The Delightful Little Moneymaker

Most murders are solved.

The murder in 1954’s Dial M for Murder is no different.

By the film’s end, the audience has seen everything that happened, so the joy in this crime thriller is in arriving at the pre-destined conclusion intact. Along the way, there are a few bumps and hiccups and there is quite a bit of genuine tension, but the end product is about the crime and its results and if the film is saying anything here it is that there is no such thing as a perfect crime, even the complicated one concocted by Ray Milland’s desperately verbose husband in Dial M for Murder.

It is no secret Hitchcock disliked this film. He admitted to Francois Trufault that he made Dial M for Murder because it was simple and safe and he knew it would make bags of money he needed to finance other, more interesting films. Dial M for Murder was already a successful stage play when Hitchcock latched onto it and transferred it to the cinema. The degree to which that transition works is a large part of why this film remains enjoyable. Hitchcock said he resisted the temptation make the play “more cinematic,” opting instead to leave it virtually as it is on stage. Accordingly, virtually all of the film’s action occurs in one room.

 

A few other things here keep us interested here, but chief among them would be Milland’s excellent performance as the kind of cultured villain who would turn up again in North by Northwest. The other would be Grace Kelly, who simply is Grace Kelly. She made just three films with Hitchcock, this being the first, but she is just as good here as she is in Rear Window or To Catch a Thief, even if she has much less to do here because she is largely the unaware victim of her husband’s complicated machinations.

The other notable twist, preserved from the stage play I presume, is the decision to stick with the conniving husband as the film’s protagonist. This twist puts the audience in the odd position of seeing the film’s events almost entirely from the perspective of the culprit – not the victim. Thus, we know more than Kelly does about what is happening and the drama of the film becomes whether Kelly can figure out what the audience already knows, and in doing so, save herself from first death and then prison.

The film’s further success is down to the dialogue, which Trufault particularly liked. Put simply, this movie is a “talkie” and you have to listen to the dialogue very closely to keep track of the plot and attuned to who knows what, when. Very few films work this way anymore and perhaps more should. Dial M for Murder races by at almost breakneck speed and lurches the audience into caring – almost rooting – for the criminal before forcing moviegoers into Kelly’s corner near the end of the picture. And all of this largely through words and acting. A simple, fun moneymaker that stands up to multiple viewings largely on account of how fun it is to watch these people talk to, at and around one another.

Bandaged and Born Again

Depending on whom you speak to, 1947’s Dark Passage is either foolishly “overlooked” or appropriately “forgotten.”

Not liking such critical absolutes, I would choose something between these two poles of opinion, though if forced to choose a side, I would lean toward the latter – and less flattering – of the two judgments. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, the real-life couple who generally shine and sizzle in just about any film they appear, cannot rescue this workmanlike film noir.

Considering the genre we are dealing with, I was fully prepared for an opaque and bleak finale, but much to my surprise, Bogart and Bacall emerge from the rather straightforward prison-break plot relatively unscathed. When we last see them they are on a terrace overlooking a South America beach, gently swaying in each other’s arms – an art-imitating-life conclusion that feels like the result of a studio executive who made his intentions known by scrawling on the film’s screenplay draft: “B&B MUST end up happily ever after.”

Champions of the film point to its nifty camerawork and lasting influence on other directors – both of which provoke a resigned shrug from this particular viewer.

San Franciso on display

The decision by director Delmer Daves to film the first hour or so almost entirely from Bogart’s perspective – that is, with the camera literally functioning as his “eyes” – is not something one comes across that often (Lady in the Lake tried – and largely failed – to pull of the same feat for the length of an entire picture). Undoubtedly, it is a brave and innovative move, but it also robs the film of one of its best qualities – Bogart – for almost half its running time. At the same time, I have to wonder if the director really needs to spend as much time as he does showing us what it looks like to conduct the mundane business of existence – walking, entering an elevator, shaving, etc. – from his protagonist’s perspective. It is many things, but interesting is not one of them, and the end result is the audience feels trapped inside a film school gimmick that does not end as quickly and as neatly as it should.

