As Disney quietly disappears huge swathes of film history into its vaults, I'm going to spend 2020 celebrating Twentieth Century Fox and the Fox Film Corporation's films, what one might call their output if only someone were putting it out.
And now they've quietly disappeared William Fox's name from the company: guilty by association with Rupert Murdoch, even though he never associated with him.
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Two of the 1940s Raymond Chandler adaptations, Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep (1946) and Edward Dmytryk's Murder, My Sweet (1944), are rightly considered classics. Hawks identified the key challenge of the first-person detective story: find a leading man interesting enough that the audience doesn't get bored of seeing him in every scene. Hawks hired Bogart.
Dmytryk was lumbered with Dick Powell, but Powell stretched himself and Dmytryk did everything to make the surroundings interesting, even nightmarish.
The third movie from the third major studio is Robert Montgomery's Lady in the Lake (1947), in which Montgomery is wrong for the role but replaces himself with a subjective camera that trundles through the scenes, panning cumbersomely from one awkward performer to the next. The device doesn't help anything, never stops being distracting, but is always sort of amusing.
Fox's film of Chandler's The High Window, retitled The Brasher Doubloon (1947) after the rare and possibly cursed coin that serves as its MacGuffin, certainly suffers from a flat central performance from another Montgomery, George. He's capable enough that you could imagine him captaining the average thriller, but when you've got him in front of you for every one of a film's seventy-two minutes, those minutes seem to extend unnaturally. His leading lady, Nancy Guild, seems to be trying hard, but that's not really a commendation. It's hard to say if the lack of tension is at all her fault, because everything she shoots out just sort of falls into space and perishes, a bit like the late Mr. Murdock whose death, captured by a rogue newsreel cameraman, is the inciting incident lurking in the backstory of this movie.
The lack of any central spark is a real shame, because we're in the hands of a noir master, John Brahm, a German emigre who also helmed The Locket, an insane Freudian Babushka doll of nested flashbacks (where he had Robert Mitchum), Gothic serial killer farragos The Lodger and Hangover Square (both enlivened by Laird Cregar), and a few other snazzy thrillers as well as numerous stylish TV episodes for The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Boris Karloff's Thriller.
Every shot has a certain zing. Granted a disturbing desert wind by the scenario, he animates his frames with billowing shadows. Ceilings crush. Faces thrust. And what faces! If Montgomery and Guild's sculpted beauty grows dull, the gargoyles pressing in around them never do.
There's an exciting turn from actual teenager Conrad Janis, playing the kind of young punk who's usually played by a pushing-thirty veteran. The authentic callowness, weaponized by a feline slink and wile, is electrifying.
As Marlowe's client, the "eccentric" widow, Florence Bates delivers a ferocious performance that seems to be happening a long way away from Montgomery, who can't quite make it out. And there are a couple of Germans on hand as well. Alfred Linder was mostly confined to second-string thug roles, which is what he gets here, but he's scarred-up and terrifically menacing.
Best of all is Fritz Kortner as the blackmailing cameraman. A major player in his native cinema, whether lusting after Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box or Marlene Dietrich in Die Frau, nach der man sich sehnt, he's always fascinating. Forced from his homeland, he never really took root in Hollywood, and you can see him slightly struggling with the language, but his magnetism is undiminished and his phrasing gains as much as it loses by fighting its way through the tangle of an unfamiliar tongue.
So what you end up with is a movie that works as clips or frame grabs but is quite sleepy to watch. Like a masterpiece died and came back as a shuffling zombie version of itself.
It's all, in principle, excellent, except for the black hole in the center. The classical Hollywood style was constructed around movie stars, and so nothing in the director's toolkit can solve the problem of a lack of central charisma. As one Montgomery was replaced by the movie camera, this one could be subbed by a wardrobe or a roll top desk without making any appreciable difference. And it's not that he's terrible. He just lacks that ineffable essence.
Philip Marlowe, after all, is quite a diffuse character: he's defined mainly by the unique authorial voice he channels.
Forgotten by Fox is a regular fortnightly series by David Cairns, author of Shadowplay.