Sat 8 Sep 2012
Mike Nevins on PIÈGES (1939), CORNELL WOOLRICH, and FRONT PAGE DETECTIVE (1951-1952).
Posted by Steve under Columns , Mystery movies , Pulp Fiction , TV mysteries[13] Comments
by Francis M. Nevins
I happened to be in New Jersey during the week in the middle of last month when an event took place in Manhattan which, had I known about it, would have led me to cross the Hudson and attend, and maybe get asked questions I couldn’t have answered on the spot.
On Thursday, August 16, as part of its ongoing series of French crime thrillers, the Museum of Modern Art ran the little-known 1939 film Pièges (Traps), starring Maurice Chevalier and directed by Robert Siodmak (1900-1973). Born in Dresden to Jewish parents, Siodmak wisely left Germany for France soon after Hitler came to power and, after completing Pièges, left France for a new life in Hollywood as a specialist in what became known as film noir.
Our interest here is in the skein of connections between Pièges, its director, and the most powerful of all noir authors, Cornell Woolrich.
First, the film’s springboard situation. After several young Parisian women mysteriously disappear, the police suspect that their adversary is a serial killer who finds his prey by placing newspaper ads seeking single young women. The cop in charge of the cases enlists the lovely taxi-dancer who roomed with the latest victim to go undercover, answer some of those ads, and serve as bait for a trap.
Sound familiar? To my ears the echoes of Woolrich’s pulp classic “Dime a Dance†(Black Mask, February 1938; first collected in The Dancing Detective, 1946, as by William Irish) are as loud as the roar of the sea, although to the best of my knowledge no one has commented upon the resemblance in print or on the Web.
Introducing Pièges to the MoMA audience, curator Laurence Kardish mentioned that the print, with new English subtitles, had arrived from France just two hours earlier. If the film had ever been shown in the U.S. before, it came and went in a blink.
Among the huge audience listening to Kardish was noir connoisseur Kurt Brokaw, who in an email (not to me) described “the first meandering hour†of the film as “more florid melodrama than noir… Chevalier sings and mugs and mopes around and is such a pain. The femme Marie Dea is good, but the picture seems to run forever.â€
Eventually, Brokaw pointed out, the film assumes a noir look and feel — and takes on a strong resemblance to Woolrich’s classic suspense novel Phantom Lady.
The problem here, as most Woolrich lovers know, is that that novel first appeared in hardcover in 1942, three years after Pièges. As they say in the cafés of Montmartre, was ist hier los? Could Woolrich have lifted Phantom Lady’s plot from a French film that had lifted its springboard situation from a Woolrich story?
When Brokaw’s correspondent invited me to weigh in on the issue, I replied that the original version of Phantom Lady was Woolrich’s short novel “Those Who Kill†(Detective Fiction Weekly, March 4, 1939).
The pub date would make it seem more likely that Pièges borrowed from Woolrich than the opposite. And when you factor into the equation that “Those Who Kill†takes place in France–!
At this point our conversation was joined by West Coast noir maven Eddie Muller, who told us that the Pièges/Phantom Lady connection was not a new discovery but had been discussed by Deborah Alpi in her 1998 book on Siodmak.
According to Alpi, the French film was based on the trial and conviction of a young German intellectual named Eugen Weidmann, who had murdered several women traveling in France.
Time out for a sidebar. Weidmann was the last criminal in France to be publicly guillotined. The execution took place in 1939, the same year Siodmak made Pièges, the same year Woolrich wrote his classic “Men Must Die†(Black Mask, August 1939; usually reprinted as “Guillotineâ€), which is about a French criminal desperately trying to avoid his date with the headsman. Coincidence, or had Woolrich been reading about the beheading of Weidmann?
As if our skein weren’t tangled enough already, there is one final knot. When Phantom Lady was itself filmed, in 1944, would anyone care to guess who got the job directing the picture? Yes, it was Robert Siodmak.
However we interpret this sequence of events, we seem to be stuck with some coincidences worthy of Woolrich himself, and maybe even of Harry Stephen Keeler. Someday I’ll track down Alpi’s book, and also a DVD of Pièges if there is one.
Anyone who sampled Boston Blackie on YouTube after reading my last column doesn’t need to be told that it was hardly a detective program at all but much more like an action-packed Western series set in the present, i.e. the early 1950s.
Also accessible on YouTube is another series of the same vintage which is closer to the detective genre and even features reasoning of sorts, but I didn’t care for it 60 years ago and still don’t today.