In the meantime, though, we do get to look at Bacall.

In relative terms, she is not nearly as racy or openly suggestive in this role as she is elsewhere. Indeed, she is so demure she seems almost de-clawed. Her ticket into the action is initially presented as circumstantial – she happens to be painting nearby the place Bogart runs to when he escapes from San Quentin prison. However, during the course of the film, it is revealed she faithfully attended Bogey’s murder trial and believes he was falsely convicted for killing his wife with an ashtray. Bacall sympathizes with Bogart and aids his escape by spiriting him straight to her apartment in downtown San Francisco.

If this seems odd, that is because it is. Bacall is clearly presented as the mixed-up type who today would be caught by her friends writing letters to convicted men in the hope of marrying one of them while he was incarcerated. She is, in other words, fairly creepy despite her tame and domesticated pose. Bacall’s character also relates to Bogey because she claims her father was wrongly imprisoned by her stepmother, and thus the relationship that develops on-screen between her and her real-life husband works as a kind of Cassandra-complex run amuck, in which she replaces her departed dad with another older man.

The obvious villain

The third peg in the plot is a busybody named Madge Rapf. It was Rapf’s testimony that put Bogart behind bars, and when Rapf begins showing up around Bacall’s place, he fears the worst. This leads him to accept an offer – made by the world’s oddest and most helpful cabbie – to allow a back-alley doctor to alter his face. The result is Bogart is given a new lease on life – and a chance to resolve the plot’s pair of dangling mysteries – through a new look, although the anonymity he hoped for proves oddly elusive.

There is not much else to assess here. Clearly, this is a film about characters that are not in control of their lives – and what is worse, they know it. The decisions by Bogart and Bacall to simply take what comes and respond to it as best as possible is a powerful example of the brand of stoicism often celebrated in film noir. That fact everything ultimately works out in the end for both characters is distinctly out of step with accepted noir tropes. There is no bloody finale and no downer-ending depicting the futility of it all.

Instead, the audience is treated to a moody, almost surreal San Francisco, populated by odd characters, fog horns and sweeping vistas. It is a delight to watch, but the claim some critics make that this picture is a Kafka-like nightmare, in which an innocent man stumbles through a plot he is incapable of influencing, seems a bit much. There are some quirky moments to be sure, but if there is a metaphor here, it involves the notion of rebirth.

Both Bogart and Bacall are looking to build new lives on top of old ones that are riddled with error or regret. The title itself could refer to the inevitably violent transition a baby makes from the womb, through the birth canal to the light of the outer world. When the bandages come off Bogey’s face, he is helpless and has to be mothered by Bacall for a week’s time. He must suck his nourishment through a straw the same way a baby feeds from an umbilical cord.

Or maybe I am reading too much into all this and looking for greatness in a simplistic movie about a guy on the run from the law?

Regardless, there is neither enough metaphor nor simplicity to make this film stand taller than the name of the stars on its marquee. The villain is too obvious, the mysteries dangled too meager and the final product in no way reflects the quality of the constituent parts, all of which is a longwinded way of saying that this film is ultimately forgettable, even if parts of it are likeable.

To Banish Evil, One Must Choose Good

At first glance, Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt is an underwhelming film.

There is nothing in this 1943 effort that matches the director’s murderous shower scene, his flocks of deadly birds or the dramatic confrontation he staged on the stony precipice of Mount Rushmore. Perhaps this is why Pauline Kael wrote the film “isn’t as much fun” as the director’s more ostentatious efforts?

In spite of overt simplicity, Shadow of a Doubt is a remarkable film, one in which a frenzy of psychological activity quivers just beneath the surface and every scene is carefully crafted so that it enhances the greatness of the whole. Hitchcock himself said this is the best picture he made in America – and he may very well be right. So far as I can tell, everything in this film is working exactly as it should, and I can think of no other Hitchcock picture that deals with good and evil as frankly and as poignantly as this one.

