The body's gone
2022-02-20 07:15So long as Mr. Denning Drives North (1951) is running on nerves and irony, it's a sharp little noir with surprisingly little reputation; when it ends in racism played for comedy, the surprise becomes less so. I believe this is what the professionals call a qualified recommendation.
I have come to recognize that domestic noirs from a male perspective are not as rare as I once thought them, but I am still interested in the forms they take. This one begins inside the dreams of Tom Denning (John Mills), in medias res of going dramatically to pieces. Formerly, we gather, a loving husband to Kay (Phyllis Calvert), a doting father to Liz (Eileen Moore), and the responsible chief designer and chairman of the Denning Aircraft Company (Percival Aircraft), he has been lately distracted by nightmares, day-drinking, and pretending that nothing is wrong. He throws aside the evening paper as twitchily as he snaps off the six o'clock news, blames the police for breaking into his garage and is not consoled to hear he did it himself in his sleep. His paralysis at work has the production line on standby and the chief accountant on his case. He's unnerving his family and wanders through his sunlit house like a stranger. Whatever's got him strung up like piano wire, it reaches a crisis when he almost allows himself to commit suicide during a hangar-buzzing joy-ride, pulling himself out of a deliberate stall just in time to merely wreck his plane in flames instead. Now when the camera returns to the domestic sphere, it is as low-shadowed as all the lonely places of film noir, Kay on the sofa staring nowhere in a room full of things meant to be enjoyed, wordlessly refusing the drink her husband offered; he takes his own over to the fireplace to drink it and fails. Standing with the glass in his hand, he looks for a moment like a mechanism that has seized, the traditional male defenses of silence and alcohol locked against the pressures that have driven him to them until something has to break and it's the boyish crease of his face, shockingly into tears. No one should make those heaving, hopeless noises, even muffled on their wife's shoulder as she tries to hold him through it, murmuring the meaningless, anchoring words of love and comfort and finally, fatally, "Darling, come on, out with it. It can't be as bad as all that. You haven't murdered anybody, you know." It's an affectionate attempt at reality check; it might even work in a film that hadn't opened with the expressionist, echoing nightmare of a murder trial. Tom meets her gaze honestly, which means with a bleak sort of mischief and still crying a bit: "Well, that's the whole point. I have murdered somebody . . . Aren't you glad that's all it was?" Technically what he confesses is more like manslaughter, but he's made it rather difficult to believe. He never hid his dislike of Victor Mados (Herbert Lom), the suave middle-aged sponger who was willing to relinquish his romance with eighteen-year-old Liz in return for £500, which would have been the end of her father's distasteful errand to London if Mados hadn't slipped in a parting taunt and Tom hadn't indulged the damn-fool machismo of knocking the man down for it and suddenly instead of a tidily bought-off sleaze, he had an unplanned corpse on his hands. "I know," he protests, "I know, I know! I've been kicking myself ever since. Say I lost my head, say I lost my nerve, say anything you like, the fact is I didn't phone the police and that's that." Instead, he drove nearly four hours north to stage a hit-and-run where the car could never be linked to him or the body to Mados, trusting that he had scattered sufficient red herrings to see his never-identified victim safely buried under a verdict of accidental death. He's been sweating out the weeks since, spiraling into panic with the realization that his careful frame of a road accident would last only so long in the face of weather and roadworks, after which a body discovered with the back of its skull bashed in would surely be investigated as a murder. The efficacy of the cover-up depended on a quick resolution and he didn't get one. "With that thing still lying there in the ditch, I'm right back there with it!"
