Malicious Roomers

My exploration of the works of Herbert Mason continues. Lots of his films are unavailable so far as can see. BACK-ROOM BOY was a rare example of real cinematic flair being applied to the British slapstick film, and A WINDOW ON LONDON was a slick and graceful combination of slice-of-life realism and noir melodrama.

STRANGE BOARDERS is also very stylish in a Hitchcockian way. It’s the kind of spy romp he might have enjoyed, although making the hero a professional espionage investigator is something he’d probably have balked at.

Scene one: a little old lady is hit by a bus. Well, it gets your attention. When she’s discovered to have been carrying top secret blueprints of Britain’s newest MacGuffin, and investigation of her lodging house is clearly indicated, so ace spy Tommy Blythe (Tom Walls) is dragged from his honeymoon to go undercover. His wife, who doesn’t know about his covert work, is naturally outraged and suspicious, so she follows him — into the lions’ den!

I became fascinated by the plot’s close resemblance to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film L’ASSASSIN HABITE…AU 21. In both stories, an investigator goes undercover in a boarding house to find out which of the tenants is involved in an ongoing crime, and is joined by his wife, who shows up unexpectedly and without his agreement, determined to investigate on her own. In both stories there’s a blind man among the lodgers, and the denouement is strikingly similar in ways it wouldn’t do to go into without spoilering both films and their respective source novels.

For here’s the thing — STRANGE BOARDERS is based on a novel by E. Phillips Oppenheim, The Strange Boarders of Palace Crescent, while Clouzot’s film is based on L’assassin habite au 21 by Franco-Belgian crime writer S.A. Steeman. I call shenanigans!

Mason’s film scripted by the great Sidney Gilliat and A.R. Rawlinson, who worked on the first MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH and was a genuine military intelligence officer in both the Great War and the one that was about to break out. They rejigged the plot quite a bit — in the very prolific Oppenheim’s book the hero is single, and is not an intelligence man, he’s more like the Hitchcockian amateur/innocent.

Steeman’s French novel appeared shortly after the British film, so he could certainly have seen it, if it were showing in France or if he saw it in England and could speak English. He couldn’t have been stealing from the book because the key elements common to both works are not in the Oppenheim original.

I can’t convict Steeman, who was a prolific and quite imaginative author (Clouzot’s magnificent QUAIS DES ORFEVRES is also based on a Steeman work, though apparently quite loosely as Clouzot couldn’t remember the exact plot and couldn’t find a copy of the paperback), but I thought I’d read synopses of his other works, since plagiarism is rarely a one-time crime unless the author is immediately caught. And indeed, Steeman’s Le Furet/The Ferret, filmed in 1949, does sound quite a bit like the film of Georges Simenon’s Picpus. Both involve anonymous letter-writers and a fortune teller, if memory serves. But stealing from Simenon, or from a recent adaptation of Simenon, would be far riskier than swiping from an obscure British thriller film. It looks like Steeman borrowed some plot elements but reworked them into his own pattern. He may have felt that’s what he was doing, legitimately, with L’Assassin…

Clouzot’s film doesn’t do much with its blinded prize-fighter, who is just a red herring, whereas STRANGE BOARDERS gets terrific mileage out of its sightless villain — in one scene, Tommy Blythe, standing stock-still to escape detection, is nearly given away by the soft ticking of his wristwatch, until he pokes his arm out the open window and it’s drowned out by traffic atmos. There’s also a fight in a darkroom — exciting stuff.

Kinky, too — Tommy playfully threatens his wife with a spanking, and when he captures one enemy agent, the ubiquitous Googie Withers, he has to enlist his wife’s aid to get her bound and gagged in the back of a car. Much is made of Renée Saint-Cyr stripping off Googie’s stoking to bind her ankles… Something Clouzot would have enjoyed, if he’d seen it, and would probably have insisted on swiping, but his film doesn’t have any equivalent of the Googie character.

Actually, the means by which Tommy gets this femme fatale out of a public night club, by insisting she’s his wife, also turns up in Edward Dmytryk’s Columbia B-movie THE BLONDE FROM SINGAPORE, made just a few years after STRANGE BOARDERS, but there may well be other movies that use that trope, which relies on the sinister assumption that the public will always believe a man over a woman.

I have been unaware of Tom Walls except for a vague idea about the Aldwych farces he produced on stage and directed on film. Now I’m starting to see them and he’s a fantastic comic actor, but perhaps a little long in the tooth for his role as a dashing bridegroom here. He’s an amazing and versatile character actor who wants to be a leading man.

Also featured: a nubile Irene Handl and Martita Hunt.

