Monthly Archives: August 2018

  • A Woman’s Face

    Old YorkerFilm review

    George Cukor (1941)

    Both IMDB and Wikipedia categorise A Woman’s Face as film noir – a reminder that the term is expansive to the point of meaninglessness.  Wikipedia’s article on noir sensibly has a ‘Problems of Definition’ section, which includes the following:

    ‘“We’d be oversimplifying things in calling film noir oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel …” – this set of attributes constitutes the first of many attempts to define film noir made by French critics Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton in their 1955 book Panorama du film noir américain 1941–1953  …, the original and seminal extended treatment of the subject. … They emphasize that not every film noir embodies all five attributes in equal measure—one might be more dreamlike; another, particularly brutal.’

    It’s a stretch to fit any of Borde and Chaumeton’s five adjectives to A Woman’s Face.  George Cukor’s movie is evidence, rather, that any black-and-white American melodrama of the period in which a character plans or commits a crime (or biggish sin) has become, with the passage of time, eligible for admission to the noir pantheon.

    The source material of A Woman’s Face is Il était une fois, a play by the Belgian-born Francis de Croisset.  The first screen adaptation was a Swedish film of 1938 (whose title also translates as A Woman’s Face), starring Ingrid Bergman in what was almost her last role before coming to America.  The screenplay for this remake, by Donald Ogden Stewart, retains the Swedish setting:  what results takes place in a no man’s land albeit closer to Hollywood than to Scandinavia.  (This may be the only film noir to include a Swedish folk-dancing routine as a supposedly dramatic moment.)  Stewart is best known as the author or adapter of sophisticated comedies:  he and Cukor had worked together on The Philadelphia Story just the year before.   Both were evidently determined to keep their sense of humour in check on A Woman’s Face but the lurid plot and Joan Crawford’s deadly serious playing of the main role occasionally combine to comical effect.  Not often enough, though, to stave off this viewer’s boredom.

    The story of A Woman’s Face derives from a variation on the ancient equation of physical and moral ugliness.  Anna Holm (Crawford) was facially disfigured in childhood:  her ‘brilliant’ but drunken father started a fire in which Anna was badly burned.  No one can bear to look at the hideously scarred right-hand side of her face; as a result, she is devoid of human sympathy.  She makes a living as leader of a blackmailing ring and proprietress of a tavern.  (So she’s a kind of twisted precursor of the determined, resourceful businesswoman Crawford went on to play in Mildred Pierce.)   At Anna’s tavern one night, the shady aristocrat Torsten Barring (Conrad Veidt) hosts a party whose guests include Vera Segert (Osa Massen).  Torsten has more social status than funds:  when the tavern refuses to extend his credit, he meets Anna for the first time.  They surprise each other – she sorting out his money problem, he treating her as if she were fair of face and soul.  They part on the tacit understanding that their paths will cross again while Vera, a married woman having an affair, becomes Anna’s latest blackmail victim.

    Vera’s husband Gustaf Segert (Melvyn Douglas) is an eminent plastic surgeon.  Anna calls on Vera to demand money in exchange for incriminating letters to her lover.  Gustaf, who returns home unexpectedly, is professionally fascinated by Anna’s disfigurement and offers to treat her.   In the course of the next couple of years, she has twelve operations and her scars disappear.  Anna renews her acquaintance with Torsten, with whom she seems meant to be in love, telling him she’s ‘not yet on the side of the angels’.  It’s a significant phrase, implying that now she’s no longer physically hideous, she could be on the way to moral improvement too.  For the time being, though, she agrees to carry out a plan on behalf of Torsten.  His rich uncle, Consul Magnus Barring (Albert Bassermann), has made a will leaving everything to his infant grandson Lars-Erik (Richard Nichols).  If the child were to die first, Torsten would become the Consul’s sole heir.  (I wasn’t clear why Torsten would recruit a blackmailer to murder the boy but guess beggars can’t be choosers.)

