Twenty years after his silent film heyday (German UFA, stints in France & England), E. A. Dupont roused himself after two unwelcoming decades in Hollywood, digging up A-list talent for this indie B-pic. Batty, but decidedly entertaining, Dupont helms his own film noir script with John Ireland’s criminally insane asylum escapee landing at an isolated turkey farm out West where he’s taken in and given a second chance by tough, but sympathetic rancher James Barton*; meets waitress Mercedes McCambridge who gives him hope; and visits psychiatrist Emlyn Williams who gives him reason to believe he really did strangle his own wife with that eponymous scarf. Yikes! Naturally, things aren’t quite what they seem, but Dupont’s ‘poetic’ dialogue, a torch song for McCambridge (who knew she could sing?), and adventures on the path to the truth, keep you hooked even when they’re unstuck to any semblance of reality. The underlying (unintentional?) joke of the film is that Ireland (really too naturalistic an actor for his role) runs away from an insane asylum only to find nothing but more insanity on the outside. Cinematographer Franz Planer, between top gigs with every great director in L.A., works up exceedingly dark lighting schemes for Dupont’s highly active camera that effectively take us up to the bounds of plausibility . . . and beyond.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Rarely seen in film, James Barton was something of a professional Irishman on the B’way stage, he’d soon star in Lerner & Loewe’s PAINT YOUR WAGON (the role Lee Marvin did on screen). Looking & acting a lot like James Cagney, his over-scaled acting precisely as phony as Cagney’s was true. Demonstrating what Orson Welles found so irresistible about Cagney, how he seemingly broke every rule of what film acting is supposed to be, and triumphed.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Great pairing for fellow ex-UFA man Edgar G. Ulmer’s grungy masterpiece DETOUR/’45. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/09/detour-1945.html
No comments:
Post a Comment