The 39-episode Front Page Detective was produced by small-screen pioneer Jerry Fairbanks (1904-1995), first broadcast on the short-lived Dumont network in 1951 and rerun times without number on local stations throughout the rest of the Fifties.
The title came from a pulp true-crime magazine but its protagonist, café-society columnist and amateur detective David Chase — described as a sleuth with “an eye for the ladies, a nose for news, and a sixth sense for danger†— was created especially for TV.
“Presenting an unusual story of love and mystery!†the unseen announcer would purr in dulcet tones at the start of each episode. His introduction concluded with: “And now for another thrilling adventure as we accompany David Chase and watch him match wits with those who would take the law into their own hands.â€
Starring as Chase was one-time matinee idol Edmund Lowe (1892-1971), a name familiar to moviegoers for a third of a century before his entry into television. During the 1920s he specialized in suave romantic roles complete with waxed mustache, but the biggest boost in his film career came when director Raoul Walsh cast him opposite Victor McLaglen in What Price Glory? (Fox, 1926), first of the Captain Flagg-Sergeant Quirt military comedies.
Lowe’s foremost contribution to the detective film came ten years later when he portrayed Philo Vance in The Garden Murder Case (MGM, 1936), but he also played a New York plainclothesman of the 1890s opposite Mae West in Every Day’s a Holiday (Paramount, 1938).
By the early 1950s Lowe had begun to show his age, and in Front Page Detective he looked all too convincingly like a man of almost sixty who’s determined to pass himself off as 25 years younger.
In many an episode he’d romance the woman in the case, rattle off a few deductions — once he reasoned that a letter supposedly from an Englishwoman was a forgery because the writer used the U.S. spelling “check†rather than the British “cheque†— and then collar the villain personally after a pistol battle or fistfight underscored by Lee Zahler’s background music for Mascot and early Republic serials.
Supporting Lowe were Paula Drew as Chase’s fashion-designer girlfriend and crusty George Pembroke as the inevitable stupid cop. Appearing in individual episodes were such stalwarts of TV’s pioneer days as Joe Besser, Rand Brooks, Maurice Cass, Jorja Curtright, Jonathan Hale, Frank Jenks and Lyle Talbot.
Filming was 99% indoors, on some of the cheapest sets ever seen by the televiewer’s eye. The director of every episode I’ve seen recently was Arnold Wester, whose name crops up almost nowhere else in TV history, hinting that it may have been an alias for producer Jerry Fairbanks.
Whoever he was, his idea of directing was to point the camera at the actors and leave the room. Many scripts were by veterans of pulp detective magazines and radio like Robert Leslie Bellem and Irvin Ashkenazy, with an occasional contribution by Curt Siodmak, the younger brother of director Robert Siodmak — do I connect the items in this column or what? — and author of the classic horror novel Donovan’s Brain.
Three episodes of the series — “Murder Rides the Night Train,†“Seven Seas to Danger†and “Alibi for Suicide†— are accessible on YouTube, and a few others can be found on various DVD sets in the bins of dollar stores.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYPaS6qp3-A
Most seem to have vanished but their gimmicks can often be deduced from the brief descriptions in crumbling issues of TV Guide. In “The Case of the Perfect Secretary†Chase tries to find out why Dr. Owens, the inventor of a synthetic cortisone, didn’t show up for a scheduled lecture. He finds Owens’ laboratory deserted and later discovers that the doctor has been murdered, the letter M imprinted on his forehead. It takes no Charlie Chan to figure out that the M is most likely a W.
“Honey for Your Tea†finds Chase looking into the claim of a young actress that her fiancé was brutally murdered by her dramatic coach (Maurice Cass), a gnarled and crippled old man whose hobby is beekeeping. Anyone want to bet that this isn’t the old bee-venom poisoning shtick?
In “The Other Face†Chase investigates the death of a handsome actor who “accidentally†fell from his penthouse terrace shortly after telling his psychiatrist of his desire to fall through space. If the murder victim didn’t turn out to be not the actor but his look-alike understudy, toads fly.
Other episodes seem to have more intriguing story lines. In “Napoleon’s Obituary†a man named for Bonaparte dies the day after asking Chase to write his obituary, and the trail leads our sleuth to a house all of whose inhabitants sport the names of historic figures.
In “Ringside Seat for Murder†Chase witnesses a bizarre murder during a wrestling match where one of the athletes (using the term loosely) is stabbed in the back with a poisoned dart while pinned to the mat by his opponent.
