Movie Review: Night Must Fall (MGM, 1937)

It’s been said by at least one film historian that by the end of the Thirties the technique of making talking motion pictures had been mastered and made into a new art form, with virtually all of its salient aspects having been explored and employed to utmost effect within that short period. The achievement encompassed in those first ten years after the demise of Silents absolutely dwarfs the so-called ‘progress’ in film in the further twenty years up to the collapse of the Studio Era, and throws into abject shame the backwards direction taken by the industry in the half-century since then — ever accelerating since George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and their many mini-clones in James Cameron, Peter Jackson and so on.

With special effects alone becoming ever more ‘sophisticated’ but looking all the more unrealistic on screen, we must be just a few short steps from Alfred Hitchcock’s prediction: We enter a private chamber, the logical conclusion moving on from largely deserted, sterile multiplexes. We get wired up, and feel whatever shocks we prefer for the moment to whatever centers of the brain that turn us on, in vain attempts to get what passes for a satisfying entertainment experience today. The bar has risen so high technically, and dropped so low emotionally and artistically — so far below everyday human relations — that staying home for a good wank must surely be the higher human aspiration. All the better if you can get another to participate, never mind a lot cheaper.

Every now and again a true lover of human drama gets to revive his spirit through seeing a film made with some thought and imagination. It’s usually several generations old, and shown on pay television in the dead of night when few are watching. As far as I’m concerned, all the better for this exclusive experience — let the sheep go where they may, with the flow.

Originally a hit London and Broadway play written by and starring Welsh actor Emlyn Williams, this screenplay was adapted by London-born John Van Druten; a year after it was released on screen he was drafted in by David Selznick to improve the script of Gone With the Wind. A movie set and filmed in England under the UK branch of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Night Must Fall was produced by Hollywood staffer Hunt Stromberg and directed by Richard Thorpe. By all accounts Thorpe was no more than an efficient workman, so credit for the fine ‘look’ of this picture must go to veteran cinematographer Ray June and its sound to prolific MGM composer Edward Ward.

Also from the studio’s Hollywood staff came stars Robert Montgomery and Rosalind Russell. Homegrown stars remaining in Britain provided only a weak draw at the box-office, even at home theaters. It was believed that all the screen talent Britain had to offer was already in Hollywood: the likes of matinee idol Ronald Colman (emulated by Basil Rathbone, Errol Flynn, David Niven and US Anglophile Douglas Fairbanks Jr), admired thespian Charles Laughton, elder statesman George Arliss, child star Freddie Bartholomew (Roddy McDowall and Elizabeth Taylor to follow in the early Forties), highest-paid Brit femme Madeleine Carroll (and Merle Oberon and Ida Lupino, soon Vivien Leigh), and comic supreme Charlie Chaplin persevering with new silents at the rate of one every five years.

Publicity shot of the star taken for Night Must Fall (1937)

Yet in America, Robert Montgomery was no longer at the peak of popularity as he had been as a youth in 1929-30, and Rosalind Russell was still on the way up. So, with an English setting and including a sterling but very English cast in Dame May Whitty, Kathleen Harrison, Merle Tottenham, Alan Marshal, E. E. Clive and Beryl Mercer, the film was panned by your typical know-nothing film critic of the time (and they still rule the media). Variety had it that the movie was slow and dull. Studio head Louis B. Mayer disowned it. What better compliments can a film hope for? Naturally, over the decades since it has been greatly appreciated as a ‘sleeper’ — a film with a relatively small budget, that was never supposed to be a hit, was largely condemned at release, and has proven all the better quality for that.

The striking aspect of the movie for me, which makes it so much worthier than virtually any modern film in general release, is its basis in ‘pure film’. Techniques in film language commonly used then are used with flair: sustained close-ups, long-distance panning shots, deep-focus group shots to contrast motives. The constant play of light and shadow over all indicates mood, heightens suspense and literally illuminates good and evil subconsciously to the audience. Nowhere is the gratuitous crushed skulls with flying gore and blood-spattering so necessary to get the message across to today’s clueless audiences. And gone, over generations, is the magic of film.

The action opens with a man walking his dog at night on the edge of a forest, and almost stumbling on to another man who whistles a merry tune but seems to be on the ground rustling in the fallen leaves — It later turns out he is covering up a body. In the next scene, morning, all is drenched in sunshine (a motif repeated throughout), suggesting that everyday life goes on regardless of dark undertones in this sleepy village — its inhabitants blissfully unaware, maybe not wanting to know.

A woman is missing in the village, and first to show real insight into her likely fate is the lowly paid, spinster companion (bachelorette is hardly appropriate — she wears hornrim glasses, a dead giveaway in film shorthand) of domineering dowager May Whitty, played by Ros Russell. She is incidentally the old lady’s niece and we learn how resentful she is of her aunt’s manipulative hypochondria, as she pretends wheelchair-bound helplessness. But Ros is seriously emotionally repressed, repeatedly rebuffing the affectionate advances of supportive solicitor (lawyer) Alan Marshal.

He is far too polite, nice to the core. Ros yearns for excitement and danger in her life. This must be why, though she very early suspects a new employee on the scene (Robert Montgomery), an obvious go-getting self-advancer, of being homicidal, that she colludes with him to win the old lady’s favor. She is strongly attracted to him. The mood gradually becomes more sombre as Ros neglects her self-indulgent, spoilt aunt, inviting danger into the home in the person of the suspicious stranger who ingratiates his way to be the lady’s trusted ‘support’.

Ros sums up ‘Danny’: “You have no feelings. You live in a world of your own — of your own imagination.” Thus defining a sociopath, no matter to her. She collaborates with him in winning over her aunt: He spend’s a week’s wages on a shawl and presents it to the old lady as his dear departed mother’s. Just in time, Ros removes the price tag and Danny knows he has her in the palm of his hand too.

