1940s, Auteurs, Film Noir, Thriller

The Lady From Shanghai (1947)

Director/Screenwriter: Orson Welles

By Roderick Heath

Orson Welles long served a cultural function as the emblematic genius discarded by Hollywood, doomed by the wrath of the kitsch Olympians to only to manage a singular labour of creative awe, Citizen Kane (1941), before being forced to scrimp his way through a fragmentary and disappointing subsequent oeuvre. That narrative for Welles’ career has long since been challenged and revised, and whilst it’s certainly true Welles and Hollywood never got along, they continued a long, uneasy dialogue for decades, and Welles only finally abandoned all hope of making a final Hollywood film in the early 1980s. Following the infamous collapse of his deal with RKO, resulting in the dumped release of a crude edit of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Welles ventured to South America on a war effort-enabling goodwill tour, during which he worked on the multipart docudrama It’s All True, only to suffer another aborted project and accompanying corrosion to his professional reputation. As an actor, Welles quickly regained footing when he returned to the US, resuming stage and radio work as well as gaining traction as a movie star. He also married his fellow goodwill ambassador Rita Hayworth, who arrived during World War II as one of the hottest properties in movies.

Thanks to arduous, self-effacing negotiations with studio honchos, Welles made his directorial comeback with The Stranger (1946), which, despite flashes of his visual ingenuity and aesthetic and thematic fixations, sufficiently fulfilled his promise to make a ‘normal’ movie. Welles was rewarded with a proper box office success, although his backers still welched on a deal to produce four more of his films. Welles went to Broadway to stage a flashy adaptation of Around the World in Eighty Days, only for producer Mike Todd to suddenly pull out. Welles tapped Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn for cash he ploughed into the doomed project, on the promise of writing, directing, and starring in a movie for him without further recompense. Welles took on an adaptation of Sherwood Kingsley’s crime novel If I Should Die Before I Wake, purportedly at the urging of William Castle, and Cohn gave Welles the green light to make the movie also featuring Hayworth. Cohn’s sense of prerogative over Hayworth’s career had already been offended by her and Welles’ union, which he deemed insufficiently glamorous, and he was properly livid when the resulting film’s rough cut was screened for him, revealing Welles’ new look for her with short, platinum blonde hair. Cohn didn’t much like the rest of the film either and had it extensively recut and reshot, reinforcing Welles’ reputation as a mercurial spendthrift. Although The Lady From Shanghai did reasonably good box office again, it was still fated to mark Welles’ break with the major Hollywood studios.

Great as Welles’ films are, none of them feels quite as urgent and personally exposed as The Lady From Shanghai, save perhaps his final, pieced-together opus The Other Side of the Wind (1976). The film’s gadabout affectations, the giddy humour and overt ridicule of neat plot rhythms and Welles’ music hall Irish accent, can’t conceal the film’s real emotional tenor, one of anger – anger with love, anger with self, anger with the world. Cohn in turn was incensed by the film for good reason, as it presented, amongst many other things, Welles’ poison pen letter to the dawning atomic age and American capitalism, his bitterest, most biting commentary on the politics of sexual possession as espoused in Hollywood, and a return to Citizen Kane’s preoccupation with the insidious gravity of power and money in warping normal human relations. This time he cast himself as a lovestruck interloper rather than the all-consuming man of destiny, a choice that betrayed Welles’ jaundiced new perspective. Spurred by the slow spoiling of his marriage and his frustration in falling from boy titan to harried supplicant, as well as his unease within the rapidly changing zeitgeist in the post-war period, Welles responded with a film lit in a sulphurous glare, fuelled by smouldering, even despairing anxieties. It’s also perhaps Welles’ most stylistically extreme film, an aspect actually amplified by Cohn’s reediting, and the violence of technique enters a feedback loop with the overtone of emotional burnout.

Welles happily occupied a contradictory position as an artist, the frustrated classicist and tragedian who delighted in playing comic book heroes and who grasped the epic potentials in pulp fiction. The Lady From Shanghai and its companion piece Touch of Evil (1958) saw him collapsing boundaries between high and low cultural argots, turning the seamy, worldly obsessions of film noir into high Shakespearean evocations of crime, love, treachery, and penance. Welles initially turns King’s story into a jokey pastiche of knight errant tales, with his character Michael O’Hara the nominated dumb Quixote, a man who testifies in his opening narration, “I start out in this story a little bit like a hero, which I most certainly am not.” O’Hara flirts with the beautiful lady, Elsa (Hayworth), he sees trundling by in a Central Park carriage and then saves her from a gang of hoods who knock out the cabbie and try to rob and rape her. The sarcastic lilt of pre-Raphaelite romanticism, as Michael ventures into the well-pruned parkland serving as virgin forest to rescue the damsel and then commandeers the carriage to ferry her homeward in gentlemanly style, quickly collides with the grease and concrete aesthetic of a Manhattan car park, a nest of Futurist swoops and curves and blocks.

There various imps of ill-fortune lurk and dangle, the heavy with a tragedy mask for a face, Broome (Ted De Corsia), and the dough-faced George Grisby (Glenn Anders) both on hand for vicarious jollies as Michael realises the lady he’s saved is the wife of Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloan), a notoriously brilliant and utterly ruthless defence lawyer, a man known to a man like Michael only as figure of awe and dark magic in anecdotes but about to become an all too familiar acquaintance. Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons both revolved a stung sense of nostalgia, ransacked for discrepancy but never entirely demystified, for a slower, quieter past where iniquity was balanced by the comfort of set order, as compared to the oncoming spree of hypermodern angst, where even the go-getters and empire builders felt alien to themselves. Destructive and intransigent as they were, Charlie Kane and George Amberson Minafer were also trapped as mediating figures, spanning the days of the aristocrat and modernity, where Bannister and Elsa are pure-sprung creatures of their moment.

By contrast, The Lady From Shanghai satirises O’Hara’s status as a man also out of time and joint, as sailor, soldier, and romantic. A man who, even though he’s been all around the world and killed whilst fighting fascists in Spain, nonetheless retains the aura of the eternal naïf, a man who’s lost contact with a vital piece of himself, a Hercules who partakes of eating the lotus and forgets his mission. Welles couches Michael as the emblematic working class hero, admired and feared by his pals to equal degrees as a guy who’s “got a lot of blarney in him but he knows how to hurt a man when he gets mad,” imbued with a faint lustre of legend because of “what he did to them finks back in ’39,” a lustre later turned against him with an overheard radio broadcast characterises him, in one of the film’s throwaway flourishes of carbolic wit, as “Black Irish O’Hara, the notorious waterfront agitator.” He’s glimpsed banging away on a typewriter in the seamen’s hiring hall in front of a poster that read, “We Accept All Americans,” a pointed dying echo of the credo that had during the war become something like an official ethos.

Bannister tracks him to that place, to hire him to crew his yacht, ostensibly seeking him as a proven good guy, Mephistopheles to grasp his Faust. “You’ve been too busy seeing the world to learn anything about it,” Bannister informs Michael. “What’s a tough guy?” Jake Bjornsen (Louis Merrill), one of Michael’s sailor pals and a former comrade from Spain, tells Bannister as he applies that label to Michael: “A guy with an edge…A gun or a knife, a knife-stick or a razor, something the other guy ain’t got. Yeah, a little extra reach on a punch, a set of brass knuckles, a stripe on the sleeve, a badge that says ‘cop’ on it, a rock in your hand or a bankroll in your pocket.” Welles uses this speech to set in play not just the film’s essential plot, but also to subvert the general basis of noir storytelling in a romanticised envisioning of the folk heroic figure of the streetwise badass. Bannister’s jealousy of Michael’s physical prowess is more than outpaced by his capacity for brutality leveraged by other means, and the thug in the alley with a switchblade isn’t half as scary as an aggrieved plutocrat with his hooks in you.

