VIVIAN CONNELL – The Chinese Room. Dial Press, hardcover, 1942; The Citadel Press, hc, 1943 (shown). [See bibliographic note below.] Paperback reprint: Bantam 454, 1948 (with numerous later printings).

  THE CHINESE ROOM. Clasa Films Mundiales, 1968. Guillermo Murray, Elizabeth Campbell, Carlos Rivas, Regina Torné, Cathy Crosby. Based on the novel by Vivian Connell. Screenplay/director: Albert Zugsmith.

   Much like the Curt Siodmak book (Whomsoever I Shall Kiss, reviewed here ), The Chinese Room starts out with a great premise for a murder mystery: Nicholas Bude is a wealthy London Banker with a wife in the country and a mistress in the city whose sterile life is disrupted when a servant’s daughter commits suicide.

   It develops that the dead girl was in the habit of writing anonymous threatening letters to herself, and while discussing this with a doctor helping the police, Bude gets into a heated argument about loneliness and lonely minds.

   He makes a bet with the doctor that anyone with a normal mind (himself, for instance) could send himself threatening letters without being driven to suicide, and the doctor dares him to prove it, which he agrees to do, in front of witnesses.

   Then he starts getting anonymous threatening letters. Is he writing them himself, without knowing it, is someone trying to drive him to suicide or setting him up for murder?

   Like I say, it’s a great start for a classic mystery — just improbable enough to sound bizarre without stretching it too far, but Vivian Connell abandons it for long stretches to talk about sex.

   Now I’m not one to object to lots of sex in a book. Even gratuitous sex is sex, after all, and I don’t mind it a bit. In fact, when it was published in war-time England, The Chinese Room shocked and titillated a nation, say the publicists. And it still has the power to shock and titillate those who are easily shocked and titillated.

   Others might find the story of a husband and wife who are horny as hell but sexually incompatible a bit tame — I know I kept wishing Connell would get back to the Mystery of the letters. But as soon as Bude’s wife gets around to discovering them and deciding to unravel the mystery herself, all the clues fall into her lap in the first hour, and Connell gets right back to the sex.

      By the way, Chinese Room was filmed — ineptly, but with surprising fidelity — by Albert Zugsmith in 1968.

   It’s worth mentioning because in the world of Cinema, Zugsmith was a true wandering soul, producing classics like Touch of Evil, Written on the Wind and The Incredible Shrinking Man, along with alternative classics and pure schlock like High School Confidential, Confessions of an Opium Eater and Sex Kittens Go to College.

   Truly an artist in a class by himself, and a good thing, too. His film of Chinese Room has some interesting ideas, but it suffers from the usual Zugsmith stigmata of minimal budget, deplorable script and regrettable acting — problems Zugsmith sometimes rose above, but not here.

Bibliographic Note:   From the Amazon description of the Barricade (2005) reprint edition. “First published in America in 1942, Dial recalled the original edition soon after publication. The Society for the Suppression of Vice demanded the censorship due to the sexual nature of a particular phrase. Citadel Press offered an edition in 1943 minus the offending phrase, and a bestseller emerged, eventually selling more than three million copies in its various editions.”

   On abebooks.com, two copies of what are said to be the Dial edition are offered. The asking price for one is $4.69, including postage (but is described as a reprint). The other, described as a First Edition, will set you back $4998.00. Both are hardcovers without jackets. Any takers?

PAID TO LOVE. Fox, 1927. George O’Brien, Virginia Valli, J. Farrell MacDonald, William Powell, Thomas Jefferson, Hank Mann. Photography: L. William O’Connell; director: Howard Hawks. Shown at Cinecon 45, Hollywood CA, September 2009.

   J. Farrell MacDonald, an American banker, travels to a small Balkan kingdom for the purpose of making a financial investment to shore up the country’s faltering economy.

   He becomes chummy with the king (Thomas Jefferson) and they plot to marry off Crown Prince Michael (O’Brien), who seems unwilling to settle down.

   Their bait is Gaby, a cabaret dancer (beautiful Virginia Valli), but the machinations of Michael’s cousin (William Powell) threaten to thwart the pair’s plans and break up the budding relationship.

   Hawks was quoted in the program notes by his biographer (Todd McCarthy) as saying that he was influenced by German Expressionist director F. W. Murnau in his tracking shots, lighting and editing.

   It’s certainly an elegant, stylish film, with the expected polished performance by Powell, engaging characterizations by MacDonald and Jefferson, and an attractive portrayal of the developing romance by the forthright O’Brien and sultry Valli.

