MOSS ROSE (1947)

With actor Laird Cregar dead and director John Brahm off to R.K.O., 20th/Fox swapped in Victor Mature and Gregory Ratoff to follow their claustrophobic London-set/fog-bound turn-of-the-last-century thrillers THE LODGER/’44 and HANGOVER SQUARE/’45.  And it’s nearly as good.  Ratoff often doing little more than staying on schedule as director, here manages some nifty studio-artifice faux London atmosphere (probably on the same sets Brahm used) in a story that sees Cockney chorus gal Peggy Cummings using a murderer as her ticket to class respectability when upper-cruster Victor Mature dashes out of the bedroom of a fellow rooming-house chorine, freshly dead in bed.  Yikes!  She protects him from the police and blackmails him, not for cash, but for lessons in Lady-like deportment, playing Eliza Doolittle to his Henry Higgins up at his country manse.  An arrangement wealthy fiancé Patricia Medina naturally objects to, yet oddly welcomed by free-spirit mom Ethel Barrymore.  With nice twists along the way, like tag-team detectives Vincent Price & Rhys Williams, on to Mature, but unable to prove anything.*  And if Mature makes an unlikely choice as London society coach and Cummings lays on the Cockney trimmings with a trowel, they each improve over time while Barrymore, often used sparingly as a prestige prop, really gets something to chew on.  Such power!  Such range!  Very frightening when she needs to be, reminding us of her position as top stage star of two continents back in the ‘teens & ‘twenties.  (She also gets a chance to act again with Rhys Williams who played in her legendary 1940 B’way comeback, THE CORN IS GREEN.  Then, when they made the film version, he kept his part while Ethel was replaced with the far too young Bette Davis.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Watch Price steal focus from Mature with an old actor’s trick where he lights Mature’s cigarette than holds (and holds and holds) the lit match so we can look at nothing else.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned above, THE LODGER and HANGOVER SQUARE.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-lodger-1944.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/04/hangover-square-1945.html