Curiosity about her loved one getting the better of her, Ros, the cook (Kathleen Harrison, playing wryly humorous in the kind of role that Thelma Ritter later made her own in Hollywood), and maid, Merle Tottenham, playing dithering and emptyheaded, supposed to be Danny’s intended, search his room thoroughly. They find evidence of a double life but he walks in on them before they can open his suspicious hatbox — just big enough for a severed head, they think.

Despite this, when the police detective calls round and is about to call Danny on the hatbox, Ros claims it as hers — thereby providing his escape route to continue murdering. He has already spied the old lady putting money in her secret hideaway. For the second time Ros goes to seek reassurance from her frustrated suitor and turns back — conveniently away long enough for Danny to strangle Mrs Bransom. She returns, she tells him, to find him out — but has no regrets that her aunt is dead. Suitor and police walk in in time to save the ever-ambivalent Ros.

While this film treatment could be called Hitchcockian in its view of the charming but murderous sociopath and annoying old ladies, it departs from the pattern of blameless beautiful woman as intended victim. Rosalind Russell plays here a woman who cooperates fully in the danger she is enmeshed in, and herself is seemingly oblivious or careless of others’ feelings as she focuses wholly on fulfilling her own fantasies.

Movie Review: ‘Love from a Stranger’ (1936)

Ann Harding in her young prime, c.1929

This is another of those old movies with a lot of things wrong with them but is still interesting enough to tempt me to stay up till 2.30am watching it on tv. I’d never seen it, or heard of it, but I was particularly fascinated because I’d never seen Ann Harding on screen before. I was unsure at first and thought it might be the English actress of the same name; she was using that popular trans-Atlantic accent required from ‘lady’ stars of the time who were trained to enunciate like English women born to the manor: Ruth Chatterton, Kay Francis, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn… She looked like the American star physically but surely there was something missing.

But no, this Ann Harding was the American superstar of very early talkies. A top attraction from 1929, her pay rate from the RKO-Pathe studio in 1933 was $9,000 a week — in all the Hollywood starlight behind only Will Rogers, Greta Garbo and John Gilbert second equal, Maurice Chevalier and Ruth Chatterton. Like Chatterton, Nancy Carroll, Elissa Landi and several other stellar women of the time, she was stereotyped in “women’s pictures” and quickly lost popularity.

This film was made in England by lower case company Trafalgar but had the supposed advantages of the American star — even one on the slide rated higher box-office than most top English ones — as well as a prestigious American screen writer (Frances Marion) and director (Rowland V. Lee). Before looking it up I couldn’t place it in time and guessed it must be around 1931, even ’30; there was something primitive about the staging, even the lighting. And the directing was so unimaginative and static I thought it must have been made during that short phase on the introduction of talkies when filmmakers were still getting used to audio technology. Luckily the ingenious plotting and imaginative dialogue of Frances Marion, by this time a legendary screen writer for a quarter century, made up for it.

Certainly by now, though just 35, the gloss seemed to have gone off Ann. In the “Golden Era of Movies” around this age was considered the declining phase for screen females — unless you were Shirley Temple, then it was 10. At 38, Joan Crawford was dumped by MGM, and at 40 Bette Davis was playing middle aged in every sense. Even the thought of a sexually active 50-year-old in the mold of Jessica Lange, Ellen Barkin or Pam Grier — if it ever even occurred to any male mogul in Hollywood at the time — would have been considered outright disgusting. From earlier photos, Ann was highly attractive, with a luminous presence. A sedate and dignified blonde — a species totally extinct on screen since the Thirties.

Rathbone, the master villain, in costume in 1936

Here she might have been deliberately unglamorised to make believable for the role of a woman (on the wrong side of thirty and in danger of being left on the shelf!) duped into love by a charming roue. Her leading man was Basil Rathbone, looking her match aged 44, years before he got into his famous Sherlock Holmes series that sustained him another decade. He had been a much sought-after leading man early in the decade for the screen’s leading divas, and was now in his period as the best costume villain on screen, usually trying to foil Errol Flynn, in Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Mark of Zorro and so on.

The plot has it that after winning a lottery she dumps, after a minor spat, her long-time boyfriend (Bruce Seton) — one of those teddibly, teddibly civilized, dependable Nigels or Lionels of the day who admirably played the doormat once shat upon. When she springs the news on him, in Basil Rathbone’s presence, that she’s thrown him over, he later apologizes for how he reacted, having left the room dumbfounded in the circumstances. Of course, he hangs around for the rest of the movie trying to keep her from harm. Neither he nor her faithful sidekick (Binnie Hale) can talk any sense into her. She even writes off the ex as a jealous cad interfering with her new-found but illusory happiness. Note that the template of the independent, wilfully self-absorbed female, totally lacking in judgment between male characters (or rather, deluding herself over her own motives), was not new in the Nineties.

As these things tend to go in real life — and remember this is written by a woman, and from an Agatha Christie story — the heroine’s love has been won by an unmitigated bounder and disreputable rotter rolled into one. It turns out several of his ex-wives are no more and he is quite a celebrated case, so much so that there are books about him floating around. Somehow the heroine doesn’t recognize him from the photo and anyway she only starts to object when he raises his hand to her.

The acting in the denouement is fairly ripe but expertly done, and incredibly subtle by today’s standards — where the actor-automatons just scrunch their faces up in unadulterated fury and beat the shit out of each other. The psychiatry here isn’t even half right — as usual mixing up psychotic and psychopathic characteristics — but that’s entertainment?! Not for the Arnie/Sly Stallone/Harrison Ford crowd or other special effects and pyrotechnics lovers.