Let's get into his mind

Cloudburst (1951) was written by a codemaker; it is a film with a key. Without it, you have a cleverly technical, surprisingly brutal noir, as ironical as a revenge tragedy and jolted in hindsight by the later image of its leading man. With it, you have a haunting, too.

I had the advantage of coming to this film for the first time ten years ago with the code already cracked, but I imagine it would have compelled me even had I discovered it cold. The opening scenes are a glorious salvo of geekery as we are guided through the coding department of SIS by the affable, pipe-smoking, prematurely silvering but irrepressibly sarky Vergil of John Graham (Robert Preston), gravely informing the latest visiting pettifogger that "Any purity from the Foreign Office is always welcome." In the newly demobbed London of 1946, he is the decorated veteran of an ungentlemanly war; for that matter so's his beloved wife Carol (Elizabeth Sellars), though his talents always ran to codes and ciphers and we gather she was more in the line of wet work. Together they drive to the school where they affectionately imagine their as yet unborn child will "rewrite the Latin language and daydream," the vacant field off a lane near their house which Graham impulsively resolves to turn into a football pitch for their progeny. "Darling," his wife laughs, "I'm hoping to give you a family, not a sports club!" Less than five minutes later she's dead, viciously mangled by the hit-and-run getaway of a couple of spree killers who careened straight from breaking the necks of a night watchman and his dog to beating and stabbing a distraught stranger as he tried frantically to get their car off his mortally injured wife. It's a jab of nightmare into a film that has been idling so romantically along, a classically noir wrench into real nastiness: Carol's face smashed white with headlights, the tires squealing right over the camera's head, a pair of scissors glinting cruelly, the terrible wet stains on the wheels that reverse and peel away from crumpling Graham. As he comes out of his shock into the worse dislocation of grief, we can't understand at first why he would withhold any information about this atrocity at the inquest. Then he reassures his in-laws after the funeral that he's going to spend his month's leave "as Carol would want me to" and we hardly need to guess the nature of the "job" for which he seeks out the assistance of his old contacts in the Resistance, men used to operating outside the rules of engagement, whose peacetime professions can be employed—like his own—as easily for dirty tricks as civvy street. The subsequent murder fulfills our expectations of a well-made revenge thriller, distinguished chiefly by the coldness of its violence and its serial-killer hints of trauma as template. With the arrival of Inspector Davis of Scotland Yard (Colin Tapley), however, the film shifts yet again onto less conventional, more deliciously unstable ground: he hasn't come to Graham out of suspicion. He's come because the sole clue to the murder of Mickie "Kid Python" Fraser (Harold Lang) is a little slip of paper found on the floor of the gym where the ex-boxer was tortured before being made to run for his life by the motorist who eventually mowed him down. It's in code. It's one of Graham's own codes and he can do nothing but give it to his own war-trained team to break and hope he can still get to Lorna Dawson (Sheila Burrell) before the police catch up to either one of them.

I had forgotten how little screen time we really spend with Carol: she leaves such a strong impression on the audience, this dark, petite woman who's an indifferent hand at crosswords and limps badly, without self-consciousness. It's hard to view her as a mere motivation for vengeance when her importance to Graham is so much sharper-edged than their latter-day state of domesticity implied. More than once her memory is invoked to convince her widower to give himself up, as if she would never have condoned his embrace of vigilante justice; it doesn't work for the simple reason that it isn't true. Like Graham, we remember how her lip curled at the patronizing assurance of the local constable who warned them of the killers that fatal night: "'We'll get them.' If I were that night watchman's widow, I'd get them first . . . I'd hound them with as little pity as we hounded Zimmerman." What might have been rhetoric coming from a civilian was a statement of fact from the field agent whose team got Zimmerman. She was never the angel in her husband's house so much as the fury that came to his hand. The old wound between them was not that she was captured and tortured by the Gestapo, but that Graham—the man who ran her, whose name she never gave up even after she was lamed for life—was never able to forgive himself for it and she was never able to make him understand that her life wasn't his to risk or protect. "If I had it ahead of me, I'd go through it again, for you or anyone. It's part of the job." One can't help but sigh for the gender-flipped version of this film where Carol Graham stalks her husband's murderers with the relentless economy of a Woolrich heroine, but I will settle for the fact that Inspector Davis finally traces Graham not through his own war record—he's looking for accident reports that cross-reference with commando training—but through his wife's. It's not an incidental detail, this martial history of Carol's. Like her husband's cryptography, it's part of the film's code.

