Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/04/24

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, August 4, 2024

Dangerous Crossing (Joseph M. Newman, 1953)

Cast: Jeanne Crain, Michael Rennie, Carl Betz, Max Showalter, Mary Anderson, Marjorie Hoshelle, Willis Bouchey, Yvonne Peattie. Screenplay: Leo Townsend, based on a radio play by John Dickson Carr. Cinematography: Joseph LaShelle. Art direction: Maurice Ransford, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: William Reynolds.

Someone disappears in a public setting -- a train, a hotel, a passenger ship -- and the person who saw them last discovers that no one else claims to have ever seen them. It's a nice trope for a thriller, like The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938) or So Long at the Fair (Antony Darnborough, Terence Fisher, 1950), so who can blame 20th Century-Fox for taking it out of the mothballs for a low-budget picture like Dangerous Crossing? Ruth (Jeanne Crain) boards a ship for a honeymoon ocean voyage with her husband, John (Carl Betz), who takes her to their stateroom and then goes to make a deposit of some money with the purser. He'll meet her in the bar, he says, but he doesn't show up. When Ruth goes to the stateroom to look for him she finds it locked, and when an attendant opens it for her, their luggage is gone. Ruth has them find the maid (Mary Anderson) who was preparing the room when the couple entered and saw John carry her over its threshold, but she swears she didn't see them and that the room has always been vacant. As Ruth becomes more distraught, everyone begins to suspect she's lying or insane. Only the ship's doctor (Michael Rennie) is willing to put up with her frantic assertions that she really is married and that her husband must be somewhere on board. Naturally, since Rennie gets top billing with Crain, we know that some kind of relationship between Ruth and the doctor is going to develop. Unfortunately, the doctor is such a know-it-all male and Ruth such a basket case that it's a dull romance, not helped by a lack of chemistry between the actors. Crain does a nice job from the start at suggesting that there's something fragile and off-balance about Ruth, so even though we've seen her with John, we feel there's something she's not telling us. There is, but as the story unfolds, the movie gets routine and predictable.