EAST SIDE, WEST SIDE.   MGM, 1949. Barbara Stanwyck, James Mason, Van Heflin, Ava Gardner, Cyd Charisse, Nancy Davis, Gale Sondergaard, William Conrad, Douglas Kennedy, Beverly Michaels, William Frawley. Screenplay: Isobel Lennart, based on the novel by Marcia Davenport. Director: Mervyn LeRoy.

   The book this movie is based on is not included in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, nor without having a copy in my hands, but relying on what I have read about it on the Internet, do I believe it should be. It’s described by one source as a novel about the “post-war social strata in New York [City]” and that those who love the social history of the city should enjoy it immensely.

   Hence the title, of course, and never the twain shall meet — except of course for the fact that they do, and when they do, the results can be both devastating and disastrous to everyone involved. And buried in the otherwise soapy melodrama that constitutes the bulk of the movie based on the book, right around the three-quarters mark, is 15 minutes of crime drama that made me sit up and take notice.

   Truth in reviewing: I’d avoided reading about the movie and the storyline beforehand, but when I saw William Conrad’s name in the credits, that gave me some advance notice, and of course Barbara Stanwyck is no stranger to noir-oriented movies, is she?

   Consider, then, the following set of interlocking triangles. I’ll omit the characters’ names, and refer to them only by the actors. Stanwyck is married to vain and self-centered Mason, who is infatuated with the beautiful Gardner, who knows it and who hangs out with nightclub owner Kennedy, whose other girl friend is brassy blonde Michaels.

   Returning from Europe as a WWII correspondent is Heflin, a non-society guy who falls in love with Stanwyck; he in return is the object of a schoolgirl crush, that of Charisse, who is a fashion model whom Stanwyck knows from the shows she attends, and who (Charisse) saves Mason from an embarrassing newspaper scandal by rescuing him after he’s punched out by Douglas (remember him?)

   Eventually a murder occurs, and this is where Conrad comes in — a homicide detective. Frawley is a bartender in Douglas’s night club, just to make sure I’ve mentioned everybody. Well, almost: Davis is one of Stanwyck’s society friends and a close confidant, and Sondergaard is her mother, whom Mason thinks he has utterly charmed.

   There is one scene in this movie that I will not forget, one in which Barbara Michael (described as being built like the Empire State Building) and Van Heflin have a brief but ferocious bare-knuckle fist fight. (In high heels she is indeed taller than he is.) They are hampered by being in the front seat of a car together, but it is one of the fiercest out-and-out slugfests between a man and a woman that I can remember ever seeing on the screen.

   While her performance is largely understated, Stanwyck is as perfect in her role as she always is. Mason is never so eloquent as he is when his makes his final plea for her love. As for Ava Gardner, is she or is she not the most beautiful woman ever to appear on the Hollywood screen? No wonder James Mason is infatuated with her, like a moth to the flame.

HATTER’S CASTLE. Paramount 1942/1948; Robert Newton, James Mason, Deborah Kerr, Emlyn Williams, Henry Oscar, Enid Stamp-Taylor, Beatrice Varley, Anthony Bateman, June Holden, George Merritt, Laurence Hanray. Screenplay by Paul Merzbach, Rudolph Bernaur and Rodney Ackland, based on the novel by A. J. Cronin. Director: Lance Comfort. Shown at Cinecon 45, Hollywood CA, September 2009.

   This Paramount production was made with frozen funds in England in 1941 but was only released in this country in 1948, when both Mason and Kerr had become box-office names.

   They’re fine in supporting roles, but the real star is Robert Newton, probably best known to American audiences for his role as Long John Silver in Disney’s Treasure Island. He plays a successful haberdasher, whose claim to royal lineage has made him a civic force to be reckoned with in the small Scottish where the drama plays out.

   Newton is a brooding tyrant, running his household with an iron fist and terrorizing his wife and son, with only his daughter (Kerr) showing some signs of independence. The hiring of an assistant (the lover, unknown to him, of his mistress, and superbly played by Emlyn Williams) will prove to be the fault in his carefully constructed world that will be his undoing.

   The arc of the movie is a long downward spiral in an unrelentingly grim drama that’s dominated by Newton’s powerful performance.

ROBERT KAPLOW – Me and Orson Welles.

MacAdam-Cage; hardcover; First edition, 2003. Trade paperback: Penguin, June 2005.