Cloudburst was the first screenwriting job of Leo Marks, nowadays more famous for a combination of originating the oft-quoted poem-code "The Life That I Have," scripting the brilliant career suicide of Peeping Tom (1960) for Michael Powell, and publishing a very funny and devastating memoir of his time as chief of SOE's code room at 64 Baker Street, Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War, 1941–1945 (1998). He was never an agent himself; he was responsible for the security and legibility of their wireless traffic and much of the memoir details his efforts to improve both of these factors while never missing a chance to tell a story against himself, such as the time that in an anxiety of efficiency he decided to track some mysterious recurrences of unreliability in his normally gifted pool of female coders and had to be informed in so many words by the personnel officer to whom he brought his earnestly bemused findings that he'd just plotted their menstrual cycles (the straight face with which his proposal to solve the problem with spreadsheets was shot down probably deserved the George Cross). His style is quotable, distinctive, and contagious:

While grim power-struggles were raging throughout every directorate in SOE, I was engaged in a still grimmer one with Edgar Allan Poe.

He was the favourite author of an officer on Buckmaster's staff named Nick Bodington, who went backwards and forwards to France as if he had a private ferry. For this trip's traffic he'd chosen an extract from 'The Raven.' Bodington's message was indecipherable and I'd been impaled on the bloody bird's beak for six consecutive hours.

The passage Bodington had chosen was:

'While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping on my chamber door . . .'

If the indicator-group were correct, the five words he'd encoded the message on were: 'came', 'chamber', 'my', 'rapping', 'door'. When I tried decoding it on these five, all that emerged was the Raven's cackle.

Some 3,000 attempts later I discovered that the indicator was correct and the coding perfect. All Bodington had done was omit a 'p' from 'rapping', which turned it into 'raping' and screwed the lot of us.

What cannot be disguised by the most chronically clever of tones is the toll it took on Marks to lose agents he had briefed and followed through their traffic and in some cases argued fruitlessly to his superiors were being dropped into networks already blown, especially as the casualty lists lengthened with the war. "Time was measured in code-groups," he observed grimly in the late summer of '44. "By now, time could also be measured in exterminated agents." He felt the attrition keenly and personally, intertwined with his recurring sense of cowardice—he once memorably described himself as "too merde-scared to be an agent. I sit in the back room and do what I can to keep 'em safe." He couldn't always, or sometimes at all. One particularly bitter anecdote involving an actual fuck-up on the part of the code room over a compromised circuit concludes with the judgment that the author should have been the next airdrop from SOE to the Gestapo. "If there'd been any justice, I'd have volunteered."

