Reeling Backward: Cast a Dark Shadow (1955)

 

Dirk Bogarde had a certain discreet charm that worked well for him as a British leading man. His enduring image on the screen is of a sleek, well-mannered gentleman of the upper crust, not very large, ramrod straight posture and almost always dressed nattily in a suit or uniform. He could be charming but also icy, and dare I say had a slightly androgynous quality, at least compared to other film actors of his era.

(By fairly reliable accounts he was gay and in a long-term relationship with another man for most of his life, and his failure to enter a show marriage of convenience like others hampered his Hollywood career.)

"Cast a Dark Shadow" is a British film noir that skillfully uses Bogarde's considerable qualities to maximum effect. It’s now out in a terrific new Blu-ray edition from Cohen Media.

He plays Edward Bare, a crafty young manipulator who uses older women for their fortunes. He contrives to kill his wife, Monica (Mona Washbourne), and stage it to look like an accident. He then marries Freda Jeffries (Margaret Lockwood), another wealthy widow, and intends to repeat the crime or otherwise squeeze her for the life of travel and ease he desires.

Dapper -- I don't think he ever appears without a tie, even at breakfast -- and with an impressively vertical pompadour, "Teddy" is slithery and charismatic. In a creepy narrative device, he continues to talk to his dead wife as if she were his conspirator and accomplice rather than victim. His pet name for her was "Moni," which in his soft Cockney accent sounds suspiciously close to "money."

Teddy is clever, and has a way of quickly intuiting the motives of others and bending them to his advantage. He appears always helpful and benevolent to every woman he meets, almost incapable of not flirting, though he is standoffish and borderline rude to other men -- especially Phillip Mortimer (Robert Flemyng), Moni's attorney who (rightfully) suspects that Teddy is after her fortune.

Although he spends so much effort thinking things through, Teddy is very much capable of outsmarting himself, as we'll see.

He seems content to go on living his quiet life with Moni, plying her with brandy and giving "magic carpet" rides by flipping through an album filled with pictures of foreign lands they'll never visit due to her health. (Washbourne was only in her early 50s when the film was made, though I get the sense her character is at least a decade older.) She gives him checks for his little amusements, including a Sunbeam Mk. III convertible he likes to dash around the countryside in, but he craves to be master of his own fate and fortune.

When Teddy hears that Moni plans to make a new will with Phillip, he tries to dissuade her, believing that if she dies with no will he will inherit everything. But he has it backward: she secretly made a will when they got married a year earlier that leaves her mansion to him but her wealth to her estranged sister, herself a widow living in Jamaica.

(So many rich widows!)

Moni intends to change the will to give him everything -- he's successfully devoted himself to her to the extent she genuinely adores him. Plus he claims to have a "wonky ticker" and expects to die before she does. Believing he stands to lose much of what he considers rightfully his, Teddy gets Moni drunk and stages an accident where she appears to have asphyxiated while trying to light the gas fireplace.

If he'd waited until the next day, Teddy would have everything he wanted. Instead, he is left house-rich but cash-poor, confiding that he couldn't write a check for 10 pounds, let alone a thousand. He even contrives to rob Moni's devoted maid, Emmie (Kathleen Harrison), convincing the simple-minded woman that the £200 left to her in the will was supposed to be a lump sum to take care of future wages.

Teddy scrapes together what he has to stake out a posh seaside resort, where he spots Freda and quickly moves in. She is almost the polar opposite of Moni: loud, brassy, lower-class and with a quirk for making inappropriate or crude jokes. But she is also self-confident and self-aware, and though she falls for Teddy and marries him, Freda insists on keeping a tight grasp on her money. She refuses to invest £2,000 in a little real estate investment he proposes to buy a plot next to the town church for a cinema.

"Pound for pound" is her oft-repeated mantra.

He is now in quite a spot. The inquest into Mona's death absolved him, but Philip is still snooping around and the potential to be caught remains. Hurriedly marrying and murdering another woman would look too suspicious. So he sets his eyes on another mark: Charlotte Young (Kay Walsh), yet another wealthy widow (!) who is looking to buy property nearby. 