   Only 35 pages into this lyrical and magical one-week interlude in 17-year-old Richard Samuel’s life, even he recognizes the fact that he’s “the luckiest bastard on the face of the earth.”

   Recruited by chance to be an actor in Orson Welles’ stage production of Julius Caesar, Richard, still a high school student in suburban New Jersey, must sneak out of classes and lie to his mother to become a part of history: opening night for The Mercury Theatre: New York City, November 11, 1937.

   On the stage with Orson Welles, John Houseman, Joseph Cotten, and George Coulouris, and madly in love with Sonja Jones, Orson Welles’ personal assistant, what flame could burn brighter than young Richard’s, if only for a week?

   The show itself is Orson Welles’ pet project. Whenever there’s a need for it, he’s creative on the spot. As we watch him slide the pieces of the play into position, this convincing portrayal of actor-producer-director Orson Welles, towering over everyone in a three-mile radius, is a gem to behold. The man, then only 22 years old himself, was a genius, and Robert Kaplow does the near impossible: he brings him back to life.

   His was a flawed genius, we know that now. It was a conclusion that became more and more obvious as his career went on. Kaplow suggests that it was clear from the beginning. Orson Welles was a gigantic talent, but only that. From page 181: Human virtues, virtually none: “generosity, decency, loyalty — whatever — all missing.”

   Richard’s life intersects that of Mr. Welles only briefly, and perhaps luckily so. This beguiling coming-of-age tale is also one of the funniest and most warm-hearted stories I’ve read in a long while. This one’s a keeper. Don’t miss it.

[UPDATE] 02-09-10.   I missed the movie that was made of this book. We just couldn’t get there. Inertia, in all honesty, and cold weather. It played here in the Hartford area for about ten days, which is about eight days longer than I expected it to. It hardly seems like the kind of picture people will flock to, no matter how well made it is. (It’s gotten 7.4 stars out of ten on IMDB.)

    It stars Zac Efron as Richard, Claire Danes as Sonja, and Christian McKay as Orson Welles. I’ve signed up to be notified by Amazon when the DVD is released. No doubt I’ll be the first on my block to have it, but I’m certainly looking forward to it.

ONE MORE RIVER. Universal, 1934. Colin Clive, Diana Wynyard, Jane Wyatt, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, James Lawton, Henry Stephenson, C. Aubrey Smith, Henry Daniell, E. E. Clive, Snub Pollard. Script: R.C. Sherriff, from the novel by John Galsworthy. Director: James Whale.

   When Diana Wynyard leaves her caddish, sadistic husband, sneeringly played by Colin Clive, to establish an independent existence, private detectives report her every move (in particular, a compromising night in the country in a disabled car with friend and would-be lover James Lawton) to Clive, who sues her for divorce on grounds of adultery, naming Lawton as co-respondent.

   Apart from the casting of his Dr. Frankenstein (Colin Clive) and the usual impeccable direction of a fine and varied cast, the materials of this absorbing melodrama seem somewhat remote from Whale’s imaginative masterpieces: The Old Dark House; The Invisible Man; and Bride of Frankenstein.

   However, three brief sequences are reminiscent of those stylish films:

    ● Wynyard pulls her hair up into a striking semblance of the Bride’s electrified coiffure.

    ● A low-angle shot catches E. E Clive looking superciliously toward the bottom of the frame with Dr. Praetorius’s prissy, pursed lips (Bride).

    ● And most moving of all, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, slowly climbing an ornate, moodily lighted staircase (not unlike the staircase in the great hall of Baron Frankenstein’ s castle), spectrally intones Lady Macbeth’s exit line, “What’s done cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed,” in a cameo scene that sums up unforgettably Whale’s unique feel for the extravagantly theatrical and sardonic, self-conscious mockery.

   The courtroom scene is splendidly acted and paced and the unlikely team of E.E. Clive and Snub Pollard, playing comic sleuths, is a delight. Finally, Diana Wynyard gives an effortless, understated performance that seems spontaneous and lends credibility to this contemporary story of a rebellion against a class and its taboos, a subject always of great interest to Whale.

RICHARD SALE – Not Too Narrow, Not Too Deep.   Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1936. Paperback reprints: Armed Services Edition #S-7, 1940s. Popular Library 247, 1950.

Strange Cargo. MGM, 1940.   Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Ian Hunter, Peter Lorre, Paul Lukas, Albert Dekker, J. Edward Bromberg, Eduardo Ciannelli. Screenplay: Lawrence Hazard, based on the novel Not Too Narrow, Not Too Deep, by Richard Sale. Director: Frank Borzage.