It is very easy, of course, to depict evil in its most perverse and grandiose forms.

One need look no further than the James Bond franchise, with is deformed and egoistical madmen, each bent on annihilating something for nothing other reason than to enhance their own sense of self, to see what I am talking about. Nazism and its adherents is another Hollywood favorite – for who among us cannot sneer at the evil Germans and root for their failure? Real evil, the kind of criminal evil each of us stands a greater chance of encountering, is much more mundane, much harder to detect. In Shadow of a Doubt, evil does not lurch onto screen, ugly and scarred and cackling so we know to pay attention to it. Instead, it is quietly invited into the picture’s plot, and for a great deal of time, we are not even certain it is there.

Joseph Cotten as the banal killer.

The inevitable struggle that follows takes place largely inside the mind of Charlie Newton, the film’s youthful protagonist. At the beginning of the picture, Newton is bored with her life in idyllic Santa Rosa and yearns for excitement. In this, she is not alone. Charlie’s father and the family’s next door neighbor are working stiffs who seem incapable of engaging in anything like fun. The pair’s solitary flash of spontaneity and leisure comes when they engage in a macabre verbal game, in which they describe how they will kill each other and then fix it so the police never discover the crime. This foolishness, fired by an overconsumption of mystery novels, also serves to illustrate the innocence of existence in Eden-like Santa Rosa. Actual murderers, intent on committing real murders, could never dwell in such a tranquil place.

When word reaches Charlie’s family that Uncle Charlie is poised to pay an unexpected visit, everyone believes the pivot away from the mundane they were all looking for has finally arrived and life will perk up. The arrival of Uncle Charlie does indeed spice things up, but not in the way anyone intended. Charlie is secretly informed by two private investigators that Uncle Charlie is one of a handful of men suspected of being the “Merry Widow Murderer,” a serial killer who seduces, murders and then robs wealthy widows.

Ominous arrival.

At first, Charlie refuses to consider the idea. At work here is not only familial loyalty, but Charlie’s shared similarities with her uncle. Throughout the film, the two Charlie’s are presented as doppelgangers, in that both carry the same name, the same genes and seem to share a distinct unease with slow-paced suburban living. Uncle Charlie sees much of the same disquiet that drove him from Santa Rosa in his niece, while Charlie correspondingly views her Uncle as something of a sophisticated and well-traveled man of the world. If she shares the same personality as him, the same proclivities and tastes, then the fact her Uncle became a killer is a kind of indictment of her as well.

For his part, Uncle Charlie seems fairly harmless until he tips his hand at dinner one night with a rambling rant about widows being fat animals who deserve to be slaughtered. The remarks are completely shrugged off by the family, but Charlie knows exactly what her Uncle is talking about, and from that point on, the cat-and-mouse game played between the two becomes the film’s dramatic heart. But in order to best her Uncle, Charlie must fully open her eyes and shed her childish naiveté, a point her Uncle makes when he accuses her of being no different than the innocent townspeople in Santa Rosa:

"You go through your ordinary little day, and at night you sleep your untroubled ordinary little sleep, filled with peaceful stupid dreams. And I brought you nightmares. Or did I? Or was it a silly, inexpert little lie? You live in a dream. You're a sleepwalker, blind. How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know, if you rip off the fronts of houses, you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?"

As I have already suggested, Charlie shares part of her Uncle’s unsettledness and therefore is less surprised by his shocking – but ultimately banal – turn to evil. Charlie is the lone character capable of understanding what the people of Santa Rosa cannot (the only other people in the film who know the truth about Uncle Charlie are detectives who come from the city). In this sense, the film is something of a Bildungsroman, in that Charlie leaves her childhood and matures into an adult during the film’s events. As Paul Duncan notes, she begins the film in a dress and ends the film in a suit. Along the way, she must face down disturbing truths and choose to follow her own nature (and in doing so, wind up like her Uncle) or reject it and help protect the innocent folks around her.