Sloan’s Bannister is one of the great screen monstrosities, a courtroom marauder who walks with canes like a mincing praying mantis, his high, crackly voice shifting between registers of slurred, liquored-up aggravation and clipped, precise assassination: the way Sloan pronounces “lover” does to the word what Exxon did to the Alaskan shoreline. The triangle of Michael, Elsa, and Bannister plays at least on the surface as a lampoon on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, down to the crippled rich man as emblem of a twisted modern age, but with woodland renascence swapped for dread-caked globetrotting and penny dreadful conspiracies where the promise of sex is part of the trap rather than a mode of escape. Welles gleefully steals imagery and textures from ‘40s travel posters and the promised high life of Hollywood’s fantasias as portrays the Bannisters’ voyage about Central and South America, with Elsa’s commodity physique celebrated in rest and motion, high-diving from rocks into the sea, splayed out the yacht deck whilst warbling a gently seductive ditty. The siren updated, coming on to Michael in playing another abused and frightened subcontractor wondering if the price paid in anxiety is worth the paycheque. Accompanying the holidays are Bannister’s nominal law partner Grisby, his hired PI and minder Broome, Michael’s pal and deck hand ‘Goldie’ Goldfish (Gus Schilling), and Bannister’s cook Bessie (Evelyn Ellis). A potent, simmering attraction seems to manifest between Michael and Elsa, but the real seduction is between Michael and Grisby, who offers Michael a wad of cash for a simple job: to confess to murdering him.

Welles’ archly theatrical and equally arch cineaste sides, held in balance in his first films, came into conflict in The Lady From Shanghai. The film is littered with verbal soliloquies and passages of visual delirium, creating a tension that finally snaps the elastic in the finale as Michael rattles off a synopsis of the plot whilst assailed by surreal images, the lingual, factual, and experiential realms crumbling before the onslaught of images evoking surrender to the absurd, dismissing the usual mechanics of the thriller story as mere detail in a story that’s much more about consuming chaos. Michael’s narration carries much of the weight of the actual storytelling, certainly to patch over some of the editing but also investing it with a palpable sense of Michael’s bewildered and stricken romanticism. Bjornsen’s speech about tough guys is the first of several lengthy, memorable discourses delivered throughout, followed by Bannister’s acidic commentary on the power of money as a vehicle not merely for survival but revenge, and Michael’s anecdote about witnessing a shark feeding frenzy that saw the beasts turn on each-other cannibalistically, implying the Bannisters and their cohort are behaving the same way. Bannister’s commentary reveals himself as a man who himself is reacting to memories of being an outsider under the thumb of the rich, describing with relish how he destroyed a man who kept his mother out of a club he owned for being of an undesirable ethnicity, whilst also noting that Bessie prays she’ll never be too old to earn the money he pays her to support her family.

This scene captures Welles’ coldest and most concise analysis of capitalism as a by-product of human urges, the desire for dominance and supremacy and a precise weighing of the “trickle-down” effect of wealth untinted, at least, by noblesse oblige hypocrisy. The Lady From Shanghai emerges as a more politically analytical and revealing film than Citizen Kane, even before it invokes nuclear terror as the new existential state, the bitter taste in the post-war triumphalism. Grisby hovers around, snatching privileged glimpses of Elsa and Michael’s simmering attraction and teasing them with his knowledge, before making overtures to Michael to be his fictional assassin, cover for some convoluted scheme to claim his own insurance and sail off to some remote clime where he’ll be safe “when they start dropping those bombs.” Bannister already resembles a post-apocalyptic thing, the first of the many atomic monsters that would start loping across screens in following years. Welles later reported he gave Sloan canes to walk with to give the actor, still relatively fresh out of radio, something distinctively physical to cover his inexperience, but the theme of creeping disease and sexual amanuensis is too tightly wound into the story to ignore.

The new look Welles imposed on Hayworth, so startling and offensive to Cohn and others, anticipated the 1950s’ run of platinum blondes as the embodiment of a plush and acquisitive age’s ideal of femininity, when Marilyn Monroe would corner the market to near-mystical perfection in playing the blonde as status symbol love object. Hayworth as Elsa is the atomic bomb in human form, the flash of brilliance on her crown and blood on the lips and the black ash of fallout in her eyes. The beasts of the aquarium where Michael and Elsa meet look forward to the aquatic beds of Godzilla and the Gill Man. The Lady From Shanghai can be seen as much Welles’ metaphor for his permanent yet agonising love affair with the filmmaking world as for his faltering relationship with Hayworth, although the two things were surely linked – how could Welles entirely repudiate a change of profession that helped him marry the most beautiful woman in the world? The Lady From Shanghai shows Welles trying desperately to hold on to these extraordinary gifts straight out of the dream life in the face of petty dictators and profit margins. Things constantly happen to Michael in ways that leave him completely mystified as to why they’re happening, the temptations and repudiations wielded by power alike wielded with capricious verve in a way that must have felt very true to experiences with the studios.

What a fresh sense of irony Welles, the boy wonder out of pinko theatrical climes with the New Deal ideals, must have gained contending with such outsized provocations to lust and wonder in Hollywood, moving from the relatively abstract depictions of trophy wives and malign plutocrats in Citizen Kane to this electro-Hogarthian stew where the mutual contempt is palpable. The film canters to its climax and it seems less that Michael and Bannister represent Welles and his tycoon nemeses than, finally, it represents the warring sides of Welles himself, the image-maker and the desperate husband: “Killing you is killing myself,” Bannister tells Elsa, suddenly revealed as the actual tragic lover in the story. Hayworth had, with Gilda (1946), nailed down a specific persona as the girl who seems corrupt purely by dint of her incarnation of sinful temptations, but is actually covertly virtuous, a persona she’d later be forced to take to a biblical extreme when she played Salome. Welles upended basic image expectations not just in look but in character: Elsa proves to be a killer and schemer whilst all the while seeming like an innocent, soulful and tremulous in her pathos. The desire to believe Elsa is good is nonetheless a compelling fiction not just for Michael but also for Bessie, who regards her as the poor child at the mercy of the monster, so perfectly does she embody a vessel of elevated fantasy. The name of Bannister’s yacht gives the warning – Circe, the sorceress who turns men to swine.

Part of The Lady From Shanghai’s strange beauty resides in the way Elsa remains a creature of perfect ambiguity even after she’s unmasked, creature of manifold realities, a woman who was “taught to love in Chinese” in “the second wickedest city in the world,” (Michael nominates Macao as number one, a place Welles would finally visit for The Immortal Story, 1968). Elsa is the product of political ructions and cultural collisions, trying to survive a uniquely cruel marriage but also determined not to be thrust back into the cold, especially when, as Michael’s pleas prove, capitalism’s gravity can only be countered by a kind of sentimental romanticism. “Now he knows about us,” Elsa says after Grisby had witnesses them in a clinch. “I wish I did,” Michael quips. Elsa’s attempt to seduce Michael into a kiss earns a slap instead, the film’s most electric moment of physical intimacy giving way to Elsa silently and shakily jamming a cigarette between her lips and lights it. A sublime piece of acting from Hayworth that manages to suggest all at once that Elsa’s far too used to being hit and controlling herself when it happens, and also the shock, not entirely disagreeable, of experiencing the real sensation, and then the equal shock of recognition: Michael’s fear. Even when exposed as a scheming murderer Elsa retains a flailing, almost pathetic quality, canary in a gilded cage trying to reinvent herself as a condor, making a hash of schemes to liberate herself. Except that everything goes awry and she has to use Michael as a fall guy.

