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Happy Birthday, Claude Rains!

The Unsuspected

Original poster.

“The Unsuspected” (Warner Bros., 1947) is a mystery/thriller that starts out silly and eventually becomes preposterous. If you’re willing to make allowances and give your credulity a stretch, it is also very entertaining. As is usually the case, Rains is better than the picture is, and the role is unworthy of his talents. Yet he plays this sort of velvety rubbish better than anyone, and it’s a big, juicy part. One can’t help wishing he had better material to work with; there is nevertheless the unique pleasure of seeing a great actor whip up a feast from table scraps. Rains plays a radio celebrity with a weekly broadcast on which he tells lurid stories of murder and mayhem. (“I give you . . . ‘The Tragedy of the Missing Head.’ “) At the beginning of each broadcast, his announcer (Art Gilmore — one of the busiest voice-over artists in the forties and fifties: he’s also heard on the radio in the first scene of “Rear Window“) introduces him as “Your genial host: the renowned writer, art collector and teller of strange tales, Victor Grandison.” Franz Waxman’s score is hilarious.

Rains handles this sort of melodramatic nonsense so elegantly and makes the balderdash sound so eloquent, it’s easy to forget that the material is not merely second rate, but very hard to put across at all. He makes it seem effortless. Try speaking some of this stuff yourself, and you’ll see what he was up against.

An hour into the picture, Victor Grandison has already murdered three people that we know about. Presumably, there are others. Currently, he’s working on two more. There’s his ward, Matilda, a multi-millionairess debutante orphaned in childhood. She dotes on dear old Grandy. If she predeceases him, her fortune is his. She was lost at sea (plane crash); that was months ago; everyone’s forgotten her. And now she washes up. Alive. Touch of amnesia, though. Enter Mr Steven Howard (Michael North); says he’s her husband. She can’t remember him, but she’s falling under his spell. Handsome devil; mysterious — dangerous, perhaps. He’s in for a nasty bump on the head. Matilda, the dear child — a shame, really, most unfortunate. Oh, why did the wretched girl go and lose her heart to Mr Howard? Why does he keep poking about in other people’s affairs? Who is he, what’s he after? Well, no matter: at this moment, Mr Steven Howard is locked inside a trunk, unconscious, and about to be dumped into a landfill. And now, dear old Grandy must stage Matilda’s suicide — and quickly, too — finish the business before tonight’s broadcast. Watching Claude Rains cajole Joan Caulfield into drinking the fatal Champagne always makes me think of the old Flanders and Swann song, “Have Some Madeira, M’Dear.”

As you must expect in a Production Code picture, things go terribly wrong for our criminal. And it all leads to this thrilling conclusion.

The Passionate Friends

Poster from French release.

Rains gave one of his finest performances in David Lean’s “The Passionate Friends,” but the picture has never found a wide audience. Perhaps the plot’s structure was too complicated for audiences in 1949. Perhaps it still is. After a brief opening narration, there’s an extended flashback sequence in which a second flashback sequence, also of considerable length, is nested. This creates, in the first twenty minutes or so, a chronological ambiguity that is more than a little disorienting. The mild confusion it creates is appropriate to the story, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it put many people off. And the leading lady, Ann Todd, is a semi-forbidding presence — frosty as Garbo but without the mystique.

Rains plays Howard Justin, a wealthy, powerful man; Ann Todd (Mrs David Lean at the time) plays his wife, Mary. Theirs is a reasonably stable, loveless marriage of convenience that has lasted more than ten years. Early in their marriage, Mary drifted into an affair with her old flame, Steven Stratton (Trevor Howard). Misery all round. Mary ended it quickly. She hasn’t seen or heard from him since. The infidelity episode is told in a flashback. Now the story moves to the present: it is nine years after the crisis. No further indiscretions have disturbed their chilly domestic calm. Mary is in Switzerland on holiday. Howard, detained by pressing business, will join her in a few days. Her first morning at the hotel, Mary is at breakfast when Stratton enters the café. They’ve had no contact for nine years and now Fate (or a missed flight connection) has thrown them together. His suite is next door to hers: he’s flying home that evening. He is mellower, easier; he’s happily married, a proud father. The sexual tension between them has disappeared, friendly goodwill and mutual interests remain. They decide to spend the day together. In the afternoon, while they’re picnicking across the lake, Howard arrives at the hotel — a day early. Mme Justin is out; she will return presently: very well, he’ll have lunch in the café, he and Miss Layton (Betty Ann Davies) will work until his wife shows up.