   I’m a deeply spiritual person, in my own shallow, materialistic way, so as the Holidays drew near, I elected to read/ watch something morally uplifting and settled on Richard Sale’s Not Too Narrow, Not Too Deep and the movie made from it, Strange Cargo.

   Sale’s book is a taut, gritty, down-and-dirty parable of redemption, dealing Fate to ten convicts trying to escape from a tropical prison hell, written in spare, evocative prose, and filled with action and suspense that somehow doesn’t cheapen the story. It’s also populated with a colorful cast of well-wrought characters, some of whom surprised me from time to time.

   Unlike most parables, Narrow doesn’t shirk from things that were considered shocking in its time, like homosexuality, and pedophilia (still pretty shocking today, but no longer taboo in literature). In short, this is a one-of-a-kind thing, and I recommend it to anyone looking for a good read a little off the beaten path.

   A few years after it was published, Narrow got the MGM treatment, released as Strange Cargo, and should have been an unmitigated disaster, what with Joan Crawford written into the story (by Anita Loos, no less) to redo her Sadie Thompson bit, Clark Gable as an unrepentant and very virile heel, plus a cast of familiar character actors including Albert Dekker, Peter Lorre, Eduardo Cianelli, J. Edward Bromberg and Ian Hunter as the mysterious figure who somehow dominates the action despite Gable and Crawford.

   In fact, this is surprisingly a very effective film, thanks mostly to director Frank Borzage, who steers it deftly between schmaltz and pretentiousness, getting powerful performances from the stars but never letting them run away with the story. And there’s a fine bit from Paul Lukas as a satanic convict not in the book. The scene where he parts company with Hunter and the rest of the group, like an angel cast out of heaven, is one of those creepy, unforgettable movie moments that carry real dramatic weight.

   As a footnote, I might add that despite some cheap sops to the censors, this film was condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency, I think because it depicts God as a nice guy who tries to help out when he can.

JANE EYRE. 20th Century-Fox, 1944. Orson Welles, Joan Fontaine, Margaret O’Brien, Peggy Ann Garner, John Sutton, Sara Allgood, Henry Daniell, Agnes Moorehead, Aubrey Mather, Edith Barrett, Mrs. Fairfax, Barbara Everes, Hillary Brooke. Screenplay: John Houseman, Aldous Huxley, Robert Stevenson & Henry Koster (the latter uncredited), based on the novel by Charlotte Brontë. Director: Robert Stevenson.

   Last night as I sat up until 2:00 a.m. engrossed in a showing of the 20th Century Fox version of Jane Eyre, I alternately cursed the frequent interruptions for the promotion of albums like Motels & Memories and local entrepreneurs like Mother’s Pizza (“Just like you remember it, only it really wasn’t ever this good!”) and revelled in the superb Dickensian detail of the sequences at Linwood School dominated by Henry Daniell’s marvelous portrayal of the sadistic religious fanati,c, Broadhurst.

   I was moved by the moody, romantic sweep of the episodes at Rochester’s estate, with the brilliant portrayal of mad Mrs. Rochester’s husband by Orson Welles, supported by one of composer Bernard Herrmann’s finest scores.

   The film is one of those meticulous re-creations of a literary classic that David Selznick, in particular, was gifted in bringing to life on the screen, but it has, at moments, something which such films often do not have: imaginative camera work which makes portions of the film seem as fresh as they did thirty-five years ago and confirms for me the rumors that Welles, coming to this project after Citizen Kane and the abortive Magnificent Ambersons, co-directed certain scenes.

   I thought I detected Wellesian touches in Jane’s introduction to Rochester at the manor; in the handling of the brief scene with Agnes Moorehead at the beginning as the camera in a sardonic low-angle shot accented the self-satisfied cruelty of Jane’s aunt and cousin; and in the exterior shots of the great house that squats malevolently at the film’s center, with its battlements and moody lighting that inevitably remind the viewer of Kane’s estate.

   You will get some idea of the quality of the team that was assembled for this film when I tell you that two of the script-writers were Aldous Huxley and John Houseman and that, in addition to Welles, Daniell, Moorehead, and Joan Fontaine (as Jane), there are splendid performances by a group of actors that can only serve to remind us of the talent that was still available to the major studios in the early forties: Elizabeth Taylor, Peggy Ann Garner, Margaret O’Brien, Sara Allgood, John Sutton (in an uncommonly fine portrayal of Broadhurst’s sympathetic alter ego, Dr. Rivers), and other players whose names are less familiar but whose faces are indelibly imprinted on our memories of films of the period.