Writing about any Welles film is hard and The Lady From Shanghai amongst the most challenging simply in the lure to muse on the visual textures, the cavalcade of astounding and evocative shots, achieved here in collaboration with cinematographer Charles Lawton Jr with uncredited work by Rudolph Maté and Joseph Walker. Welles’ desire to break away from studio simulacra saw him shoot much of the film on location with a palpable sense of place, although the result was hardly a neorealist work, the seedy glamour of the Mexican locales and the San Francisco waterfront and Chinatown instead charged with a sarcastic sense of their exoticism, albeit with the sense of strangeness inverted, such places charged with life and energy which the visiting representatives of the high life despoil. The elegance of Welles’ first two films even in their radicalisms, and the relatively prosaic grammar of The Stranger, gave way here to the vertiginous affect that would mark the rest of Welles’ oeuvre, the driving pace of editing matched to visuals that come on often with discursive jaggedness. Shots like the dollying camera tracking Hayworth as she runs, clad in swimming white, down an Acapulco street with archways and pillars breaking the shot into segments of lush yet elusive romantic fantasia.

Or the shot of Michael and Grisby standing on a cliff edge, framed from overhead, distorting all sense of geography so that when Grisby says, “So long, fella!” and steps out of frame for a second it seems he’s jumped into the void only to leave the startled Michael as the one hovering on the edge. Moments like these only represent a fraction of the cinematic creativity on display. The sight of Elsa running away from dinner with Bannister to meet Michael in the gritty Acapulco streets sees her briefly as an illuminated figure in a special effects shot, hovering in luminosity over the dark town, a shot reminiscent of images in The Red Shoes (1948) the following year, another film meditating on the figure of the mogul as cruel magician. Their stroll through the streets together sees them passing by boles of local nightlife, cellars and taverns crammed with fervent existence even as the interloping gringos find no refuge: Michael, teased by the pursuing Broome, knocks him out, only for Goldie to turn up later with some cops hoisting Broome’s unconscious bulk demanding to know who he is. “What’s the Spanish for ‘drunken bum’?” Goldie requests in gleeful derision.

Welles steadily builds a feeling of dizzied, intoxicated intensity often by framing the actors at great heights or having them move in reeling, criss-crossing lines in ways the pervert geographical reckoning. He combines the two as Michael has his fateful talk with Grisby. The duo climb on the heights above Acapulco, intersecting with other examples of economic exchange, like the gigolo reassuring his lady, as Grisby courts Michael for a different kind of service rendered. Welles plays an extended game with acts of seeing, through lenses, windows, and most famously in the climax, mirrors. Grisby watches Elsa through a telescope, the visuals becoming a succession of magazine-like poses, and then later on the rest of the party, rendering them specimen-like in their varying characters. The aquarium windows invert the specimen spectacle. The politics of seeing are correlated with evaluation and possession but ultimately feed back into the labyrinthine self as the funhouse mirrors rend and smear form and identity and fracture personas.

The beach party scene is one of Welles’ most amazing sequences, a revisit to the laboriously extravagant picnic scene depicted in Citizen Kane but again invested with a more specific and vivid texture. A grand exercise in high living curdles into a dank, tragicomic voyage into the heart of darkness – Welles’ faint revenge for his failure to film Conrad – as the picnickers canoe up tropical rivers and set up on a sunset beach with roving mariachi bands, torch-wielding partyers, and frolicking children, where the objects of rent-a-crowd exaltation sit in the fire-lit dusk and insult each-other with vicious art. Montage matches the picnickers with their animal totems amidst the sliding, flapping, squawking swamp creatures. Michael’s story conjures a whole squirming ocean full of blood and teeth even as the falling sun behind him seems to promise tropical peace. He delivers the punchline – “I never saw anything worse, until this little picnic tonight,” only for Bannister goes one better as he notes for Grisby’s benefit, “That’s the first anyone’s ever thought enough of you to call you a shark. If you were a good lawyer you’d be flattered.” Bannister so good a lawyer he can turn his foe’s attack into his own.

The Circe’s return to San Francisco sees Michael giving in to Grisby’s offer, hoping to entice Elsa away from Bannister with a safety cushion of cash, only for Grisby’s genuine and properly dead body to be found and Michael put on trial with his bogus confession taken for the real deal, with Bannister taking on his defence nominally to not make him seem a martyr for Elsa’s sake. Occasionally, as in Citizen Kane, Welles privileges the viewer to knowledge that he denies his nominal storyteller, most crucially when Grisby shoots Broome, who confronted him over his machinations, shortly before his own death, and conversations between Broome and Bannister establishing that both seem to be aware of a plot against Bannister’s life. Broome, seemingly a crass and threatening figure at first, proves one of the few decently motivated characters as hired watchdog who struggles even as he bleeds to death to warn Elsa and Michael against impending wheels of fate. Grisby, by contrast, with his perversions of elocution and bulging eyes set in a perpetually sweat-seeping face, seems a ridiculous figure, and whilst he really is a ridiculous figure, he’s also playing for high stakes, Elsa’s confederate in an attempt to bump off Bannister that goes awry and demands Michael go through with his role as killer. Grisby leaves Michael to go through the prearranged motions whilst heading out to the Circe, firing off a gun and attracting the attention of a horde of dancers in a waterfront tavern.

The trial sequence is another tour-de-force of restless visual energy and satiric gall as Welles makes a mockery of justice processes in a way that again feels fascinatingly prognosticative in a different way, here anticipating the age when celebrity culture and law would become tightly entwined in acts of mass-media theatre. Bannister turns proceedings into a vaudeville routine as he affects to interview himself on the witness stand. Jurors sneeze heartily during testimony, onlookers gawk with vicarious hungers to be sated, and the prosecutor (Carl Frank) means to oblige them by forcefully attempting to brand Elsa star in a pornographic cornucopia. The closer the camera gets to Elsa’s face as the prosecutor’s questions become increasingly ruthless sees her threatening to lose substance altogether, to dissolve into a frieze of lacquered beauty, unable to play the roles required either by self-protecting social function or natural empathy – Elsa no longer atom bomb personified by the first computer, crashing from colliding streams of information and incapacity to resolve the outcome. Bannister’s sadistic intention to sabotage Michael’s defence despite knowing well he’s innocent instead fulfils the game they’ve been engaged in since the beginning, Bannister’s urgent and ultimately self-destructive need to annihilate the man who represents all the things he isn’t, having purposefully brought Michael into his fold to inhabit the role he cannot and then destroy him. Nothing sharpens the mind like the thought of being hung in the morning, as they say, and Michael learns the truth of this as imminent condemning finally grants him wisdom.