Teddy, a former real estate agent, shows her around while pitching woo and dropping hints about making a mistake by marrying Freda. 

Here's the really crazy thing: Teddy makes no effort to hide this from his second wife, and in fact attempts to enlist her aid in the bamboozling. He essentially lets Freda know that he is exactly what everyone says he is, and if she won't festoon him with funds then he'll have to continue his little schemes to secure them. 

Freda puts up with all this, a clear-eyed calculation that she would rather have a snake in bed with her than slithering around the back door. There's even a scene where Teddy proposes moving into Moni's old locked-up bedroom and Freda adamantly refuses, saying didn't marry him "for companionship." This is about as close as the movies would get to acknowledging feminine lust in 1955.

Things go on from there, which I'll leave you to discover. The ending is a bit abrupt and stagey, though with some impressive pyrotechnics. There is one big twist involving Charlotte that I admit I did not see coming, and was impressed that Teddy did.

Directed by the great Lewis Gilbert ("Alfie"), "Cast a Dark Shadow" was written by John Cresswell, based on the play "Murder Mistaken" by Janet Green. The cinematography by Jack Asher is sumptuous, blindingly bright sunny scenes outdoors contrasted with inky pools of shadow and darkness inside. 

The sitting room where Moni perishes is the centerpiece of the movie, and Gilbert will stage Bogarde in tight closeup in the foreground, much of his face hidden, while other characters wait in the background trying to pierce his conniving, and possibly unhinged, mind. 

At 83 minutes, the movie hurries a little too quickly through its plot points for my taste. I would've liked to have more development with Freda, a strong and original female character who's just as interesting and confounding as Teddy. They make a curious pair, two twisted, dominant personalities constantly vying for the upper hand.

I could even envision a third act where the two of them pair up to deceive a succession of old biddies, partners in the art of lovemaking -- and crypt-keeping.

Reeling Backward: "The Night Porter" (1974)

"The Night Porter" was deliberately provocative, and the reaction it provoked ran the gamut.

It was banned outright in a few countries, celebrated in some high society circles, reviled in others. It got glowing reviews and seething ones. The  depiction of a sexual obsession between a Nazi concentration camp officer and one of his female prisoners, both during the war and 12 years after its end, was overtly erotic and deeply disquieting.

This was the cinematic equivalent of a punch in the face -- accompanied by a grope to the groin. Films may go for one or the other, but the combination is combustible.

Roger Ebert famously dubbed it "a despicable attempt to titillate us by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering." The many critics praising it, he wrote in his one-star review, had managed to "interpret trash as 'really' meaningful."

I'm somewhat inclined to agree, though we diverge on the value of trash. Pauline Kael made the distinction between trash and "glorious trash" -- gleefully enjoyable junk -- and I think "The Night Porter" falls into the latter category. (Though, for the record, Kael also despised the film.)

Its only offense is in trying to pretend to be more than it is: a garish portrait of the uncomfortable convergence of love, hate and sex.

People who complained that it trivializes tragedy, as well as those who claimed it spotlights the perpetuation of the Nazi mindset, both seemed to get their glands swelled by the movie -- just not the ones intended.

Today, four decades on, "The Night Porter" is comfortably ensconced in respectability, adorned with scholarly articles and the de rigueur Criterion Collection video release.

The nudity, criticized as excessive in 1974, seems borderline tame. If you take out the musical sequence in which Charlotte Rampling performs a bawdy German tune topless while wearing a Nazi officer's hat and jodhpurs -- a scene now firmly iconic, in which the movie reaches its erotic apex -- her skin time in the film probably adds up to half a minute or less.

Of course, co-star Dirk Bogarde manages to engage in a handful of sex scenes without even so much as baring his midriff. Though the BDSM aspect of their relationship is pretty well-drawn. Writer/director Liliana Cavan, who co-wrote the screenplay with Italo Moscat, plus additional collaboration by Barbara Alberti and Amedeo Pagani, establishes in the grainy flashback sequences that he enjoyed lording his power over her, and she enjoyed being submissive.

