brogmiller

Faced with problems of finance, not uncommon in the world of Film, producer Betty Box put her own money into this feature directed by Ralph Thomas which not only proved a commercial success but cemented a professional partnership that continued into the 1970's.

Janet Green's brisk screenplay moves imperceptibly from psychological thriller to fugitive story and the chase segment in North Yorkshire is more than a passing nod to Hitchcock. Interestingly, amongst a cast of familiar faces, Kenneth More plays the pursuer and would later play the pursued for Mr. Thomas in his remake of 'The 39 Steps'.

The film stars Trevor Howard, an exceptional actor and somewhat unconventional leading man who always had a simpatico with his leading ladies and here the enchanting Jean Simmons is no exception. This was to be her last British appearance before going off to La-la Land.

Geoffrey Unsworth is behind the camera and the score is by Benjamin Frankel whilst the direction, albeit reliable, lacks the indefinable touch of a master. Ralph Thomas described himself with refreshing humility as 'a sort of journeyman director, generally happy to make anything that I felt to be halfway respectable.'

1944 was a milestone year for Film Noir and the first to hit the screen was this adaptation of the novel by Cornell Woolrich AKA William Irish. It also put director Robert Siodmak firmly on the map and established Woolrich as a hot property whose novels would provide material for Hitchcock, Truffaut, Delannoy, Farrow et al. The rights had been purchased by Joan Harrison, a former script writer for Hitchcock and who happened to be one of only three female producers in Hollywood at that time. As such she was attracted to the theme of a determined female protagonist who turns amateur sleuth in order to save the man she loves from being executed for a crime he didn't commit.

In the original the heroine is the mistress of the wrongly accused man but here she is his secretary and is played by the immensely appealing Ella Raines in her first of three films for this director. Although arguably not the greatest of 'noirs' there are two sequences in particular featuring Ms. Raines which leave a lasting impression. The first of these in which she stalks a barman who has given false testimony to the police is filmed at night without music whilst the second involves her posing as a floozy to get information out of another dodgy witness, a great turn here by Elish Cook, Jr. Her gyrations in the jazz club whilst he drums orgasmically must surely be one of the greatest depictions of unbridled lust on celluloid and epitomises the sexual power that a woman's body in motion can have over a heterosexual male.

Bernard Schoenfeld's adaptation is pretty faithful in the first half but the mystery is diminished somewhat by the identity of the murderer being revealed at the halfway mark. This however offers the immaculate Franchot Tone the opportunity of playing dementedly to the hilt a paranoid schizophrenic.

Mention must be made of Arthur Hilton's editing, especially in the Freudian jazz club scene whilst Herr Siodmak's trademark canted camera angles and Expressionistic lighting are mesmerising. Cinematographer Woody Bredell said of Siodmak: "After being coached by him I felt I could light a football pitch with a match."

This milestone of the French 'film policier' although one of director Jean-Pierre Melville's most commercially successful is, strangely enough, one of his most underrated and least discussed. The style is minimalist and almost Bressonian in its restraint whilst its pre-title opening is a nod to Bresson's 'A Man escaped'.

It has been adapted from a novel by José Giovanni who in his previous existence as Joseph Damiani, had been a Vichy collaborationist and convicted murderer whose death sentence had been commuted to hard labour and whose stories are infused with his knowledge of the underworld and acquaintance with some of France's most hardened criminals. The film censors demanded that the scene in which the Ricci of Raymond Pellegrin has water poured down his throat to extract a confession be drastically cut as this method had been used by the French Gestapo and with which Giovanni, as a former member of that delightful organisation, would have been all too familiar. This scene also blurs the moral boundaries between the lawmakers and the lawbreakers!

Despite having to have one's moral compass to hand, the film is utterly compelling and masterly in its conception, construction, framing, montage, meticulous detail and its understated performances, notably Lino Ventura and Paul Meurisse as ruthless robber and clever cop. Both these superlative actors were to be on the same side in Melville's next film 'L'Armée des Ombres' in which he swaps the underworld for the underground. The only occasions on which Ventura's Manda blows his cool are when he is mistakenly thought to be a squealer which reflects Melville's time in the French Resistance when loyalty was at a premium and betrayal a common currency. Melville himself said of Manda that 'he is a danger to society but he has preserved a sort of purity' which basically sums up this director's attitude to his gangster heroes.