Michael’s escape from the court house blends clammy desperation and ridiculousness as Michael sucks down a handful of Bannister’s medication, giving him a chance to escape by beating up a couple of court cops in the overseeing Judge’s (Erskine Sanford) office, trashing it in the process. The fight is offered as a miniaturised synopsis of the threatened apocalypse, civilisation crashing to bits much to the Judge’s horror complete with his neatly ordered chess pieces sent flying – Napoleon’s bust sits silently as a cop’s head crashes back against a pane of glass, shelves filled with law tomes it toppled as a weapon – before Michael escapes the building by joining a flock of jurors from another trial and the Judge is left to demand a full report from an unconscious man. The sickly humour that pervades The Lady From Shanghai also makes sport of the nominal conjuring of exotic mystery in the title, inverting the emphasis of Josef von Sternberg’s equally baroque but more wilfully fantastical entrances into Chinoiserie dreaming in the likes of Shanghai Express (1932) and The Shanghai Gesture (1941): even as Welles depicts a descent into delirium he relentlessly demystifies, hunting the sawdust behind the tinsel. The glimpse of two Chinese-American teens at the trial, exchanging comments in Mandarin before one exclaims in ripe Californian, “You ain’t kiddin’!” Michael fleeing to take refuge in a Chinese opera house in San Francisco’s Chinatown only to fall into the hands of Elsa and her underworld contacts contrasts the impenetrable stylisation of the art form with the studied blandness of its audience, the gateway to the last act in the equally impenetrable drama, like the opera full of signs and symbols Michael cannot read.

The legendary climax confirms the correlation between show business and brutal crime, if in the most outlandish dimensions, Michael’s bemoaning that either the world or he is insane gaining a grotesque mimesis as he awakens in a funfair crazy house. Mirrors reshape him, Caligari geometry maps out his confusion, slippery slides deliver him into the maw of a papier-mache dragon and dump him out on a set that looks like a Miro painting: somehow Welles manages to cram the entire experience of modern art as a response to the opening fields of the absurd in the first half of the 20th century whilst also suggesting the carnival got there long beforehand. Painted slogans – STAND UP OR GIVE UP – both demand his action and mock his powerlessness. Elsa’s torch picks him out and she draws him into a hall of mirrors where her lovely simulacra are infinite, still protesting “I love you” even in mutual awareness she was willing to sacrifice him. Bannister’s arrival, given the last necessary jab of jealousy, sees him and Elsa annihilate each-other in a fusillade of bullets.

This shoot-out, a brief spasm of total chaos, has long since been installed as a classic cinematic moment, and films as diverse as Enter The Dragon (1973) and John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017) have taken it as a touchstone. But few imitators have tried to match the specific visual effect Welles manages, his subdivided frames and huge images of Elsa’s ghostly face compared to Bannister’s sharp, scuttling form, amounting to a surrealist study of psychological space. The obsessive clawing at the game of surfaces can only end this way, only to find nothing left once Elsa and Bannister’s bullets crack glass and break bodies. The destruction of all illusory selves is enacted, Bannister’s belief that killing Elsa is killing himself literalised. Michael’s passivity even in the face of this grim corrida nonetheless give him the key to his real problem, to deal with his existential crisis, responding to Elsa’s nihilistic credo that “We can’t win” means “We can’t lose, either – only if we quit.” The Lady From Shanghai is, ultimately, the story of Michael’s rebirth, even as he ruefully walks away confident of being proved innocent – “But that’s a mighty big word, innocent. Stupid’s more like it.” – and knows how deep the barbs of the Elsa illusion remain stuck in his sinews. Nonetheless the irony of Michael’s basic conclusion, his rediscovery of a form of faith in confronting the void and gaining the realisation that any individual has the power of a god in terms of their own specific world but their fate would depend on how they utilise that knowledge, and that only the storyteller can properly impose meaning to life, would become the essential theme for the rest of Welles’ career. But Elsa supplies the proper trash-poetic benediction for those who can’t face such a choice: “Give my love to the sunrise.”

1910s, Action-Adventure, Epic, Historical, Italian cinema, Silent

Cabiria (1914)

Director: Giovanni Pastrone
Screenwriter: Gabriele D’Annunzio

By Roderick Heath

This essay is presented as part of the Allan Fish Online Film Festival, an annual blogathon created by James Uhler to celebrate the late, learned cineaste Allan Fish, and showcase writing about films freely available online.

What impact it must have had in some muddy Apennine town where the twentieth century had barely arrived, to file into a jostling, steamy town hall and fight for a seat to watch Cabiria as the days ticked down to the start of the Great War. An experience that would link such hardy viewers with the residents of the White House half a world away, when Cabiria became the first film screened there, albeit out on the lawn. Cinema on the grandest scale, a point of gravity so much of the still-fledgling art form would orbit, taking on a form that undeniably laid to rest any notion film was just another carnival novelty. Giovanni Pastrone’s film, with storyline and titles written by the writer Gabriele D’Annunzio, expanded the scope of what cinematic narrative could encompass and how. Although it wasn’t the first film to run over two hours or to offer grand imagery and sophisticated directorial techniques, it was one of the new art’s great synthesising moments. On some levels, the weight of such historical importance can seem misaligned, as Cabiria is, in essence, a rip-roaring adventure story, replete with straightforward archetypes and heady melodrama. It survives as far more entertaining than any movie over a century old has the right to be. But it’s also a relic from a time when the new power of cinema was remaking our ways of seeing the world, even in ways that provoke misgiving in retrospect.

Compared to The Birth of a Nation (1915), its chief rival as a landmark in feature film development, Cabiria seems much more comfortable to a modern audience with its historically remote setting, outsized, almost science fiction-like recreation of that past, and broad portrait of decency versus depravity as embodied by long-vanished civilisations. And yet aspects of its ultimate meaning and context are just as thorny. Pastrone, who also worked under the professional alias Piero Fosco, had been a precocious kid who made his own musical instruments, developing a talent for finely observed form and function that would serve him well as he turned to filmmaking. He made his directing debut with La glu (1908), and set up the production company Itala in 1909. The same year, he began his string of historical epics with Julius Caesar (1909), following it with The Fall of Troy (1911) and then Cabiria. Pastrone’s directing career ran out of steam in the mid-1920s and he decisively put the business behind him long before his death in 1959. Cabiria meanwhile has a title attributing its vision more loudly to D’Annunzio, who was paid a fat sum to loan his prestige and following to the film. D’Annunzio was greatly acclaimed at the time as a writer and whose life and career say much about the bizarre and worrying twists of Italian social and political life at the time.

Pastrone’s most famous work was heavily indebted to Gustave Flaubert’s novel Salammbô, emulating its setting in ancient Carthage and figure of a royal femme fatale, mixed in with lesser historical novels and Livy’s historical accounts of the Punic Wars. Flaubert’s novel was laced with obsessive eroticism whilst contemplating the fractured political state of his era’s France through the lens of historical dreaming. Pastrone and D’Annunzio’s narrative, by contrast, was rooted in the traditional Roman view of Carthage as an embodiment of antipathetic corruption and perfidy, and they mixed in a familiar, sentimental Victorian narrative of lost foundlings and breathless rescues. The story commences in Sicily, just before the outbreak of the second Punic War between Rome and Carthage. Title character Cabiria is the infant daughter of rich Roman Batto (Émile Vardannes), whose villa sits near the foot of Mt Etna – Cabiria’s name is based in the rites of an esoteric cult. When the volcano shows signs of life Batto and his household quickly make propitious offerings that seem to quell the mountain. But during the night the eruption starts up again, earthquakes shaking the villa until it collapses. Whilst Batto, his wife, and the rest of the family flee the building, the servants, including Cabiria and her nurse Croessa (Gina Marangoni) run down a secret passage unsealed by the collapse.

