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.

Birt Evidence

I was happy to pick up a DVD of BURNT EVIDENCE, directed by Daniel Birt, partly so I could title a blog post in a weak fashion, but also because I quite liked Birt’s two Dylan Thomas scripted movies, THE THREE WEIRD SISTERS, a sort of Gothic, and NO ROOM AT THE INN, a surprisingly fierce social justice piece.

BURNT EVIDENCE is co-scripted by Ted Willis, who is no Dylan Thomas but did work on THE BLUE LAMP, FLAME IN THE STREETS and WOMAN IN A DRESSING GOWN. The story suggests film noir but the treatment is rather desultory. Maybe it’s the fact that there’s no villain, just a series of unfortunate events that get cleared up by the police. They clear them up by wrongfully arresting an innocent woman, quite intentionally, to force a witness to come out of hiding. They don’t tell the poor woman she’s not really in trouble. It astounds me what audiences will accept from their fictional cops… and their real ones.

Another astounding thing is the way Detective Inspector Donald Gray answers the phone: “Hellospeaking?” No pause. No time for anyone to ask if this is D.I. Gray or whatever the character name is. This makes no sense. Even saying “Speaking?” with a question mark on it makes no sense, like he’s asking whether he’s speaking. Clear grounds for a retake.

This isn’t a very interesting blog post but I’m trying to rescue something from the ashes of the experience of watching this film. We made so many like it. The sole bright spot is Irene Handl (top, left), making the best of a makeshift supporting role. She’s always dazzling, and as such threatens to capsize the whole shoddy vehicle. Amusingly, I then watched I WAS MONTY’S DOUBLE and “leading man” Duncan Lamont turns up in that for about thirty seconds and isn’t up to the task even in that tiny context. Here he has to carry half the film.

Fortunately the same disc has THE BLUE PARROT on it, which looks like an agreeably louche tale of Soho night life.

The Sunday Intertitle: Choccy Moloch

I’M ALL RIGHT JACK holds up better than the other Boulting Bros’ satires, I think. It’s unusual in that it’s a right-wing satire that’s actually funny. There is a slight attempt at even-handedness: when a worker explains that by having two unions, they can continually pressure the bosses to raise salaries, he adds that without this crafty approach, they wouldn’t get any raises at all. That’s a pretty minuscule sop.

So if the film, firing in all directions, is FOR anything, it’s for “compassionate capitalism.” If the workers are treated fairly by the employers, we can do away with unions altogether and peace will reign. Kind of weird that they use that title, shorthand for “Sod you, Jack, I’m all right” — intended to convey individual selfishness. Here, the different classes are united in opposition to one another, but there’s real group unity within each. They stick together.

Still, with the bosses played by Terry-Thomas (idiot) and Richard Attenborough (cad) and in bed with sleazy politico Dennis Price (crook) and sleazy foreigner Marne Maitland (seen stealing the cutlery), it’s fair to say nobody comes out of it well. But if you unpick where the film is heading with its argument, you find near-fascism at the end of the ellipsis.

My late friend Lawrie Knight found himself trapped between doors with Roy Boulting: the “filming” light was on so they couldn’t go forward and there was no point going back outside. So they waited. RB noticed Lawrie’s public school tie, and immediately became friendlier than he had been previously. Lawrie was a mere third assistant director. And he was appalled at RB’s sudden change of manner. “I mean, I’m a terrible snob, but this was too much!”

Peter Sellers’ magisterial performance as Fred Kite, union man, makes the film, though it’s crammed to the rafters with superb players in meaty comic roles. Dennis Price raises his game: sure, he’s always good, but he’s always THE SAME. He could have played this role with his eyes closed, but he wakes up for it and knocks it out of the park.

There’s a modest attempt to portray the women as the sensible parties, but this involves showing Mrs. Kite (Irene Handl, fabulous as always) cozying up to our hero’s posh Aunt Dolly with a forelock-tugging obsequiousness that’s portrayed as somehow instinctive and proper. Uncomfortable. Though seeing those two share a scene is a joy.

But I mainly want to talk about the chocolate factory. Our hero (Ian Carmichael, mousy drip to perfection) is taken on a tour of this joint, and if Willie Wonka’s plant is a gaudy death-trap, and that of Lord Scrumptious an expressionistic panopticon, then the Num-Yum factory’s METROPOLIS-inspired imagery, with the rhythmic soundtrack of burping and farting machinery (no doubt inspired by the jazzy chemistry sounds of THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT, a subtler, more compassionate and genuinely curious film than this) takes the film into a nauseating nightmare realm, just for this one scene. It’s a film full of disgust, moral or aesthetic, but it only assumes visceral form here. The boultings may have had the wrong slant on politics and society, but they got one thing right about satire: it’s motivated by nausea.

I’M ALL RIGHT JACK stars Bertie Wooster; Sir Hiss – A Snake; Chance; Kris Kringle; Jeeves; Madame Arcati; Mrs Gimble; Glad Trimble; Canon Chasuble; The Malay; Sgt. Wilson; Mr. Hoylake; Anxious O’Toole; Lenny the Dip; Archbishop Gilday; Orlando O’Connor; Lily Swann; and Sgt. Potty Chambers.