Loathario

I enjoyed NOBODY LIVES FOREVER, a Jean Negulesco noir with John Garfield and Geraldine Fitzgerald. The heart of the film is really Walter Brennan, in grizzled sidekick mode, but in a suit and hat for once — when I mentioned the movie to Hilary Barta of Limerwrecks, he immediately cited Brennan’s contemporary garb as the film’s chief pleasure.

My main interest lay elsewhere, however. Garfield plays a con artist brought in to fleece a widow, played by Fitzgerald, who has been spotted as a likely mark by a rival gang led by George Coulouris. This once-successful crook no longer has the bankroll to finance the operation, and needs a partner. He’s also too old and ugly to seduce Fitzgerald personally, but he’s reluctant to admit this. The sight of Coulouris, as saggy, glowering and sheened with perspiration as ever, protesting his undiminished desirability to the fair sex is both moving and queasily hilarious.

In a way, Coulouris is the flipside of Brennan, since both embody the wisdom of the film’s title — you have limited time on earth to make good, and will end up like these guys if you don’t accomplish it when you have a chance. Brennan is a sweet-natured pickpocket (perhaps an unlikely character in reality), Coulouris a washed-up confidence man who will resort to kidnapping and murder to come out on top, but both are vividly seedy embodiments of failure.

Of course, Garfield falls for his target and shows signs of faltering in his criminal mission. Coulouris decides to push him aside — in this scene, Garfield enters his hotel suite to find Coulouris waiting, sprawled across a chair like an unstrung puppet. Is he trying to look sexy? To prove he’s still got it or to tease Garfield? At any rate, it’s a great pose — the 40s are a fine period for unconventional use of furniture (think Peter Lorre, sitting on desktops).

In his simultaneous arrogance and dismal hints of self-awareness (deep down he knows he’s a loser), Coulouris’s characterisation reminds me of another George, Costanza from Seinfeld.

Film Directors with their Shirts Off: The Enormity Of It All

Well, we’ve already seen him with his trousers down. Now as it must to all men, the time comes to see him with his shirt off. John Houseman gives us a swift verbal picture of what we’re missing ~

“He said he had been working all night and when I arrived he was still in his bath — a monstrous, medieval iron cistern which, when it was covered at night with a board and mattress, served them as a marriage bed. Orson was lying there, inert and covered with water, through which his huge, dead-white body appeared swollen to gigantic proportions. When he got up, full of apologies, with a great splashing and cascading of waters, I discovered that his bulk owed nothing to refraction — that he was, in reality, just as enormous outside as inside the tub which, after he had risen from it and had started to dry himself, was seen to hold no more than a few inches of liquid lapping about huge, pale feet.”

From Unfinished Business.

“He looks like Tiny Tears,” says Fiona. “He’s got a body like Tiny Tears.”

George Orson Welles Tiny Tears.

Coincidentally, we listened to Welles’s radio version of Dracula via YouTube, which goes like a train and is very spooky to boot. Funny how, in eschewing the languorous pace of the Lugosi, it kind of anticipates the bracing abruptness of the Hammer version. It does borrow the curtain call speech from the Universal version. This one is so fast it omits the brides of Dracula and Renfield altogether, but beefs up Mina’s part to make her a proper heroine and give Agnes Moorehead a chance to get her hysteria out again. Welles as Drac sounds like his JOURNEY INTO FEAR heavy played too slow, sonorous and powerful, but as Dr Seward he’s really great, adding a sense of authentic terror to the piece. The neurotic fervor of George Coulouris’s Jonathan Harker redoubles the effect (even with savage pruning, you can’t escape Stoker’s messy multiplying of protagonists!)

Thanks to RWC for the Welles skin.

The Line He Was Born To Say

“I’ve always had a suppressed desire to see a grave opened up… especially at night. It’s exciting.”

Peter Lorre in THE VERDICT.

This was Don Siegel’s first film as director, and Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet’s last together. Siegel noted with amazement that Greenstreet was always on time, letter-perfect, knew his lines and everyone else’s, whereas Lorre didn’t even know which studio he was in — and yet they were magnificent together.

Very nice mystery with top smarm from George Coulouris. The look is more Warner house style than Siegel grit, with striations of glossy black shadows and fog fog fog — Hollywood England with a German expressionist tilt. I’d seen it years ago on VHS, so I was keeping half an eye on Fiona, who hadn’t, to see if the twist ending would work. It did. “Oh, I don’t want Peter Lorre to be the killer, he’s too much fun!” Is that a spoiler? Watch it and find out!

Buy: The Verdict (1946)