To a large extent, Claude Rains’ reputation is based on the range and complexity of emotions he is able to express with his extraordinary voice. One doesn’t think of him without thinking of The Voice. But this next clip demonstrates that he is also devastatingly effective when speaking not a word. David Lean’s direction of this sequence is wonderfully imaginative and cinematic.

Extraordinary how eloquently Lean’s staging of the episode conveys, wordlessly, the tidal wave of jealousy that crashes over Howard Justin when he sees his wife with his former rival. Nine years earlier, when Mary cuckolded him, he could readily forgive her and rise above his humiliation. But now, when she has not cuckolded him, when he only imagines she has, he finds the humiliation intolerable, unforgivable. What has happened to make it different this time? The sight of Stratton’s luggage outside the room next to Mary’s gives him a jolt, but a minute later, when he sees Mary come into the room, race out to the balcony and wave at the departing speedboat, the sight shatters him. When she turns her back on the lake, and comes back into the room — clever David Lean, to have those curtains hide her face! (“Beauty’s veil doth cover every blot”) — the tears in her eyes drive him into a frenzy. The first time I saw “The Passionate Friends,” I took these few extraordinary minutes as a particularly well-acted episode of a husband who, after being confronted with several pieces of damning evidence, arrives at the perfectly reasonable, yet totally wrong conclusion that his wife has betrayed him. That is, unquestionably, what happens in the scene, but the betrayal that drives him wild is not the most obvious one; it’s crueler and more subtle. But I was not fully aware of it until I saw their next scene together.

It is a month or so later, they’re back in London, living separately. Mary comes to his house one night. The divorce is still in the works. Howard has sworn to ruin Stratton: he’s prepared to be liberal with her, but her seducer must be punished. This scene contains what I consider to be some of the greatest acting Claude Rains ever did.

Mary begs Howard to believe that she and Stratton have done nothing wrong, and we know she’s telling the truth. But Howard doesn’t accuse her of adultery. It isn’t her sexual infidelity that he finds too hard to bear, it is his realization that she has starved him emotionally; until he saw her race out to that balcony, he had never seen her so unguarded, so lively, so passionate. And then those tears . . . affection, tenderness, love. And none of them for him. It is not only her body she has given to another man, but her whole self. And what has she given him? He says she has given him “the love you’d give a dog, the kindness you’d give a beggar, and the loyalty of a bad servant” — an accusation that cannot be gainsaid. (The excellent screenplay is by Eric Ambler.) Rains very rarely played anything of such naked emotional intensity. “The Invisible Man” is one of the only other pictures in which Rains cuts loose with such unhinged, volcanic fury. But the Invisible Man is already an emotional wreck when first we meet him: the wonder of that performance is Rains’ ability to sustain and increase the intensity over the course of the entire picture. “The Passionate Friends” presents a different challenge: an unflappable, highly polished man of the world who is pushed to the brink of madness by jealousy — and because the actor is Claude Rains, we see the precise moment that the madness strikes him. I cannot help thinking that Rains’ personal animosity toward Ann Todd is partly responsible for the stunning emotional violence he brings into this scene. He was enormously fond of David Lean, admired and respected him, but also really loved him. Ann Todd’s unprofessional conduct on the set drove Rains to distraction, but worse, he found her brutal treatment of Lean unconscionable. According to Rains, when she divorced Lean, she took every penny he had. Rains never forgave her.

Enoch Arden

If I had to choose, I’d say that Rains’ performance in “Deception” is my favorite of his movie roles. But I believe there’s one performance I love even more than his Alexander Hollenius: it’s his recitation of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Enoch Arden,” with piano accompaniment written by Richard Strauss, which Rains recorded in 1962 with Glenn Gould. As Rains proved in his movie debut as the Invisible Man, he was capable of giving an unforgettable performance without being seen; he proves it again with his stunning performance of “Enoch Arden.” 1962 was the same year he gave a fine performance as Mr Dryden, a minor role in “Lawrence of Arabia.” He lived for another five years, but apart from a few television appearances, a cameo as King Herod in “The Greatest Story Ever Told” and one excruciating courtroom drama, “Twilight of Honor,” “Enoch Arden” is really his swan song. And what an unforgettable performance to go out on!

Rains in ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ filmed the same year he recorded ‘Enoch Arden.’