STRANGE BOARDERS stars Major Bone; Princess Isabelle; Helen Nosseros; Eldridge Harper; Lord Edgware; Mrs. Hudson; Tom Gradgrind; Sexton Blake; Alaric Chichester; Jellyband; Undetermined Role; Miss Havisham; and Joe Gargery.

Never Look Directly into Behind the Rising Sun

What got Dmytryk his big break into A pictures was a double-whammy of sadistic propaganda films. I haven’t seen HITLER’S CHILDREN but I gather it has Nancy Drew being flogged in it. I can now say I’ve seen BEHIND THE RISING SUN — mostly from between my fingers.

it is possible to say that this film makes several mistakes. It features Chinese-american propaganda mainstays like Richard Loo and Philip Ahn doing what they always did, playing evil Japanese. I can accept their casting with something like equanimity since they’re getting payback for what Japan is doing to Mother China, in a way, though I wonder if they also found this stuff kind of degrading? But with these guys on tap it was rather unnecessary to cast white folks in yellowface, though I guess they had to get some stars in there…

But that won’t really wash, because was there really a huge audience gasping for J, Carroll Naish? No, he’s in it because of the belief that, as a versatile character man, he can play anything. He gets the opportunity to disprove that here, and does so with a ghastly aplomb.

Also continually hard to look at in wouldn’t-it-be-rubbery eyelids is Tom Neal, who, OK, I guess probably had some kind of “following,” however reluctant. He’s first introduced as a photograph, which already is enough to make the audience’s collective head recoil in horror to a distance of about a foot, and which in no way prepares for the full awfulness of his 24fps moving picture appearance, which comes soon after and then lingers for the whole picture.

And then there’s LOST HORIZON’s Margo — because Mexican is kind like Chinese, right? — under contract to RKO and also featured in THE LEOPARD MAN the same year. I can guess which item she kept on her résumé longer. CITIZEN KANE makeup whiz Maurice Seiderman apparently did her lids, proving there is no way to make this kind of thing look good. She’s granted also a Dan Dare widow’s peak, NOT a Japanese fashion, just something that apparently felt appropriately witchy to somebody, “Madness! Madness!” as James Donald is always saying.

Throw in Abner Biberman — another “he can play anything” type for whom the argument disintegrates in real time as you watch — and the cast of fauxrientals is more or less complete. Oh wait, Mike Mazurski, limbering/lumbering up for Moose Malloy in Dmytryk’s first A-picture, MURDER, MY SWEET.

I guess they could melt down his eyelids afterwards and make some jeep tyres.

The moderately good news is we also get, um, Gloria Holden, Dracula’s Daughter herself, the kind of actor who might be expected to vamp it up as a dragon lady but is here playing an occidental tourist, oh hey Robert Ryan, reliably psychopathic though I think we’re supposed to find him loveable. A man with a cucalorus permanently in his background, maybe it’s somehow shadowing him. There’s a deeply weird scene where he’s picked on by the Japanese cops for shooting at a cat — because how else are they going to show what a dystopian dictatorship Imperial Japan is, if they don’t show an American getting a hard time for shooting at a cat? What kind of country is this?

The film’s highlight, I guess, is an incredibly protracted fight between Ryan and Mazurki, with RR in boxing gloves and Mazurki doing judo throws and kicks and wrestling moves. I guess this is what they call mixed martial arts. Before we judge too hastily, at around the same time Kurosawa was shooting the same scene, sort of, in the propagandistic sequel he’d been forced to make to SANSHIRO SUGATA. Sanshiro gets in the ring against an African American pugilist… I should watch that so I can answer the question Which is more uncomfortable? which is a question I’m bound to be asked one day.

Apart from the racial imposture the other thing wrong with the movie is it kind of scores an own-goal by showing Japanese characters we like — how are we supposed to feel OK about bombing them? But I can’t have it both ways — complaining that there’s disgusting racism and also an attempt to humanize the enemy, or at anyhow suggest that not everyone in this nation IS the enemy. That’s commendable and probably rare if not unique in wartime, when, as I understand it, there was a deliberate attempt to demonize “the Jap”, in counterpoint to the way Germans were portrayed as the victims of evil leader. The explanation I read somewhere was that it was known that Hirohito was going to have to stay, so they couldn’t put all the blame on HIM…

Anyway, weird film. Its most obnoxious element is making Neal’s character an American-educated, likeable guy at first who gets corrupted by Imperialism, which comes close to making the case for the detention of Japanese-Americans, a suggestion that some innate barbarity lurks within the whole people. Maybe the whole of humanity, sure, I’d buy that.