The modern sequence takes place in Zurich in 1957 at the Hotel Zur Oper. Max (Bogarde) is the aforementioned front desk man for the night shift. He's sleek, courteous, obsequious in an imperious way. He meets all the demands of the clientele, including supplying some of the older, lonelier women with services of a personal nature. He declines invitations to do so himself, using the bellboy as a sex lackey.

Max has friends, German cinematic archetypes -- right down to the huffing bürgermeister and the stern, monocled authority figure -- who show up from time to time for clandestine meetings. They are former mid-level Nazi officers who hold their own internal "trials" to determine their individual exposure to war crime charges. This mostly involves tracking down incriminating documents or witnesses and getting rid of them.

It is implied, though not directly stated, that Max was actually the highest-ranking officer among them, but now is their socioeconomic peasant, preferring to live as a "quiet church mouse" in a nondescript job of servitude rather than becoming bourgeois elite like themselves.

They speak of their trials in the Age of Aquarius language of the 1970s rather than the '50s, of being cleansed of their transgressions so they can live in peace and harmony. Perhaps, Max suggests, he's chosen the life he has because he alone has a remaining sliver of shame that is only expressed in the light.

Then one day into the hotel walks Lucia (Rampling). They lock eyes, porter and patron, recognize each other instantly and know fear. Through the flashback scenes we establish that Max liked to shoot films of his prisoners, especially while tormenting young and pretty girls, and she was his chief victim. Later, though, we learn that she eventually came to appreciate the attention. He called her simply "my little girl," and theirs was a twisted romance for the ages.

Lucia's personage is nettlingly dubious. It's stated that she is an American, the daughter of a socialist, rather than a Jewess. But the wartime scenes show her mingled with the victims of genocide, right down to the familiar striped pajamas and sheared heads. Rampling's famous cascading mane is hidden, unconvincingly, under a poofy and obvious hairpiece.

Her preternatural lithe body, bordering on scrawniness, is used to obvious effect, along with very theatrical makeup to make her so pale as to be ghost-like. Indeed, many of the Germans favor the same makeup or even wear masks during the flashbacks, and these scenes take on a Fellini-like daze of heightened reality.

These are memories, not history, and are therefore colored by the characters' evolving emotional relationship to these experiences.

The film's somewhat kooky tone grows kookier in the second half. Max's pals become worried about the presence of the woman, believing she'll turn him in and therefore endanger themselves. In actuality, the two resume their fractured romance. He embraces her and hits her, she enjoys it and hits him back, he chains her up for awhile, she resents it, and not. A little blood is drawn, so frequently we suspect it acts as a lubricant to entice the emission of other essential fluids.

Lucia runs away from her famous symphony conductor husband, the police come asking questions, the Germans grow more anxious, and the lovers ensconce themselves in Max's apartment, slowly starving as their supply of delivered groceries is turned away by the schemers.

Their lack of initiative is dazzling, even for a bit of fantasia. The Germans' arrayed forces amount to three or four middle-aged men, a wasting wreck of a friendly dowager (Isa Miranda) and one inept henchman youth. Yet Max cannot procure food from any source or find a back entrance to sneak out of.

Perhaps he's not really trying to escape his fate, but simply wants one more taste of passion before the light dims. It's hard to say; Bogarde was a master of thespian mannerisms, but could not project internal anguish the way later generations of actors did. Lucia's internal mechanisms are even more masked. She exists as a conduit for erotic energy, and little more.

It seems no matter what reaction people had to "The Night Porter," it was a tizzy. It is one of the most reviled and celebrated art films of the last half-century. Personally, I don't see the two reactions as mutually exclusive.

Reeling Backward: "King and Country" (1964)

"King & Country" is a very harsh and bleak anti-war film that's been largely relegated to the cinematic dustbin of history, despite being very well-regarded at the time -- enough to earn four BAFTA Awards nominations (the British equivalent of the Oscars), including Best Picture.

Tom Courtenay gives a top-drawer performance as a dimwitted soldier on trial for his life for deserting the trenches during World War I, and Dirk Bogarde is also quite good  as the officious officer charged with defending him. Narratively and thematically it's very similar to Stanley Kubrick's "Paths of Glory," though not nearly as well known.