“Enoch Arden” is the story of a sailor, lost at sea and given up for dead by those he left behind: his wife, Annie, a young daughter, a younger son and a newborn baby boy. Within a year of Enoch’s departure, the baby dies and his family begins to drift into poverty. Ten years pass — “And no word from Enoch came.” Enoch and Annie’s childhood friend, Philip Ray — a prosperous miller — eventually persuades Annie (whom he has always loved from afar) to marry him “[a]nd lift the household out of poverty.” A year later, Annie gives birth to Philip’s son. And now, after more than a dozen years have passed, Enoch returns. He’s a broken man, unrecognizable. Finding his old house abandoned, he goes to a local tavern, where he collapses. While Enoch is recuperating, the “good and garrulous” landlady, Miriam Lane, tells him

. . . with other annals of the port,
Not knowing — Enoch was so brown, so bow’d,
So broken — all the story of his house.
His baby’s death, her growing poverty,
How Philip put her little ones to school,
And kept them in it, his long wooing her,
Her slow consent, and marriage, and the birth
Of Philip’s child.

Enoch does not reveal his identity, but becomes obsessed with the thought of seeing Annie one more time. “If I might look on her sweet face again/And know that she is happy.” So he goes over to Philip’s house one November night and peers through the window. Here is Tennyson’s description of what Enoch sees:

And on the right hand of the hearth he saw
Philip, the slighted suitor of old times,
Stout, rosy, with his babe across his knees;
And o’er her second father stoopt a girl,
A later but a loftier Annie Lee,
Fair-hair’d and tall, and from her lifted hand
Dangled a length of ribbon and a ring
To tempt the babe, who rear’d his creasy arms,
Caught at and ever miss’d it, and they laugh’d:
And on the left hand of the hearth he saw
The mother glancing often toward her babe,
But turning now and then to speak with him,
Her son, who stood beside her tall and strong,
And saying that which pleased him, for he smiled.

Claude Rains takes it from here. “Enoch Arden” is another rare example of Rains’ unleashing a torrent of emotion, astonishing both for its energy and complexity. It’s no trick for an actor to shed tears on cue, nor to express rage at the top of his lungs. To do both together, while making sure that every word is clearly enunciated, each individual thought is specific and distinct (as opposed to producing a generalized wash of unhappiness), and to produce a believable result (i.e., the underlying technique must be invisible), but one that is better than merely believable — this is extremely difficult to do. It requires what the great Shakespearean director, John Barton, refers to as “Passion and Coolness.” Most actors will settle for one or the other. Actors like Claude Rains do both at the same time and, being the magicians they are, they don’t let you see how they do it.

Here is the finale.

A Star Is Born: Alastair Sim in ‘Green for Danger’

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Poster for American Release.

There are plenty of good reasons to have a look at “Green for Danger” (Individual Pictures, 1946), but the first and best is Alastair Sim. He plays Inspector Cockrill of Scotland Yard, who is called in to investigate two murders at a provincial British hospital on 19 August, 1944 (two days after the first murder was committed). (Coincidentally, the date of Alastair Sim’s death is also 19 August — in 1976.) The time is of central importance. In August 1944, all over southeastern England, the indiscriminate destruction wreaked by the German unmanned V-1 flying bombs (generally known as buzz bombs) was at its height. Buzz bombs first made their appearance in June of that year; by mid-August, more than one hundred a day were exploding on British soil. In all, nine thousand five hundred and twenty-one of these deadly weapons were fired; the utter randomness of the attacks made the apprehension they excited almost more pernicious than the destruction they inflicted. It is in this atmosphere of almost unimaginable anxiety and dread that the story takes place. The attacks fell off after October 1944, when Allied forces began to overrun the sites from whence they were launched. In “Green for Danger,” buzz bombs are referred to as “doodlebugs.” Characteristically, the people who were most imperilled by them — those who lived and worked in southeast England — coined the benign, even foolish-sounding, epithet “doodlebug” for this engine of arbitrary ruin: this strikes me as an example of British pluck at its phlegmatic best.

“Green for Danger” was hardly Sim’s first picture (he’d already appeared in more than thirty, including one in which he played a character known as “Theodore F. Wilcox — the Lunatic”), but it was his amazing turn as Inspector Cockrill that finally made him a movie star — overnight, as it were. Based on a best-selling novel by Christianna Brand, the movie adaptation was a solid hit on both sides of the Atlantic when it was released, and remained a popular cult classic in the revival houses all through the seventies and into the eighties, but it seems to have been nearly forgotten since then. It’s a thoroughly entertaining, occasionally gripping and often very funny whodunit.

