When Strangers Marry (1944)

Directed by William Castle; produced by Frank King and Maurice King

Millie Baxter (Kim Hunter) arrives in New York to meet Paul (Dean Jagger), her husband of a few weeks. As more than one person remarks, it was as if Millie had married a stranger, as she had met Paul only thrice before agreeing to become his wife. At first it seems as if Paul is deliberately avoiding her; afterward, it’s as if he’s deliberately avoiding everyone else. As suspicions crowd her mind, Millie determines to find out the truth about her new husband, helped by her hometown friend, Fred (Robert Mitchum).

Though the title makes the film sound like a guide-book for newlyweds, and the poster resembles something from a 1950s teenage sex-education pamphlet, When Strangers Marry is a well-made if slight thriller, maximising the best of its assets. It is a production of Momogram Pictures, the most famous company on Hollywood’s metaphoric ‘Poverty Row’. The small budget is clear here, but so are the results: it’s what can be done with few resources.

Interestingly, top-billing went to Jagger upon the film’s release, with ‘Bob Mitchum’ in third place, after Hunter. When the film was re-released in 1949 (re-entitled Betrayed, a more generic and less provocative title than the original), Jagger and Mitchum’s positions were reversed, and Mitchum’s given name became the more familiar ‘Robert’. In terms of screen-time and significance to the movie, the two male stars are about equal.

Though both men give fine performances, these are surpassed by Hunter’s. Her excellent acting anchors the story and her expressions are lively, realistic and telling. Her character experiences the most growth, as well, as Millie struggles to come to terms with the mystery in which she finds herself.

The story rests a bit complacently on coincidence, though the coincidence is a minor one, and is overcome by other elements. The script does a good job of infusing Millie’s initial period in New York, when she is bewildered and alone, with an air of surrealism: callers on the telephone whom she can’t hear, blazing neon lights, raucous music from somewhere, notes slipped through door-cracks.

The direction also rises to the challenge. Castle later went into horror films, some of which are truly bad; in When Strangers Marry, he contributes to the nascent genre of film noir, and deserves credit for his work. There is a nightmarish feel to much of what Millie goes through - perhaps foreshadowing Castle’s later movies - that is effective. (That’s Castle in the photograph the police are given.)

The film includes touches that are as memorable as more significant moments - the annoyed bar-tender handing out glasses of water to customers who want “nothing”, the menacing police detective who obtains information by repeatedly pointing out that a witness’s “life may depend on it”. And who knew there were small businesses in the ‘40s that provided cheap trips to places in private cars? These suggest more than the average amount of thought was spent on the film.

While not a classic of its type, When Strangers Marry is a nifty little thriller that puts a lot into its 67 minutes.

The Man in the Hat (2020)

Directed by John-Paul Davidson and Stephen Warbeck; produced by Daniel-Konrad Cooper and Dominic Dromgoole

A man (Ciarán Hinds) spends all day at a table outside a Marseilles restaurant, a vaguely dissatisfied expression on his face. In the evening, he sees five men throw what looks to be a shrouded body into a canal. When they spot him, the man hurries back to his hotel and departs on what seems to have been a planned journey north across France.

This is a movie that defies the genres. It has been described as a comedy – the poster, with its misleading ‘tagline’, implies it, too – and, while it has amusing moments, mostly silent, it is not really a comedy. Nor is it a drama. I would describe the atmosphere in the film as one of gentle melancholy, a happy kind of sad, if you will, or perhaps close to what Germans call Sehnsucht.

As for its form, that too is difficult to place. Though superficially a straightforward, if episodic, adventure, The Man in the Hat has no plot, no story-line, at least on the surface. It is a series of vignettes, some of which feature the Man at their centre; in others, he merely observes or eavesdrops on a scene, or on dialogue.

The movie is, possibly, random memories, woven together into a very loose narrative, or it may be a dream. There are elements of the surreal to it: the Man keeps seeing or meeting the same people, though, logically, he should not, and he does not think this strange. It could be an allegory; for what also remains a puzzle, though clues may be taken from the phrase the Man chalks on the trunk of a tree, and from the fact that most of the vignettes appear to be about loss.

Hinds is the main performer, but his character, about which we learn nothing directly, is, as I wrote above, not always in the middle of events. Hinds is called on to react a great deal, such as when he first meets a couple of moonshiners who wordlessly agree to help him with automobile troubles, or when he overhears an involved story featuring a girl’s vanished boyfriend. While there is some mugging for the camera, by him and other actors, in the style favoured by silent-film makers, he nonetheless, with just a couple of words spoken through the film (other players say much more), make us sympathise with the Man.

Others in the cast do very well. They are a mixture of British and French performers, few, perhaps, known to North American audiences except Stephen Dillane. Aoife Hinds, the star’s daughter, plays a singing garage mechanic, while her mother, Hélène Patarot, portrays another.

The writing is very good; at least I think it is: for what I perceive the movie to be about, it is very good. There are moments of misfire. One example is when the Man spills olive oil on his shirt. He cuts out the stained patch of cloth, then uses a felt marker to make a portion of his white under-shirt the same colour as his outer garment, creating the illusion of a complete shirt. This Mr Bean-like scene is incongruous, since nothing else the Man does is similar. The writers were probably waiting years to include it in some film or other.

Yet there are effecting scenes, such as when the Man consoles another, who is crushed by grief, or when a wistful song plays while the Man sits seemingly alone in his car.

