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Tag Archives: John Brahm

Singapore (Aug. 13, 1947)

Posted on October 12, 2011 by Adam Lounsbery

Note to aspiring makers of B movies — if you’re going to blatantly rip off Casablanca (1942), take a page from director John Brahm’s book. Don’t just change the characters’ names and tack on a happy ending. Do it with real panache and also change the hero’s occupation to “pearl smuggler” and spice up the love triangle by giving the heroine a case of amnesia.

True to its title, Singapore is steeped in the exoticism and heat of the Pacific Rim, but like the film noir techniques Brahm uses to tell his story, it’s mostly just window dressing for a run-of-the-mill potboiler. But that’s not entirely a bad thing. Brahm keeps things moving along nicely, and Singapore is a lot of fun if you’re in the mood for a melodrama and you can overlook some contrivances.

When Matt Gordon (MacMurray) returns to Singapore after World War II, it’s clear as soon as he steps off the plane that he has a history there. Deputy Commissioner Hewitt (Richard Haydn) has Gordon brought to his office, and he reminds him that the penalty for removing illegally obtained pearls from a British colony is a minimum of 10 years in prison.

“Before the war it was only eight,” Gordon quips. “But I guess everything’s gone up, huh?”

Gordon sits down in the hotel bar, orders two gin slings, and sits alone, reminiscing about life in Singapore before the war. He fell in love with a beautiful young woman named Linda Grahame (Ava Gardner), but their whirlwind romance was cut short by the beginning of hostilities with the Japanese.

They were engaged to be married, but before they could tie the knot she was killed in a bombing raid, and Allied forces had occupied his hotel room, where his $250,000 worth of pearls were secreted in the motor of the ceiling fan in his room.

He made it out of Singapore with his life, but that’s all, and now that the war is over he’s intent on retrieving his pearls. (It’s established that Gordon has a service record, and saw combat during the war, perhaps to engender audience sympathy.)

Of course, Linda didn’t really die in a bombing raid. She was injured and stricken with total amnesia. Unable to remember any details of her former life, she was interned in a Japanese concentration camp, where she met Michael Van Leyden (Roland Culver), a British plantation owner who saved her life many times during the war. Now they are married, and her name is Ann Van Leyden. No matter how many times Gordon calls her “Linda,” she just can’t remember their time together, or the love they shared.

So Gordon has two problems — winning back Linda/Ann, and somehow getting his pearls out of the ceiling fan of a hotel room that is now occupied by an obnoxious married couple. The problem of the pearls is compounded not only by the watchful eye of Deputy Commissioner Hewitt, but also by the corpulent gangster Mr. Mauribus (Thomas Gomez), who wants the pearls for himself.

There are a lot of ceiling fans in Singapore, and none of them move quickly. It’s all part of the languorous, overheated atmosphere of the film, but like I said above, it’s all just window dressing. The Asian extras in the background and the crowded streets of the port city add ambiance, but not much else. The action could be moved to any other “exotic” locale, and few details of the plot would have to be changed. (And that’s exactly what happened in 1957 when director Joseph Pevney remade Singapore as a vehicle for Errol Flynn called Istanbul.)

I liked Singapore despite its flaws, and it’s always enjoyable to watch the beautiful Ava Gardner do anything. I didn’t completely buy her relationship with the hulking, thuggish Fred MacMurray — I’ve always thought MacMurray was better in comedic roles than dramatic ones — but it works well enough to keep the film moving.

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The Brasher Doubloon (Feb. 6, 1947)

Posted on March 22, 2011 by Adam Lounsbery

Ladies, I don’t know if you know this, but the cure for frigidity is George Montgomery.

Let’s pretend that you are a young woman who is terrified of a man’s touch, due to some unstated trauma in your past. You work for a tyrannical old dowager who has an unnatural attachment to her spoiled, weak-willed son. You tremble at the sound of the old woman’s voice, and you live in her Southern California mansion as a virtual slave.

Then, one day, a man appears at the front door. He’s tall, he’s trim, he’s 30 years old, and he has high cheekbones and a nice mustache. In short, he’s the complete package. He’s come at the behest of your mistress, Mrs. Murdock, who wants him to track down a coin that has been stolen from her. The coin is the Brasher Doubloon of the title, and it’s a coin with “a romantic and violent history.”

If this man approached you privately after meeting with the old woman and you told him you don’t like to have men touch you, and he responded — “Well, in that case you better do something about your appearance. And that perfume you use … Night of Bliss. You just can’t seem to make up your mind, can you, Miss Davis?” — would you accept his offer to “take it very slowly” and cure you of your phobia?

Of course you would.

In John Brahm’s The Brasher Doubloon, private investigator Philip Marlowe (Montgomery) accepts both cases — tracking down the missing coin owned by Mrs. Murdock (Florence Bates) and curing her secretary, Merle Davis, of her frigidity.