‘I Begin with Him because He Was the First to Die’

Like Claude Rains, Alastair Sim has the uncanny ability to mine humor from the unlikeliest phrases. For example, in this clip, pay close attention to how he speaks the line, “His name was Joseph Higgins; I begin with him because he was the first to die.” Seeing it in print, does it strike you that the line is the stuff of comedy? Sim obviously thought so — what’s more, his reading of it proves his intuition to have been correct. In his genius for seeing where comedy lies hid, he is like Dame Maggie Smith: when he sees a laugh, he goes for a laugh; when he aims for a laugh, he gets a laugh.

Happy the stenographer who is assigned to take dictation from anyone so droll as Alastair Sim! I could listen to him speak exposition all night long and never get tired of hearing him natter on. I also enjoy William Alywn’s fugal score for the opening credits: it’s urgent and troubled, yet also witty — it presages the tone of the rest of the picture. And I especially like the scoring when Sim introduces us to the suspects/potential victims. Sim and the strings perform a demented call and response: with each new introduction spoken by Sim, the strings reply with a menacing slur that lands a half-step higher, followed by a pizzicato (naahhhh-ump! plick!). On the next name Sim announces, the strings begin where they left off and end another half-step higher, then Sim gives the next name and so on. It’s very much of the Carl Stalling Looney Toons School of Cartoon Music: tense and intensely silly. I laugh every time I hear it.

‘I Myself, in Person, Arrived on the Scene’

Great actors are often famous for their ability to make their first entrances memorable. Though Sim’s is the first voice we hear, we don’t actually clap eyes on him until almost forty minutes into the picture. It was some fifteen years before I saw the picture for a second time, but I still remembered Sim’s entrance so vividly that I couldn’t wait to see it again. The buzzing that unsettles him, followed by the silence that alarms him, is that of a doodlebug. Unlike bombs dropped from airplanes, with the dreaded doodlebug, there was no whistling to let you know when and approximately where the impact would occur — instead, you heard the overhead buzzing begin to sputter as the rocket ran out of petrol, followed by several seconds of terrifying silence while the fiendish device fell noiseless from the sky, during which time you ran for cover, but with no way of knowing where best safety lay.

Classic Sim, up to his old tricks! What a superb clown! Look at how his knees wobble, seventeen seconds in, like Ray Bolger’s. Sim’s tics are so broad they rightly should be called tocs. I’m afraid, however, that Alywn’s music is too broad in this instance — especially that ludicrous foursome of ascending glissandi on the violin (the first ascends a fifth, the second a fourth, the next another fifth, and then — to make sure we get the point — a whole silly octave): if Sim were wearing a bow-tie, it would twirl. It seems to me that Sim provides lunacy enough without Alywn’s assistance: he needs no orchestral laugh track to tell us where the gags are. In this, he is quite the opposite of, say, Rock Hudson and Doris Day in their peek-a-boo comedies. With them, clamorous blasts of flatulent trombones and briskly dissonant chords upon the xylophone are necessary to inform the audience which moments of imbecility, precisely, are intended to induce laughter: without such cues, we’d be lost. To underscore Sim’s physical clowning with comical orchestral cues, however, strikes me as no more necessary or advisable than to gild refinèd gold. Still, I must confess the silliness of the music is so unapologetic that it does make me laugh — I don’t condone it, but I do think it’s funny in an extremely vulgar way. There’s a lot of xylophone comedy throughout the picture, cues as low-down lowbrow as anything Frank De Vol ever wrote. I can’t help it: I always like to hear the xylophone tell me what’s going on.

Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the British (an Aside)

Before I go any further, I feel obliged to mention a few things about the production values. One of my dearest friends took a look at the clip above and, with more accuracy than charity, dismissed the set as “bad community theater.” Oh, yes, indeed he’s right: I wouldn’t dream of pretending otherwise. By Hollywood standards, these are not the production values of Poverty Row, but of Skid. The whole production looks as if it were shot in a department store window — and not even a good one: I used to do more elaborate window dressings for a Seattle delicatessen where I worked in my youth; when I was younger still, I did better things with Kenner’s Girders, Pikes and Panels and with Lincoln Logs. In the circumstance, however, I prefer to look on the matter with a fond and loving eye, not a gimlet one.

