Bar Sinister

Ominous watering holes: one from BLACK WIDOW, one from THE THIRD DAY.

BLACK WIDOW is a mystery-thriller from writer-director Nunnally Johnson in Gorgeous Lifelike Color by Deluxe, Cinemascope, and Stereophonic Sound. It’s a reasonably well-conceived puzzle with an ungainly structure — it takes forever to arrive at the stage where a who has dunnit, and we have to sit through a long flashback that introduces a shoal of red herrings to occlude a crime yet to occur. All with a Broadway backdrop. “Write ALL ABOUT EVE as a murder mystery!” seems to have been the command from Zanuck or whoever.

Van Heflin is OK as the hero caught in a web of deceit — Gene Tierney has a nothing role as his wife. Ginger Rogers and Reginald Gardiner — Schultz from THE GREAT DICTATOR — make an improbably couple, but it works storywise. Ginger overplays her bitch-queen of Broadway character horribly but then pulls off a bit of a triumph at the end, proving again that “Ginger can play anything she can understand.” It takes so long for a murder victim to step forward that it feels like a spoiler to tell you that it’s Peggy Ann Garner, who is excellent, she makes you want more flashbacks.

You also get George Raft and Virginia Leith (Jan in the Pan from THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN’T DIE) and Skip Homeier, the creepy psycho kid from THE GUNFIGHTER. So you can’t complain. The best perf, however, is from Hilda Simms (above right), who got her one big break in THE JOE LOUIS STORY and has a couple of brief expository scenes which she delivers with such honest simplicity as to steal the show.

Kind of want to see THE JOE LOUIS STORY now.

In theory this is a Hitchcockian subject but there are few sequences of visual suspense, just a nice paranoid feeling of a trap closing in. Nunnally J. favours beautiful, theatrical wides, which look nice especially when there’s a scenic artist’s rendition of New York out the window. They’re not exactly fraught with tension but they work for the swellegant theaterland atmosphere.

What BLACK WIDOW has in common with THE THIRD DAY is that they’re both undemanding, time-passing, underpowered thrillers. They kind of forget to be thrilling, or else they don’t know what thrilling is. And yet they’re crowded with talent.

In THE THIRD DAY, George Peppard has total amnesia, and yet there’s no narrative reason for this except to make an excuse for exposition — the audience gets fed the plot and character set-up along with George. The story only really needs him to have amnesia with regard to the Chappaquidick-style car crash in which his companion of the night, Sally Kellerman (in flashback), perished.

But IS there a story? Too many stories, perhaps. There are business wheelings and dealings with conniving relative Roddy McDowall, there’s the crusading DA Robert Webber who wants to nail George for murder, there’s his estranged wife Elizabeth Ashley to be unestranged, and there’s Kellerman’s vengeful piano-playing cuckold husband, the remarkable Arte Johnson. I remember him as one of the sinister CEA agents in THE PRESIDENT’S ANALYST, who are all comically short. It’s quite strange to have a fight to the finish between little Arte and big George as the climax to this thing, but they do give AJ a gun. And what he lacks in height he makes up for in sheer malevolence.

I was interested in Elizabeth Ashley since we’ve loved her in Russian Doll, and I read about her in Mark Harris’ magnificent Mike Nichols bio, but I’d never seen her young. She’s striking. Very mobile face, making her hard to framegrab without making her look like a deranged mutant, but when you’re actually watching she’s fascinating and doesn’t seem remotely grotesque. I feel actors in general could get away with more facial movement. We also get Vincent Gardenia and Mona Washburne, which is a nice surprise, and Herbert Marshall, playing a guy with total paralysis to match Peppard’s total amnesia. This movie doesn’t do anything by halves, except everything.

This is Herbert Marshall’s entire performance:

Both these films needed Hitchcock but they have Nunnally Johnson and Jack Smight, preposterously unsuitable substitutes. Smight attempts some psychedelic transitions into the fatal crash flashbacks, but given the hero’s supposedly disorientated condition he could have tilted the whole thing much more into delirium. Robert Surtees’ photography is lovely and I liked the score by Percy Faith, with its emphasis on dreamy harp glissandoes.

BLACK WIDOW stars Kitty Foyle; Charles Bovary; Martha Strabel Van Cleve; Spats Colombo; Jane Eyre as a Child; Schultz; Jan in the Pan; Jules Amthor; Julia Rainbird; Marva Lewis; and Mr. Fearless.

THE THIRD DAY stars Paul Varjak; Ruth Brenner; Cornelius; Parnell Emmett McCarthy; Frau Lang; Gaston Monescu; Juror 12; Dr. Raymond Sanderson; Maj. Margaret ‘Hot Lips’ O’Houlihan; Reverend Sykes; Mushnik; 1st ‘Nameless Broad’; Hedda Hopper; and Spanky’s mother.

Sim City

By some strange quirk, the great Edinburgh-born actor Alastair Sim seems to have spent most of his later career in the sauna. In the subject of this fortnight’s edition of The Forgotten he appears in two scenes, steaming himself in both. In ROYAL FLASH he also appears in two scenes, one of which is a magnificent Victorian Turkish bathhouse designed by Terry Marsh complete with a foot-pedal-powered brass shower for Malcolm McDowell to enjoy. Sim’s character, fully dressed in gentlemanly finery, does not look like he’s enjoying himself quite so much.

One the DVD commentary, McDowell reports meeting Sim again when he went to loop a few lines. Sim looked exhausted. “I wish I could just say a line,” he moaned. The actor had, by this time, become such a master of the stutter, the hesitation and the silent working of the jaw, that replacing a line became torture, because the words never came out in a straight line. His talent was also his torment.

I should think the hardest actor to loop would be Leonard Rossiter, though, who developed a level of wordless chuntering even more extreme than Sim’s — particularly on the sitcom Rising Damp, Rossiter would flap his gums soundlessly, or else accompanied by a high, hesitant drone like a distant mountaineer plummeting, waiting for the words to actually form, for a long time before actual speech emerged, and part of the comedy was that you never knew at what point the facial calisthenics and faraway yodel would resolve into language. Lucky, then, that he worked with Kubrick, who tried to avoid dubbing whenever possible, and a little unfortunate that Sim was paired with Lester that one time, since Lester virtually rewrote his films in the dub.

But still, it’s delightful to see Sim in a Lester comedy.

None of this has anything much to do with today’s column, the Peter O’Toole tribute edition, which is available here.

Royal Flash [Blu-ray]
Royal Flash [Blu-ray]

And meanwhile, at Apocalypse Now, The ’68 Comeback Special returns with Scout Tafoya’s take on 24 HOURS IN THE LIFE OF A WOMAN starring the great Danielle Darrieux.

Le Clair-Obscur

On the subject of put-downs, Ambrose Bierce observed that “for every man, there is something in the vocabulary that would stick to him like a second skin. His enemies have only to find it.”

Over at the first fortnightly edition of The Forgotten, we encounter a filmmaker who was memorably re-christened by an opponent in just that fashion. So successfully was he insulted that I encountered the insult long before I saw a single frame he shot.

Thanks to Lenny Borger for telling me about the insult.