    Anna gets herself employed, under an assumed name, as Lars-Erik’s governess.  Once she’s in a position to kill the child, however, the compassion that grows in her as a result of her plastic surgery, starts to get in the way and raise Torsten’s suspicions.  On the Consul’s birthday, during a sleigh ride, Torsten abducts Lars-Erik himself.  Anna and Dr Segert, who’s conveniently a house guest of the Consul’s, give chase.  The pursuit ends with Anna shooting Torsten dead.  This gives rise to the murder trial that supplies the narrative framework of A Woman’s Face:  the above events take the form of flashbacks, as the dramatis personae give evidence to the court and the true circumstances in which Anna killed the dastardly Torsten are gradually revealed.

    The film needs an emotionally protean actress to make its barmy story compelling.  Instead, it has Joan Crawford.   It seems from what Cukor told his biographer Gavin Lambert that he was anxious for Crawford to underplay (and felt she did so successfully only in the first half of the film).  A strategy of underplaying, depending as it does on the actor’s bringing something out of herself instead of asserting it through external means, seems pointless in the case of this particular star.  Anna Holm’s volatile moods, as interpreted by Crawford, aren’t even interestingly distinct: she just seems cold and cross most of the time.  As usual, it takes an age for her to execute a change of facial expression.

    As the surgeon (he and Anna fall in love in due course), Melvyn Douglas does underplay well until the closing stages, where his tendency to pomposity starts to peep through.  Osa Massen seems to have been cast as Segert’s faithless wife in order to make Joan Crawford look good.   Hyper-cute Richard Nichols unfortunately makes you sympathise with Torsten for wanting to bump off Lars-Erik.  Marjorie Main is remarkably ethnically wrong as Consul Barring’s loyal but now envious housekeeper Emma Kristiansdotter.   The genuine Europeans, Albert Bassermann and Conrad Veidt, are easier to take.  There are two entertaining episodes:  first, when Dr Segert removes the many, many bandages from Anna’s face after her final operation; second, when she prepares to undo a bolt on a cable car in which she and Lars-Erik are travelling so that the child can fall to his death.  Since the outcome of both episodes is obvious, Cukor does well to make them as suspenseful as he does.  In contrast, the sleigh chase goes on too long and repetitively.

    The BFI screening was introduced by an old favourite – walkie-talkie man, who explained, with a rather irritated little laugh, that ‘decent prints of this film are incredibly rare’.  The laugh almost made it sound as if the audience had been clamouring for the movie rather than responding to BFI’s decision to include it in their Joan Crawford retrospective.  Why didn’t someone check that a decent print was hard to come by before that decision was taken?  Walkie-talkie man added (I’d guess inaudibly for anyone who’s not used to his ‘cool’ throwaways) that he hoped the ‘background hiss’ on the soundtrack wouldn’t spoil our enjoyment etc etc.  I already had a headache and this warm-up act, as usual, didn’t improve my mood.  But I don’t honestly think either of these things, or the background hiss, was the main obstacle to enjoying A Woman’s Face.

    8 August 2018

  • Spy! – John Vassall (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    Ben Rea (1980)

    The subject of the first play in Spy![1] had none of the glamour of Britain’s best-known moles of recent months, the real-life Anthony Blunt and the fictional Bill Haydon.  John Vassall was set in 1950s Moscow – drab, silent, freezing in the Cold War.  This was worlds away from the psychophysical labyrinth of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (never mind the church spires and choral nunc dimittis in the closing titles sequence that John Irvin used as an ironic counterpoint to ‘The Circus’).  Ruth Carter’s script for John Vassall even implied that the title character (John Normington), a junior member of staff at the British Embassy in Moscow, might have got his posting there simply because, as a single man, he required less accommodation.   There was a promising dramatic irony here:  in the event, Vassall’s increasing feelings of isolation were what tempted him into the city’s homosexual underground.  This triggered the threats of blackmail that supposedly led to his working as a Soviet spy.  Yet the play’s description of Vassall’s messy life in Moscow didn’t develop and the ‘dramatised reconstruction’ gradually withered into an illustrated documentary.  There was more and more information in the soundtrack narrative but little penetration of character – all the way up to Vassall’s arrest and imprisonment on spying charges the best part of a decade later, in 1962.  He received an eighteen-year prison sentence and served ten years in three different British prisons.  The relative harshness of his sentence won’t be lost on a post-‘Fourth Man’ audience but John Vassall can hardly claim credit for that impact[2].