   I was struck by the beauty of a line delivered by Welles as he described Jane’s first sight of Mrs. Rochester, “Look at Jane, all grave and silent at the mouth of Hell,” and bothered by the jarring modernity of another line describing Mrs. Rochester after her fatal leap as she “lay smashed on the pavement.”

   I was riveted by a shot of Moorehead looking like a grinning Medusa and by the long shot of the wedding ceremony with the ominous entrance of an unseen “Guest” glimpsed only at first as a shadow slipping by against a shaft of light suddenly striking a sacristy wall.

   And I was intrigued by the obvious attempt to introduce fairy-tale elements into the narrative, with the climax clearly using devices from “Beauty and the Beast” that could not have been accidental.

   In short, I was overwhelmed by the intelligence, craftsmanship, and beauty of this film and reminded that film history is filled with superb movies that are often only entries in an edition of Movies That May Be Seen as Interruptions of Late-Night TV Commercials.

THE COMPANY SHE KEEPS. RKO Radio Pictures, 1951. Lizabeth Scott, Jane Greer, Dennis O’Keefe, Fay Baker, John Hoyt. Director: John Cromwell.

    I picked this one to watch for two reasons. First, Lizabeth Scott was in it. Secondly, because Jane Greer was in it. And if you’d like me to keep going into thirdsies, with both of the aforementioned two ladies in it, the movie had to be a noir film, not so?

    Not so, or if it is, it’s the most borderline of touchy-feely noir films I’ve ever seen. Not that that’s so bad, I hasten to add, but in no way nor at no time did this movie go in a way I thought it was going to go, and I enjoyed (almost) every minute of it.

    The movie opens with Jane Greer’s character (Mildred Lynch, later to be known as Diane Stuart) up for parole at the women’s detention center where she’s serving an indeterminate sentence. She’s polite, she’s mild, she’s humble, and she convinces the three or four old biddies on the board. The one male member is not so sure.

    And sure enough, once she’s out, her real personality comes to the fore, and taking the brunt of her built-up frustration and anger at society is one of the kindest, most understanding parole officers the world has ever seen, Joan Wilburn (Lizabeth Scott).

    How understanding is that, Steve? Try this. When Diane steals Joan’s fiancé right out from under her, does she (Diane) get mad? Does she get even? I won’t tell you, but maybe if I hint loudly enough, you will get the idea.

    Nor does the world treat Diane all that well, either, which is maybe where the noir aspect might come in, but no, I’ve been thinking about this overnight, and it’s not really enough. Jane Greer might overplay her role just a little, but if one can act with only facial expressions to indicate his or her thoughts, she does it in this movie, and extremely well.

    As for Lizabeth Scott, she may underplay her role, that of an Ice Princess who sees and knows what her duty is, and goes ahead and — well, I won’t say, but I’m sure that if you read any other review of this movie, you can find out easily enough anyway, without having to watch this movie, which you should.

    Part of Joan Wilburn’s problem may indeed be the Ice Princess part of her make-up. If she weren’t so cool and collected even with her fiancé (Dennis O’Keefe, by the way), their relationship may have meant more to him than it appears it does. I don’t think he even ever got to First Base with her, if they had Bases back in 1951.

THE MIRACLE MAN. Paramount, 1932. Sylvia Sidney, Chester Morris, Robert Coogan, John Wray, Ned Sparks, Hobart Bosworth. Lloyd Hughes, Virginia Bruce, Boris Karloff, Irving Pichel.

Screenplay by Waldemar Young and Samuel Hoffenstein, based on the novel by Robert Hobart Davis and the play by George M. Cohan. Director: Norman Z. McLeod. Shown at Cinecon 45, Hollywood CA, September 2009.

    A remake of a silent film with Lon Chaney Sr. (and which is today a lost film except for two short fragments), the sound version has a dramatic power that transcends its sentimental story of four con artists (Sidney, Morris, Sparks, and John Wray recreating the Chaney role) who fall under the spell of a charismatic faith healer.

    The miracle man is played by Hobart Bosworth, whose restrained, moving performance is extraordinary in the sense of spiritual grace it communicates. The only other film performance that I can recall that rivals it is that of another fine silent actor, H. B. Warner, who starred in Cecil B. DeMille’s biblical drama, King of Kings.