Front Page Detective never pretended to be a classic, but for all its cliches and Grade ZZZ production values it was a pioneering effort in tele-detection that deserves perhaps a wee bit more than to be totally forgotten.
September 8th, 2012 at 6:59 pm
Mike:
The synopsis, or set up for Pieges is also the set up for Lured with Lucille Ball, George Sanders, and Douglas Sirk at the helm. As for Front Page Detective, I saw several of these episodes, don’t ask which, when they were new. It was always clear they lacked ambition, but Edmund Lowe was capable and likable. I always looked for his name.
September 8th, 2012 at 8:18 pm
Edmund Lowe movies reviewed on this blog:
TRANSATLANTIC, reviewed by Dan Stumpf https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=13138
GUILTY AS HELL, by Walter Albert https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=12831
BOMBAY MAIL, by me https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=10278
SEVEN SINNERS, by David L. Vineyard https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=4527
TRANSATLANTIC, by Walter Albert https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=1682
MAD HOLIDAY, by me https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=988
DRESSED TO KILL, by John Apostolou https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=875
GIFT OF GAB, by Walter Albert https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=860
I’d forgotten there were so many!
September 8th, 2012 at 9:46 pm
Steve:
Re Collector to Collector. There used to be a guy who called himself Marvin of the Movies. A great guy. He claimed to have somwhere between 30,000 – 40,000 titles. I believed him. Marvin passed a few years ago and I have no idea what happened to his significant collection. Unfortunate if these things are gone.
September 8th, 2012 at 10:08 pm
Barry
I don’t know which of the links above prompted your thinking of Marvin of the Movies, but in cinematic circles, he was very well known. Leonard Maltin’s tribute to him when he died in April 2011 says he had 42,000 movies on tape and DVD.
http://blogs.indiewire.com/leonardmaltin/farewell_marvin_of_the_movies
As for his collection, his online obituary says:
“His family has tentative plans to donate his collection to a film library.”
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/apr/28/local/la-me-marvin-eisenman-20110428
It’s nice to know that so many films do exist. I have no idea if his family followed through, but it sounds as though they knew the value of what he had. As for me, I have a lot way to go before I amass that many films.
Here’s a link to a great video about him:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Z_uiKyxUWQ
September 8th, 2012 at 10:22 pm
Transatlantic was the title that started me thinking. His daughter Roslyn was in touch shortly aftr his death but not since. I did not know either the number of films, although I had an idea, or what they planned doing with the titles. Have already ordered Bombay Mail. I like trains too.
September 9th, 2012 at 6:26 am
“The Dancing Detective” is my favourite Woolrich short story. I also enjoyed the tv-film in a special noir series. As far as I can remember this film was directed by Peter Bogdanovich, but I am not sure.
September 9th, 2012 at 11:53 am
Josef
You’re quite right about Peter Bogdanovich. That was an episode of FALLEN ANGELS that you saw, based on “The Dancing Detective.” The series aired on Showtime, the premium cable channel. There were two seasons, 15 episodes in all. Some were released on VHS cassette, which I believe I have, but I have no idea why any of them ever came out on DVD. I looked once, but at the time I couldn’t even find them on the collector-to-collector market.
Besides three episodes based on Woolrich stories, there were two by Jim Thompson, two by Raymond Chandler, one each by Dashiell Hammett, David Goodis, James Ellroy, Mickey Spillane and a few more. Not a shabby bunch at all!
Thanks for the reminder. I’ll have to start looking for this series again.
September 9th, 2012 at 10:43 am
Woolrich, the most powerful of all noir authors? Puh-lease!!!!
September 9th, 2012 at 11:21 am
#7. So who was the most powerful of all noir authors?
September 9th, 2012 at 11:56 am
D.A.
I’ll echo Michael’s question. Woolrich has been one of my favorite writers for almost 60 years, but I know his style of writing drives some people crazy. What noir writers (noir, not hard-boiled) do you enjoy?
September 10th, 2012 at 8:15 am
Today I found a book about Eugen Weidmann in the local mystery bookstore. It is a biographical novel by the French journalist Roger Colombani. Its original title is: “L’affaire Weidmann” (published by Albin Michel in Paris 1989). I don’t think that it was ever published in English.
September 10th, 2012 at 10:44 am
Synchronicity strikes again!
September 11th, 2012 at 6:20 am
Writing as he did, when he did, Woolrich is the most serious contender for the MR NOIR title–if they ever give one out.