    The early stages of the play, directed by Ben Rea, were the best.  Vassall was established as a man of, as he later admitted, limited intelligence and larger social pretension, initially treating his term in Moscow as ‘an adventure’ – with the enthusiasm of a tourist and a social climber, without much sense of responsibility towards his seemingly tedious Embassy work.  The unobtrusive editing sometimes reinforced the contrast between consecutive scenes by not emphasising a break between them and the story moved fluently towards the seduction of Vassall.  It was during this pivotal ‘honeytrap’ episode that I started having doubts about the play.  From a purely practical point of view:  why were there so many seducers?   It must have been hard to get incriminating photographs of Vassall under all the competing flesh.  And how did Vassall react to the seduction?  The polite lack of responsiveness that Mavis Nicholson noted in her interview with him for this week’s Radio Times was mirrored in the play, where it seemed a more glaring omission.  Ruth Carter’s piece changed from a character study into a case history – a cruel fate for the protagonist who, we were told more than once at the start, valued his individuality.  Carter’s script eventually suggested made a crude link between Vassall’s behaviour and a mother obsession that explained his homosexuality etc etc.  It’s worth noting that Vassall points out in the Radio Times interview that the letters he wrote home, all addressed solely to his mother according to the play, were written to both his parents.

    John Normington was expected to blend the few character traits the script supplied – hints of the cultural poseur and the social climber, a whiff of irresponsibility – with a few camp gestures and expressions, then keep repeating the mixture he came up with.  He had to do this virtually in a vacuum, since Vassall was rarely engaged in action or conversation.  It was a thankless task but Normington held on to the character tenaciously.  He was especially good at creating physically contrasting impressions – of dapper self-approval one moment, flabby helplessness the next.  He managed to convey the brittleness of a man who was lacking in support of any kind.  But Vassall’s role was so predominantly passive and reluctant there was only so much Normington could do.  The more active agents – those who manipulated Vassall – were Sinister Foreigners with either a poker face or a maniacal laugh (John Abineri, in the former category, was the best of these).

    For those sick of television espionage the arrival of Spy! on our screens might seem a crushing blow.  Allan Prior conceived the series shortly before Tinker Tailor had turned Britain into a nation of mole-hunters, and the Fourth Man affair hit the headlines.  But the BBC will need more lively material than John Vassall for Spy! to be a hit.  The inherent limitation of ‘faction’ – that the audience may well know the ending – was virtually acknowledged by Ruth Carter, who made no attempt to dramatise events once Vassall had begun to be blackmailed by the Russians.  (The protagonist even stopped writing the letters home that told us something about himself.)  There was nothing about KGB methods of interrogation or what kind of information Vassall was passing to the Soviet Union; nothing either about his sexual habits before or after his time in Moscow.    It was as if the script had been put together entirely from looking at old newspaper cuttings.  This was tough on John Normington and tough too on John Vassall, who ‘now lives alone, under an assumed name’.  Vassall lives to see his real name and his treachery dragged through the mud in a drama series with a finger-pointing title.  It’s adding insult to injury that the recreation of his story doesn’t bring him to life as the individual he was supposedly proud to be.

    [January 1980]

    [1]  Afternote:  The BBC series Spy!, broadcast in early 1980, comprised six single plays, each based on a true story from what IMDB calls ‘the murky world of twentieth-century espionage’.

    [2]  Afternote:  Sir Anthony Blunt was named in November 1979 as the ‘Fourth Man’ in the Cambridge spy ring.  Blunt had confessed to being a Soviet spy back in 1964 after being offered immunity from prosecution.

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