There the servants discover Batto’s secret treasure horde, and flee for the coastline after looting it. But the thieves are surprised by a band of Phoenician pirates who take them all captive, including Croessa and Cabiria. The Phoenicians sell their captives in Carthage, and Cabiria is singled out for a terrible purpose, as one of the child sacrifices served up to the evil deity Moloch by high priest Karthalo (Dante Testa). After Cabiria is ripped out of her arms, Croessa searches in desperation for anyone who might help save the girl. Quicker than you can “improbable coincidence,” Croessa encounters just the right two men for the job: Fulvius Axilla (Umberto Mozzato), a Roman patrician spying in Carthage, and his slave Maciste (Bartolomeo Pagano). Croessa recognises Fulvius and begs him to help, and gives him a ring she took from Batto’s hoard, which she says is blessed by the gods with propitious powers. Fulvius and Maciste enter the Temple of Moloch pretending to be worshippers and manage to snatch away Cabiria just before she’s sacrificed. They flee and hide in the Inn of the Striped Monkey, threatening its keeper Bodastoret (Raffaele di Napoli) into fending off search parties. Cabiria however can never be entirely safe until she’s away from Carthage’s influence, for until she is sacrificed, the ritual goes on incomplete, and Carthage risks the wrath of its gods.

Cabiria engages history but mixes in hype and propaganda, starting with the portrayal of the Carthaginians as bloodthirsty and rabidly superstitious compared to the noble, upright Romans. The film’s basic melodramatic propulsion derives from such libel, however, as Fulvius and Maciste are obliged to save Cabiria, a flower of Roman youth, from the billowing fires inside the colossal statue of Moloch housed in the Temple. This sequence evinces Pastrone’s vision at its height with the “Invocation to Moloch.” Dazzling framings of ranked priests in chiaroscuro lighting, proto-fascist vision of hands raised in salute amidst darkness next to flickering candles, and Karthalo hovering over billowing votive flames performing ritualised moves, come with titles declaring the phrases of the invocation, ablaze with overripe poesy. This is cinema both depicting and becoming an arcane ritual of blood and fire. Pastrone’s long shots of the temple interior with the monstrous idol still easily provoke the awe at the scale and boldness of staging that so struck 1914’s audiences in beholding Pastrone’s momentous set design. Most striking however is the unrestrained vision of sacrificial violence. The priests muster together ranks of children, screaming, wiggling, naked youngsters carried up and placed upon a hatch that dumps them into the idol’s blazing interior, great billows of fire spurting from the idol’s mouth as they’re consumed.

It’s hard to imagine any contemporary filmmaker daring such a sequence now: only the relative distance of D’Annunzio’s camera is sparing. D’Annunzio’s storyline justifies Rome’s aggression towards Carthage in the face of its alleged brutality (there is some evidence to suggest that propaganda had basis in reality, although on nothing like what Cabiria portrays). Fulvius and Maciste sneak in disguise through the crowd, and finally launching their rescue, Maciste socking the priest gripping Cabiria and tearing her from his arms, Fulvius fending off others. They climb up onto the top of the temple, battling Carthaginian pursuers all the way, and scurry down its vertiginous exterior sculptural forms. When they return to the Inn of the Striped Monkey, Bodastoret sneaks out and brings city guards back with him, forcing Fulvius and Maciste to flee, and soon they’re separated. Fulvius eludes his pursuers by making a dive off a cliff into the ocean. Maciste strays into the gardens of Hasdrubal, brother of Hannibal, and encounters his daughter Sophonisba (Italia Almirante-Manzini), who is being courted by Masinissa (Vitale Di Stefano), the King of Numidia. Fulvius’ escape from Carthage proves to coincide with a fateful moment in history, as Hannibal (Vardannes again) leads his troops over the Alps to attack Rome, signalling resumption of the great contest between the two city-states.

Pastrone here reveals a finer touch for effectively varying tone through alternations of imagery, as he cuts between hard-charging action as Fulvius, Maciste, and Cabiria flee soldiers, and dreamy, mystical romanticism as Sophonisba makes her invocations to Tanit. Matched with D’Annunzio’s purple intertitles, the effect pushes at the boundaries of mere adventure moviemaking and tries rather to grasp at the essence of a time and vision of society where the immediate and metaphysical worlds had a much more urgent proximity. Moreover it shows Pastrone was keen to the uses of cross-cutting for more than just generating excitement well before Griffith got around to his ride of the Klan. The first glimpse of Sophonisba sees her stroking a pet leopard, marking her instantly as a figure of lethal sensuality and remarkable power in an image many a director making their own decadent historical epic would copy. Sophonisba conflates roles as princess and priestess, elevated far above the gruesome fray of Karthalo’s religious duties but bound just as intimately to her nation’s fate as embodiment of its aspiring self but also its potential amorality. Small wonder D’Annunzio had been associated with the radical “Decadent” movement in art and literature in the 1890s, which was particularly fond of such imagery of supine, bodingly sensual female antiheroes. Sophonisba goes out to meet her Numidian suitor in a moonlit garden just as Macisete steals into the garden in eluding the searching guards. Maciste successfully pleads with Sophonisba to protect Cabiria before he’s captured, brutally tortured, and chained to drive a millstone for the rest of his days.

The tremendous sway Cabiria would work on so much cinema that followed, directly and indirectly, is impossible to miss. D.W. Griffith saw it and immediately set out to match it: the interpolation of a central melodrama with historical vignettes predicts the structure of The Birth of a Nation and the vistas of cyclopean walls and colossal elephant statues plainly gave Intolerance (1916) its imaginative landscape. Fritz Lang plundered it for Die Nibelungen (1924) and Metropolis (1926), with the latter’s vision of the city machinery as a fiery-mawed, man-eating Moloch a special tip of the hat. German Expressionism in general would take licence from the stylised shadow play and totemic visuals of the Invocation to Moloch scene. Cecil B. DeMille built his entire historical epic style around the impression Cabiria made, an influence perhaps most obvious in the Temple of Dagon and the chaining of Samson in Samson and Delilah (1949). Sergei Eisenstein would suggest some lingering memory of it in his Ivan the Terrible films (1946-58), as well as the portrayal of the Teutonic Knights feeding captive children to the fire in Alexander Nevsky (1938). Federico Fellini would pay homage to it as the epitome of the bygone matinee ethos whilst sarcastically referencing its storyline for his tale of a wandering prostitute in Nights of Cabiria (1958), as well as channelling its imagery for his idiosyncratic tribute to the Italian epic tradition, Fellini Satyricon (1969).

Through such mediators, generations of historical dramas and action spectacles owe it something, up to and including the lair of the Thugees in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and Conan being chained to the wheel and battling with malign cultists in Conan the Barbarian (1982). Moreover, Cabiria gifted Italian cinema with one of its perennial hero figures in Maciste, who would still be Hercules’ rival as a mainstay of the peplum or sword-and-sandal genre in the 1960s (Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans might remember the host comedians mispronouncing his name as “Cheesesteak” when they covered Colossus and the Headhunters, 1962). D’Annunzio named the character after one of Hercules’ surnames reflecting his birthplace. Pagano would return to the role several more times, helping lodge the character firmly in the mind of audiences, in movies that sometimes resituated the character in different locales and periods. Pastrone himself directed several of these, including Maciste Alpino (1916). The character bears some resemblance to Ursus, the embodiment of muscular Christianity in Henryk Sienkiwicz’s Quo Vadis?, a touchstone for many of these early epics.

