Lamp Post

Occluding lampshades are a favourite compositional device, and this one, from Curtis Bernhardt’s MGM noir HIGH WALL, is particularly interesting, though perhaps not wholly successful.

Being an MGM noir, it’s full of hedging and excuses, and that’s what stops it being great — it’s gorgeously shot, exciting and well cast — Robert Taylor even has some excellent moments, and the miscasting of Audrey Totter as a kind of Ingrid Bergman shrink complicates things and makes the story more intriguing. There’s a natural edge and intensity to Totter which makes you not quite trust her when she’s required to be sweet…

Anyway, this lamp. Herbert Marshall has to do a lot of WALKING in this film, and he manages it very well for the most part. But you can hear his wooden leg SQUEAK, which I’m amazed wasn’t fixed.

Towards the climax, Marshall and Walker have to engage in a vigorous fight, falling all over the furniture in Marshall’s flat, and this was obviously too challenging for Marshall to perform himself, so Bernhardt has devised a ruse. Yes, this also falls into the genre of “How to conceal Herbert Marshall’s wooden leg,” a trope most famously illustrated in THE LITTLE FOXES where he briefly exits frame on the left, so that his identically-dressed stand-in can stagger up the stairs while our main focus is on Bette Davis:

So, here’s the scene. Marshall has shut the door, thinking himself alone, but then he hears a noise, and a dramatic shadow in snap-brimmed fedora crosses his form — Bernhardt gets to do lots of Germanic lighting in this one, which often LOOKS more Warners than MGM.

SLOWLY he turns… and Bernhardt tracks back, the camera movement synchronized to Herbert’s pivot… and Taylor’s shoulder, side of head and hat brim slide into view.

It’s a terrific effect: it not only reveals the intruder in a dramatic and mysterious way, it makes Marshall shrink as he becomes more vulnerable, with Taylor’s positioning making him seem, in a way, gigantic.

And Bernhardt now maintains this shot for several lines of dialogue, resisting a reverse angle and showing the kind of nerve few directors have these days.

When he finally cuts, it’s to a closer view of Marshall, showing the calculation in his expression and cueing up a POV shot which tells us that he’s looking at his revolver, across the room and behind Taylor…

Having shown us what’s on Marshall’s mind and allowed us to guess what his plan is, Bernhardt now lets us see him execute it. The fact that we can anticipate what he’s up to is obviously good for suspense, as we can ask ourselves if he’ll succeed.

Bernhardt cuts back to the earlier over-the-shoulder framing of the cornered Marshall and pulls back as Marshall advances, Taylor finally coming into clearer view as he turns to follow his opponent’s movement…

But now the shot gets weird. Berndardt’s camera pulls back to what should be a flat two of Marshall and Taylor, but turns into a shot of a lamp and Taylor…

It’s one of those clever-but-stupid ideas. Because there’s no good dramatic reason for us to be observing the action half-hidden by a lampshade.

But the clever bit is, while he’s still talking, and while we can still see a good bit of his body, Marshall does a quick shuffle and steps back out of frame, letting his stand-in replace him. This happens while we can still see part of him.

By the time we get this next composition, Marshall has been replaced by his pod person:

The out-takes must have been hilarious (and swiftly burned), with Marshall colliding with his identically clad stunt-herbert, or the substitution not happening quickly enough, so that we see both Herberts at the same time, awkwardly weaving around one another…

But the trick is done imperceptibly in the movie, the only flaw being our puzzlement about why this lighting fixture suddenly has a featured role.

So now the fake Herbert can grab for the gun, the real Taylor can leap on him, the lamp can go flying (fulfilling, at last, a discernible dramatic function) and the two men can crash to the floor and tussle.

We even get a bold glimpse of the stunt-herbert’s face, with the filmmakers confident that we won’t notice that it’s not our star because there’s too much going on, it’s too quick, and anyway, we clearly saw that it was him at the start of this shot.

The other main fake Herbert bit I remember is in TROUBLE IN PARADISE, where Herbert springs out of frame, dashing for the stairs, and Lubitsch whip-pans IN THE WRONG DIRECTION, rotating almost 360 to catch the fake Herbert leaping up the staircase two steps at a time, convincing us that the star is an athletic biped but that his director is drunk…

The People Against The Thing From Another World

Called to the bar.

Casting Spencer Tracy as an alcoholic is a bit nervy… a scene showing him engaging in a sketchy interaction with Eduardo Ciannelli in the men’s room may be dicier still. THE PEOPLE AGAINST O’HARA (1951) has moments of subversion and dissonance unusual in an MGM picture.

Tracy plays a retired criminal lawyer and reformed boozer driven back to the bottle by his struggle to win the case of a young man (James Arness, THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD himself) accused of murder. John Sturges directs — his early thrillers aren’t as noirish as Anthony Mann’s, but he does have cinematographer John “single-source” Alton on his side so the movie is beautiful.

