THE CARD PLAYER (LE DESSOUS DES CARTES), an involved thriller directed by Andre Cayatte in 1948, made a very good double feature with SORTILEGES. It has a tricky and original plot involving a smuggler, a swindler, a femme fatale and a crooked cop.
The Stavisky-like swindler (Enrico Glori) flees to the Alps when his scheme unravels, and is found hanged after his wife (Madeleine Sologne, Dietrich-like in her vampish allure) refuses to join him. She stands to gain a fortune in life insurance, but then finds the policy is null and void if he’s found to have self-deleted. She heads to the scene determined to get a verdict of murder so she can cash in.
The smuggler (Serge Reggiani, surprisingly boyish) who helped the dead man cross the border prior to his demise, becomes her patsy. Meanwhile a crooked cop (Paul Meurisse, a Tex Avery wolf) follows her, determined to cover up his own complicity in the swindle and make a profit if possible.
Really cynical stuff — hardly anyone is free of guilt, and hardly anyone is punished for their evil-doing. Was this Meurisse’s first bad-guy role? He’s oleaginous and vicious, perfect prep for his better-known turn in LES DIABOLIQUES. Hard to believe he was initially a crooner cast in charming hero roles.
There’s scheming, vamping, betrayals galore and even an impossible crime to solve — how did the dead man hang himself without a ladder or chair to reach the ceiling beam? (rhetorical question but I’ll fill you in if you find it nagging at you)
I followed regular Shadowplayer BrooklynMagus’s recommendation and watched the Forgotten Lady episode of Columbo with John Payne and Janet Leigh, which is lots of fun. Columbo is rousted out of bed so shows up even more rumpled than usual — musical star Leigh has murdered her husband Sam Jaffe (!) because he refused to back her Broadway comeback — Payne is her musical movie co-star who still carries a torch. So it’s another riff on SUNSET BLVD, previously reworked for TV in The Twilight Zone episode The 16mm Shrine (with Ida Lupino).
Presumably Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly were out of reach for the show — Leigh & Payne are good substitutes, they have histories in both musicals and crime films, but not together. So their casting is very apt, and Payne is very good at gazing soulfully at JL. But when Leigh runs her old movies, they can’t come up with any shared footage, so instead we get Leigh solo in WALKING MY BABY BACK HOME, a 1953 musical with Donald O’Connor about Dixieland jazz. I get the impression Universal maybe knew they weren’t going to get any other use out of this film so might as well exploit the less toxic parts here.
The reason the film isn’t revived anymore — the copy I found is ancient — is surely down to the horrible racial elements. The plot requires O’Connor and Leigh to black up for one number, but there seems no pressing reason for Buddy Hackett to impersonate a Chinese waiter with an elastic band stretched round his head and across his eyelids, or for O’Connor to do an athletic but insensitive “oriental” dance number.
One mercy is that Scatman Crothers (billed as Scat Man as if the familiar superhero version of his name would be beneath the movie’s dignity) never shares the frame with a blackface artiste. Some kind of firewall is in place to spare our feelings.
The copy I watched is a spliced-together print seemingly transferred to VHS and thence to digital file, giving it a fuzz that’s been scrubbed clean into a blurry smear. You feel like you’re watching at 4am and you can’t get your eyes in focus, but it doesn’t matter what the actual time is — this is a 4am of the soul. So when the minstrel show unfolds in all its horror, for the first time the white bits around the performers’ eyes read like actual whites of their eyes, cartoonily massive, with tiny mousy black pupils rolling within. Maybe that’s what a real minstrel show looked like from the back row. Here it’s like anime minstrelsy. Animinstrels.
O’Connor’s athletic grace does provide moments of pleasure amid the vaudevillian grotesquerie. But, for the only time I can think of in a classic-era musical number, the movie muffs a transition into song — when the two stars go into their title tune, it has a bizarre WTF quality — we’re an hour in and all the songs previously have been dietetic performances. Suddenly we’re bursting into song and dance in the street, and nothing has prepared us for it. In fact the songs hitherto have denied that this kind of thing can happen. And then we shift to a theatrical set, a stylised Central Park out of a UPA toon so we get a second jolt of unreality. These moments of ineptitude are the film’s saving grace.
Also: O’Connor does a lapdance for Leigh, which is nice, I guess. Lloyd Bacon directs, the vigour of his pre-code days long behind him.
Forgotten Lady stars Mikey; Marion Crane; Dr. Zaius; Gunga Din; Fred Gailey; Moth; Handy Strong; Human Princess; and Cosmo Brown (archive footage).
WALKING MY BABY BACK HOME stars Cosmo Brown; Marion Crane; Tennessee Steinmetz; Rosie Kettle; Hong Kong Fooey; Mrs Miller; George ‘Gramps’ Miller; Ohtao; Paul Jones; Johnny Ringo; and Paul Regret. And who is the aggressive music teacher Madame Grinaldo, played with an inexplicable Russian accent and a lot of comedy skill? She’s uncredited, despite having a scene to herself which is more than Lori Nelson does as the young sister, who has about four lines and is sent out of the room anytime anything is about to happen…?
I feel like going on a Christian-Jaque spree after watching SORTILEGES, a feverish thriller which seems to juggle and admix many story elements from his previous, excellent L’ASSASSINAT DU PERE NOEL — remote village, snow, invalid, madness, murder, corpse laid flat on snowy hillside. With Jacques Prevert helping CJ adapt the source novel (by one Claude Boncompain) a sense of the supernatural, never formally endorsed by the narrative, is created — this is from the period of LES VISITEURS DU SOIR and LES PORTES DE LA NUIT and some of that mystic flavour has seeped in.
The intense, brooding Lucien Coëdel is the village bellringer, his bell serving as a kind of foghorn for those lost in the snow. But he’s not the best pick for the job — within ten minutes he’s murdered and robbed a wayfarer and incriminated a mentally ill beekeeper (Fernand Ledoux). Convinced of his unearthly powers of manipulation, the malign campanologist attempts to win the beekeeper’s daughter while the murdered man’s black horse rampages dementedly through the countryside, seen by all as some kind of preternatural manifestation.
Christian-Jaque pours Dutch tilts and zip-pans on the proceedings — he’s much more astute in how he links separate shots together to make them seem continuous than Hitchcock proved himself to be in ROPE. Some of this is to connect the studio interiors to the spectacular exteriors (Cévennes and Puy de Sancy, Puy-de-Dôme). He also dollies, dollies incessantly. It’s a kinetic, vigorous, thrusting film.
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