Two sides of the same coin...

That Charlie not only vanquishes the evil in everyone’s midst but then chooses to prevent their knowledge of it by never revealing her Uncle’s deeds is illustrative of both her ultimate choice and her commitment to it. Charlie has left childhood behind, faced the realities of the world and chosen to function as one of the often overlooked and underappreciated guardians who keep places like Santa Rosa free from harm: Good has triumphed over evil – and all because a girl had the strength to ignore her own inclinations and do what is right.

The power of the above is made even greater by this film’s subtle astuteness. There is no proselytizing, no blaze of holy glory. Accordingly, among the Hitchcock cannon, this gem should never be forgotten, overlooked or ignored in favor of its more flashy cousins. Watch it and be amazed. Then watch it again and be even more amazed at how much cleverer the entire enterprise becomes once you know what comes next. Like a well-made piano, all of the requisite parts here are expertly crafted and carefully assembled, so that when the plot calls for a particular key to be struck, the notes sing out, pitch-perfect and resonate for precisely the right amount of time.

Strangers in Love

I could not have asked for a better venue to view Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion.

Knowing the American Film Institute is conducting a year-long retrospective of Hitchcock films, I traveled up to the AFI theater just outside Washington, D.C. and basked beneath its gilded ceiling. It is a beautiful facility. The old-time music piped through the sound-system and the grandiose, yesteryear style of the décor in the place make it perfect for the old black and whites.

So far was my experience from the usual megaplex, shopping mall variety that accompanies movie-going these days, I probably would have enjoyed anything projected on the screen in front of me that night. Fortunately, I did not have to struggle to find brilliance in some forgotten B-movie. Suspicion made for excellent Friday fare, even if I knew little about the movie before staking my entire night on its quality.

In this, I do not think I am alone. I am increasingly aware that there are quite a lot of Hitchcock films nobody seems to know anything about.

Partly, this is because the little boy who was afraid of the dark and then grew up into a rotund master of thrillers made 53 films. Hitchcock’s career spanned nearly six decades, and in that time, transitioned from silent films to “talkies” and from black and white images to color. And while it would be foolish to claim his legendary filmography contains unearthed “gems,” (because doesn’t everyone know about Hitchcock?), I do think it is safe to say his later work eclipsed many of his earlier, more character-driven pieces in terms of notoriety.

Suspicion fits nicely into the underappreciated cart.

Released in 1941, the film is shot in black and white and has virtually no special effects. The plot shuns external threats – such as giant robots or other people with firearms – in favor of following the odd courtship and even more bizarre marriage between Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine. Grant is depicted as a lazy heel that shuns work and is forever borrowing money to maintain his lavish lifestyle, while Fontaine is an icy and overtly neurotic woman who was destined to become a spinster had she not met her eventual husband.

An unlikely couple meets on a train

Taken together, the two have little in common, beyond the fact they are attracted to one another and oddly balance out each other’s eccentricities. The essential drama in the picture revolves around whether or not it is possible for the couple to truly know their partner. Grant and Fontaine’s courtship is accidental and it quickly resolves itself in marriage before either they or the audience quite understand the gravity of what is occurring.

For the rest of the film, Grant attempts to conform to what he erroneously believes his wife wants while she neurotically obsesses about whether her husband is a criminal interested in killing her for her share of the family inheritance. Along the way, we learn that Grant is both a liar and a thief, but by the end of the picture, we are no closer to understanding the full truth about his intentions than his suspicious – and potentially disturbed – wife.

Part of this brilliant ambiguity lies in the film’s problematic production.