From the moment he got on my radar with the diametric calling cards of Hobson's Choice (1954) and Tunes of Glory (1960), I have loved Mills as a physical actor because I find myself working to describe scenes which are effortlessly storytelling to the eye and that wry little smile with its telltale hitch of tears is the key to the best of Mr. Denning Drives North, countercoiling its narrative around a protagonist whose predicament would be farcical if it weren't so likely to end with someone hanged. "Good heavens," Tom explodes at the suggestion that it might reassure him to check on the status of his erstwhile victim for himself, "wild horses wouldn't drag me back there! Listen, I know that criminals are supposed to be fascinated by the scene of their crime, but I'm different, that's all." It is thus inevitable that as soon as he falters in this resolution, he seems to cross a kind of event horizon where as inexorably as a road trip by Sartre or Buñuel, Mr. Denning will find himself driving north and north again, unraveling a little more of his cover and his composure each time. The title assumes the tone of a sardonic aorist, or perhaps a catch-22. Thanks in no small part to Tom's anxious obsession with the "sequel . . . no body, no inquest, no burial!" he's more conspicuous as an investigator after the fact than he ever was as a malefactor on the night. He interviews a potential lead in the disguise of his own horn-rimmed glasses, so distinctive that they become the defining feature by which an inquisitive visitor to the mortuary can be recalled; he pursues a piece of missing evidence so forcefully that it leads straight to the police station. He's too jaggedly wound for the film ever to settle into a joke, but it's fair that after a certain point he reacts to the quagmire of his situation with as much absurdism as fear and the sense of black comedy simultaneous with nightmare only heightens with each proof of something else he's done to cock up his perfectly adequate crime, culminating in the revelation that it need never have happened at all. Opportunistic, insinuating, and an all-round no-goodnik he may have been, but Victor Mados wasn't a worm in the rose of the Denning household, he was an adolescent rebellion a girl was already getting wise to. "Another week and I'd have hated the sight of him. You said I couldn't have him, so I said I wanted him. I didn't really at all in the end." Liz admits it cheerfully, as if smiling at her youthful folly from the great maturity of a season later: she's unprepared for the convulsion of laughter it will provoke from her father, as disgraceful and irrepressible as his tears. But what sane reaction is there to finding out that even the paternal confrontation that touched off all this mishegos was itself a fool's errand? Tom was so afraid of embroiling his daughter in a scandal, he dropped his entire family into one and now that includes the wild card of the new man in Liz's life, an American lawyer with the unenviable name of Chick Eddowes (Sam Wanamaker) and the inconvenient gift of the gumshoe. He makes, and keeps, promises like "Not till I find the missing link, as they say in the dime novels." The papers have taken to calling it the "Denning Ring Case." It is considerably harder these days to smile convincingly for the caller from Scotland Yard.
Even when the perpetually twisting plot errs more on the side of trivia than intricacy, the tension between Tom's conscience, his sense of self-preservation, and his sense of gallows humor carries the film well into its third act, where to his troubles it adds the public stage of a courtroom drama. The problem is that once the script has involved the Romanichal community, it's not possible to separate the beautiful self-complicating ironies from some much less beautiful ideas about the uses of stereotypes.
( Oh, well, live and learn. Or learn, anyhow. )
Some years ago,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks coined the concept of the cheese sandwich ending: it denotes a narrative that, whatever its other merits, ends so badly that it can be recommended only to audiences willing to replace the last ten pages or minutes with a cheese sandwich. Mr. Denning Drives North varies slightly from this definition in that it requires the viewer to have a cheese sandwich on hand on and off for much of the third act, but there will still need to be a sufficient amount left for the denouement and it's frustrating; it relegates the film to the rank of a lesser noir when there's so much of interest in it. Premise-wise, it's so close to The Reckless Moment (1949) that despite the signal differences in the emotional terrain of the two movies and the mechanics of who's covering for whom, I would love to know if Alec Coppel, who adapted the screenplay from his own 1950 novel, was familiar with either the Ophüls film or its source material of Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's The Blank Wall (1947). I have never seen anything else directed by Anthony Kimmins, but I recognize several titles from his catalogue and at least one of them looks potentially noir-adjacent. I am not sure what to make of the radio-style spoken credits that play so much like a trailer that I had to double-check with another source before I was confident of watching the correct print, but I like some of the script's other, experimental touches, like populating Tom's nightmare with figures from his waking life whose significance will click only in hindsight. A late-night movie on TV plays a crucial part in the plot. As I go on tracking attitudes toward mental health in this period, I have registered the disapproval of "If you need a psychiatrist and all his patent drugs—" I am sorry that neither Dane Clark nor Patricia Roc featured as originally announced in the roles ultimately taken by Wanamaker and Calvert, but the supporting cast is stocked with character players like Wilfrid Hyde-White, Raymond Huntley, Ronald Adam, and Freda Jackson, plus a decent amount of vintage aircraft if you like that sort of thing, which I do. It was yet another of the fruits of TVTime and can be found on Region 2 DVD as well as what looks honest to God like a home-taped VHS rip on the Internet Archive; for all its faults, I should like someday to see a decent-quality copy, mostly for the crisp-shadowed cinematography by John Wilcox and the microexpressions by John Mills. Wish me no cheese sandwich with his next noir. This difference brought to you by my learning backers at Patreon.