Separated at birth? ‘Green for Danger’ set, Kenner’s Girder and Panel set, Lincoln Logs

Let us consider when this picture was produced and under what conditions. “Green for Danger” was the first non-propaganda picture shot at Pinewood Studios after the War; it was produced and financed by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, whose artistic ambitions far exceeded their financial means. Post-war rationing was in its full vigor, shortages were everywhere, the economy was in disrepair, and in the interest of getting something on film that would amuse and entertain audiences, significant compromises had to be made. There’s one scene, for instance, in which Judy Campbell, a fairly tall actress (and a favorite co-star of Noël Coward’s), is shown running through the woods in a state of abject terror. This was a hard sequence to shoot: all the sets, including the outdoor ones, were built entirely indoors on two soundstages that had been conjoined. In order to achieve the sense of depth the outdoor scenes required, forced-perspective was much in use. When, therefore, the long legged Judy Cambpell went tearing through the forest, the trees kept getting progressively smaller, which meant she had to keep scrunching ever further down as she ran while still presenting a credible image of panic. Well, there are a number of ways to take this. The two most obvious responses are to ridicule it or to ignore it, but I find I have no wish to do either. Instead, I choose to piece out their imperfections with my thoughts and, like Theseus at the end of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” smile with gracious lenity upon the craziness that I behold. The propinquity of Alastair Sim has that effect on me.

‘Pause for Thirty Seconds while You Cook Up Your Alibis’

Here is the very beginning of a much longer preliminary interrogation of the suspects by Inspector Cockrill. I cut it short rather arbitrarily in the hope that you will ask “And what happens next?” with enough curiosity that you’ll go out and buy a copy of Criterion’s first-rate DVD, which includes some interesting special features, and an excellent commentary track by film scholar, Bruce Eder. Unfortunately, Eder’s is the only truly ugly voice on the DVD. His commentary is full of interesting information, but I find him very hard on the ears.

‘In Such a Night as This’

Leo Genn plays the chief of surgery, Mr Eden, a first-rate doctor and ladykiller. Genn is not generally what one thinks of as a Don Juan, but in both the novel and the picture, Mr Eden’s homeliness is no impediment to his success with women: he is naturally charming and serene; his skill in his difficult profession, his superb self-possession all combine to make his nurses and patients swoon with desire. In the book, he is not nearly as attractive as the average-looking Genn: he is skinny and ugly. His very ugliness is a great part of his charm. The women all fall for him because they delude themselves into thinking he’s too unprepossessing for anyone else to want. At any rate, Genn plays him with his usual unflappable authority and wit. He’s another actor whose melodious, reassuring voice is a pleasure to listen to, no matter what he happens to be saying. In this scene, Mr Eden is on the verge of making his next conquest — this time of the beautiful Nurse Linley (Sally Gray). Mr Eden knows that Miss Linley is (or until very recently has been) engaged to Dr Barnes, the anesthetist (Trevor Howard); he knows, too, that Barnes is intensely jealous and possesses a volatile temper. But what of that? Nurse Linley is attractive, attracted and suddenly available; besides, the moon shines bright on a beautiful August night. I admire how director Sidney Gilliat’s script (co-written by Claud Guerney: the credits spell it “Gurney”) pays us the compliment of not telling us that Mr Eden attempts to lure Nurse Linley into his paradise by quoting Lorenzo’s beautiful speech to Jessica in Act V of “The Merchant of Venice.” They assume we recognize the passage, probably as Mr Eden assumes Nurse Linley does not.

And do have a look at that ridiculously artificial bush behind which his rival, Dr Barnes, has secreted himself! Bad community theatre, perhaps, but certainly very funny.

The business with the mystery novel provides a good example of the excellence of the screenplay: since the scene is played in silence, it gives us a breather from all the exposition — that necessary evil, under whose burden every whodunit must stagger before it can reach its surprising dénouement. It has the further virtue of being funny — especially as played by Sim — while also establishing the very real possibility that our Inspector Cockrill is not infallible. He is fully as eccentric as Sherlock Holmes, but unlike Dr Watson’s friend, he is not superhuman. In my view, this makes his eccentricities even funnier.

‘Confidentially — Do You Think He Did It?’

Here’s one further example of Sim’s ability to mine comedy from unexpected lines. At the beginning of this clip, Dr Barnes asks him, “Can I go now?” Sim replies, “No, I don’t think so.” And his delivery makes me giggle like a three-year-old. And watch what he does with the point of his umbrella. Oh, my God, he makes me laugh.

The Claude Rains Fan Club

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