Playing catch-up to Greta Garbo in MATA HARI & Marlene Dietrich in DISHONORED, British beauty Madeleine Carroll entered the WWI spy racket as a brave Belgian nurse, charged with delivering messages hidden in cabbages & apple cores, wrapped under bandages or written on cigarette paper, when not openly whispering them in cafés. Under the cover of a hospital job that has her tending all sides & nationalities, Carroll is romanced by German Kommandant Conrad Veidt, keeping her above suspicion & beyond curfew laws. Secretly, she’s in cahoots with dashing doctor/fellow spy Herbert Marshall, for some reason, two stone heavier than he was back in Hollywood. (Too many meat pies?) With nice production value and an exceptional supporting cast (Edmund Gwenn, Nigel Bruce, Martita Hunt), Victor Saville’s direction still can’t rise much beyond a mezza-mezza script that cuts too many corners. Or rather, can’t until a stunningly handled coda signifying the end of the conflict in four static shots, done entirely without dialogue and ending on striking portrait shot of a deglamorized, yet utterly beautiful, close-up of Carroll. If only the rest of the film lived up to the tag end!
DOUBLE-BILL: As mentioned above, MATA HARI/’31, pretty ridiculous but it does include this priceless exchange between Garbo spy & Ramon Novarro target: RN: I love you as one adores sacred things. GG: What sacred things? RN: God; Country; Honor; YOU. GG: I come last? OR the generally under-rated DISHONORED (look for the superb UCLA restoration), better in almost every way from the stiff Garbo pic though mainly famous for Josef von Sternberg’s shockingly interrupted execution scene and Dietrich’s final lip-gloss touch-up.
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