I have come to recognize that domestic noirs from a male perspective are not as rare as I once thought them, but I am still interested in the forms they take. This one begins inside the dreams of Tom Denning (John Mills), in medias res of going dramatically to pieces. Formerly, we gather, a loving husband to Kay (Phyllis Calvert), a doting father to Liz (Eileen Moore), and the responsible chief designer and chairman of the Denning Aircraft Company (Percival Aircraft), he has been lately distracted by nightmares, day-drinking, and pretending that nothing is wrong. He throws aside the evening paper as twitchily as he snaps off the six o'clock news, blames the police for breaking into his garage and is not consoled to hear he did it himself in his sleep. His paralysis at work has the production line on standby and the chief accountant on his case. He's unnerving his family and wanders through his sunlit house like a stranger. Whatever's got him strung up like piano wire, it reaches a crisis when he almost allows himself to commit suicide during a hangar-buzzing joy-ride, pulling himself out of a deliberate stall just in time to merely wreck his plane in flames instead. Now when the camera returns to the domestic sphere, it is as low-shadowed as all the lonely places of film noir, Kay on the sofa staring nowhere in a room full of things meant to be enjoyed, wordlessly refusing the drink her husband offered; he takes his own over to the fireplace to drink it and fails. Standing with the glass in his hand, he looks for a moment like a mechanism that has seized, the traditional male defenses of silence and alcohol locked against the pressures that have driven him to them until something has to break and it's the boyish crease of his face, shockingly into tears. No one should make those heaving, hopeless noises, even muffled on their wife's shoulder as she tries to hold him through it, murmuring the meaningless, anchoring words of love and comfort and finally, fatally, "Darling, come on, out with it. It can't be as bad as all that. You haven't murdered anybody, you know." It's an affectionate attempt at reality check; it might even work in a film that hadn't opened with the expressionist, echoing nightmare of a murder trial. Tom meets her gaze honestly, which means with a bleak sort of mischief and still crying a bit: "Well, that's the whole point. I have murdered somebody . . . Aren't you glad that's all it was?" Technically what he confesses is more like manslaughter, but he's made it rather difficult to believe. He never hid his dislike of Victor Mados (Herbert Lom), the suave middle-aged sponger who was willing to relinquish his romance with eighteen-year-old Liz in return for £500, which would have been the end of her father's distasteful errand to London if Mados hadn't slipped in a parting taunt and Tom hadn't indulged the damn-fool machismo of knocking the man down for it and suddenly instead of a tidily bought-off sleaze, he had an unplanned corpse on his hands. "I know," he protests, "I know, I know! I've been kicking myself ever since. Say I lost my head, say I lost my nerve, say anything you like, the fact is I didn't phone the police and that's that." Instead, he drove nearly four hours north to stage a hit-and-run where the car could never be linked to him or the body to Mados, trusting that he had scattered sufficient red herrings to see his never-identified victim safely buried under a verdict of accidental death. He's been sweating out the weeks since, spiraling into panic with the realization that his careful frame of a road accident would last only so long in the face of weather and roadworks, after which a body discovered with the back of its skull bashed in would surely be investigated as a murder. The efficacy of the cover-up depended on a quick resolution and he didn't get one. "With that thing still lying there in the ditch, I'm right back there with it!"