I must have looked away during the credits because I missed Alton’s name, but the suspicion gradually donned on me as the film went on that I was seeing his work. One of the few DoP’s with such a distinctive style.

This is the shot that made me first glimmer and glom.

“Spencer Tracy’s always good as a lawyer. He’s so solid,” said Fiona. “He’s an immovable force.”

“I think you can have an immovable object or an unstoppable force…” I suggest, but then come to think she’s right. Spence is an immovable force. Or possibly an unstoppable object.

The film is very well cast — Diana Lynn has one terrific scene, John Hodiak is fine in his natural environment as third lead, Pat O’Brien fades into the furniture, Ciannelli and William Campbell are great nasties, and if you enjoy the look, sound and feel of Emile Meyer as much as I do, you will enjoy seeing, hearing and touching him here.

This is sort of a noir — there is some surprising stuff, including the ending. But the ultimate message of just about any MGM film is that the system works, so you don’t get a real sense of subversion and malaise, but then, maybe you already have enough of that in your life.

THE PEOPLE AGAINST O’HARA stars Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Hildy Johnson; Emmy Kockenlocker; John Kovac; Dr. Satan; the Thing from Another World; Cimmaron Rose; Walking Coyote; Concho; Chief Quinn; Reverend Cyril Playfair; Mrs. Carol Stark; Lt. Harry Kello; Chief Inspector Bernie Ohls; Paul Kersey; Molly Molloy; Mr. Rafferty; and the voice of Colossus.

Sothern Fried

Alert! Time for me to explore the works of Pat Jackson (if you’re nasty).

Jackson was a graduate of the GPO Film Unit, the UK postal service’s own film production arm, which also employed the great Cavalcanti, the obnoxious-sounding Harry Watt, and made the famous NIGHT MAIL. He then had a distinguished sojourn at the Crown Film Unit making war docs alongside Humphrey Jennings. He made his feature debut at MGM (as “Patrick Jackson” because “Pat” isn’t distinguished enough for a classy joint like MGM) with SHADOW ON THE WALL, a disjointed psychodrama starring Congo Maisie, Monte Beragon, Fanny Trellis Skeffington at aged 2, Gavin Elster (yay!), Sheriff Al Chambers and Nancy frickin’ Reagan.

Ann Sothern for once plays a villain, managing to incorporate some sympathy into a twisted character, and some subtlety into an intense, melodramatic story. But the film seems unable to decide WHO it’s about. We start on a wide of a lovely house, which is revealed to be an elaborate dollhouse, the first of many in the story. Andre Previn’s music veers from playfully childlike to sinister, then manages to dissonantly suggest both tones at once. We meet little Gigi Perreau, and then her dad, Zachary Scott, and discover through his eyes that his young wife (Kristine Miller, very glam indeed) is cheating on him with Tom Helmore.

While we’re pondering whether one should marry Monte Beragon and cheat with Gavin Elster, or vice versa, murder rears its antiseptic Hollywood head: Helmore was engaged to Miller’s sister, Ann Sothern, and she shoots her scheming sibling dead shortly after Miller’s stunned Scott by striking him on the nose with a hand mirror. When he awakens, he’s been neatly fitted up for murder, and will spend most of rest of the movie on death row, waiting. What nobody realises is that his little daughter witnessed the murder, but is in a state of shock and can’t tell anyone.

We now divide our narrative mainly between Nancy Davis/Reagan, a therapist trying to cure little Gigi, and Sothern, who’s trying to kill her. Much of Sothern’s business is internal, though, as she agonizes about her fear of being caught, culminating in a hilarious hallucination at the hairdressers —

 

There are some other nicer directorial touches. Jackson uses simple wide shots effectively, isolating our child non-protagonist (Gigi has no active goal, so she’s basically a nut for Nancy to crack). There are two major child jeopardy situations, one in which Gigi and a playpal debate which of them is to drink a glass of chocolate milk which Sothern has poisoned. The script milks (sorry!) this a good bit, but Jackson doesn’t do much with it. Probably a mercy.

But then Sothern tries to drown the moppet in the hospital’s hydrotherapy room, and all stops are pulled out, heaped up and set fire to. Looong lurking shot in the corridor, waiting, waiting, while infanticide is attempted behind closed doors. Merciless. Let’s remember that Truffaut said that jeopardising the life of a child in a drama was virtually an abuse of cinematic power (he did it in SMALL CHANGE, but he had reasons and had thought about it). Bruce Robinson, writing IN DREAMS for Neil Jordan, had felt unable to threaten a child’s life, despite the fact that he was writing a thriller about a child killer. This posed a problem. “It took me three months to solve it. It took Neil Jordan three minutes to fuck it up.”

Jackson had no such compunctions, it seems: he’d be back threatening children in cop drama THE GENTLE TOUCH a few films later.

I suspect Jackson didn’t find MGM a comfortable home — at any rate, he was soon back in the UK and back to being Pat. More on him soon.