Mon 11 Feb 2019
A Book! Movie!! Review by Dan Stumpf: DOROTHY B. HUGHES The Fallen Sparrow / (1943)
Posted by Steve under Mystery movies , Reviews[4] Comments
DOROTHY B. HUGHES – The Fallen Sparrow. Duell, Sloan & Pearce, hardcover, 1942. Paperback editions include: Dell #31, mapback edition, 1943 or 1944; Bantam, 1970/1979; Carroll & Graf, 1988.
THE FALLEN SPARROW. RKO, 1943. John Garfield, Maureen O’Hara, Walter Slezak, Patricia Morison, John Banner, John Miljan, Hugh Beaumont. Screenplay by Warren Duff. Directed by Richard Wallace.
I’ve long been impressed by Dorothy B. Hughes’ ability to put the reader into the head of her protagonists while writing in the third person. In a Lonely Place featured a murderous sociopath; here it’s a paranoid who really is being persecuted, but in both cases we follow a narrative in which we’re not always quite sure of what is actually happening to the central character . Or if we can trust that he’s reading it right
Sparrow opens two years before the story proper starts. Kit McKitrick, young, rich and idealistic, joined the International Brigade to fight Facism in Spain. As things fell apart he snatched some valuable relics from a looter, then spent two year in a prison cell being tortured to give up their whereabouts. His most vivid memory of that time is the periodic visits of a man he never saw… a limping man from Berlin, whose arrival always brought on new and more painful torment.
Then we switch to New York City in Wartime, with Kit returned to his Park Avenue crowd, thanks to an escape engineered (he thinks) by a longtime cop-pal who plunged to his death from a window while Kit was recuperating out West. The papers say it was accident or suicide, Kit knows it was murder.
This forms the springboard for a perfectly crafted tale of murder and subversion among the Smart Set, as Kit’s mission of detection becomes a journey of discovery that uncovers some troubling truths about the people he once called friends – and about himself.
Hughes builds suspense with some clever twists: Kit starts hearing the limping man from Berlin here in New York — or does he? Then he learns that his captors engineered his “escape†from Spain as a ploy to get him to lead them to the relics. Or did they? And suddenly, in his mind (and ours?) he is as much hunter as hunted.
When RKO filmed this the next year they wisely did it in early-noir style, with a few nods to The Maltese Falcon (1941) spiced up with expressionist lighting and oppressive camera angles. This being wartime, there are a couple of patriotic speeches about Why We Fight, but by and large the emphasis is on McKitrcick’s fragile sanity.
Producer Robert Fellows (Hondo, The Screaming Mimi, Ring of Fear, etc.) casts this perfectly, with a trio of femmes fatales that includes Maureen O’Hara (icily coiffed and made up in an Audrey Totter look) Patricia Morision and Martha O’Driscoll. John Banner, Erford Gage and Hugh Beaumont skulk around nicely in the background under the sinister supervision of Walter Slezak as a wheelchair-bound (or is he?) aristocrat with an interest in torture and the Borgias, chewing the scenery with voracious relish.
And best of all, there’s John Garfield, that edgiest of leading men, as the half-crazy hero of the piece. Nobody could convey angst like Garfield, and he sinks into the role wonderfully, veering from manic energy to desperation with a tic of the cheek. He even seems to sweat on cue!
Scenarist Warren Duff (who produced Out of the Past) streamlines Hughes’ book quite well, shortcutting past some of the novel’s digressions and wisely letting the actors convey their characters’ complexities. The result is a film that brings the book to life and makes it pure Cinema — and a fun movie to watch.
February 11th, 2019 at 10:35 pm
Like Dan I like the film better than most seem to, though I do think it is flawed. Made a few years later in the full bloom of the noir movement, this might have been a classic.
The book is prime Hughes and an interesting foray into Eric Ambler country within the whole hard-boiled milieu of many of her early books.
Perhaps its because she has no series character, but I have never felt Hughes got the notice due her as one of the best voices not only in the suspense field, but also in the hard-boiled school when she chose to write in it.
RIDE THE PINK HORSE, DREADFUL JOURNEY, IN A LONELY PLACE, THE EXPENDABLE MAN … for a while she didn’t seem capable of a miss.
February 12th, 2019 at 11:54 am
Not a book I’ve read but I really enjoyed the movie, which I’ve seen twice, most recently only a few months ago. After seeing the first time, I never felt the need to read the book. I may have been wrong about that.
February 12th, 2019 at 12:02 pm
As far as the author, Dorothy B. Hughes, is concerned, I’ve always wondered why it was she stopped writing as abruptly as she did. Almost all of her mysteries were written in the 1940s with nothing major from her after 1952. (Her Edgar award in 1951 was for her reviews.)
All kinds of reasons, I assume. We’re lucky to have as many great books as she did write.
February 15th, 2019 at 12:39 pm
I think Hughes became more interested in reading and collecting mysteries than writing them herself. As a mystery book reviewer for several newspapers she was, I think, one of the best of her time, alongside Boucher and Lenore Glen Offord (another mystery writer turned reviewer). Books from her vast collection of crime novels still show up for sale. She wrote her name in every book she owned so they are all considered association copies.