Despite their shared professions and philosophies, I am wary of identifying Graham as a direct stand-in for Marks, but he and his film certainly feel churned up from their creator's id, all the grief and intelligence and inadequacy and injustice still palpably haunting a memoir written half a century after the fact and could only have been rawer in 1948 when the original stage version of Cloudburst was produced in London and in 1951 when he co-adapted it for the screen with director Francis Searle. The absence of an obvious analogue for Carol in Between Silk and Cyanide doesn't stop her from seeming to embody the relationship between Marks and the field agents of SOE. Her endurance under torture recalls the stories of agents like Odette Sansom, Violette Szabo, and Noor Inayat Khan, all of whom rate more than passing mentions in Marks' book; she feels close, too, to his friend Tommy—F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas, the White Rabbit, for whom he wrote a poem-code as poignant as the one he entrusted to Szabo and whose condition after Buchenwald left him "violently sick on behalf of mankind." Whether they survived or not, they were people he hadn't kept safe. "I told her," Graham murmurs in the aftermath of the hit-and-run, "as long as I lived, no one would hurt a hair of her head ever again. That's what I told her." Having failed to keep that promise even though we suspect that she never asked it of him, he sets himself to carry out the mission she would have undertaken in his place, slipping so easily again into the role of "the Colonel . . . Old Man Sabotage" that we wonder how much he ever really shed it. From the moment he reactivates his network, the film takes on a curious ghost-sheen of occupied France overlaid on postwar London, as if Graham can no longer tell the difference or has ceased to care. He works with false plates and caltrops and interrogation techniques learned from instructors and practiced by enemies. He leaves his personal effects with a trusted friend and fastens a cyanide pill under his lapel. It is impossible not to feel that in methodically hunting down and executing the murderers of his wife, he is in some fashion revenging himself on her original torturers. Mickie and Lorna are a dreadful little pair of small-time villains who ran a woman down without reason or remorse, but they didn't use wires on her naked nerves to make her talk. And yet, weren't they just finishing the Germans' work for them? An able-bodied woman might not have fallen so painfully in the path of a speeding car, might have been able to scramble to the verge in time. Or a better husband gotten her safely out of harm's way. It's the same guilt all over again, the same helplessness, the same hatred, peacetime flayed to reveal a war that never healed. Graham could never get his hands on the Gestapo. He revisits his wife's death on the killers he can reach. Toward the end of the film, the telltale clue of his own code is revealed to have the simplest key imaginable to anyone who knows he wrote it: it is only the anonymity of its author that has held up its decipherment for so long, because it is a truism of the department that ciphers are only as unbreakable as the people behind them and "the man who coded this piece of paper . . . was broken long before his message was." By his own account, Leo Marks was more than a little broken by the end of the war. It fascinates me that what he did about it was put it so messily and metafictionally onscreen.

I don't know how many audience members in 1951 would have had the key to Cloudburst. Outside of his former colleagues at SOE, I am inclined to imagine very few—the Official Secrets Act would not be amended until 1989 and it would take Marks almost another ten years to publish his memoir. It stands on its own as a solid early noir from Hammer in its first year at Bray Studios; it's fun to spot the familiar names in the credits and even more fun to find them smuggled onto the duty roster of Graham's code room. Its ambivalence toward the figure of the returning veteran is as noir-topical as its treatment of a killer's personality as its own kind of code to be cracked is horror-prescient. Preston's charm is so engaging and reliable, he's riveting whenever it drops: "When you're being tortured, remember the first lie is the most important. You may never get a chance to tell another." It's just that I saw Cloudburst for the first time about six months after discovering Between Silk and Cyanide in a used book store in Vancouver and I can't separate the artist from the art. Even the voice is right there, casually scattering quips and zingers throughout a story that's anything but light. "Official channels don't exist. There are only official oceans or official sewers." "We used to make mistakes too, you know, but we could always blame the enemy." "You've broken so many codes, you shouldn't have broken the moral code, too." Actually the inspector gets one of my rueful favorites, a lean, dark-haired man with one of those dry lined professional faces rubbing his jaw after being knocked sprawling by a suspect whose face he didn't see: "Still, it's no good crying over spilt inspectors." That ineluctable wittiness as much as the unease of the plot gives the film its quality of darkly alternate autobiography—I almost typed "apology," which would have amused the Freud-reading Marks. I wish I knew if Tommy had ever seen it. I wish I could tell if its omission from the memoir was signal or noise. The title remains awkwardly shoehorned into the dialogue, but no one dies because of it. This cipher brought to you by my unbreakable backers at Patreon.