From the moment he got on my radar with the diametric calling cards of Hobson's Choice (1954) and Tunes of Glory (1960), I have loved Mills as a physical actor because I find myself working to describe scenes which are effortlessly storytelling to the eye and that wry little smile with its telltale hitch of tears is the key to the best of Mr. Denning Drives North, countercoiling its narrative around a protagonist whose predicament would be farcical if it weren't so likely to end with someone hanged. "Good heavens," Tom explodes at the suggestion that it might reassure him to check on the status of his erstwhile victim for himself, "wild horses wouldn't drag me back there! Listen, I know that criminals are supposed to be fascinated by the scene of their crime, but I'm different, that's all." It is thus inevitable that as soon as he falters in this resolution, he seems to cross a kind of event horizon where as inexorably as a road trip by Sartre or Buñuel, Mr. Denning will find himself driving north and north again, unraveling a little more of his cover and his composure each time. The title assumes the tone of a sardonic aorist, or perhaps a catch-22. Thanks in no small part to Tom's anxious obsession with the "sequel . . . no body, no inquest, no burial!" he's more conspicuous as an investigator after the fact than he ever was as a malefactor on the night. He interviews a potential lead in the disguise of his own horn-rimmed glasses, so distinctive that they become the defining feature by which an inquisitive visitor to the mortuary can be recalled; he pursues a piece of missing evidence so forcefully that it leads straight to the police station. He's too jaggedly wound for the film ever to settle into a joke, but it's fair that after a certain point he reacts to the quagmire of his situation with as much absurdism as fear and the sense of black comedy simultaneous with nightmare only heightens with each proof of something else he's done to cock up his perfectly adequate crime, culminating in the revelation that it need never have happened at all. Opportunistic, insinuating, and an all-round no-goodnik he may have been, but Victor Mados wasn't a worm in the rose of the Denning household, he was an adolescent rebellion a girl was already getting wise to. "Another week and I'd have hated the sight of him. You said I couldn't have him, so I said I wanted him. I didn't really at all in the end." Liz admits it cheerfully, as if smiling at her youthful folly from the great maturity of a season later: she's unprepared for the convulsion of laughter it will provoke from her father, as disgraceful and irrepressible as his tears. But what sane reaction is there to finding out that even the paternal confrontation that touched off all this mishegos was itself a fool's errand? Tom was so afraid of embroiling his daughter in a scandal, he dropped his entire family into one and now that includes the wild card of the new man in Liz's life, an American lawyer with the unenviable name of Chick Eddowes (Sam Wanamaker) and the inconvenient gift of the gumshoe. He makes, and keeps, promises like "Not till I find the missing link, as they say in the dime novels." The papers have taken to calling it the "Denning Ring Case." It is considerably harder these days to smile convincingly for the caller from Scotland Yard.
Even when the perpetually twisting plot errs more on the side of trivia than intricacy, the tension between Tom's conscience, his sense of self-preservation, and his sense of gallows humor carries the film well into its third act, where to his troubles it adds the public stage of a courtroom drama. The problem is that once the script has involved the Romanichal community, it's not possible to separate the beautiful self-complicating ironies from some much less beautiful ideas about the uses of stereotypes.
( Oh, well, live and learn. Or learn, anyhow. )
Some years ago,
rushthatspeaks coined the concept of the cheese sandwich ending: it denotes a narrative that, whatever its other merits, ends so badly that it can be recommended only to audiences willing to replace the last ten pages or minutes with a cheese sandwich. Mr. Denning Drives North varies slightly from this definition in that it requires the viewer to have a cheese sandwich on hand on and off for much of the third act, but there will still need to be a sufficient amount left for the denouement and it's frustrating; it relegates the film to the rank of a lesser noir when there's so much of interest in it. Premise-wise, it's so close to The Reckless Moment (1949) that despite the signal differences in the emotional terrain of the two movies and the mechanics of who's covering for whom, I would love to know if Alec Coppel, who adapted the screenplay from his own 1950 novel, was familiar with either the Ophüls film or its source material of Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's The Blank Wall (1947). I have never seen anything else directed by Anthony Kimmins, but I recognize several titles from his catalogue and at least one of them looks potentially noir-adjacent. I am not sure what to make of the radio-style spoken credits that play so much like a trailer that I had to double-check with another source before I was confident of watching the correct print, but I like some of the script's other, experimental touches, like populating Tom's nightmare with figures from his waking life whose significance will click only in hindsight. A late-night movie on TV plays a crucial part in the plot. As I go on tracking attitudes toward mental health in this period, I have registered the disapproval of "If you need a psychiatrist and all his patent drugs—" I am sorry that neither Dane Clark nor Patricia Roc featured as originally announced in the roles ultimately taken by Wanamaker and Calvert, but the supporting cast is stocked with character players like Wilfrid Hyde-White, Raymond Huntley, Ronald Adam, and Freda Jackson, plus a decent amount of vintage aircraft if you like that sort of thing, which I do. It was yet another of the fruits of TVTime and can be found on Region 2 DVD as well as what looks honest to God like a home-taped VHS rip on the Internet Archive; for all its faults, I should like someday to see a decent-quality copy, mostly for the crisp-shadowed cinematography by John Wilcox and the microexpressions by John Mills. Wish me no cheese sandwich with his next noir. This difference brought to you by my learning backers at Patreon.
