Calcutta (1947)

Directed by John Farrow; produced by Seton I Miller

Bill Cunningham (John Whitney) flies cargo and passengers over ‘The Hump’ from Chungking to Calcutta and back, along with his fellow pilots Neale Gordon (Alan Ladd) and Pedro Blake (William Bendix). Their boozin’ and brawlin’ days are ending, though, as Cunningham tells his friends, to their annoyance, that he is getting married. Yet, just the next day, Cunningham is murdered, his body found in a back alley in Calcutta. Gordon and Blake are determined to find the killer, though there is no lack of suspects, starting with the dead man’s fiancée, Virginia (Gail Russell).

Though it has some good elements, Calcutta comes across as a rather ordinary crime-film. The acting from the leads is only adequate. Ladd gives an uninspired performance, creating a character who is defined principally by his actions, rather than his personality. Russell tries, but she always put me in mind of a singer who doesn’t have the talent or range for what she was called upon to sing (The Uninvited being an exception). In any case, she is miscast here; what is needed is a stronger actress, someone who could present several sides, all credibly.

Better performances are provided by supporting players: for instance, Bendix and Lowell Gilmore, as a night-club owner. The most outstanding characters are created by June Duprez as Marina, a cabaret singer (that’s her own, surprisingly husky, voice, singing in her opening scene), and Edith King, playing Mrs Smith, a shady businesswoman. Marina is having an affair with the commitment-resistant Gordon, and acquiesces in his other, simultaneous affairs, while Mrs Smith is the sort you’d like to have on your side, maybe.

The story is good but nothing that hasn’t been featured, with different names and places, in a hundred other, similar films. The script is the best aspect of Calcutta. There are some memorable lines, such as when Virginia remarks to Gordon, “You don’t trust women one bit, do you?” To which Gordon responds, “Do you?” Virginia smiles and says, “No…” When Virginia, having spent an evening in Gordon’s company, later goes missing, Gordon questions hotel staff the next morning: “Has her bed been slept in?” Marina smiles and says, “I’m glad you asked that question…” Sometimes the stricter cinematic morality of the past forced an inventiveness lacking these days.

One of the unsatisfactory points about Calcutta is that it shouldn’t really have been set in the eponymous city. At first, I had the feeling that the story originally must have been placed in Shanghai. Calcutta is depicted as a very cosmopolitan city, with a raffish atmosphere, rather like a frontier-town, full of eccentric characters on the edge of crime. And it is given a sizeable Chinese minority which I don’t think it had.

Shanghai, on the other hand, was just the sort of location Calcutta looked like in this movie. Filled with a dozen different nationalities, controlled by big business, filled with smugglers, drug-runners and violence (there was a gun-related crime every fifteen minutes), it has been the setting of numerous adventure films. The International Settlement was also home to a large White Russian refugee community; Marina has a Russian surname, and works in a night-club, a common resort for many Shanghailander Russian girls. But that Shanghai had disappeared by the time this film was made, and it turns out that Calcutta was the intended setting all along. The Chinese presence was probably due simply to the fact that Paramount Pictures had more Chinese extras than East Indian. The consequence of all this is that the movie never really feels that it is in Calcutta.

Despite a slightly unusual ending for the era that is nonetheless decently satisfactory, the movie itself is not a successful entry in the crime/adventure genre. A time-filler, everyone connected with Calcutta has done better.