Hitchcock famously complained about how producer David O. Selznick meddled with Suspicion to Francois Truffaut. Essentially, Selznick forced Hitch to scrap an ending in which Grant was in fact a murderer and his wife bizarrely allows herself to be killed. Selznick believed nobody would buy an actor as debonair and charming Grant was a murderer – and he was right. The original ending, which stuck closer to the source material contained in the novel Before the Fact, bombed with test audiences, and thus Hitchcock’s exploration of the charming sociopath never materialized.

For the record, Truffaut also pointed out to Hitchcock that he was wrong about the ending, arguing that the film’s compromised screenplay is better than the novel because it is “less farfetched” and allows for far more “subtler nuances in the characterizations.” However, none of the three luminaries anticipated the response the 2011 audience I was a part of experienced.

Put simply, as the lights came up in the AFI Theater, none of us knew what to make of the movie’s conclusion, and the general consensus I overhead was that the film’s ending was intentionally ambiguous: That is, like Fontaine’s character, the audience is put in the position of choosing whether the self-confessed liar – Cary Grant – was telling the truth about whether he really was capable of murder. This, of course, is not what the filmmakers intended.

A doting husband with a milk? Or a murderer with Poison?

In terms of the script and its intentions, Grant is telling the truth at the end of the picture. He is not a murderer, and his wife’s suspicion is just that – suspicion. Per this reading of the film, Fontaine is a horribly neurotic character, plucked straight from the Victorian stories Hitchcock devoured as a child. Like the disturbed and unreliable female narrator in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Fontaine becomes unhinged by her own imagination and a complete lack of self-confidence. Unable to cope with and respond to reality as it actually is (her husband is a liar and a thief), she creates a much more horrible one (her husband is a murderer out to get her).

She does this, in part, because she is incapable of responding to the more prosaic truth. Overtly demure and largely passive, she functions in the film as a kind of female version of Hamlet, in that she is unable to process new information she learns about Grant and then act decisively. As is the case with the Danish Prince, this builds a palpable frustration among the audience, many of whom quietly yearn for her to cast out her wayward husband. However, such a positive act is clearly beyond Fontaine, who throughout the film acts only reactively. Indeed, she is uninterested in Grant’s courtship until she overhears her parents speculating that she will become a spinster. In response, she immediately kisses Grant, and within the next half hour of film, elopes and marries him.

The problem with viewing Fontaine’s subsequent suspicions as inaccurate is that the audience is given so much reason to believe her feelings are correct. Grant is revealed to be a fairly awful husband, as he is immature, possesses no work ethnic and at times seems unconcerned with his wife’s feelings. Worse still, Fontaine learns he is a perpetual liar, capable of cheating to acquire more money.

But does all this make him a murderer?

As the film progresses, the circumstantial evidence against Grant mounts, but at the same time, Fontaine’s reliability increasingly deteriorates. In one crucial scene, while she is playing a word game that resembles Scrabble, her subconscious directs her fingers to spell out the word “murder” in the presence of her husband and his best friend. From there, her mind easily leaps to a dream/fantasy of Grant pushing his friend from a nearby cliff. When it is subsequently revealed Grant did not kill his friend, Fontaine is overjoyed – but her suspicions return almost immediately with a new and more elaborate scheme (her own poisoning).

All of this is clearer to the audience upon the film’s completion.

During the movie's gradual progress (choosing a waltz as its theme is no accident), the audience is entirely in Fontaine’s sway and we believe what she believes, which is precisely what Hitch intended. That she is wrong at the picture’s conclusion makes us all her unwilling confederates. This is clever, but I think it obscures a deeper, and perhaps more disturbing, commentary on the two protagonists.

Throughout the film, the couple’s love for each other continually blinds them. The end result is that Hitchcock seems to be saying that no matter how much time two people spend together and no matter how close they become, they will never fully understand the inner psychological workings of the other person, even if they are man and wife. 

Will he or won't he?

How else can we explain that a woman could believe her husband is a murderer when everyone else around her does not?