This is certainly not a movie for all tastes. It may be seen as a waste of time by many; one amateur reviewer called it a ‘failed travelogue’; others saw no point to it, or missed what I think was the point and considered it no more than light-hearted fun. Professional reviewers seem to have applied the word ‘whimsical’ to it quite often. I would not call much in The Man in the Hat whimsical. Nor is it depressing. Writing this review a week after I watched the movie, I find that I like it more now than I did immediately after its conclusion, and think about it more than I did. If you like that sort of motion picture, you will find The Man in the Hat worth its ninety-five minutes.

Raw Deal (1948)

Directed by Anthony Mann; produced by Edward Small

Joe Sullivan (Dennis O’Keefe) is facing another two or three years in prison before he’s eligible for parole; unable to stand such incarceration, he breaks out, with the active help of Pat Regan (Claire Trevor), a woman long in love with him, and the promised assistance of his old partner in crime, Rick Coyle (Raymond Burr). But the escape doesn’t go as planned, and Joe and Pat have to hide out with Ann Martin (Marsha Hunt), who had worked on Joe’s case and remained interested in him. But a police dragnet and an unwilling hostage aren’t Joe’s only problems: Rick doesn’t want to share the proceeds of their joint crime, and intends to eliminate his old friend.

Raw Deal has some good things going for it, but it is, after all, a pretty standard crime movie. The prison-break is not shown in detail, only Joe’s actual escape, so no thought is expended on that aspect.

Neither is there any explanation of the crime for which he is sentenced to jail; even his original length of imprisonment is not noted. The protagonist is caught in a love triangle, and double-crossed by his former partner; both expected developments in the plot.

None of this unoriginality is necessarily bad; there are only so many plots and crises to be had in film noir. But few of these features are handled differently than in other movies. Joe Sullivan is a tough guy, cynical and quick to violence, but decent when it comes down to it; something we’ve seen in a hundred previous movies.

Burr plays a good villain, but early in his career, he filled such roles as a matter of routine - and would anyone realistically trust this guy Coyle? (I recall seeing only one movie in which Burr portrayed a good guy, Please Murder Me, from 1956, filmed perhaps not coincidentally shortly before he became one of tv’s famous good guys, Perry Mason.) Burr’s Coyle, who has a thing for fire, does anticipate Lee Marvin’s famous viciousness in 1953’s The Big Heat, but his sadism, while effective, is not unusual.

The action too is nothing extraordinary, with some gunplay and fisticuffs, though how John Ireland’s character, the interestingly named Fantail, not only survives, but is practically unaffected by, a .45 calibre bullet wound at close-range, I don’t know.

While the script provides lacklustre action and plot, it does much better in terms of character. Joe, though his attributes are the routine traits of a middle-level criminal and betrayed convict, has depth to him that is mildly intriguing. The women in the movie fare better, both being three-dimensional portrayals, though Trevor’s voice-over narration, nonetheless doing something for her role, seems out of place in a story with so many points of view.

The acting is good: O’Keefe’s work convincingly different than his nice-guy role in Cover Up, reviewed in December, and, as befits their characters, Trevor and Hunt do very well. The direction is also satisfactory, though Mann would go on to do much better.

Of interest in a few ways, Raw Deal is nothing that stands out from the large collection of film noir movies of its era. An adequate time-filler, it is enjoyable but forgettable.

Fort Dobbs (1958)

Directed by Gordon Douglas; produced by Martin Rackin

After killing a man, cowboy Gar Davis (Clint Walker) flees into Comanche territory, where he meets a woman (Virginia Mayo) and her son (Richard Eyer). The trio evade an Indian attack and, chased into the wilderness, must make it to the nearest U.S. Army fort, before their pursuers catch them, and their own mutual distrust destroys them.

When this film was made, Clint Walker was at the height of the fame generated by his starring role in the Cheyenne television series. Unfortunately, Fort Dobbs has the feel of an extended tv series episode. There is nothing new to be seen here, which would not be bad if what was old were at least handled with novelty or excitement.

The story has been done before; not long before, in fact: Fort Dobbs is reminiscent of both Hondo and Shane. The writing is ordinary and the plot predictable; the significance of the dead man found by Davis is immediately apparent when he meets the farm woman. The characters are humdrum, with the exception of an amoral gun-runner played by Brian Keith.

The script also is mundane, and introduces an anachronism: the Henry repeating rifles, of which so much is made by the characters, are treated as a new development in firearms (they were first produced in the early 1860s), yet the revolver all the cowboys use is standard Colt from the 1870s. Such displacement of props is unfortunately common in low-budget westerns, but the props in question are not usually central to the story.

The action is adequate - there is in particular an excellent though short scene demonstrating how devastating a repeating rifle must have been at the time, even in the hands of the inexpert - but the film is undermined by poor production values. The viewer receives the impression of everything being done with a strict accountant standing beside the director. The town into which Davis rides at the beginning looks composed of a few shop-fronts; though boasting two hotels, its population seems very sparse; the scenery in the wilderness is a standard western-genre setting, probably replicated in a dozen tv shows and a hundred movies.

The acting is good. Walker is a convincing and likeable ‘strong, silent type’, while Mayo and Keith fill their roles satisfactorily. Young Richard Eyer is an admirable child-talent.

What all this adds up to is a very ordinary film, perhaps even less than average. It was probably popular at the time due to its star. Sixty years later, Walker is barely remembered even by western fans; his first starring role and the movie it is in, are barely memorable.