Maciste is the model for the peplum hero, as a being of great physical strength matched to an unswerving willingness to fight for the bullied and distressed and take on tyrants, traits fully displayed here as he saves young Cabiria and wrenches apart prison bars so he can take a poke at Karthalo. When Bodastoret torments him in bondage, Maciste calmly waits for the right moment to send him flying with a kick. This is made all the more interesting given the fact that the original Maciste is a dark-skinned African, making perhaps cinema’s first black action hero, with the inevitable corollary that he’s played by a white man in body paint, and as Maciste gained independent popularity he quickly became a general-purpose white strongman. In Cabiria he’s also, at least nominally, a servile character, albeit one who shares bonds of amity and respect with Fulvius: they’re very much like the Batman and Robin of the ancient world. Maciste’s ultimate resilience is illustrated as he spends a decade chained to the grindstone but, so overjoyed he is when Fulvius comes to rescue him, he quickly tears loose his chains and returns to the fray.

During the years of the war Fulvius becomes a commander of the Roman fleet besieging Syracuse, and he’s shipwrecked when Archimedes (Enrico Gemelli) uses his famous, if probably apocryphal, ploy of starting a blaze amidst the fleet with a reflective dish. Although fighting for the Carthaginian cause, Archimedes is presented as a nobly ruminative mind. The chaos of the fleet’s destruction is well-illustrated with some simple but effective special effects, much like the early eruption of Etna, mixing foregrounded live-action elements and model work. Fulvius is washed ashore and taken to Batto’s villa, where Batto recognises the ring Fulvius is wearing, and the connection is soon made. Fulvius promises to rescue Cabiria from Carthage if he gets a chance to. Joining the army of Scipio (Luigi Chellini) in North Africa, Fulvius is granted his chance, as Scipio assigns him to enter Carthage and spy out its defences. In another of the film’s famous images, used like the Moloch sequence on some posters, ranks of Roman legionnaires form a human pyramid for Fulvius to climb the huge stone walls of the city: the human becomes the architectural and geometric, anticipating Lang’s obsessive engagement with such visual design. Once he’s fulfilled his military mission, Fulvius resumes his personal one, tracking down and scaring Bodastoret into helping him find Maciste. Once Maciste is freed and Fulvius brings him back to the Inn of the Striped Monkey, Bodastoret is so frightened of Maciste’s wrath he drops dead of a heart attack.

The grown Cabiria (Lidia Quaranta) is now the handmaiden of Sophonisba, known as Elissa. Sophonisba has married to Syphax (Alessandro Bernard), the King of Cirta, who deposed her former fiancé Masinissa and fights with Carthage, whilst exiled Masinissa has allied with the Romans. After escaping from Carthage, Fulvius and Maciste wander in the desert and almost die before they’re captured by some of Syphax’s raiders and taken into Cirta, where they’re imprisoned. Elissa’s innate decency is illustrated as she serves water to the prisoners, but fate catches up with her as Sophonisba has an auspicious dream telling her of Moloch’s wrath over Cabiria’s escape. When she reveals the dream and the truth about her handmaiden to Karthalo, who’s also in Cirta as an envoy, Karthalo demands Cabiria be handed over to him, with lascivious intent. As Masinissa lays siege to Cirta, Maciste breaks himself and Fulvius out of jail with raw, vengeful strength and Maciste kills Karthalo as he tries to rape Cabiria, but he and Fulvius are driven into the city keep by guards, where they command a great larder and are protected against assault. Meanwhile Masinissa, having captured Syphax outside Cirta, now gains entry to Cirta and lays claims to Sophonisba, but she tries to use her wiles on him to break his alliance with the Romans.

Although for the most part largely interchangeable with any number of exotic adventure stories written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Cabiria and others films like it rode a wave of Italian nationalist confidence following the country’s occupation of Libya in the 1912-14 war with Turkey, part of an attempt to build colonial might. Cabiria readily presents a popular metaphorical lens for that victory. Within a few months of the film’s release World War I broke out. D’Annunzio, who saw himself as a Nietzschean superman, would go on to become a successful fighter pilot and then leader of an aggressive populist movement that saw him briefly rule the city of Fiume and surrounds as “Duce of Carnaro.” During that brief rule he formulated customs and paraphernalia, as well as methods of brutal repression of dissent, which would be annexed and amplified by Mussolini into the trappings of the Fascist movement, although D’Annunzio would remain aloof from Mussolini’s version. D’Annunzio’s fascination with such systems of symbolism and obeisance is plain in Cabiria, most notably in the Invocation to Moloch sequence, which details the usage of such imagery and ceremony to unify an audience and dramatize collective identity. Cabiria itself has even been called the key moment in formulating the Fascist aesthetic. But the interesting disparity here is that Cabiria attributes such pomp and ritual to its villains, with a dark and ominous portrayal of communal hypnotism and performed allegiance in conjunction with acts of mass sacrifice. Perhaps this says something about how the interim of war and political upheaval in Italy altered D’Annunzio’s sense of such devices as well as that of his nation.

Such ramifications don’t seem to have greatly preoccupied Pastrone, who found his singular moment of directorial stature putting over a story of such grand scope and immediate, personal travail for his characters. His faith feels more invested in Maciste’s righteous strength and Sophonisba’s suborning charisma. Some of the spectacle is straightforward and would already have been pretty familiar to an audience of the time, like the shots of a hirsute and igneous-looking Hannibal overseeing hordes of extras spilling over the snowy Alpine peaks. But an interlude like the human pyramid scene, with Pastrone’s squared-off perspective, entwine action with design, style with function. The ideal of the humans, with their dedication to making themselves a perfect engine of unified action and resilience, connects to Pastrone’s aesthetic, one that suggests the imagery of the geometric preoccupation of burgeoning, modernist art movements like cubism and futurism beginning a colonisation of cinema. Having invented an early form of camera dolly before embarking on the shoot, Pastrone employed a degree of camera movement scarcely seen in movies before on Cabiria, which he uses mostly to escape the old strictures of the rigid, stage-like shot that had defined much early film.

The depictions of the siege of Cirta present yet more of the film’s influential visions as the warriors battle on and around massive stone walls, with men swinging on siege cranes and dripping boiling oil on their enemies. This sort of sequence, which still sparks a vague sense of awe in the scale of production and filmmaking chutzpah, explains why many found Cabiria in its day to be the first film to offer a vision of the past that felt not only convincing but palpable, and their influence on Intolerance’s Babylonian battle scenes is patent. Eugenio Bava, father of the great horror director Mario Bava, served as one of the cinematographers and worked on the special effects. Pastrone’s gliding camera still feels surprisingly modern in refusing to let the misé-en-scène become static, and he sometimes uses it for real effect, shifting zones in various sets and spaces to reconfigure attention and offer some dramatic punctuation, as when late in the film Masinissa is led away by some Roman soldiers and Pastrone zeroes in on a frightened serving girl peeking out from a curtain. Pastrone is hardly afraid of editing, with some sophisticated cutting throughout, but the effect of his moving camera feels like the beginning of a way of looking at cinema as an immersive experience, rather than just as a string of visual exposition. And yet the close-up remains alien to Pastrone’s visual grammar, where Griffith would forcefully embrace the dance of distance to create visual music and sharp emotional connections: Pastrone still mostly, merely describes where Griffith would dramatize.