This, I believe, is the overall theme one can take away from a film that teases the audience with delightful confusion and unimagined surprises: In matters of the mind, we largely remain strangers to one another, no matter how much in love we are. In that regard, the question about Grant’s true nature is as much as a litmus test for the audience memebers as anything else. Either you believe a woman could be that wrong about her husband or she knows him better than anyone else does. The choice is yours…

A Tepid Departure for Brighter Shores

Film historians, critics and audiences everywhere have largely forgotten Jamaica Inn, Alfred Hitchcock’s final British film before he began working in Hollywood, and after watching it for the first time, I can hardly blame them.

Based on Daphne du Maurier’s novel of the same name, this 1939 film is bundle of confusing aspirations and failures, beginning with the fact that the creative team hardly seems certain on what sort of picture they wanted to make. Hitchcock’s defenders generally blame this on the machinations of Charles Laughton, the actor who produced the film, starred in it and supposedly overcame Hitchcock’s notorious ego and imposed his own creative vision on the final product. Such claims are impossible to confirm or deny, of course.

What we can talk about is what we see on-screen, and what we see is a historical drama that depicts a rather straightforward crime story through familiar elements of film noir and the swashbuckling/sword-play pictures popular from the 30s and 40s. If that mixture of genres sounds confusing, that is because it is.

Set in the 19^th century, the film essentially follows the misadventures of Mary Yellen (played by Maureen O’Hara), an Irish orphan who falls into a nest of cutthroats when she lands in Cornwall to search for her aunt’s family. The cutthroats, who all work for Mary’s Uncle, play a deadly game that involves luring ships onto the Cornwall coast with false lights, killing the crew and then plundering the cargo. What little mystery there is in the film revolves around the identity of her uncle’s employer.

Mary’s unexpected arrival at the inn, and her subsequent discovery of the racket, is the convenient catalyst that launches a whirlwind of chases, captures, escapes, pistol shots and dramatic confrontations with raised voices. Unfortunately, none of it feels very dangerous, due to the ham-handed foolishness of the cutthroats, one of whom cannot stop whistling, and the quick revelation of the existence of a lawman in the gang’s midst (played by Robert Newton, the famous swashbuckler himself). Low production values that include bad sound, special effects that age poorly and some awfully obvious makeup work on Laughton do not help matters, either.

Foul deeds done at night...

I also struggled to follow the film’s timeline. The action seems to occur in just two or three days, but with the vast majority of scenes all taking place at night, it is difficult to say that for certain. Being something of a Gothic affair, the choice of nocturnal settings does not surprise me. Unfortunately, the quality of the camerawork is not up to the challenges demanded by the plot, and as a result, we must suffer through scenes that are incredibly dim (see the above snapshot).

It is not all doom and gloom, though.

Laughton’s performance as Sir Humphrey Pengallan has been criticized by some, but I found his portrayal of a gentrified madman absolutely mesmerizing. The first clue that all is not well with Pengallan comes when he brings his horse into his dining room (precisely the sort of thing Caligula did). As bizarre as this is, it is not readily apparent to the audience that Pengallan is crazed until we witness his mania for luxury goods when he is in the company of the cutthroats he employs to further his aesthetic proclivities.

From that point on, he literally bounces jovially from scene to scene, excusing all manner of iniquity by his ironic claim of exceptional breeding (madness runs in his family) and his open desire to serve his preference for the good life, regardless of human cost. Such is the level of Laugton’s sinisterly-enduring performance, Frank S. Nugent is absolutely correct to write, “we can’t recall when we’ve ever held a monster in such complete affection.”

Laughton excels, almost saves the film.

Hitchcock takes a stab at a further bit of psychology by chronicling the complicated and tender dysfunction of Joss and Patience Merlyn’s marriage, in which Joss beats her, abuses her verbally but ultimately takes care of her and stands up for her needs, which in turn, breeds affection and loyalty from her. More of this might have elevated the film beyond a plot that runs too fast between scenes to show what happens next, but instead, we are left with Laughton, and our curious pity for him at the end. That, too, might have saved this effort, as he is clearly the best thing going here, but Hitch’s usually astute radar for balancing motivation and action is slightly askew in most of this film.

