Herbert Marshall

High Wall

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Steven Kenet and Dr Lorison in the asylum

One for lovers of noirish movies with twisty plots, High Wall doesn’t in the end quite add up emotionally, but its serpentine bends make it an enjoyable crime thriller asking us to reconsider an open-and-shut case once any number of impediments have been thrown in the way. The opening scene – a man is driving his car with his wife in the passenger seat. She’s dead, it seems, and in a few seconds he’ll be dead too, if his plan to crash his car off a bridge succeeds. That seems to be the story anyway. His plan doesn’t quite succeed. He survives the crash and has soon been arrested. He admits to killing … Read more

The Unseen

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Close up of Gail Russell

Either a hopeless genre mishmash or a brilliant psychological thriller gone a bit wrong – probably both – 1945’s The Unseen was sold as a follow-up of sorts to the spooky thriller from the previous year, The Uninvited. In fact they have little to do with each other beyond the same director (Lewis Allen), one actor (Gail Russell) and that negative “Un” modifier. Russell had an “Introducing” credit in The Uninvited but she’s really the star here, though first-billed Joel McCrea would probably have disagreed. She plays a nanny brought in to tame the two children of widower David Fielding (McCrea) after their original nanny, Maxine, is mysteriously suddenly let go. There’s an aspect … Read more

Ivy

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Ivy with Miles Rushworth

Sick of “sad sack” roles, Joan Fontaine struck out for the border with 1947’s Ivy, a pivot away from the passive wallflowers of Rebecca and Suspicion, roles that had made her Hollywood’s biggest star and won her an Oscar, and towards something much ballsier. She plays Ivy (as in Poison Ivy), a woman in Edwardian Britain who sets her cap at a rich bachelor and decides to make him her husband no matter what’s in her way. Problem one: wealthy Miles Rushworth (Herbert Marshall) is in a long-standing relationship with young Bella Crail (Molly Lamont), and everyone knows they will soon be engaged. Two: Ivy is already married, to Jervis (Richard Ney), a … Read more

The Letter

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Leslie fires the gun into Hammond (out of frame)

Melodramas don’t start much better than 1940’s The Letter. A man fleeing from a bungalow on a balmy evening in Malaya. A woman fires at gun at him. He falls to the ground, obviously dead. She continues firing, not stopping until all the chambers are empty. “He tried to make love to me and I shot him,” the woman explains to her husband later. From the cold way we saw those chambers being emptied, we suspect this is not the entire truth. Nor do we entirely believe that the woman and the dead man barely knew each other. Because the woman’s explanation seems just a touch too blithe and high-handed. And because the … Read more

Blonde Venus

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An exquisitely lit Marlene Dietrich draws on a cigarette

The fifth collaboration between director Josef von Sternberg and star Marlene Dietrich, Blonde Venus is a film that’s been strangled at birth, hacked at, mutilated, and then dressed up nicely and put out there as if all was still well. It’s a strange and unsettling story, if you can pick its story out from what’s left after the censors got at it, of a woman whose husband needs a lot of money for a life-saving medical procedure and sells her body to raise it. The four-square Herbert Marshall plays the husband, a chemist who’s been hurt through exposure to radium and needs to leave the USA and go to Germany for an experimental … Read more

Trouble in Paradise

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Lily and Gaston stealing from each other

Trouble in Paradise was Ernst Lubitsch’s favourite of his own films. It’s 83 quick minutes of screwball farce, made in 1932 just as Hollywood was putting its own house in order (before the government stepped in and did it), one of the highlights of the pre-Code era. It’s more sexually risqué than later films, for sure, though that isn’t what got it into trouble when Paramount tried and failed to re-issue it in 1935. Banned for decades, it wasn’t really seen again until the 1960s. It’s the story of a conman called Gaston and a thief called Lily who try to swindle and/or steal from each other but instead fall in love. Realising … Read more