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.

Fifty Shades of Maigret

Continental Films, the German company based in Paris at the time of the Occupation, which was sort of in command of the whole French film industry, produced four Georges Simenon adaptations, comprising Henri Decoin’s classic LES INCONNUS DANS LA MAISON, starring Raimu, and three Maigret films, directed by Richard Pottier, Maurice Tourneur, and Richard Poittier again.

I’ve just lately watched the Poittier entries — PICPUS and LES CAVES DU MAJESTIC. I saw the Tourneur, CECILE EST MORT!, but I can’t recall a thing about it except it was great. Time to revisit.

In all three films, Miagret is Albert Prejean and his sidekick Lucas is a fellow called Andre Gabriello. The writers adapting Simenon differ, and this seems to make a big difference. (Simenon wanted to work for Continental and adapt his own works, which may tell you something about him — most of the people who did work at the studio had no choice.) Simenon like Prejean’s performance as his hero, but there was initially some concern that Prejean, primarily a light comic, was too young and too lightweight to play the dour plodder, but audiences embraced him — the only two previous Maigrets, who appeared the same year, were Harry Baur and Pierre Renoir, working for Duvivier and Jean Renoir, who were much closer in age and temperament, though Baur, like later three-time-Maigret Gabin, was a bit more explosive than the character in the books.

The strange thing is, Prejean IS too lightweight, but the films solve that by bending the character to fit — this Maigret is many times more whimsical, flippant, and cheeky than the novels’ version and, like Benoit Blanc, he’s also a celebrity detective (which is not a thing). It’s as if it was felt that taking a famous fictional sleuth and putting him on the screen just naturally required that his fame needed to be acknowledged by the supporting cast. WE’VE all heard of Maigret, so why wouldn’t the populace in the films.

PICPUS is written by the fascinating Jean-Paul Le Chanois (a Jewish communist resistance member working for a German film company) who later became a hate figure for the nouvelle vague as a director of the cinema du papa school, but it needs to be noted that Henri-Georges Clouzot was head of the script department at Continental, and the humour smacks of his playfulness, black comedy and grotesquerie in, say, L’ASSASSIN HABITE… AU 21, and even LE CORBEAU. Fiona became convinced of this.

The plot in this one is insanely convoluted, and then magically boils down to a simple confrontation with very little summary required. A nice job of screenwriting.

There’s a crazy sequence where we’re suddenly at the Last of the Mohicans Archery Club and everybody’s wearing an Indian headdress — it’s interesting that Maurice Tourneur, who directed (co-directed, really) MOHICANS in Hollywood, was around, and would make the sequel. But he doesn’t seem to have ever been attached to this one — I now have a copy of Christine Leteux’s book Continental Films, which produces the receipts.

By the time of LES CAVES DU MAJESTIC, the last Continental production as the occupation ended, scripted this time by the great Charles Spaak, the comedic tone has been modified a bit to allow more emotion, and Prejean’s Maigret has reintegrated the character’s original interest in psychology and humanity — his interest in why is greater than who. But this had been blended with Prejean’s light persona, so that Maigret can say he’s forgotten all about the murder he’s supposed to solve, because he’s more concerned with the human fallout.

This is the film whose shooting is documented in Tavernier’s underrated LAISSEZ-PASSER — Spaak completed the film in prison after being arrested, and this partly explains why there’s so much talk about food in the film — the writer was starving and couldn’t think of anything else. But the film’s concentration on the theme of paternity becomes even more moving when you know that Spaak’s wife, pregnant with their first child, had also been arrested. They got out OK in the end.

Poittier’s more interesting than I had somehow assumed — he throws in a splitscreen shot in PICPUS (as Lucas briefs Maigret on a murder, we see the discovery of the body played out in a little box) and an impressive sequence shot in CAVES.

It’s curious — I tend to rate movie Maigrets on their resemblance to the literary figure, but Prejean’s portrayal demands to be judged differently, on the basis of how successful his warping of the role is. And it’s extremely successful, on its own terms.

All the facts here come from Leteux’s book and Tavernier’s film. Some of the speculations are mine.