O'Hara and Newton

Somewhere, inside this uneven jumble, there is a great movie trying to break through and blossom. The shame of it all is that it the breakthrough never occurs, the proverbial petals remain closed and we end up stuck in a valley of mediocrity, peering up at hill full of brilliant roses that might have been. Nugent argues Jamaica Inn “doesn’t seem like Hitchcock.” And while I cannot agree with that sentiment, because there are too many Hitchcock tropes on display here, I can understand why he wrote it. Hitchcock made better movies before Jamaica Inn (see Secret Agent or Sabotage), and less than a year later, he made Rebecca, which won him an Oscar. Compared to that record, to say nothing of all his other Hollywood masterpieces, this is disappointing. Period.

Dinner Theater Done Right

It is not everyone’s favorite dish, but if you like the sort of old-fashioned mystery wherein a great detective magically solves a crime involving what initially appears to be unrelated people and unrelated facts, then Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express is probably your best bet, in terms of quality and craftsmanship.

The 1974 film based on Agatha Christie’s novel of the same name is bolstered by a heavyweight cast of actors that includes Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, Michael York, Anthony Perkins, Albert Finney and Vanessa Redgrave. Bergman collected one of her trio of Oscars for her portrayal of a Swedish missionary whose faith in God far outstrips her command of English.



The highly talented cast



I will not attempt to describe the plot here, as it would be difficult to do and would remove the satisfaction of seeing it play out on screen with total ignorance. Suffice to say, a murder happens to happen on the Orient Express, the grand dame of all great railway lines (it ran from Istanbul to the coast of France) and Hercule Poirot (Christie’s fastidious detective) happens to be on board when the foul deed is committed. In the wake of the killing, the film’s plot revolves around Poirot’s skillful set of interviews with the train’s first-class passengers, none of whom, of course, are what they initially seem.

The man with the moustache, Hercule Poirot

There is a fine line in these kinds of endeavors between success and failure. That is, like the police procedural, there is a rather plain formula at work in these kinds of films (indeed, the audience almost expects the formula, and consequently is disappointed if it is absent). Therefore, the game for the creative team behind the film is how to reinvigorate old tropes so that they feel new – even when they are not – and in the process, keep the audience guessing. This is, after all, a mystery – and it should be mysterious, right?

Put into practice, this involves enlivening conversation, as much of these films revolve around clues revealed via dialogue, and creating a memorable set of characters who must manage the complicated feat of standing out and avoiding obviousness at the same time. Typically, as with all of these kinds of potboilers, the actors chase their goal through lavish overacting.

Poirot confronts his suspects on the Orient Express

The trick, of course, is to keep the overacting within the bounds of acceptance and away from the bounds of annoyance. For the most part, Murder on the Orient Express manages this tightrope dance quite well, and even injects some humor into the proceedings, via some snappy remarks and not-so-subtle sarcasm. The film looses some of its early vim in the middle portion, and I cannot help but feel like the final revelation fails to deliver on the early promise that plays out in a wonderfully eerie opening montage.

But make no mistake: This is dinner theater done right, if that is your thing. A wonderful cast, high production values and a lighthearted aura of whimsy make this film well worth the time of both the mystery aficionado and the viewer in search of some simple entertainment that does not involve clashing robots, superheroes or various other platforms for incindiary special effects...

Life Among the Ruins

Film noir thrillers come and go, but not many seem as wonderfully bleak and overtly stylish as Carol Reed's The Third Man.

Part spy thriller, part mystery, this 1949 film delves deeply into the ugly side of humanity among the bombed-out grandeur of post-War Vienna and concludes that people can easily become grotesque and contorted versions of themselves if they are forced to exist in a rotten enough environment.