Fulvius and Maciste’s imprisonment in the Cirta keep sees them trapped in a world of plenty as they’re stuck with great stores of food and wine. Pastrone uses his moving camera here to strike a note of droll character analysis and even a faint edge of self-satire in regards to the historical epic’s idealising tendencies. Pastrone shifts from Maciste ferretting for food to Fulvius idling away time by drawing an elaborate chalk mural portraying an amphora-sporting goddess with a man perched worshipfully at her feet. This feels like the sort of joke Richard Lester or Frank Tashlin might have employed decades later, the improbably good creator of artworks for the ages. Pastrone makes more of it, however, defining Fulvius as a frustrated romantic in search of love and Maciste as a bacchanalian: Maciste offers an improvement by drawing a stream of booze pouring from the amphora. The difference between the two characters also says something about the schismatic impact the film would have on movie culture for Italy and the world. Maciste is a hero for the oncoming age of the everyman, a fond representative of the vast bulk of the audience, where Fulvius belongs to a hierarchy still indulgent as long as it thinks it rules. Sophonisba’s dream, with hovering eyes, reaching hands, and the face of Moloch with Cabiria in its jaws, presents a jolt of oneiric weirdness that also seems exactly half-way, in terms of cinematic style, between the theatrical evocations of George Méliès and the dynamic effects of the oncoming moment of cinema’s expressionists and surrealists.

Sophonisba emerges as the most complex and interesting figure in Cabiria, where most of the others are simple extensions of their story function. She stands as a genuine antiheroine, the opposite of the eternal innocent Cabiria and representing a radically different value system. Her difference is hinted at as she makes invocations to different gods to her countrymen, and becomes more urgent as she obeys Karthalo’s demand to hand over Cabiria as her dream tells her the fate of her nation depends upon it. Sophonisba is a crafty arbiter of statecraft who knows how to manipulate men and situations and a walking icon of seductive intent, to the point where she manages to convince Masinissa not to let her be paraded as captured Roman chattel. Whilst Sophonisba initially seems sympathetic in her readiness to take in Cabiria, she proves willing to countenance her sacrifice if it means safeguarding her nation. But Scipio’s arrival and determination to see Sophonisba paraded forces Masinissa to fool Fulvius and Maciste into delivering to the princess a means of killing herself to avoid the humiliation. The dying Sophonisba tells Fulvius that Cabiria is still alive, being held in a dungeon for sacrifice: Sophonisba has her released as a show of mercy in exchange for being allowed her own death, and also perhaps because Sophonisba herself takes her place as a state-sanctioned victim, and the two women embrace tearily before Sophonisba expires. Pastrone’s last shot is both absurd and a great example of his art, as Fulvius and Cabiria, now married, ride on a galley’s prow for home with Maciste, a flight of sprites circling in the air about them in celebration of their union. Like many films from the decade of cinema’s adolescence, Cabiria often reminds the modern viewer just how long ago that was. But at its best, Cabiria can still arrest to the point where the interval vanishes.

Cabiria can be viewed here on YouTube.

1950s, British cinema, Crime/Detective

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)

Director: Terence Fisher

By Roderick Heath

This is the best film of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s book. In fact, it’s better than the book. Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels hardly stack up against his short-story gems. The novel of Hound shoots itself in the foot by blowing the cover on its villain halfway through, then stumbling through an anti-climactic last act. It also avoids examining undercurrents the story presents, even copping out of the science/superstition clash that drives the narrative, only flirting with the ideas comically when Bishop Frankland threatens to sue amateur anthropologist Dr. Mortimer for body-snatching in his digs at Neolithic sites. But Doyle fails to bring anything to a point. He even writes Holmes out of half of the novel.

Armed with a tight screenplay by John Bryant, Fisher’s film charges with force into the story’s potential. Opening with a typically thunderous James Bernard score timed with lightning bursts, the camera closes in slowly on the matte-painted Baskerville Hall. The velvet-threat tones of Francis de Wolff, playing Mortimer, intones the legend of the hound. In the 17th century, a tenant farmer is tortured in the Hall by aristocratic cads because he stood between his daughter—imprisoned upstairs—and Sir Hugo Baskerville (played with perfect sleazy elegance by David Oxley). Baskerville, for a coup de grace, roasts the man in the fireplace.

Sir Hugo has to pay up on a wager to his fellow noble scoundrels on how long the man would last, and being the gentleman he is, he proposes paying with the girl. Proceeding upstairs, he finds the girl has absconded out the window via the ivy-covered walls. Hugo orders his hunting hounds released to chase her down, and sets out on horseback, crying “May the hounds of hell take me if I can’t hunt her down!” He catches her in the fog among wreathed ruins of an abbey and stabs her death with relish. He is then confronted by a growling, unseen monster that devours him greedily amid the creep’s blood-curdling screams.

Having gotten our attention, Fisher dissolves to Holmes’ study as Mortimer concludes his reading. Unlike the novel’s agreeable geek, this Mortimer is a fat, faintly shifty self-publicist who responds huffily to Holmes’ less-than-enthralled air. Peter Cushing’s Holmes is introduced, his pencil-thin form leisurely lifting his hand with a gasp of vision not at Mortimer’s words but to play a chess move that’s occurred to him. Watson is played by Andre Morell, who had portrayed Nigel Kneale’s scientific titan Quatermass on television, making it clear he’s not a Nigel Bruce buffoon but a quick-witted, if slightly old-boyish, colleague.

Dr. Mortimer engages Holmes to solve the mysterious death of Sir Charles Baskerville with a litany of relishable clues, such as the footprints of a gigantic hound and the fact that Sir Charles tiptoed (“But he wasn’t tiptoeing,” Cushing intones, “He was running, Watson, running for his life until he burst his heart!”). Holmes is also to protect Sir Charles’ heir, Sir Henry (Christopher Lee), who, it soon turns out, needs protection badly. There’s a stowaway tarantula in his boot, that crawls onto his shoulder (suggesting, in one shot, a large lump of lint), and is disposed of by Holmes who hits it like he’s killing an anaconda. Though hardly dangerous to anyone else, the spider could have been fatal to Sir Henry, with hiss inherited heart condition. Holmes announces he must stay in town, so he has Watson accompany Mortimer and Sir Henry to Baskerville Hall.

First seen in delicately menacing sunlight with Bernard’s eerie oboe scoring, Dartmoor soon becomes a nightmare-drenched wonderland. There’s the convicted killer of prostitutes Selden (David Birks) loose from Dartmoor Prison, for piquance. There’s dingbat local minister and entomologist Bishop Frankland (Miles Malleson), for comic relief. Or is he? Did the tarantula come from his collection? Why does Mrs. Barrymore (Helen Goss), wife of the trusty housekeeper (John LeMesurier), weep at night? Why is Selden signaling to the hall? What are saturnine farmer Stapleton (Ewen Solon) and his enfant sauvage daughter Cecile (Marla Landi) up to?