Merle is played by Nancy Guild (rhymes with “wild”), who looks a little like a softer-featured Margot Kidder. She and Montgomery are an attractive pair, but their limits as thespians keep The Brasher Doubloon from being a top-flight picture.

Montgomery delivers every line in an emphatic huff. If it’s supposed to be hard-boiled it doesn’t come across that way. When a slimy coin dealer named Elisha Morningstar (Houseley Stevenson) asks Marlowe if he’s threatening him, Marlowe responds, “Yes…,” as though he’s not sure. When Marlowe tell Mrs. Murdock, “I do things my own way,” he sounds like a petulant child.

Throughout the film, Guild looks as though she’s been thrown into the deep end of the pool and doesn’t know how to swim. (This was only her second film — the first was Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1946 noir Somewhere in the Night.) Luckily, wide-eyed panic is what her character calls for. Unfortunately, her performance remains pitched at exactly the same level throughout the film.

Dorothy Bennett’s screenplay, which is adapted from Chandler’s 1942 novel The High Window, is pretty good. John Brahm’s direction is excellent. Unlike The Big Sleep (1946), this isn’t a picture that’s overly difficult to follow, and the settings — from baronial mansions to smoky underworld dives and rented rooms — are well-done.

The Brasher Doubloon is one of the least well-known films adapted from a Raymond Chandler novel. After two B movies adapted from Chandler novels that did not retain the Philip Marlowe character were released — The Falcon Takes Over (1942) and Time to Kill (1942), based on Farewell, My Lovely and The High Window, respectively — the two most famous Philip Marlowe movies were made: Murder, My Sweet (1944), which starred Dick Powell as Marlowe, and The Big Sleep (1946), which starred Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe. Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947) rounds out the “big three” Philip Marlowe films of the ’40s, and while it’s not as well-regarded as the other two, it’s available on DVD, and is an interesting picture.

The Brasher Doubloon is currently unavailable on DVD, which is a shame. While the acting by the two leads is pretty bad, and there’s a really cheesy scene at the end in which Marlowe assembles all of the suspects and explains to them who committed the murders, overall this is a pretty tight noir mystery.

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Hangover Square (Feb. 7, 1945)

Posted on August 26, 2009 by Adam Lounsbery

Hangover_square
Hangover Square (1945)
Directed by John Brahm
20th Century-Fox

Laird Cregar’s is a sad story. A brilliant character actor, Cregar died in December of 1944 as a result of a crash diet that most likely included amphetamines. Cregar shed approximately 100 pounds in a short space of time in an attempt to reinvent himself. Reinvention is a hard business, and no more so than in the studio-controlled Hollywood of the ’40s. Firmly established as a towering, 300-pound, sympathetic (and often childlike) heavy, Cregar’s notion that he could shed his tonnage, get plastic surgery, and reinvent himself as a romantic leading man was delusional.

Hangover Square is a follow-up of sorts to The Lodger (1944), in which Cregar played a highly fictionalized version of Jack the Ripper. Both films were directed by John Brahm, and both feature sympathetic depictions of mentally ill characters who are compelled to kill. In Hangover Square, Cregar plays a composer named George Harvey Bone, a man who is struggling to complete his masterpiece (an effective if not totally convincing concerto composed by Bernard Herrmann, who also composed the film’s incidental music). However, Bone suffers from a bizarre condition that causes him to black out when he hears loud, discordant noises. In these fugue states he may or may not be committing murders. His energy and creativity are reinvigorated, however, when he meets a beautiful singer, played by Linda Darnell. Unsurprisingly, she leads him on and then does him wrong, which frays his last shred of sanity to the breaking point.

Hangover Square was based on a novel by Patrick Hamilton. The novel was published in 1941 and took place in the late ’30s. I’ve never read it, but apparently it’s a black comedy, and there’s a lot of thematic material about the rise of fascism in Europe. Not much of that stuff made it into the film. Originally the film was supposed to be set in the present day, but it was changed to the late Victorian era, presumably to capitalize on the success Brahm and Cregar had had with The Lodger. Both films are very good, and worth seeing, but Hangover Square is more of a mess than its predecessor. Herrmann’s score, as well as the music he writes that’s meant to be composed by Bone, makes the film feel very contemporary, and the Victorian setting isn’t handled very well. What Hangover Square does have going for it, besides Cregar’s performance, are a couple of incredibly striking scenes, both involving fire, that will stick with a lot of viewers.

It’s a shame that Cregar died when he did. He hadn’t even hit 30 when he passed away (although he could play much older). Even in minor roles he always made an impression. Had he lived, would he have been the gay (or at least gayish) Orson Welles? We’ll never know. In his last role, he’s not what anyone would call “svelte,” but the weight he had lost is noticeable. He appears diminished, haunted, and on the verge of being destroyed. It’s a masterful performance in a pretty good film, and one worth seeing.

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