I last visited Maurice Tourneur’s FIGURES DE CIRE — WAX FIGURES — ten years ago. It’s a 1914 spooky short with missing footage and film decay which only make it creepier.
One of the earliest MT films, it’s made with considerable panache, and both Tourneur and his cast seem to know how to do this horror movie genre that hasn’t been invented yet. NOSFERATU, for instance, is still eight years in the future. Maybe the fact that one of the leads is an import from the Grand Guignol theatre is a help here?
Sidenote: while Maurice Tourneur was making films for German company Continental Films during WWII, and his son Jacques was in Hollywood making spooky thrillers, the actors of the Grand Guignol were still hard at work providing gross-out thrills and chills to Parisian theatregoers, who now numbered among them large numbers of uniformed German visitors. The SS, surprisingly, really enjoyed shows of sadistic violence. But behind the scenes, a number of the actors were in the Resistance, working to defeat their audience. I’ve always felt that scenario — the fake horror on stage and the real stuff sitting out front — would make a much better movie than Truffaut’s LE DERNIER METRO.
My latest viewing left me with a fresh respect for the stagecraft of Tourneur and leading man Henri Roussel. As director and star explore the midnight waxworks display with a slow creep leftwards, Roussel is always ONE EXHIBIT BEHIND: the camera reveals the next sinister tableau while Roussel is still peering at the last one — we get to anticipate his reaction — and anticipate, and anticipate. Finally he’ll turn, and give a little jolt of surprise at the next scene of infamy.
As the film reaches its climax, so does the nitrate decomposition, blinking in as sepia thunderflashes or flickering at the edge of frame like a devouring fire. The process of decay seems to be working in close collaboration with the filmmaker. Nothing is ruined, everything is enhanced.
And then, the classic Tourneur trope (pere et fils): THE MOVING SHADOW.
I feel the urge to delve deeper into M. Tourneur. I’ve seen lots, but there are lots more.
Needs music. I used the 5th movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, and found it synched beautifully, gesture by gesture.
PROFESSIONAL BUILDING. Well,what kind of Crime Doctor would operate out of an Amateur Building?
This was my first CRIME DOCTOR film — pure B movie goodness. I’ll definitely watch more. William Castle directed a couple, but this one was by the noir-adjacent Eugene Forde, who throws in an expressionist-adjacent dream sequence:
POISON!
So, anyway, Warner Baxter is Dr. Robert Ordway from the radio programme Crime Doctor, where he was played by THE NAKED CITY’s House Jameson. For the movies, you need a movie star (radio adaptation I LOVE A MYSTERY ported over the audio actors from its source, and they were a tad disappointing to gaze upon). For a B-movie you will settle for a FORMER movie star. Enter Warner.
(Cary Grant described stardom as a crowded bus — he hung off the back for a few years, then squeezed inside, “then Warner Baxter fell off and I got to sit down.”)
ROBERT ORDWAY M.D. PRACTICE LIMITED TO PSYCHIATRY
And crime-solving, of course. Lloyd Bridges and Lynn Merrick, both staple supporting players in B pictures — he keeps turning up as waiters and stuff in the LONE WOLF films — are the nice young couple who come to ask Crime Doc’s advice. He was an innocent suspect in a previous murder case where his employer was offed, and Ordway got him off. The police still think he’s a little off. Soon, he’ll be a suspect again — perhaps he’s been hired precisely to divert suspicion from the real killer. This is roughly the plot of Carol Reed’s THE GIRL IN THE NEWS, made a few years earlier in the UK, and therefore suitable for re-arranging into a fresh plot.
POISON. Soon, even L. Merrick will be suspecting L. Bridges of being the poisoner. Hard not to, when he carries poison about with him. But that’s too simple for the Crime Doctor, who explains that a guilty man would have thrown the poison away. An innocent man suspected of murder might have done the same, but not our Lloyd.
PATRICIA GIRLS. GOLDEN NIGHTS. G ROOMS OFFICE. NO SMOKING. QUIET.
A flashback takes us into a vaguely Gay Nineties theatrical setting, which feels like a different movie. I joked that from now on the film would be a period musical and we’d never return to the detective story. B movies very rarely go that far awry but sometimes, out of sheer cheapniz, you get peculiar narrative strategies.
CAFE MAN DESERTS WIFE AND CHILD. A truly magnificent headline. Cafe man? I imagine the same editor’s other works: LAMP WOMAN SLAYS FOUR. FLASK PERSON IN WASP SHOCK. BANISTER THING DESTROYS IDAHO. They’ve also buried the lede: this is a case more of theft than abandonment. Unusually for the period, the full newspaper story has been typed up and printed by some Columbia employee, rather than just some Latin text or a cut-and-paste article about the Chamber of Commerce. So you can learn that the theft victim is one Walter Burns, so we’re back to Cary Grant again.
UNIONS. SUPER-SOFT SCHOLL’S NO-PADS.
BURNS PHARMACEUTICAL CO. ADDISON BLAKE PRESIDENT. 1128. FOR SALE. APPLY BUSINESS PROPERTIES INC. 916 WEST 18TH AVENUE. CITY CAB CO.
The B-movie world is full of Acme-type generic business names. City Cabs. Professional Buildings. Business Properties Inc. Looking forward to REPO MAN, where characters drink from cans labelled BEER, or buy tins of FOOD.
PHYSICIAN 7X 38 51.
The Warner Baxter we meet in this film (not pictured) is a strangely muted fellow — perhaps preferable to the barking bully of the 1930s. He’d suffered a nervous breakdown and was going to die pretty soon. Either this, or the underwritten character, makes him gentler and actually more appealing. But not very lively or interesting.
JOE’S LUNCH ROOM. SHORT ORDERS. OPEN ALL HOURS. “What the hell is a lunch room?” demanded Fiona. “A Room where you get Lunch,” I suggested. She felt any business opening only at lunchtime would be a failure, but the answer is painted on the window: the round-the-clock lunch, a great American invention. But is it really lunch if it’s all hours? Another mystery we’ll never solve.
Buncha names. MR. MRS. MALLORY CARTWRIGHT.
This charming couple supplies all the eccentricity the film can bear. She’s discovered working as a cook in the murdered man’s house, but she’s clearly not legit. The Crime Doctor catches her “pretending to cook.” She soon throws off her disguise and flees through an open window. Learning her real name, he tracks her to her home address, where alas she does NOT say “Come in, I was just pretending to make coffee.” We learn that she’s a process server, and was serving food in order to get close enough to her target. Her husband is played by Jerome Cowan, and he’s a sheet music salesman and unconscious pyromaniac — small fires break out whenever he’s around. This becomes a hilarious running gag. This couple have little to do with anything, they’re mainly herrings of a deep crimson hue, but they bring the entertainment. The fact that Cowan’s job requires him to play the piano to demonstrate songs, and he does this very, very badly, is also hilarious. Does he sell many songs to the people whose homes he ignites? THAT question may actually be the Crime Doctor’s Strangest Case, but there’s no time for a solution because this is —
Just back from Edgar Wright’s LAST NIGHT IN SOHO, which is good. Worth seeing, I think. Fiona wants to co-write something about it, but I just want to say I appreciated the Clouzot INFERNO borrowings and shout-out — the club called INFERNO works as an Argento reference, of course, which is how most will read it, but really it’s tip of the hat in thanks for the sparkles, though at no point in the proceedings does Dany Carrel or anyone else attempt carnal knowledge of a Slinky™.
shadowplay 