There is another film, which sounds even more appalling than this — FIRST YANK INTO TOKYO — in which Neal plays a GI who gets “racial reassignment” plastic surgery to go undercover in Japan. I presume once he arrives he finds lots of other Yanks made up as the enemy, and it’s like The Man Who Was Thursday — the whole of Nippon is just Caucasians in phony eyelids and a bunch of cooperative Chinese-American bit-players. I may have to watch it, but this one was enough to last me a while.

BEHIND THE RISING SUN stars Soldadera; Bruce Gentry; Chief Sitting Bull; Smith Ohlrig; Countess Marya Zaleska; Dick Stanley – aka Deadwood Dick; Neb Jolla; Ernie Wright; Saburo Goto (uncredited); Latigo Means; Wang Chi-Yang; Sgt. Tanaka; Moose Malloy; and Choy Wong.

Battleground State

I came to Edward Dmytryk’s TILL THE END OF TIME via Bernard Dick’s Radical Innocence book on the Hollywood Ten, which spoke highly of it. I slightly disagree with the author when he says that Wyler’s THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES has become a classroom text on deep focus and can no longer be enjoyed as a film (paraphrasing — maybe he doesn’t quite say that). No doubt it’s true for him, but I came to the film late, never saw it in a class (at “film school” we saw very few films in class), and the superb (and strange) Gregg Toland photography is only one aspect of what I enjoy in it.

Anyway, Dick says that Dmytryk’s more modest film is more human, and therefore a greater success. The comparison is certainly apt as both films follow three soldiers returning to civilian life, dealing with problems of adjustment, and suffering from injuries both physical and mental.

The Dmytryk trio are Guy Madison (handsome, a tad bland), Robert Mitchum, and Bill Williams as the amputee — Wyler scores far above this film by casting a genuine amputee (I wonder if poor Harold Russell was subjected to the usual infinite series of Wyler takes — I somehow suspect he wasn’t, as he would have actorly tricks to strip away). Dmytryk writes that Williams couldn’t act at all, had to be told exactly what to do — “It made me feel rather Teutonic but not particularly comfortable.” But the results are just fine. Perhaps Williams’ slowness is why the personable lead’s career never caught fire, though.

Since this one ISN’T three hours long, it focuses more on one vet than the others, and unfortunately the one it chooses is Madison. In fact, he’s fine, I wouldn’t normally mind spending time with him, but when the way-more-interesting Mitch is lurking offscreen somewhere one gets antsy.

Also along is Dorothy McGuire, who as Dick notes is an unusual character for this time period — a war widow who hasn’t necessarily been faithful to her late husband’s memory, may have been playing the field (the film throws up this suspicion only to deny it — we aren’t wholly convinced by the denial, though). So she’s a maybe-loose woman who’s still alive and relatively happy at the end of the movie, an unusual proposition for the forties.

The other main girl is the second Mrs Dmytryk, Jean Porter, a little firecracker who looks about twelve but is meant to be perhaps nearly eighteen? When she started jitterbugging I suddenly recognized her from Esther Williams musicals where she also pops out of the chorus, a magnetic solar presence.

Like the heroes of IT’S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER the war-damaged protags finally resolve their troubles with a massive Fordian donnybrook. What makes it OK is they’re fighting fascists. I’m dubious about the healing power of violence but anything where fascists get punched has appeal. I guess this is another example of Dmytryk’s leftism creeping in, but as with the Wyler film the movie is deep-down patriotic, more so if anything. We’re regularly reminded that help is available for American casualties of conflict.

Video link

The most cinematically radical scene occurs early on — as the men go through the demob process, Dmytryk’s camera (cinematographer Harry J. Wild — I’m Wild about Harry) first rushes down a line of men as they give their names, then, far more unusually, swishpans between interviews, filming each with a curving dolly shot that circles the interviewer then pans onto the interviewee, still rotating, then ZZZIP off to the net pair. Very exciting stuff.

I asked myself WHY this was being done, beautiful as it is. I guess to make a dry bureaucratic process seem exciting (OK, we meet some personable folks, but it’s PROCESSING…) — but whose excitement is this? Not the men’s — presumably for them it’s fairly boring, with a slight perking-up when they reach the head of the queue. No, the thrill must be the army’s, we’re experiencing the joy of a machine, not the slomo trudge of the participants but the well-oiled ball-bearing smoothness of a system where everything may be subjectively slow to the men but it’s as fast as it can be made to go, which registers as top speed to the army.

So it’s pro-America propaganda, without a trace of subversion. America DOES seem to look after its injured better than other countries. It just isn’t enough — how could it ever be?