Charles Victor), the older proprietor of the pet shop across the street, had to coax the shy housewife to accept his offers of odd jobs around the house. For the merchant sailor Michael Murray (John McCallum), the woman who greeted his win of a canary from a shooting gallery with the laughing challenge, "I bet that ain't the first time you've been given the bird, sailor!" was the earthy, free-spirited love of his life to whom he should have written just one letter on his last voyage. For ten-year-old Alfie Finch (Robert Scroggins), she was the lady with the parrot he was always trying to get to talk. "We've seen all these Astras," muses the rawboned, thoughtful Superintendent Lodge (Duncan Macrae) as the interviews pile up and the inconsistencies with them, "but which, if any, of them is the real one?"
This scenario is a coup for Kent, obviously, who proves she can be just as persuasive as an idealized woman as a demonized one and all the complicated possibilities in between, but the script by John Cresswell takes it wisely further and extends the same ambiguities of memory and embroidery to the rest of the cast. If you believe Mrs. Finch, Baker's a slick chancer whose American accent advertises violence and vulgarity as loudly as his flash ties, but for Catherine, he's a vulnerable, romantic figure who may win the audience's heart as well as her own when he punctures his transatlantic glamour with the blushing confession, "Catherine, I was born in Liverpool—I've never been farther west than Bristol in my life!" In his own words, he comes off as raffish and sincere, sympathetically a bit of a loser, and he never breaks his American kayfabe. His Catherine is a sensitive, sensible girl who'll wait steadily and honestly for her lover to be legally free and Mrs. Finch long ago wrote her off as a prissy chiseler with a nasty habit of interesting herself in other women's husbands. Then again, the older woman paints herself as an eternally accommodating caretaker while the young lovers seem to regard her as a self-important busybody and Murray remembers her trying to nick an extra tin of duty-free goodies out of the suitcase he brought for Astra. Ineffectual to the point of not even appearing in one version of the three-way confrontation on the stairs where all parties atypically agree that Astra was threatened to her face, Pollard when he relates the altercation is brisk and manly, taking charge of the situation like a keep-calm-and-carry-on poster personified. Everyone's the hero of their own vignette, just that extra dash sweeter, wittier, or more assured than we know can have been the case in real life—or more at fault, since it is nearly impossible for our storytelling species to resist the urge to edit either way. It's not a total cloud of unknowingness. Beyond the indisputable fact of Astra's corpse, there are lines or interactions that recur across multiple accounts, sometimes contextualized or interpreted quite differently, but nonetheless sufficiently attested that they can be rationally determined to have occurred. The question is whether any of them will shed more light on the murder than the lacuna of Astra herself.
( Aye, but what did he mean to her? )
I am gradually realizing there are some fascinatingly weird objects in Asquith's well-made filmography and as much as I love some of the famous ones, so far I have been delighted every time I've run across the other kind. I had no idea this one existed until it bounced up on Criterion in a search for Dirk Bogarde. It's more than its conceit, but its conceit is terrifically realized—even the sets dressed by Carmen Dillon and the cinematography by Desmond Dickinson are shape-changers, lending the viewpoints of different characters almost the separate tones of an anthology film. It plays as experimentally with its narrative as any non-linear noir and as fair with its evidence as a detective novel of the Golden Age. To be honest, Macrae's gaunt, wry investigator is just enough of an eccentric that I'd have followed a series of him. I imagine it would be more productive to track down other films starring Jean Kent. This mosaic brought to you by my many-voiced backers at Patreon.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}