Despite the noisy music and equally loud color, Fisher’s films are marked by a cool mixture of poetic realism and tightly built sequences, and, as in The Hound of the Baskervilles, a riot of florid atmosphere—rotting leaves, jagged stone, dawn-lit moors, rustling silk, blood-red coats, Marla Landi’s earthy skin, dripping mines, lanterns, and black bogs. Fisher’s Hammer films revitalised British cinema and rode point for a revolution of Horror popularity that only ran out of steam some 25 years later. Fisher began his directorial career in stultifying quota quickies. His one early work of note was So Long At The Fair (1951), featuring Dirk Bogarde and Jean Simmons, a fascinating mystery based on a great urban myth. The film sits heavily under the starchy influence of the standard period film, and would have benefited from Fisher’s later, rowdier touch.

Indeed, before the Fisher-Hammer explosion, British genre cinema, though rich and fascinating, lacked the damn-the-torpedoes drive of their American brethren. Suddenly, that WWII-era, stiff-upper-lip veneer cracked, and out came a bloody-gorged beauty, luxuriating in sex, violence, pounding melodrama, black humor, and with a coherent thematic agenda. Like the “Angry Young Man” tales that were emerging at the same time, Fisher’s early Hammer films jumped with the eagerness of a terrier on rats onto the skeletons in the English cupboard—particularly sex, class, and religion. Hollywood and European Horror of the ’20s and ’30s, only took cues from Freud and surrealism. This hitherto unexplored element in the Gothic genre became, in the hands of ’60s Horror practitioners, at its best a potent vessel for revisionist views of history, power relations, and morality shifts.

Dracula, for instance, the invading foreign seducer preying on the flower of English femininity, was refashioned by Fisher and Lee as a suave precursor of James Bond, a vampire Heathcliff, a variant on the handsome ruffians Stewart Granger played years before. Amidst the generic explosion the success of the early Hammer productions generated, Fisher’s films laid down the blueprint for a movement away from purely metaphoric horror into more socially and psychologically aware works.

Whilst too many horror stories are reflexively conservative creations, serving up doses of misogyny, fear of sexual deviancy, and needful conformity, Fisher began a trend that would be expanded on by later directors such as Peter Sasdy, Michael Reeves, Gordon Hessler, Hans Geissendoerfer (in his vampirism-is-Hitlerism parable Jonathan, 1968), Roman Polanski, and George Romero. Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, written by Anthony Shaffer and starring Lee, created as a parody/tribute, inverted Fisher’s style by replacing Gothic chic with deceptive folkish whimsy, but reverently employed his intellectual approach. Much later, Fisher would be paid homage by Neil Jordan with his remarkably bizarre fantasy The Company of Wolves (1984) and Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow (1999).

Fisher’s films show a consistent fascination with the relationship of Manichaeistic forces: good and evil and their fraught relationship. As axiomatic as this fascination sounds in the genre context, it is, in fact, hardly so. Some directors, Jean Rollin for instance, regarded traditional “good” as an idiotic blind alley. Others, from Murnau through to Polanski and Romero, regard it as fragile and ineffective. Still others, the true exploitation directors, conform to standard moralist structures even as they rejoice and celebrate what they purport to condemn. In Fisher’s films, good and evil stand entwined, evil usually rather more attractive than good, and fatally so.

Fisher’s moral eye was unpredictable, original, and inescapable. He turned tragic titan Victor Frankenstein into a ruthless, destructive sociopath, a meddler so driven to discover that everything, even human life, becomes incidental. He is light years from Colin Clive’s preening motherly male, instead a manifestation of the alienation found in Edward Teller’s disinterested statement about the detonation of the atomic bomb he helped create: “Who wants to see that? It’s just a big bang.” Fisher then became the only director to do anything interesting with Dracula’s nemesis, Van Helsing, turning him from aged savant into dashing man of iron, comforting in his fearless resolve and paternal, caring strength, but frightening in his puritanical brutality and willingness to crush the leech-like sensuality of vampires (usually women). As well as the first servings of truly in-your-face gore in his stakings, Fisher also offered a clear statement of the painful relation between “good” and “repression,” an indictment of for-your-own-good regimes.

In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes stands in the same position as Van Helsing and Dr. Frankenstein as an arbiter of rationalism in an ignorant, intellectually sluggish world; he is Frankenstein with a moral compass. He clears away the shadows and reveals the greasepaint and old rope used by Stapleton to make Sir Henry think the past is quite literally haunting him. Holmes is (here at least) a less interesting figure than Cushing’s Frankenstein and Van Helsing, except in his haughty, egotistical streak, a strong trait in the stories, more emphasized here than any other film.

The film is most crucially interesting in remoulding the relationship of Sir Henry and Stapleton’s daughter (in the novel, his actual wife, forced to pose as his offspring to make his potential future claims easier). Casting Lee as the descendent of the depraved Sir Hugo marks him as a powerful, imperious, sexually magnetic presence. As such, far more meaningful than the novel’s pallid baronet, Sir Henry is attracted to the gleaming-eyed, sullen-mouthed, Spanish-born Cecile Stapleton (Marla Landi), who provokes and yet runs from his stirred lust. Sir Henry is cursed with the same rapacious instincts as his ancestor, but so is Cecile—her fire is the Baskerville genes sharpened by deprivation and centuries of rage held by the peasantry towards their aristocratic exploiters, to their deadliest, most sexually sadistic point. A femme fatale to the max, Cecile is Sir Hugo returned in his victim’s body.

Likewise, Stapleton (Ewen Solon)—in the novel an insidious, devious naturalist, a false-benign opposite of Holmes—here plays the gentleman farmer but crippled (by an inherited trait of Sir Hugo’s, a plot point) and down-at-heel, generating his evil plot with native cunning rather than intellectual prowess. The Stapletons’ revenge enacts the classic “return of the repressed.” In the film’s breathlessly well-staged finale (apart from a less-than-terrifying mutt), Cecile, having lured Sir Henry to the Abbey, the ruins of which are, throughout the film, a bullring-like battleground of good and evil, and turns their passionate tryst to a mocking tirade in preparation to serve Sir Henry up for dinner. Doyle had a singular running theme of abused women in his stories–in one, a maltreated wife fills her villainous husband with the entire magazine of a revolver, to Holmes’ and Watson’s unblinking approval—and characterized Miss Stapleton as a terrified dove trapped by her husband. Fittingly, where in the book it is Stapleton who is sucked into Grimpen Mire, here Cecile is last seen sliding into the muck. The evil of the Baskervilles, their greedy sexuality, dies with her. Fisher, though not as decoratively sophisticated as Bava, was great at pace and action—two elements that directors with infinitely larger budgets and resources can never get in proper balance. None of his films slow for a second, whilst remaining as coherent as filmmaking can get. His trademark touches include vigorous close-ups and deep-focus dioramic shots that bind together elements and crystallise the action.

Fisher expanded his intensely rhythmic approach to editing (his job in movies before becoming a director), and The Hound of the Baskervilles stomps on its tackier production elements to create a film of racing verve. Hound was a comparative box office failure, because the audience resented a lack of monsters, so a planned series of Holmes films did not join the painfully distended Frankenstein and Dracula cycles. Fisher continued provided visitations on traditional themes, though his romantic variation on The Phantom of the Opera (1962) proved a big flop and stalled his career. Generally out of place as Hammer films became sillier, sexier, and more violent, Fisher nonetheless served up several more bona fide classics, including The Gorgon (1963), The Devil Rides Out (1967), from a Dennis Wheatley novel, and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969), before retiring and dying in 1980.

film freedonia

Film essays and commentary by Roderick Heath

Tag Archives: femme fatale

The Lady From Shanghai (1947)

Cabiria (1914)

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)