I think what makes the film stand out is the way it was shot by director Joseph Losey and cinematographer Denys Coop. It was really ahead of its time in terms of cutting away from the actors to show other imagery while they're talking, especially still photographs, to illustrate what's going through their heads.

For instance, when Private Arthur Hamp (Courtenay) is speaking about some of the horrible things he's seen on the front, the picture will cut away to an image of a dead soldier half-buried in the mud, or equally disturbing pictures. Losey will often accompany it with a slow zoom in or zoom out on the photo, a technique that Ken Burns would become known for in his documentaries decades later.

These visual switches will somtimes occur in the middle of a scene, without preamble; I'm guessing audiences in 1964 were confused at first at what was going on. But including these harrowing visuals lends the actors' words additional power beyond what their own faces could show.

The film opens with a long, slow tracking close-up along a statue and facade that terrifically relates the grime and muck that typified WWI fighting. Following the twists of limbs, weapons and rocky outcroppings gives an immediacy to events long ago and helps set the stage.

"King and Country" is also a damp movie, quite literally: I'm not sure if it ceases raining during the entire course of the movie. Everything is filthy and caked with mud; the men live in moldy dugouts and caves covered with tin sheeting. Pools of filthy water surround the men at all times, as if rendering them castaways on some alien planetscape.

Story-wise the movie is pretty straightforward. Hamp abandoned his post and began walking aimlessly, and nearly made it to a disembarkation point on the western coast of France before he was captured. He claims to have been barely aware of his actions, other than he wanted to get away from the sound of artillery fire and go home. Though we soon learn he doesn't even have a home; his wife and her mother, who dared him to enlist in the war, have since abandoned him.

Now he's on trial for desertion, and seems not to understand that he could well be executed if found guilty. After three years he's one of the most seasoned soldiers in his unit, and Hamp imagines this legacy will protect him. Maybe he'll get some prison time, he reckons.

Captain Hargreaves (Bogarde) does not exactly have a sterling reputation among the soldiers for his abilities as a military defense advocate. A group of Hamp's fellow grunts act as a sort of Greek chorus, hanging around the periphery of the trial and commenting upon the events. They even perform their own mock version of the tribunal, with a lowly rat -- beaten out of the rotting belly of a dead horse -- standing in as their former comrade.

At first openly hostile to Hamp, Hargreaves eventually comes to sympathize with the young soldier and mounts a stirring defense of him. It's all a sham, of course. The presiding colonel can barely be bothered to pay attention, and when he does speak it's to undermine Hargreaves' case.

An effective cross-examination of the unit's doctor (Leo McKern) reveals him to be a pompous ass who believes any soldiers complaining of shell shock are malingerers, and his prescription for virtually every case is a dose of "No. 9" -- aka laxatives.

I also appreciated James Villiers as Captain Midgley, the prosecutor who seems very detached and unemotional, occasionally standing up to a great height to leer over the witnesses like some great bird of prey.

Since the officers participating in the trial are all from the same unit, many of them share quarters and interact with each other on a day-to-day basis. So there's an additional farcical sense to the trial, as in between sessions they decamp to their bunks to share meals and cleverly insult each other in that oh-so-British way.

At one point Hamp's commanding officer, Webb (Barry Foster), who had described him as an excellent soldier, complains to Midgley about turning the screws on him during his own appearance as a witness. But it's in a good-natured, bantering way, and it's pretty clear that Webb won't be terribly upset about whatever happens to Hamp. (Indeed, he's later put in charge of the firing squad as "punishment" for defending Hamp in his testimony.)

I admired "King & Country" more than I enjoyed it. It's a well-acted drama, beautifully bleak visually and made with great craftsmanship. It's so unrelenting in its dour message -- war is bad; war is dehumanizing -- that it ends up holding no surprises for us. Hamp's martyrdom carries less power than it should precisely because it is so inevitable. Evan Jones wrote the screenplay based on a play by John Wilson and a novel by James Lansdale Hodgson.

The filmmakers would have done better to give us a little more hope for Hamp.