Indeed, the symbiosis between the film’s characters and its urban setting is both powerful and confusing. At no point are we certain if the people are altering the environment with their actions or allowing the environment to dictate their behavior – or some subtle combination of the two. What is clear is that Vienna operates in this picture as a kind of canvas, on which only the worst elements of humanity can thrive and excel.

A masterpiece of black and white photography, nearly every shot in this film is composed with striking angles and acute shapes, many of which are presented in a neo-expressionist fashion that recalls the intentional geometry of classic silent films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, seen below here.

The result is an empty and moody Vienna, one in which everything is warped and distorted and nothing at all is anything like safe and ordinary-looking.

The city also functions as a Pandora’s Box for protagonist Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton), who arrives fresh-faced from America in search of a job with his old friend Harry Lime. When Martins learns Lime was struck by an automobile and killed just before his arrival, he suspects foul play. That he is naïve and incapable of comprehending the actual depravity associated with Lime’s death is masterfully illustrated through Martins’s interactions with Major Calloway, the British MP who investigated the fatal accident. Calloway forthrightly tells Martins to quit nosing around the Lime case and leave Vienna: “You don't know what you're mixing in,” Calloway chides.

Clearly, Martins is the stereotypical American who is not quite ready to deal in the harsh brutalities present in the larger world. When he finally learns the truth about Lime and what he has been up to in Vienna, he is shocked at the inhumanity of it all. Calloway, who has swum in these troubled waters before, is not.

By the film's end, Martins is more like Calloway, in that he becomes a compromised character willing to trade other people in the name of a ultimate end. In this Vienna, nothing else seems possible. The only difference in the people is the end they are aiming for -- everyone is using everyone else as a means for something, and in this environment friendship and fidelity are quickly sacrificed to expediency. Anna, Lime's one-time girlfriend is the only character who remains loyal, and at the end of the picture, she is a lonely figure, doomed to be re-patriated by the Soviets. Her loyalty bought her nothing, a result which forces the audience to ask if she might have been better off joining in the game of compromises, too.

This form cynical realism is further reinforced when Orson Welles (Lime) finally appears on-screen. Absent for most of the picture, the wait for Welles is well worth it. Not only does he outshine all of his cohorts, he also delivers the most important lines in the film. The speech given on the Ferris Wheel is rightly famous as one of the most sinister pieces of dialogue ever committed to film. What it lacks in moral sentiment, it makes up for with diabolical and coldly pragmatic logic:

“Victims?” Lime says, when Martins alludes to people who suffered from Lime’s tampering with morphine. “Don't be melodramatic. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots (the people on the ground below them) stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?”

Lime then lashes out against governments, claiming this is how they treat people, so why should he not do the same thing? Considering that we have seen the British and Soviets trading people like poker chips in the film (and are aware, as an audience, that the Cold War looms on the picture’s historical horizon), the argument feels powerful in its initial gusto.

What it lacks, however, is any moral consideration of perspective and intent. The black market – itself a distorted and unnatural part of capitalism – has thoroughly corrupted Lime by compelling him to limit his vision and actions to a sole actor – himself. Thus, Lime ends up alone, and after being chased through a sewer, he is killed by his oldest friend. That he becomes one of his own dots is the film's ultimate irony: The ominous and foreboding circular motion of the Ferris Wheel is complete.

However much he had it coming, Lime’s death still leaves us confused and unfulfilled, in that it feels like there is no justice or retribution present in the act (certainly Martins’ face seems confused about what the execution means). This is because the demise plays as little more than a sum to the equation Lime set in motion himself. The  confusion is simply testament to the film’s power to muddle morality, to stretch it and distort it and filter it through this post-war Vienna’s troubled prism. It is also a subtle verification to many of the uncomfortable ironies that makeup the history of civilization. Or as Lime puts it:

“You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”