Post by london777 on Mar 26, 2017 22:04:38 GMT
SPOILERS
I watched this last night for the first time. It is an odd film. Usually labelled Film Noir, but I think of it more as a melodrama, or even as a "woman's picture", more than a Film Noir. Of course there is no reason why it cannot be all three.
It has all the right ingredients. The director was Max Ophüls (here amusingly credited as Max Opuls). Top billed is the wonderful James Mason who, despite a string of excellent and varied performances, somehow managed his career so that he only appeared in a small handful of very good films (and only one truly great one: Odd Man Out 1947). Sharing top billing with Mason is Joan Bennett, an accomplished actress who never rang my bell sexually, maybe because she looked like my Auntie Rita. She always seemed to be too "homely" (I do not mean in the insulting or condescending sense as used in the USA) to be a femme fatale.
Et voilá, here she is as that harrassed homemaker. Already harrassed because she is the mother of two of the most obnoxious teenage brats found in US movies (which is quite an accomplishment), her husband is away from home and her live-in father in-law seems in the first stages of senility as his favorite pastime is wearing a sea-captain's hat and playing on the waterfront with a gang of pubescent boys. Then she finds out that her daughter has just murdered her (the daughter's) lowlife middle-aged lover in the adjoining boat-house. We are in Mildred Pierce territory here as the mother tries to cover it up, taking the blame at one point.
James Mason then enters the movie belatedly, still using his Odd Man Out Irish accent for no explained reason. He is a blackmailer in possession of love-letters tying the daughter to the dead man. He is polite and reasonable, but we assume he is just in the long line of suave and educated villains (Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet, etc) who turn out to be more lethal than the common thugs. But no! Somehow his friendliness translates to extreme concern for Bennett and he makes the ultimate sacrifice for her. How this happens is only very skimpily portrayed. Blink and you would miss it. I don't think he even falls in love with her. He has apparently had a tragic life and is entranced by the spectacle of family bliss. Personally I would run a mile from that family. Bennett is ok, but the other three? Ugh!
So that is the main oddity of the flick. The other is what I assume to be attempts at humor.
For example there is a strange running joke about the son being inadequately dressed. I thought she might have cottoned on to the grandfather's predilections but she allows the son and grandfather to share a bedroom.
And immediately after discovering the body and suspecting her daughter of the killing, she carries on blithely fussing around the house and nagging the children. In another movie this would be shown as her desperate attempts to look "normal" but here it looks as though she is so thoroughly immersed in her Douglas Sirk post-war homemaker role that patting cushions and discussing the shopping list remain the most important things in her life, and murder and blackmail are only aggravating distractions from it.
What I suspect is that great chunks of the original story were axed in development which, if left intact, would have chronicled Mason's more gradual transition from evil blackmailer to devoted guard-dog, and also filled in more on why he is the vile failure in life that he claims to be. Maybe he is still an IRA killer on the run?
Watch it. An Ophüls film, by whatever name he goes, smells as sweet and Mason was one of the most distinctive actors of his day. He loathed the Hollywood circus. Maybe that is why he never got as many of the really key roles as he deserved.
I watched this last night for the first time. It is an odd film. Usually labelled Film Noir, but I think of it more as a melodrama, or even as a "woman's picture", more than a Film Noir. Of course there is no reason why it cannot be all three.
It has all the right ingredients. The director was Max Ophüls (here amusingly credited as Max Opuls). Top billed is the wonderful James Mason who, despite a string of excellent and varied performances, somehow managed his career so that he only appeared in a small handful of very good films (and only one truly great one: Odd Man Out 1947). Sharing top billing with Mason is Joan Bennett, an accomplished actress who never rang my bell sexually, maybe because she looked like my Auntie Rita. She always seemed to be too "homely" (I do not mean in the insulting or condescending sense as used in the USA) to be a femme fatale.
Et voilá, here she is as that harrassed homemaker. Already harrassed because she is the mother of two of the most obnoxious teenage brats found in US movies (which is quite an accomplishment), her husband is away from home and her live-in father in-law seems in the first stages of senility as his favorite pastime is wearing a sea-captain's hat and playing on the waterfront with a gang of pubescent boys. Then she finds out that her daughter has just murdered her (the daughter's) lowlife middle-aged lover in the adjoining boat-house. We are in Mildred Pierce territory here as the mother tries to cover it up, taking the blame at one point.
James Mason then enters the movie belatedly, still using his Odd Man Out Irish accent for no explained reason. He is a blackmailer in possession of love-letters tying the daughter to the dead man. He is polite and reasonable, but we assume he is just in the long line of suave and educated villains (Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet, etc) who turn out to be more lethal than the common thugs. But no! Somehow his friendliness translates to extreme concern for Bennett and he makes the ultimate sacrifice for her. How this happens is only very skimpily portrayed. Blink and you would miss it. I don't think he even falls in love with her. He has apparently had a tragic life and is entranced by the spectacle of family bliss. Personally I would run a mile from that family. Bennett is ok, but the other three? Ugh!
So that is the main oddity of the flick. The other is what I assume to be attempts at humor.
For example there is a strange running joke about the son being inadequately dressed. I thought she might have cottoned on to the grandfather's predilections but she allows the son and grandfather to share a bedroom.
And immediately after discovering the body and suspecting her daughter of the killing, she carries on blithely fussing around the house and nagging the children. In another movie this would be shown as her desperate attempts to look "normal" but here it looks as though she is so thoroughly immersed in her Douglas Sirk post-war homemaker role that patting cushions and discussing the shopping list remain the most important things in her life, and murder and blackmail are only aggravating distractions from it.
What I suspect is that great chunks of the original story were axed in development which, if left intact, would have chronicled Mason's more gradual transition from evil blackmailer to devoted guard-dog, and also filled in more on why he is the vile failure in life that he claims to be. Maybe he is still an IRA killer on the run?
Watch it. An Ophüls film, by whatever name he goes, smells as sweet and Mason was one of the most distinctive actors of his day. He loathed the Hollywood circus. Maybe that is why he never got as many of the really key roles as he deserved.
